The corporate golf tournament’s an increasingly common animal in these prosperous times. Big companies will rent out a golf course (exasperating shut-out club members and “muni” players), inviting customers and friends out to play the bastard stepchild of golf called a scramble. These are not intimate affairs. Long, winding lines of white and green golf carts, many carrying already intoxicated golfers wobbly from drink and a heat index approaching 202, are the norm. The sheer act of getting the carts all moving toward their respective holes requires the precision of a major military operation. Snarling traffic snafus are inevitable and common. One cart will go the wrong way, stopping the entire procession cold in its tracks. Getting that one cart turned the correct direction, amid the curses, shouts, and general insults hurled at the offending driver and his hapless passenger, as one cart piles on top of the next, would vex General Patton.
With 150 grocery salesmen and 150 customers and 150 cell phones finally spread out over 18 holes, play, in a manner of speaking, begins. In theory, a scramble should move rapidly. A team of four will play only the best ball hit. Nobody has to play balls out of the woods or spend extended periods of time thrashing about in poison ivy, searching for balls lost in a canyon 500 feet below. Someone always has a ball in the fairway. Piece of cake. But as in science, there’s a significant gap between the theoretical and the real. First, every shot, no matter how elementary, is analyzed and dissected as if the team were playing on the final Sunday, in the final group of the British Open. Complete novices weigh in on breaks of putts and the wisdom of hitting a ball 30 yards out with a poor lie over a sand trap as opposed to taking a ball 100 yards out but dead in the middle of the fairway. These mid-course conferences are more inscrutable than the Israeli/Palestinian peace talks. Six-hour rounds are common. Scrambles, in fact, move at the pace of a lost turtle.
Being a poor player on a good day, scrambles bring out the worst in my golf. The ant-like pace and my poor, loser mental attitude of “who cares, the other guy will make the shot” are not mental qualities discoursed upon by Harvey Penick. These events always have closest-to-the-pin prizes on par-threes. In a golf career that rarely sees a round under 96, I’ve won five different closest-to-the-pin contests, an extraordinary occurrence belying any rational explanation. It happened again when I hit — truly — my only decent shot of the day. A sweet, choked-up 8-iron, within five feet of the pin. Not really that close, but, somehow, it held up. You might surmise I’m some kind of a money player. Those who know me would rightly scoff at this absurd suggestion. On the contrary, I’m one of the great chokers of all time.
With the exception of the unlikely 8-iron, I was useless to my team. My drives clattered against out-of-the-way tin sheds. I nubbed a 20-foot chip shot a few inches. I sculled two pitch shots into distant (though picturesque) ponds. On the putting green it was worse. On two consecutive flat, straightforward putts, I missed once five feet right, the next 10 feet left. My playing partners studiously avoided eye contact, hoping not to catch whatever putting disease I’d contracted. Every facet of my “game” was in total shambles.
I won $100 with that lucky 8-iron … which created a dilemma. I’m a modernist. I subscribe to the theory that bad golf can be fixed by modern technology. Whatever’s new this season from Callaway — maybe a little tungsten, mixed with titanium, combined with a new scientific loft design with the ubiquitous promise to “get the ball in the air faster” — will turn 100s into 90s, and 90s into 80s. This is how the mind of the golfer works.
I had my eye on a new club, guaranteed to “get the ball in the air faster and straighter.” In spite of a compelling body of evidence to the contrary, I believed this claim without question. With my winnings in my pocket I sallied forth, the next morning, to the neighborhood golf store. I walked round and round, petting and stroking this new cure. Then an epiphany struck. I remembered some sage advice my younger brother rendered a few years ago. “Andrew,” he sighed, rubbing his red eyes in exasperation as I told him of the new set of irons I coveted — guaranteed to … well, you know — “Why don’t you forget the clubs and spend the $800 on lessons?” This was good advice that I — without a moment’s hesitation — ignored. I got the clubs. My logic was unassailable: lessons = work. Titanium clubs = magic.
Today, in a rare moment of golf lucidity, I put the new club back in its rack and left the store. I figured my winnings plus another hundred would buy four badly needed lessons. After only one lesson I’m excited about my new, quicker tempo. My right elbow has stopped flying. My putting stroke is, again, fluid and true.
Still, I do think about that club, patiently waiting for me in its nice, cozy rack.
This article appears in June 2 • 2000.