Fore! Play Read online

  Rick, a powerfully built guy, goes first and hits a nice drive. No, actually, it’s going into the water there on the right. All right Rick! My man! Diane very loudly counts “oooonnne,” as he tees up his second opening drive. Practice makes perfect, and his second drive is much better.

  Then it’s my turn. I’ve seen a golf club manufacturers’ survey showing that 41 million more people would play golf were it not for their embarrassment on that damned first tee.

  But my first problem today is … I don’t have a ball, such an important part of the game. Val has extras. “How many extras?” I ask. “Plenty,” she says. I doubt that. She’s never played with me before.

  I even look bad at the tee. I don’t just gracefully bend down and stick the tee in the ground and balance the ball on top all in one motion. I squat and use both hands, sort of like I’m doing some complicated gardening function. And I really have no idea how far down in the ground the tee is supposed to go.

  I stand up and look down the fairway like they do on TV, and quite frankly, I don’t like what I see. I see a sizable pond to the right, and—through those trees there—the Red Lobster restaurant on the left. I am fully capable of hitting both, although probably not with the same shot. I envision claws and bibs and melted butter flying; it could be bad. I see a lot of sand looming off in the distance and menacing stands of trees. Rumor has it that they’re making the course a tad easier, to accommodate a PGA Seniors tournament scheduled to come here, but to me it looks like the course was designed by the same krauts who did the defenses at Omaha Beach. Where’s the love?

  Since there’s no defense or even an opponent in golf, instead there are hazards—which other sports do not have. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were water hazards and sand traps on a hockey rink or a basketball court? Or a big tree in center field at Yankee Stadium?

  The only good news for us bad golfers is that hazards are put where they are in order to trap decent golfers. We always hit short of the traps, although we do often catch them on our second or third shots.

  Most hazards are trees, sand, or water—although not always those intended by designers. My brother-in-law placed two successive wood shots into a crowded swimming pool at a country club where he was a guest. Adjoining condos are also hazards, and rules vary about playing balls off patios, guests at barbecues, and coffee tables.

  And there are regional peculiarities. Eighty cows roam a course in Nebraska. Hit into a pie, you get a free drop. Goose poop is a hazard on courses almost everywhere now—despite the best efforts of dogs and noise cannons and what have you to make the lazy things fly south instead of lounging around up here performing their vital excretory function. No one has tried semiautomatic machine gun fire, however, which I favor. At The Florida Club, we found the stench of pigs next door to be a monumental hazard. There’s a feud with the pig farmer, who has taken to buying more and more pigs and using large fans to blow the stench at golfers.

  Black bears roam the courses of Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Coyotes, too. Crows fly off with balls. Lions are seen on the links in Kenya, crocodiles in Zambia, gators in Florida. In Zimbabwe you get a free drop if your ball goes into a mortar crater, and at the course along the Demilitarized Zone in Korea, hooks go into real minefields. You can bet if the balls are expensive ones, golfers go right in there after them.

  Despite the rising hazard anxiety, the golfer must go on. Standing here at the first tee, I demonstrate complete knowledge of my game, if not the game, by confidently predicting—based on my experience at the driving range a few days earlier—that I will, in fact, be slicing the ball into the pond on the right, with a 10 percent chance I’ll hit a little chopper to the left at a 45 degree angle about twenty-five feet from the tee.

  I draw back that driver, trying to remember all two hundred things that Liz told me in the gym, but as I bring it forward something comes over me, a flush of unease and a premonition that this is going to turn out badly.

  I look up—too soon!—to see the drive rising high and with a fair amount of distance but beginning to tail off a bit to the right … and a bit more now … and … yes, we have splashdown, Mission Control, in the pond, about five feet offshore. Just as I’d predicted.

  It is suggested I try another tee shot, which I am happy to do, and this one bounces to the left at about a 45 degree angle, coming to rest about forty feet away from the tee. As predicted.

  We have already broken a course rule: “The taking of a mulligan on the first tee is not permitted.”

  It is here that Rick reminds me of the old golf custom that when a man hits a drive that does not reach the ladies’ tee, he is to pull down his pants and leave them that way until reaching the green. My second tee shot so qualifies. Diane says that when she and her sister were paired with two strangers on a public course in Nantucket, one of the men hit just such a short shot and when they informed him of the old custom, he informed them that he was Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and really couldn’t afford to play along. Presidents are so much more fun than senators.

  Sooo, I elect to play the first shot, the splasher. The one at the bottom of the pond is the better lie. Brian gives me a ball, tells me to stand a club’s length from the pond and drop the ball, from shoulder height into the 3.0-inch rough.

  He hands me an iron of some kind, which I use to advance the ball about ten feet. Obviously it’s his fault; the ignoramus gave me the wrong club. So, it can be good to have a caddie. To blame.

  There are at least two schools of thought on caddies. A group called the Bad Golfers Association discourages their use on the theory that they prevent you from cheating, e.g., finding your ball in the woods when you don’t want to, catching you kicking the ball, and so on.

  However, a caddie I spoke to says just the opposite is true: He’ll run on ahead, and to keep you happy and to keep the game moving so he can go back and play cards, he’ll be sure to do whatever’s necessary to ensure a nice lie. “Hey,” he reminds, “you’re paying us.” Then he held out his hand.

  The servant thing is bothersome. Caddies are often treated poorly, although, here again, quite the opposite can be true. One former caddie I know parlayed his contacts with successful businessmen he caddied for into acceptance at a fine university, an internship at a major investment banking house, tutelage in starting up his own Internet Web site, and a $20 million profit when he sold it at age twenty-two. He is now a member of the country club where a couple of years ago he was caddieing! It’s like the French Revolution, with the caddies taking over the club.

  Despite Brian’s best efforts, that problem of hitting little squibs would haunt me all day. Too many shots in which the ball goes ten feet. Except near the green, where I’d like to hit the ball ten feet onto the green and instead the ball goes thirty feet over it. Often my ten-foot shot is a warm-up, as it were, for my next shot, which seems to always go just about where I wanted the one before it to go. And that one stroke, which can turn a 7 into a 6, makes all the difference between a truly terrible golfer and a merely hideous one.

  The rest of my first-hole golfing experience goes well, by my standards, and I wind up with a 6 or 7. I can’t really remember. I’m blocking. I will be at 6s and 7s all day, but—hey!—I’m staying off adjoining thoroughfares and not hitting from the Hooters parking lot.

  On the second hole, Brian suggests I keep my left arm straighter and not lift my head so soon. He is very diplomatic, saying things that are meant to be positive, like, “That’s okay, you’re advancing the ball.” As opposed to what? “Retreating the ball”? I can do that, too.

  Using his golf tips, I hit a decent drive followed by a nice 5-wood. Val takes the opportunity to compliment me, saying “You’re not bad despite your shitty shoes.”

  And I actually believe Jody’s new, technologically advanced clubs are helping a little, perhaps turning my frighteningly bad shots into merely poor ones.

  “That was poor, Bill.”

  “Thanks, Rick.”

/>   My short game lets me down, as I chop-chop-chop my way to the green using the P (for Pathetic) wedge again—and again—and again. For a 7. Val helpfully gives me a string with beads on it for counting my strokes, sort of a pocket abacus. But it only has ten beads.

  On the third hole—which is another 6 or 7 for me—putting becomes a major concern. Val remembers that I was a better putter at mini-golf. So I ask her to stand between my ball and the hole with her legs spread and her arms waving like a windmill, and you know, it does help.

  But I am not beating the little middle-aged women. And it’s starting to irk me that they get to tee off twenty yards ahead of me, on the red women’s tees, when they are clearly better. Why do they get the advantage? This is the twenty-first century for chrissake. You want equality, I’ll give you equality … get your butts back here and tee off with us! No! Wait! We’ll move forward.

  Diane is far better than me, and Val is only clearly better. I do manage to tie her on a few holes, largely because she and Diane have already played eighteen holes of golf this morning and are beat. Rick is having an inconsistent round, hitting some truly great shots and some not so great. He has begun getting down on himself, taking shots and saying things like: “The only two good balls I hit all day were when I stepped on the rake in the sand trap.”

  To add spice to their games, Rick and Diane don’t play for money, but for even higher stakes. They play “Your Wish Is My Command” golf, which means the winner can command the loser to do anything, which used to be pretty racy. But after playing like this for many, many years, the couple came home from a round of golf one day and the loser, Diane, said: “What do you want me to do, big boy?” Or words to that effect.

  “Well,” Rick replied, “I’d really like you to wash my car.”

  “Our marriage is over!” cried Diane.

  The most discernible pattern emerging here is that it’s usually my turn. The person farthest from the hole—the person who is “away”—always hits next, and that always seems to be me. You really get your money’s worth when you’re bad. Not like other sports, where you sit on the bench when you’re bad and don’t get to play at all.

  Make no mistake about it, while many great pros have played here, this old course has seen some nasty shots. One golfer hit a shot into the men’s locker room here, prompting his partner to run in shouting, “Clear the way, he’s playing through!” (Which has been done in tournament play at another club, by the way, where the golfer opened the window and hit it back out.)

  John hit that hole-in-one over on the practice putting green, and any number of duffers have put one in the swimming pool or into the seafood salad on the patio during lunch. I am part of a great heritage.

  One player was hit by a ball in the balls and was seriously injured here. He eventually lost a testicle. The other three players in his foursome lay him down by the side of the fairway and kept playing. Hey, tee times are tough to get on weekends. Golfers understand.

  I slice my next shot into a stand of trees. Brian informs me that since I’d have to stand on the cart path to play the shot, thereby possibly becoming a hit-and-run victim, I get to drop my ball again in a spot a bit farther off the path. Unfortunately he won’t let me drop it on the fairway side—nor will he hold back the branches of, nor prune any limbs from, a large tree staring me in the face.

  Even so, Brian and I are bonding. He says encouraging things like “You could be a lot worse.”

  “Gee, thanks, Bri.”

  “Some guys miss shots and break their clubs over their knees,” he says. “One throws his putter back at the bag when he misses, and of course we’re wearing the bags on our shoulders.”

  By the 7th hole I am ready to lie down by the side of the fairway. I am already tiring, I hate to say. But of course I’ve already taken a lot of shots, and I’ve walked one hell of a lot farther than the others, taking serpentine paths, tacking this way and that, zigzagging my way from tee to green.

  “This one is bad,” Rick warns as we approach the next tee. “It makes you want to crush your clubs. Put ‘em right in the ol’ car crusher. Still in your car.” I slice my shot into a gorgeous flowering crabapple, creating a dazzling floral spray.

  It is beautiful out here, in late April, with the flowering trees and bushes and the buds on the trees. A hawk flies over. Brian points it out and says foxes and even a coyote have been spotted on the course. A wildlife refuge to be sure, right here in New Jersey in a suburb better known for its myriad species of shopping malls. Too bad Audubon didn’t get a chance to paint the Garden State Mall.

  On the 8th, talk begins to turn away from golf to cocktails and what kinds of cocktails we are going to have when we finish. The gimmee putts suddenly become twice as long as before.

  The 9th green is adjacent to the club, on purpose, allowing golfers to relieve themselves in clubhouse rest rooms before setting off on the back 9, thereby reducing the assessments necessary for new shrubs. It also allows golfers like ourselves to … just … quit.

  As we approach the green, I ask Brian which club he’d recommend and if he’d mind going into the club and closing the drapes so people inside can’t see me play. I also feel the curtains might provide another measure of safety for patrons in the bar and dining room.

  I don’t know what my final tally is and I don’t ask. Club rules specify you must post your scores for 18 holes, but not 9. Since most of my scores were 6s or 7s I figure my score was probably around 60.

  It’s a good day. As a guest I can’t buy drinks or dinner even if I want to—it’s all on the monthly tab.

  To sum up, I finish fourth. I don’t beat any little women, but I don’t lose any balls (thanks to Brian), except that very first one that went in the water. I receive no citations for dress code violations. I don’t hit anybody. I don’t throw any clubs, pee on any bushes, and I keep the ball off surrounding thoroughfares and hit no houses.

  Damnit, I’m getting good.

  10

  Mind If I Join You?

  Maybe I should join a club. A country club.

  Sure, they’re stodgy and expensive, but how else can you play this stupid game? Unless you enjoy sleeping in your car to get tee times at public courses, you’re almost forced to join one.

  One morning I drive over to the Metedeconk National Golf Club, its stately private clubhouse fronting a fantastic Robert Trent Jones 27-hole course.

  Driving in, I see no guard towers, no concertina wire, no checkpoints, and no aggressive valet parkers trying to carjack me—so it all seems rather casual, open, friendly. I stride briskly up the front steps, hoping to stay a step ahead of the radar, half expecting a couple of burly Secret Service types with walkie-talkie cords in their ears to grab me. But none do. So, I take a survey stroll through the dining room and bar area—very nice—then step confidently to the front desk and ask the receptionist:

  “Do you have an application form?”

  She gives me a quizzical look: “Are you seeking employment?”

  Not good. I thought I was blending rather well, but this shakes my confidence.

  “Uh, no, not really,” I reply. “I mean, membership forms. Applications for membership.”

  “One moment please,” she says, picking up the phone to speak to someone—hopefully not Security: What if she has one of those red buttons under her desk like the bank tellers have?

  “Mr. Bechert,” she says into the phone, “we have a gentleman here asking about membership.”

  Chip Bechert, a most amiable, fortyish man, dressed “resort casual” and ready to hit the links at a moment’s notice, bounds into the lobby to greet me warmly and invite me to sit down for an iced tea. Things are back on track, going rather swimmingly, don’t you think?

  Chip, the director of membership, casually asks what I’m looking for in a golf club, and I tell him “a course.”

  “Do you play a lot?” he asks.

  “Oh, not really,” I say, “I’m new to the game.”

  �
��What’s your handicap?” he asks.

  “None,” I reply. Why? Did I wrongly park in a marked spot in the lot? I didn’t want him to think he was going to have to build a ramp or anything.

  He’s referring to my golf handicap, which has never been calculated, but is severe and possibly inoperable: “I shoot about a 110,” I say, lying. It’s probably more like a 125, really, and on this challenging course more like a 175. I look around the course later, and see that it is at once uncommonly beautiful and fraught with perils such as I’d never seen before, perils like double doglegs. Long ones. We’re not talking dachshunds here.

  And you do have to put your golf handicap on your application! “It’s okay if it’s high,” he insists, “although if you tell me you’re shooting a 125 [which I hadn’t], I would certainly tell you all about our fine practice facility and the hours our golf pro gives lessons.”

  “Do you belong to other clubs?” he asks. I can’t think of any. I told him we joined BJ’s Price Club, a discount store, and the AARP sent me a temporary membership card, unsolicited, when I turned fifty. The bastards.

  Whether or not there’s a waiting list is difficult to determine, but one more answer out of me like the 110, and I think the answer is “yes” and “long.”

  Never join a club until you find out about the food, a (fat) friend had advised me. I ask, and Chip says it’s “great”—although “great” food at a country club is usually like “great” food at a pet motel. Furthermore, he says there’s no annual or monthly minimum you have to spend, unlike almost every other club I’ve ever heard of. Generally my wife and I are treated to the hospitality of our friends belonging to country clubs on the thirtieth or thirty-first of the month, when said friends take us to their clubs to try to eat up to those minimums: “Another chateaubriand, Bill?” The worst part of these minimums is that they can’t be used for alcoholic beverages.