Fore! Play Read online

  “It should feel natural,” Liz says, standing behind a woman with her arms wrapped around her, going through the swinging motion.

  “Nothing feels natural,” replies the woman, who unfortunately disappeared from class after two weeks.

  “You’re grimacing,” Liz says to the next student. “Are you in pain? Golf is not meant to be physically painful. It is meant to be emotionally painful.” All agree that it certainly is.

  “How many went to the driving range over the weekend like I suggested?” Liz asks. “None? Well it’s a little cold. Remember, at the range, don’t stand too near to the ones you love. Balls fly all over the place. And if the experience is a nightmare, change clubs.”

  A couple of students in the second class say they did go to the range, but with mixed results. The mother of the eleven-year-old in class, Sean, says she went to the driving range and that she’s hitting the ball straighter now—but only fifty yards.

  “With which club?” Liz asks.

  “All of them” is the reply.

  “Where’s Sean tonight?” the teacher asks.

  “He had homework,” his mother replies.

  “Tiger Woods never had homework,” comments another student.

  “What if you’re missing the ball completely?” asks another.

  “You’re probably swinging hard and fast and not looking at the ball and pulling your head up,” Liz answers.

  One woman says she slices, and Liz tells her: “Women tend to slice more. We push the ball instead of striking it, and we don’t follow through.” Women like myself. Liz tells me to make sure my thumbs are straight, then rotate my right hand counterclockwise, close the clubface, and “finish!” Previously, my approach was to look at the hole, turn my body 45 degrees to the left, and hit my normal slice. The trouble is that when you do it that way, the ball does what it’s never done before: goes straight.

  Another student says her problem is that she hooks all the time. “As long as your bad shots still have names,” Liz says without a trace of irony. “Slices and hooks we can try to deal with.”

  The topic of the next class is: “The Pitch,” which I thought might be a lesson in how to cheat by pitching—i.e., throwing—the golf ball baseball-style. When I attended the University of Missouri, a guy there set a world record that apparently still stands for 18 holes played by throwing the golf ball, an 84.

  “The pitch is used for shots less than a hundred yards,” Liz tells us. What I don’t tell her is that all my shots are less than a hundred yards. I can only drive the ball a hundred yards. “You’ll use your 9-iron or maybe the 8, or the one that says P for pitch on it.”

  I wasn’t sure what those letters on the clubs stood for. Or the numbers either for that matter. I didn’t know the 1 was the driver until a couple weeks ago. I thought the P might mean it was strictly for Poor or possibly Piss-Poor shots, which were all I ever hit with it.

  She demonstrates by hitting the ball perfectly, off the center of the basketball backboard. She once took an entire class outside the school, where she demonstrated a 5-wood shot that was all too perfect, traveling over a house at the end of the baseball field. A policeman returned the ball—the evidence. “The officer was impressed with the distance,” Liz says in all modesty. “The truth is, I now know how far all my clubs will hit the ball.” Imagine. She even has an idea of what direction.

  After her perfect backboard shot, we take over, hacking and thwacking the balls—and the little carpets—every which way. I hear the young woman next to me complain “I can’t do this shot”—and she isn’t kidding. But when she repeats herself I realize that, no, she isn’t saying “I can’t do this shot”; what she’s saying is “I can’t do this shit,” referring not simply to this particular piddling little shot, but to “All This Shit,” meaning the entire game of golf.

  Appropriately enough, our next lesson is on the S club. No, the S stands for sand wedge. “You will be in the sand a lot at first,” Liz warns, but remains positive. “At least in a sand trap you can still see your ball. It’s not in the woods or underwater.” She tells us that an S does not always come with a set of clubs, but to be sure to buy one because we’ll be needing it. Badly.

  “Now on a New Jersey public course,” she continues, “the sand is going to be different than at a nice private course in Florida, where it’s dry and fine. Here it’s heavy, wet, rocky, muddy New Jersey muck. And you’ll have to swing harder.”

  “And oh yeah,” she adds. “After you’ve swung three times unsuccessfully, pick up your ball and leave. But remember to rake the sand. In golf, etiquette is very important.”

  She says if we are polite and not slow we will be welcome to play anywhere, despite being bad.

  “It should only take four to four and a half hours to play,” she says.

  “You mean for 9 holes,” says a student, speaking from experience.

  “Nooo,” says Liz, patiently, “that would be for the full 18.”

  After putting class, we take up scoring, which is something of a sore subject with this group. Liz’s first piece of advice is: “Once you’ve doubled par, pick up your ball and move on for the sake of golfers behind you. It’s just not that important if you get a 13 instead of a 14.”

  Liz defines terms like “eagle.”

  “Why would we need to know that?” a student asks. Good question. Occasionally we have to remind Liz how bad we are, like when she starts telling us that a red flag means the hole is on the front of the green, or how to toss grass to gauge windage, or reading yardage marks on sprinkler heads. We really don’t have much use for that kind of detailed information.

  Liz tells us of birdies, pars, bogeys, double bogeys, and more useful terms like triple bogey, which is something we can certainly all shoot for. Other useful terms include colorful phrases like “snowman,” which is an 8, and “picket fence,” which sounds like an 11.

  Naturally, students bring up cheating as a way to improve their scores. Liz doesn’t condone putting down a 6 when you shoot an 8, but admits that partners may not catch you or call you on it, providing money isn’t at stake.

  “A true golfer isn’t paying attention to your shots,” she says. “True golfers are only paying attention to their own.”

  I write that one down. I’ll want to use that to admonish any golf partner who accuses me of lying, e.g.: “If you were a true golfer you wouldn’t even have noticed I shot a 12 instead of a 6!” Bastard.

  Her other practical scoring tips include: “A whiff, where you swing and make no contact with the ball, doesn’t count.” Great news! Although the United States Golf Association disagrees.

  Also of immediate help: “If you hit a bad tee shot and the starter’s not watching, re-tee and hit again,” she advises. “My husband is good at this, very fast. He does it almost every time. He says: ‘If you can’t afford lots of balls, you shouldn’t be playing golf,’ and I always say, ‘But, George, 18 balls every round?’ ”

  “My husband is always reminding me that he’s better and always telling me what to do,” a student complains.

  “You don’t golf with someone so they can tell you what to do,” Liz replies. “If you golf as a couple, your husband is only there to tell you where your ball went, to fetch sodas, and to pay.”

  “Don’t ever play with your husband!” yells another woman, who has good reason. “The first time we played I was four months pregnant and he wouldn’t let me go back and pee. I had to go in the bushes.” I jot down a reminder to ask Liz about the rules of urination during our etiquette instruction.

  “My husband has an 8 handicap,” complains another student, “and I’ve played three times. It’s not fair.”

  “Well,” says Liz, “if he shoots 80 and you shoot 120, take your handicap and tell him you win.”

  Handicaps are our next class subject. Students are excited. Handicaps may be our only hope. My golf handicap is so high I should get to park in the specially marked spots by the front door at the grocery sto
re. If there was a Special Olympics of golf, I’d be there. At this point they should stop calling it a handicap, and say I’m golf-challenged. Would it kill them to be a little sensitive?

  Handicaps “level the playing field,” as they say, giving me a chance to “beat” anyone on the professional tour. I’m not sure I understand the point. Am I supposed to feel better about my 125?

  Handicaps are (almost) enough to make you stop cheating.

  “Can we use tees on the fairway?” a student asks.

  “No,” says Liz, “that’s cheating,” and then reminds us: “Cheating on your scores will only drive your handicaps down.” I’d never thought of it that way. She says some “sandbaggers” will shoot eight pars in a row then purposely shoot a 12 on the next hole to keep their handicaps up. That’s getting a little perverted.

  However, it does occur to me this might be an excellent excuse for my atrocious golf game. Maybe people will think I’m playing poorly on purpose to keep my handicap up.

  Liz says there’s great news on the handicap front! “They’re giving people 40 and even 45 handicaps, way higher than they used to.” Let’s see, 45 plus par 72 is … well, it’s still not quite enough, but in a comprehensive program with some throws and kicks it’s going to help a lot.

  At the sixth and final class there is real danger. This is the night Liz teaches us how to tee off. Students bring drivers and swing them wild and hard. Diana hits another student in the head with one of her balls. “Medic!” he yells. Jack can’t seem to hit the ball with his driver—at all. He whiffs over the top of the ball or he hits the carpet and sends it flying. A couple of times there are thuds and clangs as he hits under or behind the carpet swatch, thwacking the linoleum floor. He may have even produced a linoleum divot on one attempt.

  “Take a breath and count to three,” Liz says, consoling him. “Keep your chin up but not when you’re hitting the ball!”

  She instructs another student to stand farther away from the ball with her driver.

  “Why?” the student demands to know.

  “Because it’s longer,” Liz replies.

  “Don’t let your tee shot psych you out,” she warns. “It can ruin your whole game. My father taught me to play golf using only a 6-iron. No tee shots. That would be a good idea for you. Just throw that first tee shot if you have to. Or if it gets too bad, just pick up your tee and go.”

  And with that, school’s out for summer. Some of the students stick around to ask individual questions like why pro golfers wiggle their butts and their clubs before hitting the ball, but our golf instruction is over.

  Can you really learn to play golf in six hours for sixty-nine bucks in a grade school gym in New Jersey?

  Nope. And, to a degree, yes. Liz introduces us to the clubs and to the fundamentals of how to swing them. She succeeds in making us feel like we know enough to at least go out and try to play. And when no one’s ever told you anything about the grip or the swing or the clubs or the etiquette, and you find yourself walking out to that first tee, you really do feel a bit like you’ve been beamed down to an alien planet.

  Liz saves her best bit of advice for last: “Don’t keep score, not for a long, long time.” We turn in our carpet swatches, wish each other luck, and go out into the cold.

  3

  Bogeyman Goes Public

  Christ had an easier time getting up on Easter than I did. Exactly what time did he have to rise anyway?

  My alarm went off at 5:00 A.M., four hours after I went to bed. I’m not an early riser. Why, I didn’t get up till nine in the army. True, we lost that one. ‘Nam. These days, I’ve found a job where we don’t have to be in the office until ten or ten-thirty. And if any fish out there ever wish to be caught by me, they can damned well wait until noon.

  Something they don’t tell you when you’re learning golf is that you can’t actually play! There’s no place to do it. There are golf courses everywhere you look in this bountiful land, but they’re all jammed. Is there a better reason to support Zero Population Growth and put up electrified fences along our nation’s borders? Malthus warned us about this. There are now six billion people on this planet and if we don’t get our heads out of the sand we’re going to run out of food and tee times!

  The county I live in has tens of thousands of golfers registered to play at three public courses, and Lord knows how many unregistered. Golfers are like dogs in this respect. Indeed it’s dog-eat-dog for tee times.

  They’ll arrive at the Paramus, New Jersey, course at 10:00 P.M. on a Thursday night, for example, so they can be among the first in line at 6:00 A.M. Friday when the sign-up sheet for Saturday tee times is put up. “I used to tell my wife that these people are nuts,” one of them named Billy tells me, “and she’d say, ‘That’s right, they sure are.’ ”

  There’s a phone-in reservation system by which you can, theoretically, reserve a tee time seven days in advance. Golfers can call at 12:00:01 A.M. Sunday to reserve a spot for the following Sunday, but by the time their calls go through the course is somehow already booked. The scorned suspect skullduggery.

  Regulars do know, however, that there’s a raffle over the winter for tee times. My brother-in-law joined a conglobation of twelve duffers who entered the raffle for an entire season of tee times. And they won, sort of, if you want to call it that. They won the right to buy twenty-five weekend tee times from April through October for $1,800.

  But their allotted tee time was 6:18 A.M.! Moreover, only four of the twelve can play each week, so newcomers like my brother-in-law, Bert, received the less-than-prime dates, such as Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Easter. Some dates are so unpopular that they need substitutes to fill a foursome.

  And this is how I am blessed to rise on Easter morning at 5:00 A.M. to play golf. Bert invited me. It is raining. It is 43 degrees. And pitch dark. But we’re going, come hell or high water. And in this case we have both.

  I put on my golfing attire, such as it is—and a ski parka. And gloves. Not golf gloves. Winter gloves. I make a mug of instant coffee, using two tablespoons of coffee and one tablespoon of sugar. At Starbucks, this would be “The Coronary Grande.”

  I have time to take this strong medicine only because my golf partners arrive five minutes late to pick me up. They had trouble rousing my brother-in-law, and had to mount a Janet Reno–style raid—battering rams, assault weapons—to extract him from bed. His hair resembles the Statue of Liberty’s crown when he knocks on my door.

  “It’s not too bad out,” he says. I point to the TV screen where the Weather Channel is telling me it’s 43 and raining. “Oh,” he replies.

  I have a long history of unfortunate experiences with my brother-in-law, some involving sports. He once represented himself as a fisherman, for example, and talked me into going with him on a fishing expedition to Canada, where he implied that trophy fish just jump into your boat. There, too, we arose before dawn on the first day … and caught … nothing. He looked good, however, donning an Orvis fishing vest and other accoutrements, but it quickly became apparent that he knew not. It is unclear if he knew not that he knew not. He ceremoniously withdrew from his tackle box an antique sterling silver lure from Scotland, tied it to his line, and made his cast … a beautiful cast, sailing out and out and … “Son-of-a-bitch!” he cried, realizing he’d not tied it securely and the family heirloom was splashing across the waters before plunging to the depths. Gone. Things went from bad to worse. I caught a fish, a northern pike (possibly) that displayed such fearsome fangs Bert insisted on knocking it unconscious before bringing it aboard. As I brought it up, he smacked the fish in the head with a paddle, a glancing blow that knocked it off my line, and we watched it swim away. Hours went by, uneventfully, until we saw a fish swimming in the clear waters directly toward our boat at a depth of less than a foot. Bert again grabbed the paddle and began thwacking the waters, in an attempt to cold-cock the fish. But that approach also failed. And so it went for an entire week until my wife was lucky eno
ugh to land a suckerfish.

  So, naturally, I am a bit wary about golfing with him. Billy—yes that very aforementioned golf nut—is in my driveway in his minivan. He is the “commissioner” of the twelve-man golf league. It is under his auspices that I’m playing (and so he should be named in any legal actions resulting from the round). With him is Dave, another league member, and as we drive to the course they carry on steady, good-natured banter, the kind of thing I can’t stand at such an hour. Turns out these guys like to get up at four and five in the morning. They should get a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise.

  “This is our first golf outing,” Billy says.

  “Me, too,” I say. “Of my life.” They laugh. Why?

  “You all have kids?” I ask. They do. “Don’t you guys catch a lot of flak at home for not being there on Easter morning for the baskets and church and everything?” They do. Yet … they are here. They are golfers.

  The sky begins to lighten a bit as we pull into the parking lot at six sharp. And the rain has slowed to a drizzle. I’d hoped for a while that the weather would worsen and we could all go back to bed, but I came to realize that there is no going back with men like these. These men are nuts. Golfers.

  We take our bags out of the minivan and head for the clubhouse, which is very nice indeed for a public course. I mean, check out the public basketball and tennis courts sometime, with the bent rims and no nets. Here there’s a nice bar, a restaurant, and locker room facilities. It even has a drink cart that runs around the course—unfortunately not at this hour.

  Right now the guy behind the desk is saying that due to a computer error we may not have a tee time.

  “What’s the problem?” Billy asks genially. “We will kill you,” I add.

  But he finds our reservation and chirps: “And the weather’s pretty nice now.” Relative to … ? He must be from Seattle or Ireland, where they have twenty-six words for rain, and drizzle isn’t even one of them. “Drizzle” is one of their words for “nice day.”