My buddy Lloyd and I are watching the U.S. Open golf tournament this weekend while Charlie reads some books.
The tournament is an interesting one because it is the oldest in the United States (127 years), it is the national championship of golf, it is “open” to professional as well as amateur golfers, and any golfer can play in the tournament if he can qualify in a regional tournament. The course that the contestants are playing this week is The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, the oldest country club in the United States.
As usual, the first day featured remarkable scores from relatively unknown pros and amateurs. In the second day, most of those wannabes petered out and the best professionals began to move up the leaderboard. There are two days left in the tournament and it appears that one of the top ten golfers in the world will win the thing, which is expected and appropriate. It’s fun to watch these guys do things with a golf ball that regular Lunchbucket Joes can only dream about when they are hacking the ball around their local public course.
Golf is a unique game because the player is also the referee: it is a game of honor, where a rules violation is expected to be called by a player on himself. It has been said that you can learn a lot about a person simply by playing a round of golf with him, because the game tests skill, determination, ingenuity, composure, and honesty.
Another aspect of golf that attracts followers is that it takes place out in nature, with the game itself being conducted on grass, dirt, sand, weeds, forests, and sometimes beaches. That wonderful day in the outdoors is easily ruined by struck balls that can’t be found, find a body of water, end up in trees, or leave the confines of the golf course entirely. Windy days bring their own measure of torment to golfers. Cold weather and rain can make holding a club and swinging one difficult. Some frustrated wag described golf as “a good walk spoiled”.
Speaking of spoiling, I believe that competition/gambling really ruined the “game” of golf because it took something that is basically a test of man vs. nature and turned it into warfare between human beings on a battlefield that just happens to be a beautiful golf course. The game of golf was meant to test a player and reveal what stuff he is made of. Formal competition and gambling introduced the need for rules, referees and such, and took much of the magic and fun out of the game (in my opinion).
Handicaps, for example, were created by the U.S.G.A. so that golfers of different ability could “compete” with each other on a supposedly equal footing. A handicap works thusly: If a pro will shoot 72 on a course and an amateur will shoot 85, then the amateur would get a 13 handicap so that he could theoretically compete fairly with the pro. Handicaps facilitate gambling among the players. Both the equal playing field idea (handicap) and gambling itself assume that players will be honest about their handicap. Dishonest people lie, and these folks commonly abuse the handicap system, to the point that good golfers abhor playing in competitions that are handicapped. I’ve known of country club members who are shunned socially when it is discovered that they are handicap cheats: one couple had to move from our Jack Nicklaus golf community because of the shame. Another cheater was blackballed from Country Club membership.
I’ve golfed at a relatively high skill level in the past but really enjoy the game when I’m out playing with friends, for no money, no championship on the line, simply for fun, etc. I enjoy hitting a few good shots among the bad ones, high-fiving my buddy who has just made a tricky putt, and razzing someone in the group who just jacked a ball out of bounds. Golf is supposed to be fun, not the Bataan Death March; it’s having some laughs, maybe discuss business and politics, and an excuse to drink a few beers afterward at the 19th green pub.
I don’t play much anymore nor do my friends: maybe a half dozen times a year. Accordingly, our games suck, with a lot of bad swing mechanics, horrid shots, lost balls, and three- (or four-!) putts on the greens. And, still, we enjoy ourselves because we’re out there for sun, exercise, and male bonding (i.e. laughing at ourselves, telling nasty jokes and busting each others’ balls).
The official “Rules of Golf” take a back seat to camaraderie when we play. We’re old, so we get to take advantage of the Senior tee boxes (which makes the distance from tee to green closer), and we give ourselves Mulligans on the first tee if we dribble a shot down to the Women’s tee box or jerk our drive out of bounds. We’ve been known to allow Shapiros as well. That would occur when a player hits a bad shot, declares a Mulligan, re-tees his ball, and then hits a WORSE shot. The Shapiro allows the player to choose between the two poorly-struck golf shots… with no penalty. It’s genius, obviously devised by a shyster lawyer.
Professional golf rules are very anal about “playing the ball as you find it”, even if your shot ends up in someone’s divot in the middle of the fairway, comes to rest in some asshole’s un-raked sand trap, or perhaps rolls up against a tree root or rock. “Tough luck” says the Rules of Golf. We geezer golfers don’t play like that. No matter the season, “Winter Rules” are in effect at all times, which means that the player can move his ball a club length, without penalty, if it has come to rest in an unfortunate spot. And, because we don’t play on the manicured courses that the pros do, there are lots of unfortunate lies that our balls seem to find.
We also “give” putts to our buddies and ourselves, meaning that a putt which misses the cup by a distance of less than a club length is declared a “Gimme” and the next putt is considered made without having to putt it and go to the effort of bending down and taking it from the cup. Very considerate, huh? Particularly since all 70-year-old duffers have bad backs…
When I was playing a round with my buddy Lloyd the other day, and neither of us had shot a round of golf in a very long time, we employed the Defective Ball Rule, meaning that any shot intended to hit a fairway or green that veers off said part of the golf course (like into the bushes, into a lake, out of bounds, etc.) was obviously caused by an improperly manufactured golf ball and the player may then be entitled to a free drop on the fairway nearest the site of the unfortunate incident without penalty. This rule is not only humanitarian but it also speeds up the game and, in our part of the country, lessens the chance of being bit by a rattlesnake. The Defective Ball Rule is a No-Brainer that should be adopted by the PGA Tour, in my opinion, particularly in Florida.
(Update: We watched the third round of the U.S. Open yesterday. The course that they are playing is a very old and cunning layout, with all manner of trouble just waiting to torture the players. Yesterday, it was windy and most of the professionals took a beating. It was lovely to watch, to be honest, because these elite golfers ended up in places that we duffers see every time we play and those pros had some difficulty extricating themselves from the poop.
As I mentioned earlier, the official U.S.G.A. Rules of Golf are a bit over-the-top anal about playing the ball “as it lies”. Yesterday, Justin Thomas, one of the world’s greatest pro golfers, fell victim to those rules when his perfectly struck drive off of the tee landed in the middle of the fairway, right where it should have, and rolled into a small depression where a 12’x12” drainage grate was situated. Clearly, it was unfair to make Justin play the ball from that peculiar spot, as it impacted his stance and, therefore, swing. But, the rules official said, “Tough luck, play it as it lies.” Justin did, flubbed his shot, and cursed out loud.
Later in the day, another contender hit a ball practically out of bounds, behind some bleachers, on grass trod upon by spectators, with a blocked view of the fairway and green. He was allowed by the rules officials to take a “free drop”, giving him a chance to hit his next shot onto the fairway.
A good shot penalized and a bad shot rewarded. Doesn’t make sense, does it? That’s the Rules of Golf in a nutshell.
Had my friends and I been playing with Justin Thomas, we would have congratulated him on his tremendous drive and told him, “Drop the ball away from that fucking grate and hit away, Sir”.)
I’ve have many great memories from my golfing addiction over the years. Like I said, after I retired and took some lessons, I dropped my handicap from 14 to 6, which meant that I regularly shot in the upper 70’s. I won some trophies, played team golf, had a hole in one, and enjoyed my weekly Saturday morning round with my closest buddies, when we gambled a few bucks. Probably my fondest memory was the time that Charlie and I joined six other couples in a one-week Hawaiian golfing vacation. We stayed in Maui, at Country Western singer Randy Travis’ compound (seven suites in one massive house!), played tournament golf and barbequed every day, and partied at night. I played horrible golf in Hawaii and had a WONDERFUL time because of the wonderful camaraderie.
Golf is incredibly hard to master. It requires a very high degree of coordination to do properly, something that I’ve never come close to. The difference between a decent hacker (me at my prime) and a professional is huge in terms of skill. The game looks easy on TV because everyone that you’re seeing is at that professional level. If an average hacker would tee it up with PGA pros, on TV, you would see the difference: Joe Sixpack hits his driver 200 yards, while the pro uses a wedge… and flies that guy’s ball by 15 yards. The pros are also used to putting on greens that are as slick and hard as glass: an everyday golfer, at the local public course, would four- or five-putt those slick greens.
I said before that I had a hole-in-one one day at Bear Creek. I’ve also had four 300 games in bowling. Which is the harder game? Golf by a long shot. I’ve seen 300-pound beer bellies, chomping on pizza and quaffing beer between shots, average 225 in bowling. It’s one uncomplicated, repetitivre motion that even handicapped people can master. I rolled my first perfect 300 game within one year of taking up bowling, while I spent 30 years (and lots of lessons) trying to become proficient at golf… and never mastered it. Golf requires a complex set of physical acts, concentration, and imagination.
A bowling alley is just a wooden lane with some pins at the end, situated in an air-conditioned building. Golf courses have different kinds of terrain, lakes, shapes of fairways, elevation changes, and TEMPERATURE, PRECIPITATION, and WIND to deal with. The same golf hole can play completely different from one day to the next depending upon where the tee box and the pin (the hole on the green) are situated. Golfers must use their wits; bowlers, even good ones, can be nitwits.
Maybe that’s why I like to watch the U.S. Open: an opportunity to watch the greatest golfers in the world match wits with Mother Nature. Yesterday, the pros got spanked.
(Update: The U.S. Open was won by Matt Fitzpatrick, an Englishman who won the U.S. Amateur tournament at this very same Boston, Massachusetts course back in 2013. The guy was rock-solid all week, using his course knowledge to keep out of trouble. On the final hole, he had a very difficult shot to make (156 yards uphill, blind, out of a sand trap) and he put the ball about 15′ from the cup, something that a true champion might do.
The runners-up, Will Valatoris and Scottie Scheffler, also played in that same U.S. Amateur back in 2013. The rest of the 155-man field had never played the tricky course, demonstrating how different golf is from other professional sports. As implied previously, much of the game is played “between the ears”.
Another aspect of the sport is that it is dominated these days by young players. Many of the younger players are involved in pro-level competition while in college and are at peak physical and competitive condition when they begin to play on the PGA Tour. The winner, Fitzpatrick, is 27 years old and the runners-up are both 25.
In contrast, the 15 players from the upstart LIV circuit (the professional tour being funded by Saudi Arabia) are mostly in their mid-30’s, some are in their 40’s, and Phil Mickelson is 52. Fifteen LIV players started the 155-man U.S. Open tourney, only four made the 74-man cut on Friday, and the highest LIV finisher came in 24th (Dustin Johnson). This extremely poor showing by LIV golfers underscores the reason why a bunch of PGA Tour pros jumped to the LIV tour: a lot of guaranteed money that these old-timers wouldn’t make if they had to compete with the young bucks. You can’t blame them for that, even though they must wear a Scarlet Letter because of the Saudi blood money.)
