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Forget
marshals, rangers and "ready golf" platitudes. Unless someone hits these
tortoises where it counts, the four-hour round will go the way of the
mashie-niblick.
Twice
in the golfing year - from late July through Labor Day, and from roughly
Valentine's Day to Easter - there falls high season. Courses crowd with
vacationing golfers, many of them part-time adherents at best. Slow play
becomes enough of a problem to make even the most dedicated "gowfer" consider
giving up the game as he stands waiting to play, club waggling in ever
faster, ever smaller and more nervous circles, blood starting to bubble
to the boil - watching dire events unfold at a snail-like pace ahead of
him, just within range (and hopefully just out of earshot).
I am
not a slow player, nor one noted for patience. Even with forty percent
of my seventh decade behind me, I expect to walk a decently laid-out course
in four hours or less and shoot my usual mid-eighties score as part of
a four-ball. I miss 'em quick, and after I've played a shot, no matter
how indifferently, I immediately go to work figuring out how I'm going
to play its successor, even as I trudge dispiritedly up the trail of my
last foozle.
Although
I consider my wit as finely honed as the next golfer's, I long ago learned
that Cypress Point and Caroline's Comedy Club are completely different
venues built with entirely different purposes in mind. You will not see
me deviate from the direct route to my ball to cross fifty yards of open
fairway in order to lay the one about the three Irishmen and the parrot
on another member of the foursome. Experience has taught me that even
the best told joke is unlikely to relieve the gloom with which a fifteen-handicap
golfer contemplates a lie that Seve in his best days would have found
daunting, and does even less for the mood of the tiny figures who can
be observed stamping their feet, shaking their fists and blowing smoke
out their ears on the tee in the rearward distance, their faint, epithet-laden
howls barely audible on the soft, salty sea breeze playing at my back
as I get to the punch line.
Last
winter, on vacation, my group set off six times from tee number one and
only twice got in a full eighteen holes. Four times the slowness of play
ahead added sufficiently to my systolic count to dictate that we either
cut around or be buried where we waited. Usually we fell victim to the
"layering effect": We'd come up behind a father with small children; he
would be behind four Japanese golfers playing with the deliberateness
to be expected from a culture that gave the world noh drama; they in turn
would be barely keeping up with the "Wrecking Crew." And there you have
it - three layers of slow golf, as impenetrable to brisk play as the Kevlar
veneers of a bullet-proof vest are to the output of a .38-caliber Saturday-night
special.
The Wrecking
Crew is an invention (drawn from real life, no doubt) of P. G. Wodehouse
in the story "Chester Forgets Himself," from The Heart of a Goof, first
published in 1926:
The Wrecking
Crew consisted of four retired businessmen who had taken up the noble
game late . . . and tried so hard that it seemed . . . inconceivable that
they should be so slow. . . . [The star performer, nicknamed] the First
Grave-Digger . . . differed from his colleagues--the Man With the Hoe,
Old Father Time, and Consul, the Almost Human--in that while they were
content to peck cautiously at the ball, he never spared himself in his
efforts to do it a violent injury.
What
a Wrecking Crew wrecks, of course, is everyone else's pleasure. Just as
the nun driving forty-seven miles per hour in the speed lane of the Long
Island Expressway (LIE) induces road rage in her fellow drivers, so does
a Wrecking Crew induce the equivalent golfing psychosis. The difference
is this: As a habitué of the LIE, I am an old hand at road rage, but somehow
I have managed to conquer it, to sublimate my vehicular ire to a series
of choice expletives hurled uselessly into the exhaust-blue air.
But for
golf's version of road rage, I have yet to find the cure. Delay me on
a tee for five minutes and I am reduced to a babbling jelly of vituperation.
Confront me with a twenty-seven-handicapper lining up a six-foot putt
from both sides of the hole, or taking three-wood practice swings in the
fairway while waiting for the green 240 yards ahead to clear, and I sink
to depths of animal brutishness.
I ponder
the issue of slow play obsessively. I'm not alone. The USGA does too,
as do the better golf publications, club and course managers, committees
and anyone else who cares about the game. When, back in April, the Wall
Street Journal published an article indicating that golf was experiencing
something of an economic slowdown, slow play was cited as a principal
reason people are either giving up golf or not taking it up.
Slow
play is the prime enemy of golfing productivity, which we might define
as the number of full rounds a good facility should be able to manageably
accommodate in a single day. The conventional solutions, aggressive course
"rangering" and so on, don't seem to work. The truth of the situation
is that a problem can only really be eliminated by attacking its root
cause, which in the case of slow play is the simple fact that most courses
are too difficult for most golfers. Offer a nonpilot the controls of an
F-14 and the likelihood is that he'll decline the thoughtful invitation
out of simple common sense and self-preservation. But deny a twenty-two-handicapper
access to a 75.5- rated course and he'll sue you for depriving him of
his civil rights, despite the established fact that a twenty-plus-handicapper
has about as much chance on Oakmont as someone in a wheelchair on Everest.
I do
have two proposals that I offer in the same spirit of modesty with which
Swift proposed in 1729 that the Irish famine might be alleviated by eating
unwanted newborns.
One proposal
has to do with on-course fees: caddies, trolley and cart rentals. I think
that these costs should rise exponentially by the half hour after the
four-hour ceiling has been breached. By a modest amount for the first
half hour but steeply after that, so that a round of more than five hours
will really sting. For example, if a cart rental is $40 a round, set that
as the four-hour price, with the cost rising to $50 for up to 4.5 hours,
to $75 for 4.6 to five hours and then rising by $30/$40/$50 for each half-hour
overage thereafter. A six-hour round (not unknown when a group of high-handicap
bankers is out playing "Honest John") would cost $40 + $10 + $25 + $30
+ $40 = $145. If you made the same sort of adjustment on green fees, a
real dent might be made in the problem, because the cost per player of
a six-hour round at Pebble Beach would rise to more than $1,000, serious
money even by NASDAQ or Yakuza standards.
Then
there's segregation by handicap, although this does raise the question
of whether special treatment of the golf-challenged amounts to discrimination
in constitutional terms.
Here's
my thinking. Traffic jams occur backward from up front, rather than forward
from behind, so my thought would be to create "handicap tiers" of starting
times: Four-balls with an aggregate handicap of forty or lower tee off
first, then sixty or better, then eighty or better and, finally, in the
shank of the afternoon, the Wrecking Crew. Persons unable to substantiate
a handicap would automatically be given a twenty-five and their groups'
"tiering" adjusted accordingly, which would encourage the sort of internal
self-discipline that anthropologists have noted in other primitive societies--which
is what the world of golf, thanks to slow play, is coming to be.
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