This Old Course Might Turn Out to Be Coarse

Welcome to 1910. Shucks, welcome to 1890.

Listen! Tired of the 20th Century, are you? Had it with phones that work, faucets that deliver hot water? Up to here with eight-lane highways? Yearn for country lanes, wooden houses, soda fountain America?

Have I got a place for you! I mean, we’re talking major league turn of the century here. Floradora Sextette time. “We were sailing along on Moonlight Bay.” Barbershop harmony.

The Great Gatsby is around here somewhere. Sitting on the veranda in his two-toned shoes, wondering where Daisy Buchanan went and how Wolfsheim ever fixed the World Series.

F. Scott Fitzgerald would love this place. William Howard Taft is still President here. California hasn’t been discovered yet. There’s nobody in the Hamptons sub-railroad baron.

The first thing that shocks you about this golf tournament is that they’re not using wooden sticks. Laurie Auchterlonie is not the leader in the clubhouse.

Clubhouse? Listen. When I tell you it was designed by Stanford White I have told you all you need to know about Shinnecock Hills.

They put the U.S. Open here because they’re sick to death of cart-path, sprinkler-head golf. They’re sick of eight-birdies-in-a-row shot making, bored with drive-and-an-8-iron on par-5s, gagged with 63s on your own ball, fed up with blond kids out of BYU, wherever that is, shooting four 65s without getting their hair mussed or their slacks wrinkled.

And that’s OK with me.

When I die, I don’t want to go to some palm-lined island in a sapphire ocean, or some gilt-lined pleasure palace in the clouds. I want to go someplace where golf shots trickle into snakepits or alligators’ nests, where they never land on a green or a fairway, where they hit trees on the off-chance they get into the air, at all, where they find water off the tee four times out of five and sand the fifth.

I want to go to a course where the nearest point of relief on a free drop is Tokyo--or Scotland. And the course is in America.

I want to go where there aren’t any par-5s and the par-4s require a drive and a 3-wood, positively. In fact, I want to go where there’s no fairway to speak of and the greens are all perpendicular to the rest of the course.

My favorite sight in all the world is a blind pitch to a conical green entirely surrounded by water. I would outlaw the eagle entirely in the game and the double-eagle would be punishable by death or Devil’s Island.

The worst sound in all the world to me is the birdie roar around a packed green. I thrive on groans.

My favorite sound in all the world is the agonized shriek, “Oh, no! Not over there!” followed closely by, “Oh, hit it, you dummy!”

I’m crazy about, “Get legs!” Next, I like, “Hit something, please!” I like, “My God, where’s that going?” only a little better than, “Anybody see where that went?”

Red numbers on a scoreboard drive me into a frenzy, like a bad bull.

I think I’m going to like Shinnecock.

It’s too early to tell, of course--the tournament starts today--but I have a feeling this course is going to be like a walk through Central Park after midnight for the guys who have to par it for a living.

If it was human, it would have teeth missing and tattoos, a gun in its belt and murder in its heart. Its picture would be in every post office in the land, and the FBI would be taking pictures at its family weddings. It’d be the Godfather of golf courses.

I think. I hope.

I want these guys to find out what golf is like for those of us who know that the ball doesn’t have to go into the air every time you hit it, that seven-foot putts aren’t tap-ins, that water hazards aren’t put there for the swans only. Shots can go there, too.

I want them to find out a ball doesn’t have to go 200 yards every time you hit it, that it can pop into the air, never leave the ground, hit a rock. It’s too much to hope they will miss it altogether, but with rough this wiry you never can tell.

I want to be standing there when they do, and grin this wicked little grin and say, “Awful feeling, ain’t it?” or, “How does it feel to look down there and see the ball still there, eh? Feel silly, do you? Now you know what real golf is like, not that 20-under-par you guys are used to!”

Listen to Jack Nicklaus, no less, as he is describing Shinnecock in a pre-tournament press conference: “The only thing I don’t like about the golf course is the fairways are very, very lush, and if you miss on one side just a trifle outside the fairway, you can’t play from it. I’m talking about a shot that is just off the edge of the fairway.”

Well, Jack, why don’t you hit it way, way out into the rough like we do?

“You have to have an artificial place to stand on,” complained the world’s greatest golfer.

Shucks, most of us have stood on rubber mats more than we have on grass to hit our shots. They should put an Open on one of those courses some time.

“There are tons of shots I can’t play in that rough,” groused Jack. “I can’t get a club through it.”

Well, so what! We can’t get a club through it on a fairway.

“I like a fairway that moves sideways as you go along,” Jack said.

Well, we all like that. What we don’t like is a fairway that disappears on you, fades into the distance, as you go along.

“It looks like a right-to-left course to me,” Jack confided.

Well, it looks like a right-to-right course to me. Every course looks like a right-to-right course to me. Because that’s where I hit it. Even on doglegs left. Especially on doglegs left. How will Nicklaus engineer his round of golf? “I play where they put the pins,” he said. Not us. We pay no attention at all to where they put the pins. We try to play where they put the greens. Without much success, I might add.

Well, you can see I have great expectations for Shinnecock. I plan to have more fun than Jack the Ripper at a nurses’ convention. I’ll be like Madame De Farge knitting at the guillotine. I may make home movies. The chain saw massacre in cleats.

Don’t bet on any golfer you ever heard of winning this thing. Unless, of course, it’s Andy North. Andy North always wins these things, doesn’t he? No matter where they play it?