Published: September 13, 2009 12:50 am      

The Obnoxious Golfer

Golf, in the early stages, was considered a “rich man’s sport” or a “gentleman’s game.”

I have determined that being rich does not automatically qualify you as being a gentleman.

A perfect example would be the great Bobby Jones. We can watch his golf lessons on the Golf Channel. The calm gentleman, with his well-modulated Southern accent was, at one time, banned from playing in any USGA-sponsored tournaments because of his temper tantrums.

It was not until he wrote a letter of apology and a promise to control his temper was ever able to come back and register his many great feats.

One of his most famous quotes was, “Golf is a game that creates emotions that sometimes cannot be sustained with the club still in one’s hand.”

We have all experienced bad days on the golf course and the resulting altering of our personalities and usually for the worse. There are days when it seems that all the breaks are bad, and you even start feeling sorry for yourself and cannot understand why others cannot share your feelings.

It is about at this stage of the game when your complaining is starting to get on the nerves of your playing partners, and you can become obnoxious.

I once knew a member who never hit a bad shot in his life that was not caused by an outside agency. He could hear people talking in an airplane at 30,000 feet.

To make matters worse, one of his playing partners would never stop talking and would describe every shot he had just hit.

They were a great pair and continued playing with one another until they could no longer play. They are both gone now. I don’t know if they went up or down, but I’ll bet they are still playing together.

You are fortunate if you can find a foursome in which you can find all four compatible. Sometimes I think this is far more difficult than finding a mate.

Finding one partner is sometimes a difficult task, much less four.

Out of 100 golfers teeing off on a day, only 10 or so will come close to the round they were dreaming of all night. Those 10 will go home and be nice to their family. The other 90 will have mixed reactions, and will often take this mood home with them.

A final story, purely fictional, was about a foursome, which did a lot of gambling.

One day Tom and Sam gave Jim and Joe quite a financial beating. Jim was so distraught that he went into the men’s locker room and got a razor and slit his wrists. He was standing at the sink draining his blood, when his partner stuck his head in the door and said, “Tom and Sam said they would give us two-up a side tomorrow.”

Jim quickly taped his wrists to stop the bleeding, and said, “What time?”