Fore! Play (2 page)

It’s the only one where the players keep their own scores. Imagine if quarterbacks Kurt Warner and Peyton Manning met at the
fifty-yard line after a big football playoff game as a packed stadium tensely looked on:

“What’s your scorecard look like, Kurt?”

“Well, Peyton, I put myself down for a touchdown and extra point in the first quarter, another 7 in the second, 14 in the
third, and 21 in the fourth for 49 points. But I did take a mulligan—five downs—on that last touchdown pass.”

“Gee, Kurt, that’s okay. Counting that 15-yard gimmee field goal I have a 45, so it looks like you win.”

And Rams fans go wild!

In golf, fans don’t go wild. They have to be quiet most of the time. When something good happens there is polite applause,
the kind you hear after the guest speaker on “Transplanting Delphiniums” at the garden club.

Announcers
whisper
, like they’re broadcasting a church service or reference work at the library. They say that fans and announcers must be quiet
because golfers have to concentrate. Yeah, like basketball players don’t have to concentrate to sink a fourth-quarter foul
shot while hundreds of screaming fans wave colorful three-foot polystyrene weenies behind the basket.

So golf seems less a sport than an
activity
, even though it borders a good deal of the time on inactivity. How does golf stack up against napping? Napping is preferred
by many because there are no lessons, skills, frustrations, complex rules, outfits, expensive tools, fees, and special shoes—although
it would not surprise me if Nike came out with $100 napping shoes.

Moreover, golf is a noncontact, nonaerobic activity—although personally I get more exercise than most, hitting the ball nearly
twice as many times as my partners and walking many more miles in my serpentine paths to the greens. Still, it requires much
the same conditioning as stamp collecting. Running is not permitted on the golf course.

It is also a
game
, a game of great skill and practice. One that frustrates great athletes like Michael Jordan and very good athletes like my
son and formerly mediocre athletes like myself. It is written that two thirds of new golfers give it up after five years.
Golf even frustrates Tiger. Watch him shake his head and mutter all day on his way to another championship.

So what draws these hundreds of millions? What attracts Bill Clinton and Celine Dion and John Updike and Alice Cooper and
Hootie and the Blowfish?

Updike writes (Cooper does not): “As it moves through a golf match the human body, like Alice in Wonderland, experiences intoxicating
relativity—huge in relation to the ball, tiny in relation to the course, exactly matched to that of the other players. From
this relativity is struck a silent music that rings to the treetops and runs through a Wagnerian array of changes as each
hole evokes its set of shots, dwindling down to the final putt. The clubs in their nice gradations suggest organ pipes.”

Huh? So, as we were saying, what draws people to golf?

Many things. It is the only sport with carts and cocktails. I’d still play basketball if you could use carts. When you’re
young, you play baseball, basketball, soccer, and other games where the ball moves and so do you. As you get older you either
play doubles tennis, where
you
don’t move, or golf, where the ball doesn’t. Or you watch others play these games on TV.

I predict that sumo wrestling will become the next big sport for aging baby boomers, because it actually
requires
participants to be fat and it usually lasts about three seconds. Golf is currently the only sport in which fat, middle-aged
chain-smokers can flat out kick your butt. It is also the only one that offers any hope of improvement to these out-of-shape
athletes, if you will, over fifty.

Another reason people play golf is what I shall call here the “Ice Fishing Factor,” which holds that men will do almost
anything
to get away from their loved ones for a while—to include sitting in a shed on a frozen lake all day drinking syrupy schnapps
and looking at a hole in the ice.

Another reason is that like trout fishing, golf takes place in beautiful places, many as lavishly landscaped as Japanese gardens;
pastoral, serene enclaves offering a few hours of escape from the hustle and bustle, from traffic, from television, even from
cell phones, which are banned at many clubs—reason enough to play golf.

Golf confers a measure of class on its players, smacking of the idle rich. One must be of a certain station in life to take
off four or five hours on a Tuesday afternoon to play golf. Not to mention joining an exclusive golf club. Show me the Winged
Sphere National Bowling Club that costs $50,000 to join and where a single blackball can keep prospective members off the
lanes.

Golf is good for business, my friends tell me. But in my case it would probably be the medical business, the personal injury
law business, the window replacement business—as well as golf ball sales.

They proselytize, these golfers, worse than the Jehovah’s Witnesses. A friend came to the door to give me a golf magazine
featuring an article on why everyone should take up golf and I felt like he’d handed me
Lamp Unto My Feet
.

They always ask me to play with them, saying, incorrectly, that I couldn’t possibly be as bad as I claim to be. They say it
doesn’t even matter if I’m bad, so long as I just keep hitting the ball and don’t hold them up.

They speak of the fragrance of freshly mown grass, of the sparkle of the morning dew, of fawns scampering across the fairways,
of the exhilaration of hitting even one fine shot, of relaxation and serenity, and, perhaps most of all, of the camaraderie.

I can’t argue with any of that. I’ve had terrific times out on golf courses on beautiful days with partners who could hit
bad shots and laugh about them. It’s just the damned frustrating, maddening, impossible, merciless game I hate.

But I want to see my friends and about the only place to do that anymore is on a golf course.

So, I’m giving it a try. But I’m not going to call it a “try,” I’m calling it “one man’s personal journey” so maybe I can
attract a little interest from Oprah’s Book Club. I approach this with some hesitation, steeling myself for humiliation, and
fearing addiction.

I mean these golf nuts are gone, folks. Round the bend. And they’re not coming back. I have friends who are plopping down
$1,500 or more for clubs, $50,000 to join the country club, taking golf vacations to California and Scotland, and moving to
golf communities so they can literally
live
on the golf course (and have my golf balls land on their coffee tables). There are coffins decorated in golf motifs.

Now, if golf were a religious cult, and I certainly don’t mean to imply it isn’t, and you saw your friends suddenly acting
in such an irrational fashion, you’d have them
deprogrammed!

And if someone like Chi Chi Rodriguez should take them on a golf vacation to Guyana and tell them they are all going to a
better place, the big country club in the sky, where there are no monthly food minimums and they will play par golf with custom
Callaway clubs on a Robert Trent Jones–designed course every day for all of eternity … what do you think happens?

They drink the Kool-Aid, no question.

I
am from a golf-deprived background. No one taught me to play. I picked up the game in the 1950s on the hardscrabble streets
of my hometown, Champaign, Illinois, first in my own yard where my brother Dave sank a number of tin cans, then at a miniature
golf course across from a trailer park, and finally at a little 9-hole public course between a cemetery and a pigpen.

Of the two forms of golf, little and big, I preferred the mini version, where there was always a lot of laughing, and where
a really bad shot—one that hit another golfer or another golfer’s Buick, or one that skittered across the street and had to
be played out of the Illini Pest Control parking lot—was always considered the very best shot of the day. It takes a certain
skill to get some loft on the ball and drive it that far with a putter.

We played (for 35 cents, as I recall) on warm summer nights, the course semilit by dim bulbs strung here and there, accompanied
by the sounds of crickets and top ten tunes like “Green Door” or “Tammy” that were trying to make themselves heard on the
single raspy speaker attached to the shack. The balls were colorful and the clubs almost dangerously barbed and ratty, having
the look and feel of spoons that had been dropped into a garbage disposal—except those weren’t invented yet. There were always
friends there, and sometimes a group of cute girls in short shorts that would cause my friends and me to show off—sometimes
in ways that involved minor property damage and expulsion.

It was exotic. There was the little bowed bridge over a six-by-eight-foot pond—probably the largest body of water in the county.
And there was the windmill. How clever. Turns out all mini-golf courses have windmills, but I didn’t know that. We didn’t
get around much. Provincial? Our high school foreign exchange student was from America. Hawaii. Who knew?

Mini-golf was fun. But big golf is not played for fun per se. You don’t hear a lot of laughing on your standard-sized courses.
Oh, there was some laughing at that public 9-hole course, where players were generally awful, not serious about the game,
sometimes drunk, sometimes without any golfing equipment, and occasionally there just to make out. You never see couples making
out on the country club course or at those golf tournaments on TV. Too bad.

My friends and I didn’t know how to play, and we didn’t know that the 9-hole course was as bad as we were. A round of golf
cost next to nothing and that seemed a fair price. Actually, I’m not sure we paid. I think if you started on the second tee
you didn’t have to pay.

The course had no landscaping as such: no trees, no berms, no sand traps, no rough—-just the tees, straight fairways, and
flat little greens. Like a sod farm. On one fairway, the designer decided to get a little tricky, placing across its width
a foot-high, grass-covered hurdle that resembled an enlarged speed bump—although in retrospect that might have been a sewer
pipe or the work of a large rodent.

That was all to the good. We were not accustomed to trees—all of which had been wiped out by Dutch elm disease—or topographical
aberrations like slopes, knolls, or knobs—let alone hills. We were flatlanders. The land was flat in every direction for hundreds
of miles. My driveway was the steepest slope in town. The first time I saw hills and curves, I rolled my Volkswagen.

I inherited my golf clubs from an uncle killed in World War II. There were four in the bag as I recall: two putters, a driver,
and an iron. My friends and I approached the game as just an enlarged version of miniature golf, really. We just swung harder
and were pleasantly surprised to find there were no windmills to take into account on the greens. We played poorly, were uninterested
in improvement, and laughed at ourselves and others. Unfortunately, this was to become our overall philosophy of life. We
approached everything the same way. When we bowled at the fabulous new automated Arrowhead Lanes, we imitated the mannerisms,
nuances, and seriousness of TV bowlers, while depositing balls in the gutters. We filched the green, red, and tan bowling
shoes with the sizes displayed on the backs, and wore them to school. The fad never caught on.

I don’t know that we kept score on that golf course. When you start on the second tee, you don’t get a scorecard. Par was
probably three for each hole on the course, although I’m sure a good pro could do them all in two, with no hazards, other
than the police, who were occasionally summoned when there were, say, fifty golfers on the course and no gate receipts. Our
scores were probably in the 60s, respectable on the pro tour, not so hot on a par-3 9-holer.

It was here I developed my pronounced hook shot (something I never could do in bowling) and my noteworthy ability to play
amongst tombstones. If your hook was severe, you could hit a drive into the cemetery, where my grandfather was buried. You
had to hit for distance, though, to clear the street and the hedgerow. I did that only once, with the assistance of a strong
crosswind, and I did have to go look for the ball because I could only afford the one. After paying my respects at the family
grave site, I advanced my ball several plots with my iron, before electing to throw the ball back in play rather than trying
to chip it over the hedge and the street. It was a decent toss (I played pitcher and third base as a kid), but still short
of the green, leaving me two chip shots and four putts before holing out.

A slice on that course could be even worse. The course was positioned—as are so many things in the Midwest—next to pig and
cattle pens, and a severely sliced shot could mean wading through animal dung (actual bullshit!) to play your ball. If it
were actually in actual bullshit, what to do? Pick it up? With what? Try to hit it out? This may be where the term “chip shot”
was coined, I don’t know.

For all the golfers playing the course, not just the ones bad enough to hit
into
the pens, a southerly breeze through that area turned a round of golf into a memorable odoriferous experience. Ever try to
putt and gag at the same time?

The first real golf outing I can remember was with a group of former college buddies a couple of years after we’d all graduated,
on a weekend with our wives at a house on Lake Michigan.

Most of them had played golf throughout college. And bridge. I didn’t play golf or bridge because my older brother played
bridge and suffered from a dangerously low grade point average as a result. I didn’t want to become hooked on those vices.
So I began playing pinball machines on occasion and then for several hours every day. For five years (had the two senior years).
We didn’t have carpal tunnel syndrome back then or I would have died from it.