Fore! Play Read online

  Keep firmly in mind that in 1974 the Ohio state legislature made cheating at golf a violation of the civil codes, and second-time offenders face up to a five-year prison term. Presumably, then, under the new three strikes law, the third time you mark yourself down for a 6 when you shot a 7 you’d get life, except in Texas where golfers would be made to play in lightning storms holding irons on their heads.

  My attorneys advise me that all of these rules—no mulligans, no gimmees, no throwies, no kickies, no adjustable scoring practices—make shooting a decent score next to impossible for law-abiding golfers and they strongly suggest I do my golfing outside Ohio.

  If rules are what you can’t do, etiquette is what you shouldn’t do. So many don’ts in golf. Hundreds of books out there on golf etiquette. Other sports have rules, but I’m not sure any others even have etiquette. Show me the etiquette primer for the National Hockey League.

  Mr. Golf Etiquett’s Golf Etiquette Primer talks of manners and courtesy, suggesting we be quiet and not run on the golf course, and when we walk “walk quickly but lightly.” No, golf is not at all like other sports.

  There’s to be no laughing or talking at the tees. Moreover you’re not to even so much as move while others are teeing off. Have they thought of having a nun with a ruler there to rap offenders’ knuckles? Shouldn’t golf at least be a little more like recess?

  Like the rules of golf, some golf etiquette seems ridiculously complex. You practically need a state license (written and practical exams) to tend the flag stick, for example. When putting, your ball may not strike the flag stick (2-stroke penalty), so a fellow golfer must hold it while you putt and remove it while your putt is on its way. The laws of etiquette demand that when tending the flag stick, you must stand to the left or right of the cup, ensuring that your shadow does not fall on the hole or on the ball’s path. You are to stand an arm’s length from the hole, taking care not to stand on the path other players’ putts will have to travel so as not to indent said paths. You are to hold the flag itself against the flag stick so as not to allow it to flap in the wind. You are to “become invisible,” not fidgeting or talking. You lift the stick after the putt is stroked and lay it down in a prescribed manner (we’ll not even get into that here) off the green. You are not to ever, ever forget to replace the flag stick.

  Recently I tended a flag stick at an exclusive private club. I’m quite sure I did it wrongly, but the other golfers were polite enough not to mention it. I yanked out the flag stick as the long, difficult putt rolled directly toward the hole. However, not only the stick, but the entire hole—about an eight-inch-long steel cylinder—came out of the ground and the ball clanked against its side. These things just have a way of happening to me on a golf course.

  Liz was big on etiquette. She said other golfers don’t really mind how bad you are, only how rude and inconsiderate (to include slow). If I understand her correctly, if you say, “Please excuse me for hitting that drive into the club dining room and placing your mother in a coma,” you’re fine. “It was my fervent hope that it would sink rather than skip when it struck her bowl of soup.”

  On the tee, Liz suggests: “Wait until the group in front of you has completed their second shot.” Otherwise they get PO’d when your ball lands amongst them. (When you’re bad, you never know how far your ball is going to go.) She said players have been known to purposely hit a shot into the group ahead to send them a message they’re playing too slowly. Be aware, however, that groups hit into have been known to retaliate by teeing up a ball and hitting it back at the menacing group behind them. This is most un-genteel and completely out of place, a form of guerrilla golf not to be condoned.

  “Keep it moving,” she says. “Slow golf is the biggest complaint in the sport. Know who has honors [who won the last hole and tees off first].” Hint: It’s not you!

  5

  Driving Ourselves to Drink

  I am not at home on the range. Not in the least. I am as out of place and potentially dangerous on the driving range as I am on the course itself.

  It was suggested by my Easter partners that I practice and hone my skills at the driving range—“golf’s laboratory”—before hitting the links again. It’s a weekday in May, before the summer rush, so there shouldn’t be too many people around. A good day for a couple of bad golfers like my son Willie and myself to hit the range.

  We select our clubs from two bags in the garage. One bag belonged to a late stepfather-in-law and contains a few nasty clubs left over after a brother-in-law took the ones he wanted. The other bag is a set I purchased (Wal-Mart?) on sale for my son that should have carried a warning label stating “Caution: Too Short For People” and are way too short for tall people like him. Also, they are not your top-o’-the-line clubs. I forget the brand. Popeil, I believe. He’s brought them home with him from his apartment not to play golf, but with the intention of leaving them here. They apparently wouldn’t fit in the Goodwill bin and anyway statistics show that really poor people don’t play golf. Although they should. They might be more successful. Ever notice how many golfers are also successful in business? Why, poor people might even become doctors if they played enough golf.

  We’re headed to a run-of-the-mill driving range on a run-of-the-mill public course for run-of-the-mill golfers—although we personally haven’t achieved that level yet. The bartender sells us two five-dollar tokens for the golf ball machine, and points us in the direction of the driving range, which is a long way down a steep incline on a winding lane—a good safe distance from the clubhouse.

  A feeling of exhilaration comes over us as the tees, the empty tees, come into view. No one is there, and it’s secluded. No one will see us here in the woods. We don’t like people to watch.

  The golf ball machine issues us forty balls each in two cute little wire baskets. Someday such machines will be able to read our retinas, identify us as nuisance golfers, and refuse to issue us golf balls without a license. When you’re as bad as we are, there should probably be a three-day waiting period.

  We tee up our first balls of the day. Willie hits his first, a little chopper that would be a foul ball in baseball, to the left of third base, and just about that far. His second, third, and fourth drives are pretty much the same, but the fifth is an improvement, a grounder where the shortstop would be. Such shots are bad golf shots, of course, but not all bad here on a driving range, as they remain so close at hand that they can be retrieved and hit again—at a savings of 12.5 cents each.

  Pros tell us in their little instruction booklets that golfers really only hit one fourth of the ball. Willie has chosen to hit the top quartile. As mentioned, he is tall and his clubs woefully short. I tell him to stoop down, although I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a golf instructor specifically say “stoop down,” not per se. He doesn’t listen to my advice, nor should he.

  Sometimes he swings so high that he whiffs, missing the ball altogether. When I hear the Whoosh! of a good miss like that, I always look over to see Willie fighting back a laugh, or sometimes a curse, but always pretending it has been a practice swing. “Okay, let’s get started,” he’ll say.

  I don’t hit the ball on top. I hit it low, on the bottom, sometimes very low, sometimes striking the mat behind the ball rather than the ball itself. Hitting the ball like this makes it go very high, sometimes so high you can’t see it when you look downrange, until it plops down about fifty yards away. This shot is known in some quarters as an “Elephant’s Ass,” because it is high and it stinks.

  Sometimes the shot only goes twenty-five yards. I think this is because of the backspin that some golfers spend years trying to achieve but which comes to me quite naturally. You see it on TV, where a professional’s shot will land, “bite” the green, and roll backward nearer the hole. Mine never do that on the greens, however, just on the tee shots.

  I have been to covered driving ranges, where they put a little roof over the golfers’ heads for protection from inclement weather. Although these
roofs are quite high and project out only a couple of feet in front of the tee, I can, and do, hit these roofs when my drives go straight up. Usually, driving range tees also have short little wooden protective walls separating them, walls that project only a foot or two in front of the tees, and I can, and have, hit those as well with drives traveling sideways at almost 90 degree angles.

  My first drive this day at the range is high, as usual, but not too high, and pretty straight … for about fifty yards … where it encounters some strange force, possibly isolated wind shear, that makes the ball peel off to the right in a beautiful curve, really, that carries it toward the high netting meant to protect surrounding flora and fauna from the likes of me.

  My son handles the play-by-play à la Mets announcer Bob Murphy calling a Mike Piazza home run: “This ball is high, it is deep, it is going, going, gone, goodbye, this ball is outta here, folks!”

  The drive has carried over the protective netting and landed in the woods. If Mark McGwire hit that everybody would be cheering. Tiger Woods, too. Pro golfers hit shots like that all the time, hooks and slices that are called “fade” and “draw” shots, which they hit purposely to go around trees. So shut up.

  Drives like this tell me I must somehow be hitting the bottom and the side of the ball at the same time—two quarters at once! No mean feat. That was the first of many of my shots to clear the netting this day. I came to appreciate the wide range of percussive sounds the balls made when they hit the trees, discriminating amongst those that cracked and crashed against limbs, thunked richly against trunks, made muffled sounds as they struck way back in the woods, and the rare double or even triple thwacks of a ball ricocheting through the woodlands on this lovely spring day. It made you wish Robert Frost had been a bad golfer: “The woods are lovely dark and deep, shanks and slices yon forests keep …”

  Willie grows frustrated. If all the drives he hit were bad, it would honestly be better. But this evil enterprise gives one a fleeting glimpse of solid improvement, then snatches it away. He hits some straight, long beauties, and feels he’s finally really getting this game, then follows them with a half dozen horrors.

  It is at this point that he slowly and gracefully takes a few steps forward and, maintaining complete control, ever so gently tosses his club just ten yards downrange.

  I return to the same driving range with my wife, Jody, whose golf skills are well matched to those of other members of the family.

  Forty golf balls tumble into my basket and it occurs to me that this is just what I need when I play real golf: a basket of balls. Or perhaps a golf ball machine towed behind my cart.

  This time, we are not alone on the range. There are three young boys, about nineteen or twenty years old I’d say, dressed in T-shirts, shorts, and sandals. I hope they won’t be good. They don’t disappoint me.

  They swing hard like baseball players, and like baseball players they miss the ball a lot. (So, why is it called a strike, when one fails to strike the ball?) Their drives are highly erratic, traveling somewhere in the one- to two-hundred-yard range.

  My favorite technique of theirs is one in which they stand back ten feet, then charge the ball and swing at it wildly. They see this as a way of generating immense power, but it doesn’t seem to work. They’re swinging so hard that after a while they complain that their backs hurt. So, what does work?

  “I took off my shoes and that seemed to help,” says one.

  Focus seems to help. A target. A deer wanders out on the course, about 250 yards downrange, and the boys suddenly get a lot better. They hit the ball farther and with more accuracy as they try to hit the deer. Now, understand—People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals—that deer are not beloved here, where there are more of them than there are of us, where they dispense lyme disease, cause traffic fatalities, and devour our shrubs and flower beds. Understand, too, that these boys don’t stand a chance in hell of hitting the deer. It might make for an interesting sport though, come to think of it, combining a driving range with a game farm, where you’d get 100 points for hitting a deer at 200 yards, maybe 50 for a prairie dog at 100 yards, 5 for an elephant at 50 yards—that sort of thing. Understand, furthermore, that this idea comes from someone who wanted to liven up the Winter Olympics by having biathlon (skiing and shooting) competitors fire at speed skaters as they went by a hole in a fence.

  We run out of balls at the same time the boys do. We all look at each other, look up the hill to see if anyone is watching, then the five of us dart out onto the range and as fast as we can pick up dozens and dozens of balls lying within twenty-five yards or so of the tees, then dart back to the tees again.

  Now, you need not practice at a driving range. I’ve seen a guy practicing his bunker shots in the sand box at a local elementary school.

  You can practice golf almost anywhere, even in your own backyard. Indeed, lots of golf nuts are installing regulation putting greens in their backyards.

  I practice putting in the house, using an electric putting hole gadget my son gave me that spits the balls back. My cats love to chase my putts and bat them about, and frankly are as good at getting them in the hole as I am. I’m getting better as I learn to read the break on the hardwood floors in our 107-year-old house.

  On vacations, we hold chipping and driving contests in the yard. We try to chip balls about fifty feet into swimming pool tubes we’ve scattered about. Our friend Pam won the contest and the six-pack by chipping one into a bucket! Magnificent shot. At some point we take aim at the swimming pool itself, although this always results in a certain amount of collateral damage to the house, the wooden fence, the garden, and the patio furniture—in part, because we’re drunk. I am quite good at chipping balls into the pool; hitting balls into water just seems to come naturally to me.

  We also hit drives toward the bay, endangering beach-goers, protected wetlands, egrets, and neighboring homes. It also ruins the lawn as we take toupee-sized divots out of the yard. The inlet and marsh is only about 150 yards out, so a golf ball splashdown is good, but a shot onto the beach (some 200 to 250 yards away) that hits an umbrella or scatters sunbathers is excellent. For this we use the five-for-a-dollar “previously owned” balls from a stand next to the local course. Around Easter every year we have a used golf ball hunt in the thorny thickets extending from the edge of our yard to the inlet.

  After Jody receives a nice set of clubs for her birthday (even though she’s never played) we decide to inaugurate them at another driving range on a cool spring day. This is right after Liz’s golf class and I’m most eager to find out just how much my game’s improved.

  Easier said than done here in golf-crazed suburbia. But as dusk settles, spaces do finally begin to open up. I see another novice put a token into the ball machine, fail to place the basket directly under the spout, and the cascading golf balls roll everywhere. I am secretly pleased, beginning to think that maybe for once I won’t look like the fool of the day.

  There is no privacy. But to my great joy I don’t seem to need it so much anymore. The lessons seem to have helped. My 7- and 9-iron shots are going straighter, some even landing on the greens at fifty and a hundred yards! Of course they roll off the greens, in shots that TV commentators would lament, and true there are no sand traps here, but for me this is spectacular. And, I seem to be hitting fewer off the sideboards. Thank you, Liz.

  My driving, however, remains as poor as ever. My irons are going straighter and just as far as my driver shots. My drives are short—even with a titanium driver!—and thickly sliced. And, I still can’t hit the damned guy in the ball retrieval cart (there is no People for the Ethical Treatment of People). Once the ball retrieval cart went by just five feet in front of my tee and it was tempting, believe me.

  There is a certain amount of chuckling coming from observers on benches behind us, but I choose to believe they are watching their awful friend next to me. It’s the guy who spilled the balls, and who is now hitting some of them as little as three feet off the tee
. Dribblers. And God bless him.

  6

  Golf Wars Weaponry

  Maybe it’s my socks.

  “Could very well be,” suggested the helpful salesman … of socks. Maybe it is. Maybe my golf game sucks because of bad socks.

  As Americans, we have a deep and abiding faith in, tend to place all of our hopes and dreams for the future in … technology. We the people do further believe that stuff we buy will make our lives better and happier. And although golfers are among the best educated of any sportsmen and -women, they have this weakness, this addiction, that leaves them completely vulnerable to dealers of anything—anything!—that claims to take one single, solitary stroke off their scores.

  Which brings us, Jody and me, to a veritable Mecca of golf technology and other assorted claptrap: the PGA Golf Merchandise Show in Orlando, Florida, to see what sort of breakthroughs the scientific community—physicists and engineers!—has made to ease the pain of struggling duffers like ourselves.

  This show—this lalapalooza of golf technology—is enough to make one wonder how any golfer could possibly be bad! Here before us, spreading way beyond the indoor horizon, are sixteen hundred booths purveying humongous zirconium-titanium drivers, possum-skin gloves, computer swing analyzers, laser putters, Hole-In-One nutrition bars, neodymium and polybutadiene core balls, golf global positioning systems—you name it—each and every advanced product claiming to take strokes off our games.

  We spend two full days walking up and down the aisles, each step potentially lowering our golf scores, and each step adding to our bedazzlement at the overwhelming resources brought to bear on this national priority: getting a ball in a hole.