Cut and paste (Parting shots)

If you’re a regular reader, you know I generally write articles pandering to … er, I mean attempting to edify and inform you – the golf course superintendent. This month’s column is a little different.

Instead, this humble scribbling is aimed at a new and untapped audience: your players. You know, those nice folks who shuck out anywhere between $15 a round and $15,000 a year to play at your place. In short, the idiots. Your idiots.

Thus, it’s with great pride I present the “Complete Idiot’s Guide to Golf Course Maintenance.” Feel free to cut, paste and post this in the locker room as needed – if you dare.

Greetings esteemed fellow golfer:

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Pat Jones, and for 20 years, I’ve been privileged to write magazine articles about the art and science of golf course maintenance for nice folks like your golf course superintendent. I’ve met, worked with and/or written about thousands of superintendents and golf courses, literally. Along the way, I’ve learned a few things that might be helpful to your enjoyment of the game and your understanding of some important aspects of how courses are maintained. I respectfully submit the following polite thoughts for your consideration:

• It costs money to maintain these things, you bonehead. Don’t expect champagne conditions on a beer budget. If you’re paying $30 a round, shut your gaping piehole, ignore the flaws around the edges and play golf, dammit.
• Only a handful of you fools carry a handicap low enough to appreciate the nuances of very fast greens, so stop yapping about wanting them all the time. Unless you’re GHIN card has a single digit on it, you shouldn’t even be allowed on greens running 11 or higher on the Stimpmeter. Do yourself a favor, you moron, and learn to appreciate the fact you’re just not that good and fast greens will make you stink even worse and lose even more Nassau to the clowns you play with.
• You know those big holes with the sand on them in various places around the course? They’re called bunkers (there’s no such thing as a “sand trap,” knucklehead), and they’re supposed to be a hazard. The really smart person who designed the course put them there to make the game more challenging. Being in one is called a penalty. Should the sand not meet your standards of perfection, don’t hit into it. If you do hit into it – which is probably a lot because you suck – stop whining and swing about an inch behind the ball and follow through (repeat as necessary). Then take 10 seconds and rake the bunker, you lazy schmuck.
• Don’t even get me started about frost delays and cart restrictions. The weather is what it is, not some vast conspiracy dreamt by superintendents to deprive you of an early start or a motorized cup-holder for your can of Bud Light. Frosted greens and footprints don’t mix, dog-breath. Driving carts on soggy fairways kills grass and makes big-ass ruts that screw up the course for weeks. By the way, you might want to consider the fact golf is meant to be a walking game and carts were invented for handicapped people, you fat shiftless turd.
• Just exactly how many of those freebie souvenir ball-mark repair tools do you have stuck away in that crappy old bag of yours anyway? Perhaps you could dig around through all the range balls you’ve stolen, find one of those tools and actually use it, you dope.
• It might come as shocking news to you, but when it doesn’t rain for a long time, grass turns brown. Did you skip biology class in high school the day they covered that whole “plants need water” thing?
• Unless his name is Carl Spackler, the person who maintains the course is not the greenskeeper. He’s usually the golf course superintendent or he might even prefer to be called the greenkeeper (with no “s” in the middle, dimwit). Whatever you call him or her, the superintendent probably works harder than you and actually cares about doing a good job as opposed to spending most of the day surfing the Web for fantasy football statistics and stealing office supplies like you, you useless doofus.
• Enough already with the moaning about trees. Trust me, the superintendent hates them even more than you do.
• Last but not least, don’t, under any circumstance, compare the course conditions you see on TV with the conditions of courses you actually play. The facilities that host Tour events spend a zillion dollars and commit thousands of extra man-hours to create a short-term illusion. Prepping a course for a televised event is like putting on a big fireworks display on the Fourth of July – it takes a lot of time to organize, costs a bunch of money and only lasts for a beautiful, fleeting moment. If you’re ever planted in your La-Z-Boy some Sunday afternoon watching golf on the tube and think, “Our course should look like that,” please smack yourself upside your pointy little head and get over it.

So, my fellow lover of the links, I hope you’ve enjoyed this chance to see the beautiful world of golf through the eyes of your course superintendent. It’s my fervent wish these small insights will give you a new appreciation for the game and the importance of sound maintenance practices, even though they might perturb or inconvenience you occasionally. I know you’ll accept my meager words in the sincere spirit in which they’ve been offered.

Now just shut up and hit the @#$&!! ball. GCI

Pat Jones is president of Flagstick LLC, a consulting firm that provides sales and marketing intelligence to green-industry businesses. He can be reached at psjhawk@cox.net or 440-478-4763.