Golf: The Antidote to Joy (Part 1)

“Rich white guys on cell phones adjusting their pants.” That’s my answer to the question “what is golf?”

Having never been on a golf course, you can imagine my exhilaration when I was recruited as a hole-watcher for the 2002 Golf Classic at a local country club.

All types were represented by the gathered golfers that chilly Monday: tubby rich men, slightly more tubby rich men, downright hefty rich men, and life-threateningly obese rich men. True, not all of these men were rich by corporate definitions, but anyone who is able to skip a day of work and slap down $100 for a round of golf is wealthier than some obscene percentage of the world’s population. The overweight claim needs no such qualification. They were all overweight by any standard you could apply.

You read my second paragraph correctly, I was a hole-watcher. I watched a hole. There were three hole-in-one prizes, which I can only assume were devised to bait the golfers off of their cell phones and onto the green. It seems that for these men a day on the course is less about playing golf than it is about looking like you’re really too busy to be playing golf. Anyway, I was watching a hole for which the prize was $5000 in cash.

Eager to fulfill my task, I had practiced watching the night before, first watching a pencil, then the leg of a snack tray. Later I tried watching Larry King but swiftly returned to the snack tray. I showed up at the event in top form. Vigilant. Looking. After waiting patiently for several cell phone conversations to end, my questions were answered and I had my mission: to watch hole 2 for holes-in-one. It was of no small import to me that my employer, who will remain nameless, had determined the watchedness of this hole to be worth a day of my wages. And I would not see them disappointed.

As an event coordinator debriefed me, I tried to impress her by casually watching a few things behind her. This did not seem to work. Still, I knew of the excellence in my gaze, and everything seemed super, until she showed me to my cart.

Golf carts are a menace to human well-being on a level with medieval torture machinery and bio-chemical weaponry. Their natural state is rolling down a hill, thanks to their equivalent height and length, and “driving” one really consists more of postponing the inevitable descent. If there were an amusement park ride which safely and slowly recreated the experience of riding in a golf cart, I would not go near it.

So distracted was I by my imminent death that I failed to notice right away the complete absence of signs or labels of any kind to indicate which tee was which. Even more significantly, there was nothing to denote what was a tee at all, and not a random patch of earth. I careened around the grounds aimlessly for a while, nearly perishing about nine times before I came upon a golf course serf working the fields. He was kind enough to show me to my hole, and I set about my task.