Fore! Play (6 page)

Being guys, at the 18th tee we decide we’ll all just hit the ball as hard as we can, and this approach always yields some
breathtaking shots.

Let’s talk about Dave’s, shall we? Dave hits one of those drives that sort of reminds you of
Challenger
, as it rises majestically, higher and higher, farther and farther, like a rocket, and you go “ooooo”—
until
you begin to get this sick feeling in your stomach that something is going terribly wrong. In Dave’s case, it’s that his
ball is going to land not one, but two fairways over. Bert gives him a lift in the cart, since he’s going that way after his
own drive anyway. Bert is just the one fairway to the right and his second shot carries over the correct fairway onto the
fairway to the left just short of a cemetery. A friend of mine refers to this as “military golf: left-right-left-right.”

Personally, I once again hit my ball into the sand, and while the three of them leave to retrieve their balls from fairways
unknown, I take the opportunity to just pick up my damned ball and toss it. I haven’t played in sand so much since kindergarten.

After I toss the ball, I kick it toward the hole for good measure. After the sand problem, I have somehow managed to hit two
successive decent shots and am very excited to be putting to perhaps
win
the 18th hole outright, until I remember about the tossing and kicking.

I sink my putt, and joyously—because we’re finished—toss the ball toward a Dodge Neon in the parking lot, but of course I
miss that, too.

I am “in the clubhouse” with a solid 120. Bert holes out with an even 100. Dave a 91. Billy an 83. But, then, Billy has the
scorecard. The team of Billy and me wins. My brother-in-law owes me six bucks (to this day). Once I get my 45 handicap legally
established I’ll be beating them all.

Being Easter and everything, I figure we’ll all hustle home to our families. Nah. We go into the bar for breakfast. We are
a group of mud-splattered heathens, taking our own sweet time before heading home to righteously ill tempered spouses, who
have hunted colored eggs with the children, dressed them, and taken them to church on Easter morn.

We are golfers.

L
iz strongly suggested we learn the rules and etiquette of golf before hitting the course, and it was obvious I wouldn’t be
learning them from Bert, Billy, and Dave.

I purchased a copy of
The Rules of Golf
as approved by the United States Golf Association and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Scotland, and was horrified.
One hundred forty-four pages! And they said I really needed the companion 481-page
Decisions on the Rules of Golf to
boot.

It appeared that not only the USGA and all the Royals and Ancients had put their two cents in, but the Pope, the Supreme Court,
and various and sundry state legislatures and city councils as well.

The books are as byzantine as any tort law tome I’ve ever laid eyes upon, chockablock with definitions and all manner of restrictions
regarding provisional balls, casual water, crossing the margin, free drops, grounding of the club, lateral water hazards,
loose impediments, nearest point of relief (not the men’s room), and (ouch) embedded balls.

The rule book addresses such issues as whether snow and natural ice other than frost are “casual water” (any temporary accumulation
of water on the course that is visible before or after the player takes his stance and is not in a water hazard) or “loose
impediments” (natural objects such as stones, leaves, twigs, branches, and the like; dung, worms, insects, and casts or heaps
made by them, provided they are not fixed or growing, are not solidly embedded, and do not adhere to the ball). Ice cubes,
of course, are an “obstruction.” Having determined whether said snow is “casual water” or a “loose impediment,” the golfer
must then turn to the applicable chapters to research what can legally be done about it. It’s surprising that golfers are
only accompanied by caddies, and not by golf attorneys as well.

Some sections are amusing, I must admit, and useful to players of my caliber, such as rule 25–3 regarding what to do when
you find yourself on the “Wrong Putting Green.”

The USGA receives hundreds of calls a year to rule on certain technicalities, and some of the decisions seem cruel. If your
ball lands near an alligator in Orlando you must play it—dead or alive. A ball within ten feet of a rattlesnake in Arizona,
however, may at times be deemed unplayable. If you hit a ball from within a water hazard and a fish is beached along with
the ball and said fish blocks the next shot (not a common occurrence but it did happen in a recent NCAA women’s championship),
the fish may be tossed back in the water with no penalty—
if
it is still flopping. Alive, the fish is defined as an “outside agency”; dead, it’s a “loose impediment” and moving it would
cost you a stroke. Keep that in mind.

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!

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.