by Bill Giest
On display here, too, are special balls just for putting, like the Bald Eagle, with several “undimpled striking points,” because “striking a dimple ridge can throw off a putt 5 degrees or more.” But how you go about exchanging that great putting ball for the “world’s longest legal ball” that got you to the green, without your partners noticing, isn’t outlined in the colorful brochure. You’ll have to figure that one out yourself. Also, I’m not so sure that I don’t want my putts thrown off 5 degrees.
Sadly, there are no magnetized balls that are just drawn to the tin cup, but there is the EZ-Reader ball with a built-in bubble level window to show you the slope of the green. And there are “guidance system” balls with arrows painted on them to show you that your ball is rolling true.
Could any of these things possibly be legal? And, if they’re so hot, why doesn’t Tiger Woods use any of this crap?
There are training balls with badminton feathers so you can swing away in the backyard without those reckless endangerment charges being filed by the neighbors … trick exploding balls … balls with your former spouse’s picture on them … Eco-Golf balls, which decompose in fresh-or saltwater within ninety-six hours with no toxic or hazardous residues left behind (but how does that help me?) … glow-in-the-dark golf balls … floating—yes!—golf balls … and the Golden Girl ball for “older women with slower swings,” which I would definitely buy if the words “Golden Girl” weren’t printed on them … and the Won-Putt ball, brazenly claiming it “saves 3–10 strokes per round"!
Good Balls: -3–10 strokes per round. That’s 81–88 strokes off my game so far. I’m closing in on par!
22
Cutting Your Losses
Now, you don’t have to spend a fortune buying all these clubs and balls new. In fact, it’s suggested that novices might want to consider used equipment, because at first we do tend to abuse our clubs and lose our balls. We don’t call them used, of course, any more than we call used cars used. We call them “pre-driven” or one of the “encore series.”
As mentioned, we like to shop at Grandpa Brennan’s Previously Owned Golf Ball Emporium, owned and operated by Jerry, his wife, Peggy, their children and grandchildren. He has a prime location, albeit a dangerous one, adjacent to Goat Hill. They live there, too, just a two-hundred-yard slice from the second tee, not more than ten or fifteen yards from the fairway just across a little two-lane road. Love Canal might be safer.
Merchandise is displayed on a table in the yard, separated into the three-for-a-dollars (to include balata and titanium balls) kept in a wooden case or twelve-pack egg cartons, and the five-for-a-dollars in a dish strainer. “It’s a quality difference,” Jerry explains, with some of the five-for-a-dollars showing a slight blemish here and there. At either price, it’s a deep discount, representing substantial savings over new balls that sell for from one dollar to more than four dollars apiece these days.
Jerry’s balls bear the names of individuals, banks, beers, investment houses, country clubs, and fast-food restaurants, as well as encouragements to “Go For It!” and to “Just Say No.” In addition to the classic white, the balls come in every color not in the rainbow, such as fluorescent yellow, shocking pink, and roadwork-ahead orange.
As we’re shopping, there is a sharp, loud CRACK! as an errant tee shot hits the road ten feet away and bounces onto the Brennans’ roof. “Did they get ya?” Jerry laughs as he comes out of the house. I’m having a damned flashback to ‘Nam—"Incoming!"—but Jerry’s jocular tone snaps me out of it. He shows me the side of his house, the one facing teeward, which is riddled with holes, some the size of golf balls, others larger.
“Bullet holes,” he remarks with a chuckle. “There’s some real beauties.”
His wife, Peggy, thinks it’s funny, too. “We’re thinking of having the grandkids wear helmets when they come over,” she says, and the two of them laugh together. Peggy has been hit, and her friend’s car window smashed here.
The family collects balls from the yard and goes ball-hawking on the course. There are eight kids and eleven grandchildren, who all join in, equipped with long poles meant to fetch balls from water hazards, but which work equally well in the brier patches. Jerry won’t reveal his best spots, any more than clammers around here will reveal theirs. It’s fertile ground. The public course attracts some really bad players, like myself, and there are no caddies to watch the flight of the ball.
Jerry is a retired teacher who started the business to make some money in the summer. He sells about 4,500 balls a year now. “Many are repeaters,” Jerry says. “Sometimes we sell the same ball over and over and over.”
Jerry sells us some balls as we head for the course. “I think I’ll be seeing these balls again,” he quips. I write “Hi Jerry” on one with a marker.
There are used club dealers, too. I’m driving along a two-lane road on the North Fork of Long Island when I spot a small display of golf bags, clubs, and balls sitting in a front yard. I hit the brakes and pull into the driveway of Reg Peterson, whose porch and yard comprise a showroom of golf equipment.
He ball-hawks, too, in the woods surrounding Island’s End Golf Club down the road, and has thousands of clean, like-new golf balls—sorted by brand and type—to show for it. He found four thousand last year. He offers Pinnacles at $6 a dozen, Titleists for $7, and Taylor Mades for $8. He has the new Callaways for 60 cents a piece—the ones that sell new for $4.40 each!
“Some of these have only been hit once,” he claims. Reg knows this because he’s seen them leave the course off the first tee. “I was out hawking one day and watched a guy hit a ball seven times in a sand trap before he finally picked up his ball and threw it at me. He said I was making him nervous watching him"—and after all, Reg is a bit like the Grim Reaper of Golf. “He said I had no business on a golf course, and I told him he certainly didn’t either.”
Where did all the clubs come from? He finds some of those in the woods, too. “Most of those I find are snapped in two by angry golfers,” he says, “but sometimes guys are so mad they just fling ’em into the woods.” He wishes he could get at those water hazards, a favorite destination when disgruntled golfers hurl their clubs.
He gets some of his club inventory from garage sales or those special big trash days when homeowners can set anything they don’t want on the curb for pickup. And some people really don’t want their golf clubs anymore.
“People start to dislike the game and can’t wait to get rid of them,” he says. “You’d be surprised.”
“Not really,” I reply.
“These old clubs are better than all these newfangled ones,” he says, taking a handsome wooden wood out of a bag there in the yard and caressing it. “They sound better and feel better when you hit the ball. These metal things sound like those awful aluminum bats they use in baseball. The major leagues don’t use them for a reason. That ping and clink drives me nuts.”
Whereas new woods and irons can easily cost $100, $200, $300 or more apiece, Reg is selling woods for $16 and irons for $7. He’s offering a complete set of clubs in an attractive (to some) baby blue bag for $100. He has a complete line of golfing equipment, including left-handed sets. He even has shoes, although this being the height of the season and everything right now he has just the two pair and both are women’s eight and a halfs.
You ever hear of those super sports stores like the one in the Mall of America where you can try out your clubs in the store? Reg has had that for years, right there in his side yard. He even has a hole with a flag in it.
He’s been in the business twenty-seven years, although he gave up actually playing golf five years ago when he made a hole-in-one.
“I quit right then and there,” he says. “I never was much good at the game.” And fortunately for him and the missus, most other golfers aren’t either.
23
A Few Modest Proposals
There are a few things I’d change about golf. Playing the closest hole, rather than being lock
ed into that whole numbered hole thing, would be first and foremost on my list of changes, but golf could also use some other improvements like a few more holes in each green for players like me. And par. Par’s got to go. No other sport has par. It makes 99.9 percent of all golfers feel bad.
If it is to continue posing as a bona fide professional sport, golf needs a lot of work. It’s time to bring this sport or hobby or skill or whatever it is into the twenty-first century, to ensure its TV viability, and maybe finally get it into the Olympics, where every other conceivable form of human activity is on display, to include synchronized swimming, where the “athletes” wear sequins and blue eye makeup, and that one where people run around in their leotards with streamers and rubber balls.
Right now watching golf on TV is tantamount to tending an aquarium. Herewith, a few modest proposals to get golf moving.
Golf is the only sport with carts, so perhaps the game should be played in them, with golfers hitting their balls from moving carts, polo-style. This, plus the added possibility of playing polo golf with lots of players and just one ball, possibly in teams, with a “goal” of a green and cup at either end. Most sports have goals at either end: football, basketball, hockey, soccer. And with teams you’d have uniforms. Get out of those earth-tone polo shirts, willya? Get some cool uniforms. Black and teal. You know.
If they insist upon sticking to regular individual golf, maybe on the 18th a goalie could run onto the green as the putt was rolling and try to make a diving save. Introduce a little defense to golf. Like every other sport. Imagine Tiger trying to hit a fairway shot with somebody guarding him. Goalies and defensemen, that’s better.
Maybe throw a few windmills on the greens to make things more interesting. Or cross golf with a little croquet so that you could hit your opponent’s golf ball, and “send” it into the bushes or the water hazard. Hazards could stand to be a little more interesting, too. Instead of sand, how about Jell-O chocolate pudding in those bunkers? And if traditionalists insist on sand, why not quicksand. That would speed things up.
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.
24
The Bad Golfers Association National Tournament
Maybe 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 WBGA 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 u
nderstand 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.