My Game was Realy sucking

My Game was Really Sucking

1996 was my sophomore year on the PGA Tour. Coincidentally, it was also my second to last year as a member. Heading into the Byron Nelson Classic I wasn’t exactly in top form, in fact, my game was really sucking. I made the cut by a shot so I thought I’d try something new and exciting on Saturday. The main cause of my obesity is that I skip breakfast. When you have three entrees for dinner you generally don’t get hungry until around 11am, which, ironically, is the exact time that the buffet in the locker room starts serving lunch. Vicious cycle! The food isn’t really that great, but they don’t limit the number of trips through the line (at least not officially and I’ve read the PGA Tour rules and regulations after acrid remarks from some of the emaciated players).

Anyway, let me get back to the story at hand. I was paired with Davis Love III, you might have heard of him. He is, by my estimation, a pretty good golfer. Anyone with a jet meets my criteria for the “pretty good golfer” category. Some people have different rating systems. This is mine. I was also playing with Donnie Hammond. He doesn’t have a jet and although he is a very nice person, I wasn’t particularly worried about embarrassing myself in front of him. I’m sure they were both thrilled about playing with me.

To break my cycle of poor golf, I thought I would try a big breakfast. And yes, I thought this up all by myself. The items that appealed to me were parts of three different breakfast entrees. The Salesmanship Club of Dallas (they run the tournament) has some unusual way of taking care of the food for the players. You can get as much of whatever you want and it is free. The only trick is that you have to sign the ticket. You don’t have to sign your name, just a name. This may explain why Ed Fiori’s food bill was over $2000 one year. Then again Ed may have just been hungry that week. Well, anyway, I chose pancakes, corned beef hash, two eggs over medium, white toast, and bacon. This seemed reasonable to me. Let me tell you that got things stirred up. The waiter informed me that this order was well outside the parameters of their ordering protocol and processing it would crash the system and probably bring the entire golf tournament to a grinding halt. I assured him that money was no object. Ed Fiori signed for another $37 breakfast.

After my ninth birdie of the day, the bloated feeling finally subsided. That is when the troubled started. I was playing the 7th at TPC Los Colinas as my buddy Glen Day was playing the parallel 8th. He saw that I was nine under par with three holes to play and that I had a chance at shooting 59. I didn’t even realize that the course was a par 70 until he “gently” reminded me. Then Glen asked if they were still offering a million-dollar bonus to anyone shooting 59 on tour. I honestly couldn’t remember if they were or weren’t. Somehow, I scraped three pars together for my 61. Miraculously, Glen and I are still buddies.
In case you are interested Davis Love III shot 71 that day. Let me help you with the math. Charlie Rymer 61. Davis Love III 71. Same tees. That would be 10 shots. I’ll never forget and you can be sure I won’t ever let Davis forget. In fact every time I see him, I ask if he needs 5 shots a side. He just smiles and says, “Want to ride on my jet.” Davis seems to be the only player on tour that can shut me up.

That 61, which by the way beat Davis Love III by 10 shots, put me in the final pairing on Sunday. That was the first and only time that I played in the final group in a PGA Tour event on a Sunday. Let me tell you, there isn’t much oxygen around that first tee. I was paired with Phil Mickelson who I’ll wager, even with all his accomplishments, has never beaten Davis Love III by 10 shots in one round. Anyway, when I arrived on the tee, there was the great Byron Nelson. He could sense that I was distraught and immediately came over to calm me down. He told me that the 61 I had the previous day was one of the best rounds he had ever seen. And that upon further reflection he realized that in his career he had never shot 61. At this I started to breath a bit better. I looked over at Mickelson and realized that maybe he is mortal and that on occasion he has been known to miss a short putt or two. I was starting to feel my oats; after all I had beaten Davis Love III by 10 shots the previous day. It was at this point that Mr. Nelson uttered the words that unintentionally sealed my fate as a television golf analyst. He proclaimed, “I shot 60 on many occasions, but never a 61.”

GOLF ACCORDING TO CHARLIE

Golf According to Charlie

I ‘m a golf expert. What are my qualifications you might ask? Well, in 1996, I finished 39th at the Buick Classic. Tiger Woods was 43rd. Now that we have established my credentials, let’s go over my thoughts on the way golf ought to be.

My number one pet peeve is the tee time. I’d like to meet the idiot who came up with the concept of tee times and hit him right in the mouth. One should not be required to determine six weeks in advance the exact time at which a round of golf will commence, much less who it will be played with. My home club allows members to secure tee times two days in advance. As we have 1100 members, you can imagine what the pro shop is like at 8am on Thursday mornings. You have to be a speed dialer to play on Saturdays. And I really hate the computer tee time management systems some of fancy clubs have. Make me deal with one of those and I’ll be cutting grass every weekend.

A much more efficient system is to have the golf professional manage the various groups of players to give them a range of when they could expect to play. The young guys who like to gamble are the first one’s out. Let’s send the ladies after that. You wouldn’t want to send the ladies in front of these guys, as they would start betting on the ladies. “I bet you a hundred Mrs. Johnson takes at least 6 practice swings.” “Double or nothing says Mrs. Smith just fell asleep in the cart.” Next will come the doctors and lawyers. Nobody else can stand playing with them and besides, they deserve each other. Following closely would be the group that includes me. Those players that are too cheap to gamble and too lazy to get up early. This is the group where everyone is talking and no one is listening. It’s also the group that stops for lunch at least once and on occasion has a player put some vaseline on the face of a driver. And finally, we get to the serious uptight golfers. These are the guys that have a copy of the Rules of Golf in their bag. No mulligans allowed. Putt everything out. Smiling or idle chitchat prohibited. Real golf with a purpose sort of a thing. These folks do golf stretches before rounds and cool downs afterward. Conversation is limited to spin rates, coefficient of restitution, launch angle, and the demise of hickory shafts. This group must tee off last; otherwise nobody will finish before dark.

Golf carts. Much has been written about these great monstrosities. The worst 3 words in golf are “cart path only.” I say either walk and carry your bag or ride all over the ranch. There is nothing in this whole world worse than standing on a tee and watching a golfer in front of you walk back to the cart because he has the wrong club. Especially when you know he’ll get the same results with the one he has in his hands.

I really love the folks with the pull carts and trolleys. If you use a trolley and you sense that good golfers think you are an idiot, then you are dead on. Pulling a trolley is only about 10 times more cumbersome than carrying a golf bag. And besides it’s really hard to throw a trolley…tough to get a good grip. I recently spent some time at the PGA show in Orlando. They had all kinds of trolleys; big wheelers, four wheelers, and some that were remotely controlled. They had one that looked like a lunar rover. You strap some pager-looking device to your belt and the contraption follows you around like a puppy dog. I grew up playing golf at the Fort Mill golf course in Fort Mill, SC. If you ever want to get beat up and thrown in a ditch, show up at the Fort Mill golf course with a remote controlled golf trolley.

Dress codes at golf courses make no sense to me. A sign on the first tee at Uncle Remus Golf Course in Eatonton, GA reads “No tank tops, No muscle tees, No fishnet shirts.” I say if someone wants to play golf in a fishnet shirt, let them have at it. In some ways, the absence of a dress code can be quite beneficial. Golfers are always looking for excuses. “Well of course I hit that ball out of bounds. How am I supposed to focus when Bubba over there is wearing a fishnet tank top?”

As a former PGA Tour player, I can tell you the worst pairing in golf is to be stuck behind a group of fat guys wearing plastic spikes. Lets face it, the real reason plastic spikes have become mandatory at many courses is the fact that course owners don’t have to replace flooring in and around clubhouses nearly as often as facilities that allow traditional spikes. One of my best buddies is CEO of the worlds largest carpet manufacturer and he HATES plastic spikes. Ask PGA Tour players if they would rather putt over an old fashioned spike mark or Coke bottle cap dents and they’ll take the spike marks every time.

And finally we get to the item that really, really, bothers me the most. One of the greatest traditions in all of golf is the Sunday lunch buffet. After the last “amen” there has always been a mad dash from the church to the country club. In the South, this is a way of life. The challenge is to stuff your gut and then race to the first tee in order to get in 18 holes before sunset. The problem is that you always seem to get stuck in the buffet line behind a gaggle of blue-haired church ladies. You want to get to the roast beef and pecan pie while they are picking through the baby corn. It’s truly a miracle that this phenomenon hasn’t yet led to the loss of life or limb. Don’t blame the church ladies. It’s not their fault. The blame should be placed squarely on the club manager. Clearly the CMAA has failed to address this issue. Place the deserts first, followed in precise order by: meats, other hot entrees, bread, butter (not margarine), anything else that is white, green, or yellow, and lastly the salad paraphernalia stuff (including margarine). The guys can get their fried chicken, pecan pie, and 18 holes. The church ladies can pick at the beets, broccoli, and tofu until the cows come in. It’s really an embarrassment to human kind that it took someone so long to figure this out. Not to mention the fact that the “someone” is me.

Did I mention I’m a golf expert?

Have we killed the Goose

State of the Golf Business: Past, Present, Future

Golf is a way of life to some and a pass-time to others, but on one level or another its played by almost 30 million Americans today. Despite its popularity, the only thing growing in the domestic golf business these days is the grass. Some have even speculated that golf is dead, the run is over. Golf is not dead at all, its just sick, we’ve killed the goose that laid the golden egg.

To understand this first we need clarify which measuring stick we are using and separate the business of golf from the game of golf. First a little math and a short history lesson is in order.

There are about 16,000 golf courses in the United States as of 2008. We know this amongst other statistics found here thanks to a small group of dorks that keep up with such things at the National Golf Foundation In Jupiter, Florida. Over 3000 of these golf courses have been built in the last 20 years. That’s almost 20% or one fifth of the current supply in economic terms. Now during that time the average number of “golfers” or people that consider themselves such, has fluctuated some, but remained mostly static somewhere between 28-30 million. Now it doesn’t take a dork at the NGF or an economist’s infinite wisdom to see that someone misread the demand curve here. Why were so many golf courses built? Well, it actually had nothing to do with golf and everything to do with real estate. The golf industry is simply suffering from the same “irrational exuberence” that led to the housing bubble and and other related problems in our economy.

Historically most golf courses fell into a few categories, private, municipal, and public daily fee courses. Many of the first wave of courses built in the US were in private clubs, which evolved during the roaring 20’s and the days of prohibition when land and money were plentiful and where the clubs provided a veil for the elite. As golf’s popularity grew many public facilities were built to give more access to the sport, but these courses were often subsidized to stay afloat and keep the cost of greens fees down. Eventually, the numbers made sense and a private developers built courses with small club houses and low overhead where the fees generated from rounds were enough to make them economically viable. Along the way however, much of the stigma of golf being a “rich man’s” game stuck with it despite the fact that today the national average for a round of golf with a cart is about $42, which you’d be lucky to get out of a movie or bowling alley for these days.

Enter the developers, marketing “experts”, and bankers. Golf courses ceased to be self supporting entities and became amenities. They were no longer there to sell greens fees, but to sell hotel rooms and real estate lots. In 2005, at the peak of the housing bubble it is no coincidence that there were over 1000 courses in some phase of construction either proposed, in planning, or actually breaking ground. 60 percent of those were part of a residential community, whereas historically only about 20 percent were such. Demand was no longer driving golf, cheap money was. A golf course now only had to perform long enough to sell the development and many times was then left in the hands of an unsuspecting homeowners association. It was a game of hot potato. If you think a condominium project has a problem if it can’t sell enough units to take care of the common areas, imagine a struggling subdivision trying to support a 150 acre golf course. Just as home loans get foreclosed on so do golf courses. When they fail the banks don’t know what to do with them as when a course is broken down it doesn’t make very good collateral, are hard to liquidate, and most of them are only worth a fraction of what was actually put into them form an investors point of view. In fact you may even own a course or two and not know it thanks to a REIT, stock, or your local bank. However, not all is lost as the aftermath of this building boom may leave some jewels that may have never been built otherwise and may sentence some of the junk that should have never been built under any circumstances to fade back to dirt.

So what does the future hold for golf? In short, golf is making a move back to the basics, not declining per se, but where it should be. When we finally come out of the other side of the tunnel golf will be better off. We will see less and less of the $20 million “signature” courses and more quality golf for more people. Green will no longer just symbolize money and grass to the industry, but a chance to mitigate its misunderstood relationship to the environment. The worldwide push of sustainable building practices may play a key role in turning golf courses from amenities to assets as we learn how to integrate them into tools that contribute to green space, wastewater filtration, and even giant heat exchangers for district geothermal heating and cooling systems of the subdivisions they encompass.

Golf’s base is also growing in diversity. Worldwide popularity is gaining and courses are being developed in emerging markets such as China, Eastern Europe, Russia, as well as those closer to home such as Mexico, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua. With golf pushing to become an Olympic event, the international celebrity phenomenon of Tiger Woods, and players such as South Korean Y.E. Yang that just became the first Asian-born player to win a major at the recent PGA Championship this trend is sure to continue. So while some measuring sticks may show that business is down, the game itself is doing just fine.

Golf is far from dead, its just evolving.