Golf / Rich Tosches : Slowdown Continues Despite City’s Attempt to Speed Up Players

This month marks the end of the second year of the City of Los Angeles’ “Go Golf Program,” a campaign designed to speed up play on the heavily trafficked municipal courses, where a round of golf during peak hours can take about as long as a transcontinental flight.

By all measurements, the program has not been very successful.

“It went off very successfully,” said city Recreation and Parks Department spokesman Al Goldfarb. “We surveyed the golfers and got nearly a 90% acceptance of the program.

“But because it was expensive to maintain with the part-time help we had, we have had to cut back a considerable amount on monitoring the program.”

The program is now used only on major courses, such as the Sepulveda Dam courses of Encino, Balboa and Woodley, and Rancho Park and Griffith Park, according to Goldfarb.

The program--whereby a round of golf at an 18-hole course is designed to be completed in less than 4 1/2 hours, and which utilizes subtle messages on signs along with the polite urging of marshals to keep play moving--has not resulted in significantly faster rounds, according to dozens of players interviewed at local courses.

It has, most said, helped educate and thus speed up the slowest of the golfers. But overall, according to virtually every golfer who was asked, the program has had little impact. The Recreation and Parks Department keeps no statistics on the program.

“Occasionally the problem was some beginning golfer just didn’t know the rules and didn’t understand what he was supposed to do, and his partners probably didn’t know much more,” said Aaron Keppler of Tarzana, a frequent player at the Encino golf course. “The program with the signs and the marshals has helped those guys to play faster.”

But the real problem is golfers who know the rules and understand golf etiquette, but still play at roughly the same speed as growing hair. They stand over a ball for endless minutes, hitching up their green walrus pants and crouching down to line up the ball, dangling the club to find some imaginary line that they don’t quite understand and then repeating the whole process again a minute later.

And that’s just on the tee. On the green they hover over a putt for ages, switching their focus from the ball to the hole and back again.

“But the thing that really makes me mad,” Dale Thomson of Sylmar said, “are those guys who have never hit a ball more than 145 yards in their life, and every time they stand over the ball on a fairway they think they might hit that one 320 yards. They wait and wait until the group in front of them is nearly out of sight, about a half-mile away, and then the guy rips this ground ball about 90 feet. It just drives me crazy. After you play golf for a few years, you know how far you can hit a ball. Some of these guys are just out of it.

“I don’t see any difference at all in the time it takes to play a round since this program started. If anything, it seems to me it might take longer, on the average, because every month there are new players . . . more players.”

Can’t beat the price: Professionals from the city’s 18-hole courses will provide free lessons June 27-29 for golfers under the age of 18, the Recreation and Parks Department has announced. The clinics will be held from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. each day at the Sepulveda golf courses, Hansen Dam courses and Rancho Park in West Los Angeles.

Golfers must bring their own clubs and pay for a bucket of practice balls.

A long-shot shot: Sam Boris of Sherman Oaks scored his first hole-in-one last week, 55 years after taking up the sport.

Using a driver on the par-3, 212-yard 8th hole at Rancho Park, Boris lofted his tee shot into a stiff wind. It landed on the green, took a couple of bounces, slammed into the pin and dropped into the cup.