TriumphAnt

Golf is just flog spelled backwards – 2

Some generalizations

When you get right down to it, golf is just about the worst sport on the face of the earth to try to watch live. (OK, maybe the annual Round the World Ocean Yacht Race from your front porch in Saskatoon, but golf is only barely ahead in terms of practicality.)

Think of it. A complete “game” of professional golf requires four days of competition on a field whose total dimensions are measured in thousands of yards and whose individual playing surfaces, often as not, are bounded by tall and visually impenetrable stands of trees. Its fans (so called everywhere except at the Augusta National, whose directors dictate that they be called “patrons” in a painful burst of pomposity at the course where the Masters is played each year, but I digress) are required to keep monumentally still when the competitors are actually engaged in playing their sport. Fans are allowed to release their shouts of support only after the ball has been struck and is either rolling or flying towards its target.

And thereby hangs a gripe of mine. There is, without exception at every tournament, indeed at almost every shot, a moronic yahoo among the fans whose sole mission in life is to be the first to scream “IN THE HOLE!!!” a nanosecond after the ball is struck. The influence the shout has on the ball’s line of travel is exactly none. Yet as surely as God made blue skies and green grass, this idiot will make himself heard. At least one such eruption on the 18th this year earned the source a shouted, “OK, who brought the American?” that, in turn, was followed by loud applause. (Nothing personal, DB, but it was funny.)

From the golf fan’s perspective, you really have two choices when it comes to watching your sport live. 1. You can stake out a single spot on the course past which the entire field will travel during the day’s play, or 2. You can follow your favourite through his round. (And oh alright, but it really goes without saying… 3. You can spend part of the day doing both.)

If you opt for 1, you get to watch player after player after player hit precisely the same shot. So if studying the power of the drive is your favourite shot, you hang around the tee on any hole longer than a par 3.

Iron play / approach shots? You make a rough guess about where you think most drives will be landing and stand beside the fairway at that point. (This choice offers the added adventure of a possible skull fracture as that small white missile occasionally comes soaring in somewhat off its intended line. But it’s a rare aberration at best, and unless the kindly pro offers you his autograph by way of half-hearted apology for your not getting out of the way fast enough, even the small risk far outweighs any benefit of the experience.)

If skill with a putter is what you most enjoy watching, then among the greenside throngs you try to find a line of sight that gives you a view of the whole green. And “throngs” there indeed will be, because putting seems to be what most fans like to watch.

Mitigating factors? If it’s a hot, sunny day and your chosen spot is unsheltered, you’d better have pre-armed yourself with a hat and enough sunscreen to grease the Titanic’s slipway at the Harland and Wolff shipyards. Meanwhile, you can choose between regularly hydrating yourself, and consequently being forced to abandon your spot several times in search of relief (and I don’t mean from a “Temporarily Immovable Impediment”), or remaining where you are for six or seven solid hours, gradually desiccating to such an hallucinatory level of dehydration that Lawrence of Arabia’s “Sun’s Anvil” scene looks like a beach movie by comparison. Needless to say, the purveyors of beverages in the concession tents just love these people. On a sunny day, after the round’s last player has passed an unsheltered observation point, the rush of parched fans staggering in looking for a drink of anything at any price (even water at $3.75 a bottled serving) gives new meaning to the word “stampede”.

On the other hand, you might elect to stay with your favourite, possibly even through all 18 holes of his round. But this is an even crazier method of following the game live.

First of all, the only people with direct paths of travel during a tournament are the players, their caddies and the occasional following TV camera crew. Everyone else has to wait for the shot to be struck. (For that matter, you have to wait for your favourite’s playing partners to hit their shots as well.) Then you race down the side of the fairway to where the ball landed; occasionally rushing across the fairway – but only at a designated crossing point and only when a steely-eyed course marshal says it’s OK. You wait for your hero to hit his approach shot, then speed ahead to the green, hopefully in time to watch him putt out.

(If a digression might be permitted… the use of “his” and “him” is not sexist in the context of describing a PGA – Professional Golfers’ Association – tour event. Sweden’s Annika Sorenstam’s one-time foray last year into a men’s event notwithstanding, professional competitive golf still rigorously maintains a separation between men’s and women’s tournaments.)

And you repeat this entire exercise up to 18 times – except for the short par-3 holes, which occasionally offer you a catch-your-breath opportunity to see the hole played from your favourite’s tee shot to his final putt, without your having to change position.

Mitigating factors? Because you have to crisscross several fairways at spots that always seem calculated to cause the greatest possible fan inconvenience, you can figure on having to walk and run a total distance that probably adds 50% to the designated length of the course. A course set to challenge players on the PGA tour now pretty well has to begin at a length of at least 7,000 yards – and that’s just the tee-to-green distance. Add the spaces from the green of one hole to the tee of the next, and a typical golf course walk – for a player – is about five miles.

For a fan, you can factor in at least another couple miles, at speeds ranging from a brisk walk to a short burst of running. And depending on the course, some of that can be uphill to a degree charitably called “steep”. (Glen Abbey, for example, has three holes located deep in a picturesque valley. When you undertake the climb from the green of the last of these – the 15th – to the 16th tee high above, if you’re not careful you can still trip over the pitons first pounded in by Sir Edmund Hillary and his faithful Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay.)

So unless you’ve trained as an Olympic marathoner, you will be pretty much exhausted by the time the player you’ve been chasing sinks his final putt on the 18th green.

Yet countless people do this. And obviously, the more popular the player, the larger the throng chasing him around the course. Trying to follow a marquee player the likes of Mike Weir in Canada, or Tiger Woods or Vijay Singh anywhere, is really absurd. On most holes, no matter where such a player winds up after his tee shot, most fans of average height will be able to see no more than the top of his hat and the upper arc of his swing. This is because “chasers” are always relegated to second choice places behind those who have earlier staked out the positions past which your favourite is now travelling.

At the 2003 Canadian Open in Ancaster, when Mike Weir teed off on the first hole of his final round, a mid-length par 4, the entire hole – from tee through fairway to green – was completely encircled by fans up to ten people deep! That’s thousands of people, just to watch the very first shot – and in some cases from over 300 yards away – in a round that eventually (and typically) required over four hours to complete.

Even as I write this down, I realize just how completely insane this must sound to people who aren’t golf fans.

But as I mentioned in my previous entry, following the game as an on-course spectator is considerably different from following it at home on television. But that certainly doesn’t make being at a golf tournament less enjoyable, just… different.

How different?

Well, consider that when Mike and Vijay putted out, with a tie score, after the first of their three playoff holes (a replay of the 18th hole), they next walked to the tee of the 17th hole – designated as the second playoff hole. Most of the crowd, however, took a chance and guessed (correctly as it happened) that 17 would also play as a tie and, just maybe, they would get to see the tournament actually finish right back here at the 18th green (a re-replay of which – still with me here? – was designated as playoff hole number 3). So there we remained.

People watching on TV at home got to see number 17 played with such close-up television clarity they could read the brand name on Mike Weir’s golf ball as he lined up his putt. Those of us left sitting in anticipation around the 18th green, hundreds of yards from where the two competitors were now playing, had to get our information by whatever creative means we could.

In my case, I was standing quite near the enclosed booth at #18 in which the greenside CTV cameras were set up. A sympathetic cameraman was monitoring the images being fed by one of his colleagues from the 17th hole. After every shot, he opened the door to his booth to shout the result to everyone within earshot… “Mike’s ball is in the fringe, about 30 feet from the cup; Vijay is on the green about 20 feet away.” (groans).

It sounds silly, but it’s all a necessary part of the “Wow! I really am here!” experience.

A lot like Woodstock, really – skilled players (golf instead of guitar)… a sea of fans ranging from the very knowledgeable to the “I’m only here for the celebrity watching”… all patiently waiting for their favourite superstars to appear on the “stage”… naked women frolicking in the pond.

(Oh? You mean you people watching at home didn’t see that last bit? Pity.)