Whatever you do, guard that golf ball

At our training session, it’s made clear what we must not do -- like watch the fun stuff.

An official of the United States Golf Assn. shows a slide of a woman holding up her arms to hush a crowd while, behind her, a golfer swings. “As the player hits, she’s facing the gallery. That’s perfect,” our tutor lectures a packed auditorium. “It’s not a position for you to watch all the good golf.”

There’s plenty more we are not to do too, such as have a beer on the job. Or squabble with unruly spectators who have had a few -- there are people up the ladder to handle such matters.

“And above all else, don’t get caught like this guy,” the instructor continues as another slide appears, of a man in a uniform of sorts, like the one we’ll be wearing, slumped at the base of a tree, snoozing. That snapshot wound up on the front page of a newspaper, reflecting poorly on the volunteer profession we are soon to enter. Our mission?

“Get out there,” our mentor says, “and protect that golf ball!”

One of the Grand Slam tournaments of golf, the U.S. Open, is being played in New York this week, and it requires more than 5,500 volunteers -- the most visible being the 2,000-plus “marshals” working in shifts throughout the course -- this year at historic Winged Foot Golf Club, 45 minutes north of Manhattan. The marshals spread out over the 18 holes, just inside the ropes, to keep the 40,000 paying customers away from Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh et al, and, as the man said, protect their golf balls.

By tradition, other area golf clubs volunteer a year in advance to handle a hole each. My club, Bonnie Briar, located down the street from Winged Foot -- we hear their lightning warning sirens and they hear ours -- drew the 16th, dubbed “Hells-Bells.”

“What a hole it is!” Mickelson’s caddie, Jim “Bones” Mackay, declares in a pre-tournament analysis of the uphill 480-yard par four, which doglegs left, its fairway protected by towering trees and its two-tiered green by a menacing maple and a trio of deep sand traps, adding up to potential disaster for the players, though we hope not for us, its guardian flunkies.

We each pay $160 for the privilege of patrolling this monster in six-hour stretches in the hot sun. For that we get a “marshal” hat and pin, two shirts and a windbreaker that must have been designed by a UCLA alumnus -- it’s bright blue and gold -- and can fold into a fanny-pack pouch. We also get a “volunteer” squeeze bottle that they apparently don’t trust us to fill ourselves -- we have to get it filled, with water, at the course. We also get lunch vouchers for each day we work, and that’s the first thing we use Monday, the first day the public can watch the players practice, and the first chance for us to practice our roles too. There’s little traffic early in tournament week, so the shuttles from our club reach Winged Foot well before the 1 p.m. start of the second shift. We thus head to the nearest concession stand to use the coupons that get us cheeseburgers, sodas and chips or an apple. “Collecting your pay, huh?” a voice says as we grab the grub. It’s a marshal from another club who has finished his shift and looks at us as if we’re making a mistake taking our rewards before we’ve done a stitch of work.

It takes half an hour for the 20 of us on the shift to tromp across the course and find the 16th fairway, where our “hole captain,” Gene Donovan, a 70-year-old retired engineer, explains that we’ll work a rotation system, moving at his command to sample all the posts and tools of the trade. Those are the paddle, wielded behind the tee, so a marshal can signal whether a player’s drive is headed where it should -- straight -- or veering right or left; the little yellow flags, wielded up the hole, to mark where a ball settles into the rough, which is so thick at the Open that you sometimes can stand right over a ball and not see it; and the ropes, wielded at crosswalks so spectators can pass only when the players are not around or about to hit.

On practice days, the golfers often hit three or four drives, so we get to work on our own techniques with the paddles and flags. On this sleepy opening day, however, there are long stretches when no players pass and there often are more volunteers around than spectators. I sense my colleagues growing uneasy, like the gay Mafia captain, Vito, on this season’s “The Sopranos,” who tried doing honest work but found himself staring at his watch by 10 a.m.

“Tiger’s expected by at 3!” one of the crew announces (meaning there will be crowds then) but one of the world’s best players quits after nine holes, so we never see him, or the crowds, this day.

Our only potential crisis this Monday comes from within our own ranks, as the early evening’s long shadows descend. Two men, frequent playing buddies, replace two women who have happily held down the job that provides the closest contact with the golfers: handling the ropes alongside our green that give them a path through the spectators to the next tee. First the men gripe to me that the women are telling them how to do the job. Then the women complain that the men are operating the ropes all wrong. I decide this brewing battle of the sexes requires the quick intervention of our captain, Donovan, and march down toward the tee to find him. I arrive just as a saving message comes over his earphones from Marshal Central. “No more groups are coming,” he reports. “They say we can go home.”

The alarm clock goes off at 5 a.m. Thursday, the start of real tournament play, when we must be at our posts by 7. The hole captain for this shift, Roger Maxon, who owns two liquor stores, stations me behind the tee with a just-retired banker, Bob Purcell, who gets the paddle used to signal where drives are heading. “He’s taller,” Maxon explains.

As we reach the tee, eight tournament officials are swarming over the nearby 15th green with tape measures and test balls, determining where they will cut hole all four days of play. Two FBI wander past with black backpacks, going to their command post trailers behind a fence.

Luckily, we don’t need the feds’ help later, when we have our first “incident” at the 16th. After Mickelson hits his drive, a spectator tries to step inside the ropes to grab a half-inch remnant of the crowd favorite’s broken wooden tee, which is left on the turf. “Back, please,” we command, then flip him the souvenir. “For my son,” he insists.

After two-plus hours at the tee, Purcell and I are moved up the hole to the landing area and given the 18-inch-tall yellow flags to mark shots that land off the fairway, in the tall grass. The rule for when the players and caddies approach is: Don’t speak until spoken to. Yet some competitors strike up conversations anyway. “Keep those yellow things away from me!” quips Rocco Mediate, who evidently has had too many flags mark his shots in the gnarly rough. When Singh comes through, tied for the tournament lead at one under par, he asks a question about his drive, “Which tree did it hit?” He apparently is pondering whether he might hit over the trees in a future round. But this time a branch costs him a crucial stroke, and the lead.

The job reminds me of the parable of the elephant and the blindfolded men each allowed to experience only a small part of the huge animal. We marshals glimpse, however closely, one tiny piece of the whole. Of course, we convince ourselves that history will be made, if not the entire tournament decided, on “our hole.”

On Friday morning Woods hits the maple tree bordering “our” green and finishes with a double bogey that would seem to doom his chance of surviving the cut. For two days, millions of TV viewers around the world witness his terrible play, all his wild drives into the trees.

As I’ve watched those highlights at the end of the wearying days, I’ve studied figures at the edges of the TV screen -- my fellow marshals coping with his prodigious crowds. I saw a marshal Thursday night who could have been a model in our training slide show, his arms raised to signal silence and his back turned to the marquee player.

Those at home might wonder why golf nuts would pay $160 for ringside seats at a fight that they, at crucial moments, cannot watch. That reminds me of the last line from a 1932 film, “I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang,” in which Paul Muni unjustly lands in a Southern prison work crew whose brutality turns him into an animal before he escapes. The final image has him vanishing into the fog while explaining how he survives: “I steal.”

I can’t speak for all marshals, but in the interests of truth, I have to confess: “I peek.”