Fore! Play (23 page)

Pick up the pace! Golf would be a better game for fans, certainly, and better for players, too, if we didn’t have so much
damned time to
think
. How about a time clock? Fastest to play 18 holes wins. Get a little running going out on the course. Almost every sport
has running. (Except the two-man luge, which still has the lying.) If you had running you’d have sweating. Almost all sports
have that. With running and sweating, you’d have substitutes and benches and coaches and
plays
. Golf plays: “Tiger drives it way over the head of the defender to Duval, who darts past another defenseman, drops the ball,
and chips it onto the green, where Mickelson buries the putt!”

Fans go wild. Right now, golf fans never go wild. They’re told to be quiet all the time and the announcers have to whisper.
There should be booing at golf matches, and when a fella mis-hits and ruins his chances in a tournament, the gallery should
let him have it: “Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, hey-hey, goo-ood bye!” When someone’s putting, fans should be yelling and waving
their arms. There should be cheerleaders and pep bands. And bonfires!

Not to mention brawls. A pro hits a 300-yard drive, the second guy hits one 350, the first guy throws down his club and goes
after him. Sure. Let’s see a little emotion out there! How about when a pro golfer tees off, his opponent gets to take a shot
at the drive with a shotgun? Skeet-golf.

How about Extreme Golf, with Vince McMahon, head of the World Wrestling Federation, running the Masters in Augusta? He’d have
stronger characters, in flashy outfits, with names like Hole-In-Juan, Course Buster, and Par Force!

Or Obstacle Golf, where players have to climb over fifteen-foot walls and swing on ropes across crocodile-infested water hazards
to get to their next shots. That would liven things up. And for ratings: Survivor Golf, played on an uninhabited island off
Borneo, a marathon golf match, 500 holes, over a month’s time with no water and no food save for beetle larvae and roasted
rats!

Yes! I’m going to talk to golf’s governing body, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Scotland, about just that.

M
aybe I could win a tournament, a national tournament, a national tournament of the very worst golfers in America: the Bad
Golfers Association Open in Kansas City.

Have you ever asked yourself, perhaps after a particularly heinous shot, “Just how bad
am
I?” I mean, you know you’re bad, but you’ll never really know how bad until you’ve put your skills to the test against the
worst of the worst.

At the BGA Open bad golfers are given the opportunity to do just that—if you qualify. The BGA was founded a few years ago
by two of the worst golfers I’ve ever seen, John McMeel, president of Universal Press Syndicate, and Pat Oliphant, the renowned
political cartoonist, after they’d played another miserable round of golf together, one in which Pat had watched the head
of his (rented) driver fly into a Florida swamp.

“We decided that we were so spectacularly bad,” says McMeel, “we wanted to somehow honor that by organizing.”

“And,” Oliphant chimes in, “why should the game of golf be left in the hands of a bunch of grim-faced over-achievers? Have
you ever seen anybody
smile
on the PGA circuit? They’re the wrong role models"—apparently implying that he and McMeel are, somehow, the right ones.

“There are more of us than there are of them,” McMeel concludes, noting that about 27 million people play golf and only an
estimated 10 percent shoot 100 or better.

He said bad golf is part of our heritage, and you could almost hear the fife and drum as we recounted together such historic
summits as that of Presidents Clinton, Ford, and Bush playing together in the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, the one where Ford
hit one spectator and Bush hit two, a ricochet shot off a tree that broke a woman’s glasses and gave her ten stitches in her
nose.

Thank God we live in America. They say that in the Netherlands golfers need to pass a test and hold a golf ability card. They
must hit three drives straight more than 130 yards, hit five approach shots to within four and a half yards of the cup, and
putt five balls from eleven yards out to within six feet of the hole! Thank God they didn’t win the war!

I’d phoned McMeel to detail my qualifications and credentials for winning a slot in the BGA tournament. “You seem more than
qualified,” he said, just halfway through my presentation, which seemed flattering and insulting at the same time.

Upon arriving in Kansas City, Jody (who was thinking of playing in the
W
BGA tournament) can’t help but be impressed. These guys are serious about bad golf. They have all the trappings of the PGA,
including a complete line of products—calendars, mugs, golf shirts, and such—all bearing the official BGA crest, which shows
a bent putter and a wreath of poison ivy atop the motto “Bad But Proud.” The night before the tourney there is a lavish soiree
at the Ritz-Carlton. Everything about the BGA is first-class—except, of course, the golf.

The BGA Open brings together 132 bad golfers from throughout the country, who feel a need to test their own ineptitude against
that of other low-notch incompetents. This is more than a contest, however, it is a chance for the golf-challenged to meet
others with similar handicaps and to share their experiences, unashamedly, the way other kinds of freaks do on Jerry Springer.
For some, it’s a chance to merely play golf with other people, since no one wants to play with them at home.

“Their love of the game just exceeds their ability to play, that’s all,” notes McMeel, who probably should be fighting back
tears.

A group of us sit in the shade and talk about our appalling golf games before the Open begins, a time when we probably should
be practicing or slamming down Bloody Marys.

The first to speak says he wishes he could play with a bag over his head. “I stand up to the ball and have absolutely no idea
what’s going to happen when I hit it,” says the strapping young man. “It might go 5 feet or 270 yards. I’ve hit surrounding
houses so hard the balls come back on the fairway. I can’t understand it. Why would anyone build a house just 220 yards from
a golf course?”

“Well,” I note, “that
is
an eighth of a mile.” He puts his head down and nods.

“I’ve broken windows in houses,” blurts out another golfer, and you can see the first guy already feels a little better. This
is turning into something of a support group.

“I’m so bad I destroy the clubs,” says another. “One time the head fell off my driver and another time I borrowed a 7-iron
from a friend and slung it by accident into a pond and had to go in after it. It’s embarrassing swimming around in front of
other golfers.”

Two lay claim to the title “worst golfer in Kansas City,” something that will be decided this day on the field of play. One
of these men says his biggest drawback is that his wife won’t let him play on weekends. The other says he is the worst golfer
in K.C. because he doesn’t cheat. “Honesty,” he proclaims, “is a major handicap in golf, obviously.” Words to the wise.

Others in this group therapy session describe themselves as “the worst you’ve ever seen,” “the worst golfer you’ve ever met,”
and so forth. It was an illustrious-free field. All are well known in their local communities as very bad golfers. A guy named
Becker from Seattle has set a personal goal of proving here that he is the worst in the world and says: “I should have my
own organization: the Really Bad Golfers Association.” Some say they’ve never kept score, but Becker says he shoots in the
“85 to 150” range, which means if he has a bad (i.e., a good, low-scoring) day he won’t stand a chance.

But none said they would stoop to cheating to be the worst. “That won’t be necessary,” McMeel says.

One woman says she’s played all her life and still shoots in the 120s and 130s. “I have high hopes in this tournament,” she
says. “I expect to be really, really bad.” And you know something, she
was
. She visualized it, then went out and did it.

“I’ve improved,” says a 125-er from Cleveland, “in that I’ve stopped throwing my clubs—because they’re too expensive these
days.”

Some of the golfers even have physical handicaps, yet remain undeterred. “My instructor said I’m just the wrong size to play,”
says a burly fella. “He said that at my height and weight he could give me a hundred lessons and I’d never be any good.” What
an inspiring teacher. So the brawny lad says he saved his money and shoots the same 115 (“not counting all the strokes,” and
who among us really does?) he would have if he’d spent $10,000 on lessons.

But how do they
feel
about sucking at golf? “It’s embarrassing,” says one man. “Guys will call and ask my wife to play and say I can come along
and carry the bags.”

McMeel tells a comforting tale: “I was invited to play at Augusta, where they play the Masters. I was going to rent clubs,
but they don’t rent [apparently Palmer, Nicklaus, and Woods all have their own]. We played for three days—three of the longest
days of my life. At the end of the third day, my host says, ‘John, look around, because you’re never gonna see this place
ever again.’ And he meant it. I notice that whenever I’m invited to play golf by someone, they only ask once.”

The impressive thing about almost all of these bad golfers is that they aren’t just inexperienced golfers. These are golfers
who play quite a bit and are still just god-awful. Never get any better. McMeel is like this, a president who leads by example,
consistently and earnestly playing really bad golf that is, frankly, horrifying at times.

In a Bad Golfers Association tournament, is it the low scorer or high scorer who wins? Or is it like high-low poker, where
they split the pot. And what is the pot?

On the eve of their national tournament, McMeel and Oliphant seem taken aback by this question. They really haven’t thought
about it, which seems unusual, since they’ve thought about everything else—except, the BGA isn’t big on score-keeping.

This becomes obvious when one reads “The Rules of Golf—According to the Bad Golfers Association,” rules that are rather at
odds with the Rules of Golf as written by the USGA.

Take the BGA’s definition of par, for example: “Par: The BGA rejects this as an elitist definition which may force BGA members
to attempt emulation of ego-driven over-achievers with whom they would never normally or willingly associate. Par, the BGA
defines as being whatever you say it is.”

Or their definition of “Strokes Taken: The number of strokes a player has taken shall not necessarily include any penalty
strokes incurred. In fact, the final score taken should not necessarily include some of the actual strokes taken.”

The tournament is to be played in accordance with the BGA rules, so I boned up on the idiosyncrasies the night before. One
of the cardinal rules of the BGA is that taking golf lessons is anathema and if you take them you’re out. My lessons in the
grade school gym, then, would seem to disqualify me! Have I made this pilgrimage to Kansas City in vain? Not necessarily,
since the one BGA rule that seems to override all others is that none of these rules apply unless you’re caught. It seems
to be the ol’ “don’t ask—don’t tell” rule that Bill Clinton put into effect to cover gays in the military and interns under
his desk.

Although it remains unclear whether high or low score will win the tournament, I opt to try to beat this gathering of golf
klutzes, to try to be best of the worst (the tallest dwarf in the circus), to try to win
something
, to best
somebody
, in this god-forsaken sportlike leisure time activity.

And I am leaving nothing to chance. I procure a secret weapon that I believe will ensure victory: the Ballistic Driver.

Now, Ballistic Driver is more than just a name, more than just another new miracle club fashioned from some revolutionary
new super-turbo-titanium amalgamation, more than a driver with a head bigger than Bertha’s.

This son-of-a-bitch uses real bullets! Explosives! The clubhead opens up like a rifle chamber, which it is, then a .27 caliber
bullet is loaded, and the chamber locked. Then the weapon is placed two inches behind the ball, a trigger on the club grip
is pulled, and BLAM! the bullet fires, and the spring-loaded face of the driver shoots forward at two hundred miles per hour,
blasting the ball 250 yards! Every time. Without even swinging. Seriously. All you do is line it up.

I talked with the developer of the club, Jim Duncalf, who told me it doesn’t leave a big hole in the ground when it explodes,
and isn’t even all that loud because it’s equipped with a silencer. He agreed to ship one to my hotel in Kansas City, because,
after all, you couldn’t very well carry the damned thing on an airplane, now could you? Those little security personnel stationed
at the airport metal detectors would go … ballistic.

Will I need a firearms license to play golf with this contraption? Would there be a three-day waiting period? Background checks?
Would they find out about my toll evasion charge on the Tri-State Tollway in Chicago?

“The Ballistic Driver is not a joke,” answered Duncalf. “Think how they could help handicapped golfers. Would you like to
invest $100,000?” I told him no, and that I really didn’t even want to send him $800 for the Driver, so he let me use it free
just this one time.

I assured him it was no joke to me either. Anything that would remove my unsightly swing from my golf game was a serious improvement.
It sort of reminded me of dynamite fishing in Texas, which consists of lighting a stick of dynamite, tossing it into a lake
or stream, and harvesting stunned fish and fish particles. I “caught” some little sun-fish once as a kid utilizing this same
technique and waterproof cherry bombs. Like dynamite fishing, the Ballistic Driver also bypasses the need for expensive equipment,
knowledge, and skill. No permit is needed, since it is not permitted.