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More tales of reader woe Posted: Monday January 20, 2003 2:56 PM
I was wrong last week. It does get worse. A universal theme among golfers is that we've all played some really, really bad courses ... and are proud of it. Every time I run readers' tales of bad golf, I receive another batch of nominees. And they're all so bad, they're good. Sorry if I'm in a rut, but here it is, Bad Golf, Volume IV. (The roman numerals give it a little touch of class, don't you think? OK, you're right. Nothing short of Italian marble could class up this column.) I work for an international development agency and, in the course of 26 years posted overseas, I have seen myriad golf courses. Perhaps the most intriguing was the 18-hole course at the Francistown Club in Francistown, Botswana. I wrote "18-hole" because that was its only resemblance to golf as we know it. The course has no fairways or greens. Because the total rainfall in Francistown averages about 16 inches a year, water is scarce and far too expensive to use on a golf course. There also are no tees. The soil is so rocky and unyielding, one needs a steel tent peg and an eight-pound hammer to get anything into the ground. Fairways are a variation of rough with no grass, just gravel and rocks. It's not unusual to hit a drive straight and true down the fairway only to have it land on a rock and suddenly veer 40 yards off in another direction. For this reason, there are no out-of-bounds stakes. The greens are brown -- that is, fairly fine sand that has been oiled to approximate something sort of smooth. To say the browns play slow is an understatement. Once you putt out, each green has a six-foot wide, flat, metal contraption you drag around to remove the footprints and ball lines for the next group. During competitions, this responsibility often went unnoticed. Given that midday temperatures often exceed 100 degrees, the preferred time of play is late afternoon. But everyone's favorite is the 19th hole. The Francistown Club seems to have the coldest fridges and, therefore, the coldest beers in northern Botswana.
You know how it is, E-Male. A golf course is only as good as its greens ... and its bar. Scarlett Woods in Toronto got its name, I believe, from players running into the trees and slashing their wrists in frustration. This is the land that etiquette forgot. It's as if the concepts of divot replacement and ball-mark repair were written in Sanscrit and unknown to the English-speaking world. Imagine playing golf on a bomb-testing range, and you'll get the idea. The drainage here is also terrible, and 18 holes will guarantee you a case of foot rot, even if it hasn't rained in weeks. The best part, though, is the geese: hundreds of them, with their droppings covering every square inch near the water on the course. There is something disconcerting about having a gaggle of geese line the center of the fairway while you hit your drive. This course is a disaster. I played it twice, then decided that elective dental work was a better way to spend my free summer hours.
Thanks, Smithy. My dentist says he'd like to meet you and just so happens to have an opening next Tuesday at 9 a.m. Are you in or out? Some years back I joined a group on the first tee of Van Cortlandt Park Golf Course in the Bronx, N.Y., which has the dubious distinction of being America's oldest public course. After waiting for about 10 foursomes to clear the first hole, most of whom sported the customary Bronx tank top and gym shorts with sneakers, my group was about to tee off when the fabled homeless golfer appeared about 200 yards out. Almost mythical, the homeless golfer carries a torn, beat-up bag with some mismatched clubs. This guy just appeared out of the forest on the first hole, crawled through a hole in the fence, dropped a ball in the fairway, and hit his approach shot. Not happy with his play, he dropped another dirty range ball and hit another approach. As veterans of Van Cortlandt, we are accustomed to the unusual and have even adopted local rules dealing with common obstacles such as buried mufflers in sand traps (no relief given). But this was bizarre. So one of the guys in my foursome pulled out a bunch of shag balls and the group and groups behind us (I watched) started launching warning shots over, about and around the homeless golfer. Impervious to it all, the homeless golfer continued playing, even smashing another approach into the group leaving the first green, and finished out the hole. But one good thing about the homeless golfer is that if you ever lose a ball at Van Cortlandt, which is possible even on center-cut shots landing in the middle of the fairway (many kids roam the course searching for loot), he'll be sure to find it and sell it back to you somewhere on the back nine.
I think it's official. We can hereby declare New York and its assorted boroughs as the home of bad public golf. Thanks, Sam. Say, uh, you didn't have a famous son, did you? I played two courses while working as an auditor in Islamabad, Pakistan. The first, Islamabad Country Club, had zero grass on its driving range. You hit off dirt. The best thing about it is you can hire a ball boy, 6-8 years old, who tries to shag the balls you hit while they are on the way down, just like baseball batting practice. You have to bring your own range balls (but you get them back), and the ball boy costs about $2 for 18 holes and range work. Since there is not much to do in Islamabad, I played this hellhole numerous times and my caddy often had to run off stray donkeys, goats and chickens from the tee boxes and greens. Did I mention cobras in the nallas (big ditches/bayous for when it rains) that the ball boys will dive into to retrieve your ball? Of course, neighboring Rawalpindi Golf Club is where I was treed by a pack of wild dogs (I think that is what they were -- they did not have much hair), and while I was in the tree I heard the lovely howling of Muslim prayers (in Urdu) played over the loudspeakers in the city. I finished my 18 holes but never went back. After that, I figured Pete Dye courses are not so bad.
It's hard to say, Keith, but based on your description, those wild dogs may actually have been sportswriters. The no-hair thing was a giveaway (I speak from experience). I also think you could start a nice side business selling Islamabad Country Club golf shirts with a logo of, say, a Stealth bomber flying over the 18th green. That would be very cool. A nominee for worst track ever has to be Elkhart Golf Course in Elkhart, Texas. Amenities include mowing equipment that apparently died during use and was left to rust; unfortunately, some of these pieces of equipment are just off the fairway. The greens are mostly sand with a little grass sticking through. The problem is that the grass is at least half an inch high; you couldn't get a ball to the hole with a driver. A couple of water hazards should be put on the EPA's Superfund cleanup list; I hit a ball into one of them and it made an indentation that took five minutes to fill in. Local color was provided by an eightsome playing in eight carts. My brother-in-law pointed them out coming up an adjacent fairway, and it looked like a Shriners parade. After our round we went into the "clubhouse" for a beer, only to be told that we were in a dry county. No problem, except that the manager and his buddies were sitting around the only table in the place playing dominoes and taking turns on a bottle of Jim Beam, two more bottles of which were sitting on a shelf. So if you're ever in east-central Texas and get the chance to play Elkhart National, don't.
And if you do, remember it's B.Y.O.B. During my college days, Mimosa Golf Course in Tuscaloosa, Ala., was the most frightening goat ranch of an 18 I'd ever seen. The fairways were covered with that thick-bladed type of grass that used to clog the lawnmower when you were a kid. Because of lazy groundskeeping, a drive at Mimosa would lose 15 yards of roll just from resistance. Sand traps were little piles that looked like somebody had emptied a litter box. The first hole overlooks, well, a bog, and the green is populated with geese. More than once I just kicked a ball into the water rather than clean off the goose poop. There is a par-3 on the front nine that requires a 3-wood across a 90-degree corner of a muddy lake to a small patch of "green" surrounded by the red clay of the lake bank. I dare a ball-retrieval company to dive that snake-infested patch of H20 for some Pro Staffs. I once spooked a water moccasin with my drive. I don't remember the back nine as well as the front; I was only able to complete it once because four holes were always flooded. I swear that some days you could literally hear the theme from Deliverance floating gently out of the surrounding woods. I snaphooked a drive into the unmarked O.B. once and thought I was going to have to fight Bigfoot for my ball. The only good thing about Mimosa was that it was cheap and did not have a dress code. I once saw a guy on the first tee who was shirtless and wearing cutoffs. He crushed his drive into the geese.
Next time, Duke of Earle, pack a bow and arrows. Last week one reader wrote about having the hole moved when he was on the green. I played a course in southern New Jersey that had a long par-5 as the 17th hole. With a good drive of near 300 yards, you still had 250 remaining to the green. The second shot had to be all carry because there was a pond in front of the green. My drive went about 270 yards. I could not reach the green from there so I tried to lay up just short of the water. The ball hit something in the fairway and rolled toward the pond. I could not find my ball, so I prepared to drop another one -- when a guy in scuba equipment emerged from the water holding a ball, which he plopped on the grass for me to play. I did not know if I should apply the Rules of Golf to this situation.
So that's how you met Jacques Cousteau? But not so fast, Bobo. You want us to believe a guy named Bunting hit a 270-yard drive? What, you think we were born yesterday in Flin Flon? Sports Illustrated senior writer Gary Van Sickle writes for the magazine's Golf Plus section and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. Click here to send him a question or comment.
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