Category Archives: Two-Hour Eighteen™

Report from the Club Championship

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On Sunday, Addison and I played in the final match of our club championship. At 5:25 the evening before, I received this email from him:

Headed to the course if you’re interested in a quick nine right now. Will wait til 5:40 for a response. Or just be there by 5:40.

He sent the email from his phone, in his driveway, but I beat him to the course, and we teed off at 5:38, for a practice round. On the fourth hole, we saw a red-tailed hawk fussing with something on the ground—maybe a chipmunk. When we got close, the hawk moved to a tree and turned its back to us:

Except for the hawk and whatever it was eating, the course was empty, and we played half of a Two-Hour Eighteen™ in 55 minutes. Then we went to dinner at our favorite restaurant, Popey’s—which is pronounced “Poppy’s.” (Don’t bother searching for it on Google, unless you’re interested in Popeye.)  One topic of discussion: how easy it would be, with a little red, blue, black, and white paint, to make the name on the sign look the way it’s pronounced. Also, we got ice cream.

Our club championship final is 27 holes. The next morning, Addison and I teed off at 8:00, and played the first 18 holes in two hours and fifteen minutes. It was too early to start the final nine—the Sunday Morning Group was still playing, among other reasons—so, to kill time, we went to lunch at our second favorite restaurant, the Hidden Valley Eatery,  with Tony, who was caddying for me. (One of our club’s best traditions is members caddying for members. In last year’s final, Gary, our superintendent, caddied for Ray, who won.)

Hidden Valley wasn’t serving lunch yet—too early—so all three of us ordered breakfast pizzas, a house specialty. Bacon, cheese, tomatoes, something, something, and two fried eggs. Then, back to the course for the final nine, with the usual gallery:

(I won!)

18 Good Things About Golf: No. 10

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Stanley, with a golf accessory designed to speed up play.

10.  Although golf is expensive in absolute terms, on an hourly basis it isn’t much costlier than bowling. A perfectly serviceable set of used clubs can be had for a couple of hundred dollars—or less, if you know an obsessive with a garage full of equipment he can no longer stand to look at. An hour or two spent poking through the bushes on virtually any course will turn up a month’s supply of balls. Sneakers can usually be worn instead of golf shoes, especially now that golf shoes increasingly look like sneakers. Even relatively fancy courses now offer recession-inspired discounts on greens fees and memberships. I know hunters and fishermen who spend more.

The truly oppressive cost of golf is the cost in time: dawdling choppers make life miserable for everyone stuck behind them. They transform what ought to be a pleasurable diversion into an all-day slog, and they hurt the game itself, by increasing the national supply of player frustration and spousal resentment. The ideal solution would be for everyone to play faster, but since that’s unlikely to happen the best remedy is to bypass the slowpokes, by avoiding, whenever possible, the most popular times, days, weeks, and months. My friends and I often go out late in the afternoon for what we call a Two-Hour Eighteen™: a full round, on foot, faster than most Americans play nine holes in a cart. We pick times when our course is likely to be empty or nearly so, and we don’t take practice swings, agonize about where to aim putts we weren’t going to make anyway, or stand still while other people hit. When you can comfortably play eighteen holes in two hours or two hours and fifteen minutes, you can put in a reasonable day’s work, get in a full round, enjoy a beer with your pals, and still be home in time to ask, “Hey, Honey, what’s for dinner?”

When I took up golf, twenty years ago, I worried that I was too horrible to swing in public. But I soon realized that, bad though I was, I wasn’t much worse than most of the other golfers I saw, and that even the good ones didn’t mind playing with me as long as I kept up. In fact, they scarcely noticed me at all, so absorbed were they in their own struggles. As my friend Jim explained, “Nobody ever gave a shit about how anybody else played golf.

Save time by showering at the course. Member-Guest 2011.