‘Knuckleheads’ Tee Off Purists Concerned With Golf Etiquette

Mr. Golf Etiquette hates Maximum Golf. Not that he’s read it, of course.

He has no time for a new magazine that features a comely “Cart Girl of the Month” on page 26, and a putter wrapped in the part of a bull that distinguishes it from a cow (“hold the beef-jerky jokes, please!”) on page 58.

Golf “needs to be desissified,” the magazine declares.

To put it mildly, Mr. Golf Etiquette does not agree.

“That is not maximum golf. That’s maximum knuckleheads,” says Jim Corbett, a Seattle executive who writes a Web column called Mr. Golf Etiquette.

“We have enough knuckleheads. They’re welcome to attend all the World Wrestling Federation shows they want, but they should leave golf alone.”

Not likely.

With its leering humor, keg-on-the-cart boisterousness and irreverence for the traditions of a most traditional game, Maximum Golf might be dismissed as a joke (albeit a lushly printed, smartly edited, 128-page joke bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch).

But it reflects something that is happening on the greens and fairways. Golfers who revere the game are encountering more and more Maximum Golfers, loud and loutish guys in goofy clothes who don’t let the game get in the way of a good time.

Check out the introduction to fringegolf.com, a Web site that promotes itself as “the new address of the modern golfer”:

“Hey, you! What are you looking at? Yeah, you! You in the plaid pants. Get off the green! We’re lookin’ to play through. Freakin’ old timers! This isn’t grandpa’s game anymore.”

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Michael Caruso remembers, as a kid, caddying and playing golf at the Knollwood Country Club in Lake Forest, Ill.

“The fun that I had was with the caddies, not out on the course with those old duffers. Those were the guys who kind of strangled golf--they took all the spirit out of it.”

He grew up and became a magazine editor for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Details, Talk. But he yearned to edit a sports magazine.

Sports is “one of the purest, most passionate things left. People don’t get that passionate about politics anymore, or about religion. People do not paint their faces to go to church,” he says.

Historically, people have not painted their faces to watch golf, either, but Caruso says that’s changing.

Partly, he credits Tiger Woods, “a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, the way Michael Jordan was for basketball.” But he also thinks the game is shedding its “elitist, country-club image.”

Maximum Golf is doing its part. There are memoirs of golf with rocker Tommy Lee and Sylvester Stallone, reader submissions of wacky days on the links, a faux interview with a St. Andrews sheep.

There’s a lot of sex in Maximum Golf--sex of the juvenile sort (i.e. cart girls and the bull putter), ribald jokes that might have found a home in Playboy in the mid-1970s, or Maxim today.

There is little in Maximum Golf for female golfers. “This is a men’s magazine in disguise,” Caruso acknowledges.

He has big dreams for Maximum Golf. It kicked off with some rousing publicity, when Woody Harford, a 36-year-old British Airways executive, won $1 million by sinking a 100-foot putt at the launch party.

He hopes to raise its circulation base from 300,000 to 550,000 by 2002. Ad pages are few, but Samir Husni, head of the magazine program at the University of Mississippi, says he thinks “there’s a market for this.”

“Finally, there’s a magazine for people who like to spend time on the golf course but don’t like the game,” Husni says. “Ride the carts, drink beer, and if they hit the ball--why not?”

Actually, there already was a magazine for those guys. It’s called Schwing! and features pictures of Hooters girls, rockers like Vince Neil and Alice Cooper swinging clubs, and a Japanese guy with three balls in his mouth. A recent article suggested how to sneak onto the course.

It’s low rent, and 24-year-old managing editor Will McCulloch, who still caddies on weekends, likes it that way.

Maximum Golf? “For $20 million, I’m not impressed.”

Maximum Golf, Schwing! and fringegolf.com do offer serious golf tips. They all say golfers should know the rules, observe the etiquette, honor the history of golf.

But then again . . . On a day when the newspapers report the death of Robert Trent Jones, Michael Caruso is asked how the great course designer fits into the picture at Maximum Golf.

“He’s dead,” Caruso says. “He doesn’t fit in at all.”

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There is a Ben Hogan room at the U.S. Golf Assn. museum in Far Hills, N.J. It is filled with Ben stuff under glass, including the 1-iron with which he made one of the most famous shots in golf history, on the 72nd hole of the 1950 U.S. Open.

Andy Mutch, the curator, says some visitors, on tight schedules, leave their cars running in the driveway and dash in to pay their respects.

“Everything involved in this room is very sacred and meaningful,” one visitor writes in the guest book.

Something about golf inspires this sort of reverence. It has its saints, like Hogan and Bobby Jones. It has its cathedrals, like Scotland’s St. Andrews, and Augusta, Pebble Beach and Baltusrol in this country.

At Baltusrol--the Springfield, N.J., site of seven U.S. Opens and August’s U.S. Amateur Championship--members recently rejected a proposal to allow shorts on the course.

“What we’re afraid of is pulling up and seeing a lot of plaid shorts at the putting green,” says Mike Martin, a private investor who at 9:30 a.m. on a Thursday is sitting in the Baltusrol cafe watching the stocks on CNBC while waiting for his round to start.

“One of the things about golf is, it’s so beautiful. When you see things that are out of the ordinary, it’s no longer so beautiful. When people are very loud or not appropriately dressed, it doesn’t belong.”

Some of this is merely a matter of style and attitude.

“Golf shirts are not made for guys like us,” says Steve Perry, vocalist for the punk swing band Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. On the course, he favors knickers and wingtips--and brewskies.

“We drink beers, yes, we do,” he says.

“I’ve gotten past the idea of golf being the bastion of the good-old-boy, middle class. You don’t have to be around those people.”

And yet, talk to Perry long enough and he sounds like a traditionalist, though with a punk twist.

He hates disruptive golfers. “I’m a punk-rock guy but I find that kind of boorish behavior to be horrible. . . . They kind of treat it like it’s a . . . hockey game.”

Like when Jim Corbett, Mr. Golf Etiquette, went to California’s Monterey Peninsula to play at Poppy Hills, a longtime dream.

He was assigned to play with two guys in their 20s who pulled up “at 90 mph.” When Corbett went to put his clubs in the cart, he saw open bottles of Southern Comfort and Jack Daniels. The younger golfers took a couple of swigs and offered Corbett a drink.

“These guys are already into two bottles at 9 o’clock in the morning. And they were joking back and forth in the rudest, crudest way,” he says.

Mr. Golf Etiquette politely demurred and said goodbye.

There have been glimmers of such behavior in the pros. At last year’s Ryder Cup, in Brookline, Mass., the American team celebrated a momentous comeback by whooping it up while European golfer Jose Maria Olazabal tried--and failed--to make a 25-foot putt to tie.

Meanwhile, the gallery was out of control, taunting and heckling. Someone spit on the wife of European captain Mark James.

Ron Sirak, editor of Golf World magazine, says golfers used to be brought up in the tradition; they learned the game from their fathers, generally at country clubs, then caddied or played college golf.

These days, caddies are going the way of the gutta-percha ball, as many courses insist that golfers use carts. And more golfers are taking up the game in their 20s, without guidance.

The result, Sirak says, is bad golf played by louts.

Serious golfers complain that the new breed slows the game by learning on the course instead of at the practice tee, by taking 12, 15, 20 shots at a hole, by taking a lifetime to line up a shot.

Jim Bedenko plays at Baltusrol. He is 57; he took up golf seven years ago, and it is now his passion. In January, he and eight friends played at Troon North in Arizona. The first day, a round that should have taken three hours took six; the second day, they quit after four hours and 12 holes.

“People don’t know what they’re doing. It spoils the game,” he says.

And to its adherents, remember, this game is far more than a game. In his upcoming book “The Way of Golf,” Robert Brown, a psychologist in Freeland, Wash., titles one chapter “Life is a Metaphor for Golf.”

To Brown, life on the course reflects life beyond its boundaries. “Our society is saying, ‘Do things that are quick, do things that are easy, do things that are fun, don’t work hard anymore,’ ” he says.

He has established a nonprofit foundation, Keepers of the Game, to enlist golfers who will “embrace golf’s core values, including courtesy, respect, discipline and honor.”

Replace those divots, he says. Repair the greens. Do not yell.

“The essence of the game must not be lost in a world where change outpaces perspective,” he writes.

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The editor of Maximum Golf isn’t bothered by the Ryder Cup flap.

“The old guard was offended,” Caruso says. “But the younger guard said, ‘This is what the sport ought to be. You better get used to it.’ ”

Because Caruso sees the future. The number of American golfers, 26 million, has been fairly flat. Caruso foresees a surge fueled by Tigermania, maybe 40 million or 50 million duffers hacking their way across America’s courses, each with a copy of Maximum Golf in his bag (along with a six-pack and a bull putter).

The sound you hear is Harvey Penick, rattling his putter in his grave.

“To me, fun does not mean dancing and singing down the fairways, creating a hullabaloo and telling loud jokes,” the legendary golf teacher wrote in “The Game for a Lifetime.” “This behavior might be amusing at a summer camp, but I believe it does not fit with the game of golf.”

But then, Harvey Penick doesn’t fit into Maximum Golf. He’s dead.

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On the Net:

Maximum Golf: https://www.maximumgolf.com

Mr. Golf Etiquette: https://www.mrgolf.com

Keepers of the Game: https://www.keepersofthegame.org