by Bill Giest
At the next tee some absolute fool is trying to sell chances to win airline tickets if we hit a hole-in-one. We all have a good chuckle over that. (There is such a thing as “hole-in-one insurance,” whereby a tournament offers, say, a $100,000 prize for a hole-in-one and buys insurance based on the hole distance, number of players in the tournament, and so forth. So, the insurance premium for, say, a $1 million prize on a two-hundred-yard hole at the BGA tournament would probably run about what? Five bucks?) At another hole, golfers could, theoretically, win a new Buick for a hole-in-one. If you’re in the market for a late-model Buick that’s never been driven, it’s probably still sitting there.
Over the course of the next couple of holes, I notice an odd thing happening—a great thing: O’Day isn’t always hitting the best ball. Sometimes even I do. In golf, we what? Learn from one another! Bad golf is contagious.
“John O’Day was a fine golfer until he met us,” McMeel explains.
“I used to be a 16 handicap,” O’Day confirms, “then I went to 20, played with these guys a few more times and went to a 24, and today I’m probably a 30 thanks to them.”
On the next tee, I whiff, missing the ball completely. Luckily BGA rules read: “These swings shall be deemed practice swings and are not subject to penalty … intent to hit the ball is immaterial and cannot be proven anyway.”
I swing again, hitting my ball about three feet on my second try, ten feet on my third, and next elect to throw not the ball, but rather my driver. Just five feet or so, but the head comes off, which makes driving just that much more difficult the rest of the day. There is laughing. You never see laughing at PGA tournaments. Even my throwing is critiqued: “Use more of a helicopter motion rather than just the straight toss,” Oliphant suggests, sounding like he knows whereof he speaks.
At televised PGA events you don’t see members of the ground crew aerating the greens, removing big plugs, with a machine, while you’re putting. I don’t think we were being taken seriously. You don’t see dogs copulating on the course on TV either, but you do here.
On the next hole, my drive lands on the fairway—hurrah!—and bounces just barely into the rough. O’Day’s drive is on the fairway, but not as close to the hole as mine. Mine has a chance of being best ball! Oliphant rushes me to the scene in his cart.
“Your ball has an awkward lie,” he proclaims.
“If a ball has an awkward lie, you can adjust it?” I ask.
“Yes,” Pat says, “with your feet and hands. You can just toss it to a better spot, although kicking is not as noticeable.” Without even looking, this BGA pro nonchalantly and adroitly gives my ball two short kicks, soccer-style, out of the rough onto the fairway.
McMeel arrives: “This is why Pat is known on the golf course as ‘The Tailor.’ He’s a master craftsman at making alterations and adjustments, shortening, lengthening, moving, letting it out a little.” And I must say, he certainly had tailored my rather unsightly shot into “best ball"!
The next fairway has a big lake right in the middle of it. McMeel explains to me the physics of golf balls and water, and the ongoing battery of scientific tests concerning the propensity of water to exert a gravitational pull on golf balls, thereby pulling them down into the water in a most dastardly fashion.
“Until those tests are completed,” he explains, “the BGA allows golfers to place a provisional ball on the other side of water hazards without penalty.”
So trying to drive over the water was just for fun, didn’t count. Possibly because it isn’t necessary, I do in fact hit my drive over the water in complete dryness. So does O’Day, of course, followed by McMeel, who sees two perfect drives sucked down by that unexplained pull.
“Do you have a snorkel in your golf bag?” asks Oliphant. “A rubber raft?”
Then he steps up and executes the shot of the day. Pat puts a little something extra into his tee shot in an attempt to clear the lake. His ball blasts off at a low angle, hits the water, but skips twice on the surface, and carries to dry land, where it hits a tree, ricochets off a fence, hits a golf cart, shoots straight toward a TV crew covering the tournament, scatters them, and plops back into the water.
We stand in stunned silence. Finally, McMeel speaks for us all: “That, is the shot of the day!” Best I’d seen. Ever. The three of us break into applause.
“Do I get the Buick?” Oliphant cries. McMeel says, “No, but you’re up for the Gerald Ford Public Safety Award.”
Possibly owing to shots like that, the galleries are smaller than I’d expected at a national tournament. Apparently they were bigger last year, but many fans are still out with injuries. Two women sitting on a bench by the next tee say that they sometimes find it necessary to get behind or under the bench.
The day is peppered with shouts of “Fore!” “Watch out!” “Duck!” “Hit the dirt!” “We surrender!” “Hey, asshole!” and the like, as these bad golfers spray the course with errant shots. Word is that a squirrel has been killed or perhaps just coldcocked by one such shot. The course isn’t safe for man nor beast.
“If you hit anybody or anything,” advises Oliphant, “it’s best to leave the area as quickly as you can.” He carries a collection of other people’s business cards so that if he does any damage he can express his regrets and leave the card so they can contact “him” should there be medical or repair bills. As the rule book clearly states: “The BGA believes that litigation has no place in the game of golf. Any maneuver employed to protect the reputation of the game and its adherents is to be applauded.”
O’Day tells of breaking the windshield of a car once with one of his shots and his stunned partners looking at him and asking, “What are you going to do?” To which he replied: “I think I’ll change my grip a tad, maybe rotate my hands a quarter inch on my next try.”
The next hole is 592 friggin’ yards. “Can’t be!” wails Oliphant. “Did you bring something to eat? We’ll need a picnic basket.” We tee off, hop into his cart, and set out to find our balls. When we come upon his—in the fairway!—instead of stopping the cart he leans out, snatches his ball on the move, and gives it a cart ride another hundred yards. We dub this “taxiing” the ball to the green. From the moving cart he tosses it onto the green, with great accuracy. Very impressive, but you have to remember that he’s been cheating a long, long time.
This elongated hole—a third of a mile!—takes forever, after which we’re so tired we decide to skip the next hole. We are encouraged to do this by the course starter, who makes a special trip out from the clubhouse to tell us we’re playing too slowly. He is obviously unfamiliar with BGA rules: “Golf is not a game to be hurried. Therefore never allow another group to play through.”
On the next hole, the green abuts a narrow street with houses just on the other side. I hit a ball too hard, over the fence, over the street, and over a house.
“Hear that?” shouts Oliphant. “I think I heard the ping of a Weber grill in that guy’s backyard.” I can’t try to retrieve it as there is barbed wire on the top of the fence surrounding the course, which I think has less to do with keeping interlopers out of the exclusive club and more to do with keeping BGA golfers in. I drop a new ball by the fence.
“Oh, you found your ball,” says Oliphant. “Any barbecue sauce on it?”
As I try to putt, my partners continue to advise and encourage me, jingle change in their pockets, and say, “There go those two dogs again.” Not to mention, someone drives the cart onto the green itself, parking it between my ball and the hole. I offer sportingly to putt beneath the cart, but am told that, even by BGA rules, the cart must be moved to another spot on the green.
By the 16th hole, we’re all dragging, and the gimmee putts grow longer and longer. We’re getting a tad surly. I am roundly criticized for not keeping my shots close enough to the cart track, thereby taking up too much time and energy. On the 17th green Pat suggests, “Let’s not putt,” and all four of us pick up our balls and move on. “Whose big idea was
18 holes anyway?” someone asks, and we decide to just skip 18 altogether.
It’s going to be tough to score this round, but skipping two holes is still one of the quickest ways I know to take 15 strokes off your game. But where do we stand? Has McMeel made up the scores yet? Who won?
Back at the clubhouse everyone is boasting about how badly they played. But who is badest? Who is Worst-Of-Field? Is it McMeel, or Pat, or me, or someone else? I’m not even sure I’m the worst in our foursome. One thing is certain: The future is bright for the BGA, what with McMeel and Oliphant leading the way and more and more bad golfers taking up the game every day.
Scores are difficult to calculate, what with the various ball adjustments and skipping holes and such. And no one ever seemed to be writing anything down. “Would you?” asks McMeel.
I figure O’Day shot somewhere in the high 80s, plus the two holes we skipped, giving him about a 97. McMeel, Oliphant, and I were at about 115, plus the throws, kicks, penalty strokes, and those skipped holes, which puts us at right about the 135 mark. But that great shot of Pat’s: skipping off the water, into a tree, a fence, a cart, nearly killing members of a TV crew, then back into the water—well, that sort of took the cake. I’m not taking anything away from myself, I’m not saying I’m not as bad or worse than he is, I’m just saying that this day he has been just sensationally atrocious.
And, there are rumors that some guy is in the clubhouse, atop the leader board (or buried somewhere beneath it), with a legitimate 188! Extraordinary. The man has almost shot his weight.
Who is the absolute worst? Who is the best of the worst? Who knows? But in the Bad Golfers Association tournament, it can truly be said that there are no winners, that everyone here is a loser—and that’s the beautiful thing.
“You’ve proven that you belong here among the nation’s elite bad golfers,” President McMeel says to me at the closing ceremonies—and he does offer to give me a sash proclaiming me the worst in my state.
Unfortunately, with this array of talent, not everyone can lose. This day, I am not the worst golfer in the world, and I am not the best of the worst. I am nothing. Not to mention, a guy from the pro shop shows up with a bill for $300 to replace the club I’d beheaded.
At golf, I just can’t win.
EPILOGUE
Still Par Free
At this point, after spending many months at the game, I realize that I still haven’t purchased clubs. This may be a measure of my commitment. I haven’t bought clubs and I haven’t joined any. I haven’t shopped for golf attire and I haven’t been asked back by anyone to play a second time.
I believe I have definitely improved, although my scores don’t reflect this. After my lessons, and using my wife’s good clubs, I can hit the ball straighter more often. And do I ever hit it more often. But still not very far. I’ve developed into a consistently bad golfer—rather than a spectacularly horrendous one. Golf seems to take time, effort, and dedication—and isn’t that too bad?
I have developed something akin to respect for good golfers and a better appreciation of the game. I kind of like to watch it on TV, although I didn’t really need another reason to vegetate in front of the set, now did I? And I can now chat about golf with friends at parties: “Olazabel faded a 3-iron 225 to the apron, no bite, dead within the leather—rub of the green.” Abso-friggin’-lutely!
As for my future in golf, I am troubled by a recent court ruling in my home state of New Jersey that held liable an inexperienced golfer like myself who was playing on a public course and hit a partner in his foursome with his tee shot. Deeply troubled. The victim was sitting in a golf cart ten or fifteen feet ahead of the tee at about a 45 degree angle when the novice hooked one. The hittee thought he was safe because the guy had just sliced his first tee shot. This is an all too familiar pattern. So, on the advice of my golf attorneys, until and unless that appellate ruling is overturned, I really can’t afford to continue.
And besides, I’m still not quite sure I like golf. I like the carts and the cocktails and the idea that even in my “middle age” (middle of some serious decay) there is a “sport” in which I could possibly still improve. I do like the landscaping, the rare serenity in this day and age, the escape, and most of all the camaraderie. I’ve had some great fun playing amongst terribly witty terrible golfers.
As for what we’re actually out here doing with all this waggery, this beauty, this tranquillity, this bonhomie—struggling with this maddening addiction in an attempt to reach the impossible par … well, I’m still not quite sure I get it.
“Geist makes me laugh.”—Russell Baker
“Mr. Geist has a gift for uncovering the quirky detail that makes the mundane humorous.”
—New York Times
“Very, very, very funny.”
—Larry King
“Bill Geist is unable to write an unfunny paragraph.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Hits the funny bone dead solid perfect.”
—Dan Rather