TOM

By Tom Bedell

Speaking of Arnold Palmer, the King hit the ceremonial first tee at the opening of the Masters today, four days prior to the 50th anniversary of his first Masters win. Of course, he wasn’t the King then, but he did know the rules of golf, and he used them to his advantage in that tournament.

Augusta National had been pelted with rain the night before and morning of the final round, so players were permitted free drops from embedded lies through the green. But when Palmer overshot the par-3 twelfth hole rules official Arthur Lacey told him he couldn’t lift the ball from an embedded lie. Palmer protested, but he played the ball out of the lie for a double bogey, then played the shot over with a drop, and scored a three.

Palmer was playing with Ken Venturi that day, and in 2004 Venturi was still raising a bit of a fuss about the shot (and probably trying to boost sales of his autobiography) in suggesting that Palmer had misinterpreted the rule. But three holes later the officials ruled that Palmer had indeed scored a three, and he went on to win the tournament by one shot.

Palmer mentioned the incident in a book he wrote a few years ago called Playing By the Rules, and he recently teamed up with the USGA for a photo shoot to help illustrate the 2008 USGA Annual Rules Quiz, which anyone can take by following the link.

It’s a sobering enterprise, or was for me, at any rate. I thought I had a fairly decent grasp on the rules. I thought wrong. I missed more than fifty percent of the questions–and this was after I had started reading the newly revised The Rules of Golf, which became effective at the beginning of the year after four years of work by the USGA and the R&A.

There are only 34 rules of golf. However, they do span 79 pages of sometimes bewildering cross-referencing that a keen legal mind might find challenging. And there are further discussions and decisions regarding the rules on the USGA website. I guess I’d better keep reading.

There’s a handy golf bag pocket-sized flip guide for $9.95 that might help: Golf Rules Quick Reference 2008-2011. It’s waterproof, illustrated, with quick reference tabs keyed to parts of the course–the tee, the fairway and rough, bunkers, hazards and so on, so players can flip to a quick answer out on the course, rather than trying to parse the intricacies of, say, the actual Rule 26-2, b., (iii), Note 1, while holding up the foursome behind.

The author, Yves C. Ton-That, has a law degree, but he’s also a rules official. Of course, even rules officials get it wrong sometime. Ask Arnold Palmer.

By Tom Bedell

(Photo by Will Doak)

After heavy snows in December and on New Year’s Day, the club of choice here in balmy southeastern Vermont has been the ice scraper or snow shovel. This is actually tolerable for awhile. It’s not bad to take a vacation even from golf, to head out in the backwoods on snowshoes, pondering animal tracks instead of tracking a wayward golf ball. Or to strap on the cross country skis and ponder a different sense of balance than the usual worries about reverse pivots.

I began writing about golf more than a decade ago, and ten years ago precisely for the local daily here in southeastern Vermont, the Brattleboro Reformer. What it pains me to admit is how little my game has improved overall in that time.

Then as now, I’m still struggling to break 90 on any kind of consistent basis. Worse, I’m ten years older. According to the National Golf Foundation, which provides statistics to the golf industry, I’m still pretty much an average golfer: “The average score on an 18-hole regulation golf course was 98.3 in 2005. Average score was 96.4 for men and 108.1 for women.”

The average score has changed little over the years despite the improvement in equipment, except for those at the top of the game. (The rich get richer.) That’s because there are always new and lesser-skilled players joining the throng, says the NGF.

The organization also said, in a chilling note, that, “…average score increases as golfers age, which tends to balance out better scores by younger players.” Great. But I’ll try to keep my ripening envy in check. Attempting to keep up with the youngsters will surely promote fierce and hurried swings, and more trips to the backwoods.

Barely one in five adult golfers breaks 90 in an average round. One might presumably take some comfort in this, but all the caterwauling out on the course suggests otherwise. Only about one in five golfers maintains a handicap, and the average is 15 for men, 23 for women. There, alas, I’m currently slightly above average, despite flirting with 15 last season.

Still, I have in no way accepted that I’ve begun my inevitable golfing decline. I’m still convinced I can improve, especially if I work on my short game. There’s always hope.

Ten years ago I wrote the following, all still utterly true: Every winter, my golf game improves considerably. This is because I think about it, rather than actually play it. When I think about golf, I’m quite the strategist, and see clearly how simple a game it is. With superior course management in mind; with my easy swing, honed through endless repetition from December through March; with my steely putting, sharpened by countless rolls across the living-room carpet; with mental images in mind of holes actually played though actually lying in bed at night, I survive winter buoyed by hope.

Why do we bother?

We bother because we love the game, of course, and because we’re driven by hope. The legs may be the first to go, but lose hope and we’re lost indeed. The NGF noted 15,990 facilities with at least one golf course in the U.S. at the close of business on December 31, 2006. Of those, 11,608 were public courses. All the fields of hope.

In terms of travel, I was probably slightly above average again last year. I played in five countries, most exotically in China, most thrillingly in Scotland.

Both trips could bear long tales at another time. In Asia I played about a half-hour north of Hong Kong at the Mission Hills Golf Club, and it was the experience at a place like this that the term mind-boggling was meant for. Except there isn’t quite another place like Mission Hills, the world’s largest golf facility, with 12 courses, more than 4,500 acres (roughly equivalent to five Central Parks), three clubhouses (one the largest in the world at 650,000 square feet), three golf academies and a Chinese menu of resort facilities.

There are 10,000 club members at Mission Hills. Yet the logistics of moving members or guests around the site seem staggeringly efficient. Our group would show up at our appointed course staging area to find the uniformed, red-clad ranks of the 3,000-strong caddy force ranged at attention, all women in their mid-twenties and indefatigable in their golfing duties. Mission Hills hosted the Omega World Cup of Golf this past November, and will continue to do so through 2018 on the Olazabal Course, each of the dozen tracks sporting name designers–Nicklaus, Norman, Faldo, Ernie Els, Annika Sorenstram, Vijay Singh, Pete Dye and so on.

The stars had varied input on the designs. Most were done in collaboration with golf architects Lee Schmidt and Brian Curley out of Scottsdale, who created some real wizardry not only in the consistently high quality of the courses but in their sense of variety. But while I saw nine, I played but eight, so a return trip seems essential.

I went to Scotland in April, and it wasn’t cruel at all. There was nary a drop of rain the entire time I was there, enjoying an extended stay at the Fairmont St. Andrews and making raids on one great course after another: Cruden Bay, the Jubilee Course at St. Andrews, Kingsbarns, Carnoustie, Crail, not to mention the two tracks right at the Fairmont, the Torrance and the Devlin, and Panmure, a hidden gem.

Still, it would have been difficult to top my initial, jetlagged round, a few hours after arriving in St. Andrews. It might have seemed unfortunate to play my first round at the venerable Old Course in winds gusting to 40 mph, but it actually seemed perfectly apt. When the announcement came over the loudspeaker, “The 3:40 group, play away,” I was thrilled to set out on this venerable golfing ground at last, and never emerged from an exalted sense of thrall.

It helped that I played pretty well, for an average golfer. Heck, if not for a few closing doubles, I might even have broken 90.

Old Tom on the Swilcan Bridge