Sandy Parr at the 19Th Hole

Copyright © 2012 by Mohamed Noorani.

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CONTENTS

1 WHAT GOLFOLOGY SAYS ABOUT GOLFERS

2 FIRST GOLF IN ENGLAND

3 MY GOLF CLUB IS MY SECOND HOME

4 CLUBBING IN GOLF CLUBS

5 DECORUM AND CIVILITY ON THE GOLF COURSE

6 GOLF ETIQUETTE

7 ARE WE STILL THE HONOURABLE COMPANY OF GENTLEMEN GOLFERS?

8 THE WORLD GOLF RANKING

9 GOLF GOING HI-TECH

10 WHY ARE WE PLAYING BY THE R & A RULES

11 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CHANGES IN THE RULES OF GOLF

12 A MARKER WRITES YOUR SCORE, BUT YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR IT

13 DEALING WITH WATER HAZARD

14 GOLF RULES ARE NOT ALWAYS LOGICAL

15 LIFTING A BALL AND THEN REPLACING IT, DROPPING IT, RE-DROPPING, OR PLACING THE BALL

16 MIND THE RULES OF GOLF

17 THERE IS ONLY ONE NEAREST POINT OF RELIEF

18 WHEN TO DROP, RE-DROP, OR TO PLACE AND REPLACE YOUR BALL

19 WHEN YOU MAY NOT PLAY A PROVISIONAL BALL

20 THE PERIL OF NOT MARKING YOUR BALL

21 A GIMME IS A TACTICAL MOVE, NOT A GENEROUS ACT

22 THE ILLUSION, BLUFF, AND ENTREATING OF GIMMES

23 TAKING A MULLIGAN?—BEWARE; IT COULD BE A NEGLIGENT SHOT

24 WHO IS MR MULLIGAN?

25 GENTLEMEN AT THE CLUB AND THE GOLF WIDOWS AT HOME

26 GOLFERS ARE DAMAGING THE ENVIRONMENT

27 INSIDE THE AUGUSTA NATIONAL GOLF CLUB

28 MOVE FASTER, PLEASE

29 GOLFERS: BEWARE OF LIGHTNING

30 HAVE YOU BEEN LOSING YOUR GOLF BALLS?

31 HOLE-IN-ONE

32 RENOVATING THE GOLF COURSE

33 ABOUT PUTTING

34 ABOUT GOLF BALLS

35 FAKE GOLF CLUBS

36 CLONE CLUBS

37 AREN’T YOU PLAYING IN THE US MASTERS?

38 DO YOU REMEMBER WHO WON ANY OF THE 2009 MAJORS?

39 THE 1999 OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP: THE COLLAPSE OF VAN DE VELDE AND THE RISE OF LAWRIE

40 THE 2005 OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP: BACK TO ST ANDREWS

41 THE OLD COURSE—THE SITE OF THE 2000 OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP

42 THEY RIPPED THE OPEN

DEDICATION

To

Shirley, who will never understand

why husbands play golf, then become golf nuts.

Sazali, Azman, Emiliah, Haris,

and Julia—what is a home without children?

WHAT GOLFOLOGY SAYS ABOUT GOLFERS

The other day, when my wife saw me reading something intently, she, as usual, would interrupt with an unnecessary question. She asked, What are you reading?

Err . . . Golfology, I said.

When I mentioned the term golfology, she sniggered. It is her habit. She would sneer any time when golf is mentioned. Isn’t it strange? There are couples: the husband loves golf as much as the wife hates it. While golf is the husband’s first love, it is something so disgusting to the wife. I feel sorry for those who reject golf. They don’t know what they are missing. Golf has become an important part of our life that it cannot escape meticulous study and discourse. We are into golfology nowadays.

One recent dissertation from the sphere of golfology is a profile of an American golfer. This is what it looks like. Today, USA is a nation of golfers. It is estimated that 30 million Americans—about 10 per cent of the population—play golf. If we count up the people who find employment in upkeeping golfing facilities, the golf widows, families neglected by the golfer-fathers or golfer-heads of household, then probably more than half of the population is affected by golf—for better or for worse.

Golf courses are being built faster than the golfers can play them. If you have an ambition to play at least one round of golf in every golf course in the United States, then you better ask for extension of at least 300 years more of your life.

Most of the courses are lined by homes because even non-golfers want to look at the verdant fairways through their windows. When the golfer is not playing golf, but is staying home, he is still into golf. He sits and stares at the television set, twenty-four hours a day, doped and stupefied by the channels that air golf programmes. And yet, golf is relatively new in the United States. Golf arrived in America only about a hundred years ago.

It had to wait for some Scotsmen to settle there. The homesick Scottish settlers found a perfect therapy in golf. They had to take golf with them to America. Recently, a profile of the American golfer was compiled from a survey of 2,000 avid American golfers who play at least twenty-five rounds (eighteen holes) or more per year.

All sorts of questions were shot at them.

Why do you play golf?

Where do you play?

Why can’t you play better golf?

What bothers you most about the game?

What about it do you most love?

With whom would you rather play golf: Lorena Ochoa or Pamela Anderson?

How many more majors will Tiger Woods win? And so on.

Here are some of the interesting findings of the survey:

1. For a start, we find that golfers are pretty serious about the game. Their average score is 91.9 strokes.

2. Only 20 per cent play golf, as members of private clubs and 22 per cent play at semi-private clubs. The rest—58 per cent—do not belong to any golf club; they are the roving golfers. They play in public courses, or anywhere.

3. Probably, it is for this reason that 17 per cent of the golfers don’t have official handicaps.

4. It seems that in the United States, being a golfer and belonging to a golf club are two separate issues. There are those indefatigable golfers who can’t wait for the sun to rise, yet they don’t belong to any golf club. On the other hand, there are members of golf clubs, or country clubs, who have never touched a golf club. They are members of a golf club for the mere prestige of being in the company of who-is-who.

5. To play golf, just as in other games, one does not have to belong to a club. There are many public courses in the US and all over the world. The so-called public courses, mostly associated with the local municipalities, are regular features in the neighbourhood of the residential suburbs.

Oh! I forgot to mention that all the 2,000 respondents interviewed were men. Anyway, the answer to the next question would confirm that.

The question: Of the three women, who is your first choice as your playing partner: Karrie Webb, Lorena Ochoa, or Pamela Anderson?

The answer: Lorena Ochoa—52 per cent; Karrie Webb—25 per cent; and Pamela Anderson—18 per cent.

The fact that Pamela Anderson is the last choice confirms what we always know: golfers are earnest, honest, purposeful, and serious about golf. There is no diversion. There is no distraction. Would the wives believe it?

If there is anyone who has other ideas about golfers, he better think again. However when the question was reworded, the real men stood out. The question that let the cat out of the bag went something like this: If you were to make a golf date with any of the three women, who is your choice: Karrie Webb, Lorena Ochoa, or Pamela Anderson?

The answer: 73 per cent selected Pamela Anderson. The rest selected all the three! Oh, well! There is a huge difference of objective and purpose between a golf playing partner and a golf date.

Whenever a golfer plays golf, he is in the exclusive company of three other golfers for at least four hours. Sometimes, we wonder what the golfers talk about while they are in a round of golf during the long hours.

You might think they would talk only about golf. They certainly do, if there is a lady in the group. Otherwise, a fairly large majority (71 per cent) said, girls and sex was the favourite subject. Oh . . . really?

On the question why they think they have trouble improving their golf, this is the reply: lack of time and inclination to practice (29 per cent), lack of fully qualified instructor (29 per cent), they are not young any more (21 per cent), they are just not born for golf (12 per cent).

Ever wonder what golfers think of if they could ban one thing on the course?

About 37 per cent say slow play. Mobile phones come close second (34 per cent). The rest of the nuisances, in descending order, are foul language (13 per cent), children (8 per cent), cigars (4 per cent), mulligans (2 per cent), and golf carts (1 per cent).

We have an interesting finding on the matter of slow play. Around 63 per cent of golfers say they are more bothered being held up by the group ahead or in front of them, rather than being pushed by the group behind. It shows that golfers are aware that they are always slowed down in their pace because of the front group is slow: but they hardly realise if they are slowing the game.

The study also revealed that a fairly large majority of golfers thought the game had become slow when the group ahead of them bothered them rather than the group from behind breathing on their necks.

The slow players don’t think they are the root cause of slow play. It is either the front group is slow or the group from behind is playing too fast. Indeed, the complexity of slow play belongs to the science of the interdependence of matter, time, and space and their combined characters of motion, velocity, and mass.

We need to study in this area. As yet, there is no sure cure for slow play. One day, golfology will tell us what to do about slow play, we hope.

The next set of study was for the purpose of finding why and how the good players experience their golf differently from their less accomplished golf brethren.

For the purpose of the study, the low handicappers are those who have an average gross score of 81 and below, and the high handicappers are those who have an average gross score of 95 and above.

According to the study, the low handicappers play golf more often: on average, they play 92 rounds per year, which means they do it at least twice a week, whereas the high handicappers only manage 62 rounds per year.

The low handicappers started playing golf at the age of twenty-three. The high handicappers picked up golf only when they were thirty-nine. That was when they have become overage and are rejected in other sports. Golf was the only escape route left.

Around 65 per cent of the low handicappers had taken up the game by the age of twenty-five. About 77 per cent of the high handicappers think they were too young to take up golf at twenty-five, and instead were laughing at those who did.

The low handicappers started golf when they were young. Their fathers introduced them to the game. In fact, more than three times as many low handicappers as the high handicappers had their golf introduced by their fathers. Those so introduced to the game also had some forms of formal training.

How about when they feel some body is breaching the rule or just outright cheating? Only 18 per cent of the high handicappers have taken action—probably they are not sure of which rule were being breached. In the same situation, 45 per cent of the low handicappers have taken action because they know which rules have been breached.

If President Nixon and Co. had known that the night guard at the Watergate Building played golf to a very low handicap, probably there would not have been the Watergate scandal. Research in golfology tells us that the low handicappers were less than even-tempered.

Around 59 per cent of the low handicappers had thrown a club in anger, whereas only 21 per cent of the high handicappers had done so. About 33 per cent of the low handicappers had broken a club in anger but a mere 4 per cent of the high handicappers had.

The low handicappers give everything to the game when they were at it. Call it concentration or focus. But the high handicappers had many other things in their mind. Now we know why the low handicappers periodically display a new set of golf clubs when they walk to the first tee: they had broken their previous clubs.

We also know now why so many equipment companies tailor their advertising to the good players . . . err . . . the gullible low handicappers. Around 62 per cent of the high handicappers are terribly confused by the many different models of golf clubs and balls. Titanium or graphite doesn’t mean a thing to them. But 66 per cent of the low handicappers are bought over by the profusion of hi-tech golf equipment in the market. They know about the titanium, graphite, and all.

About 60 per cent of the low handicappers knew the specs of their clubs like weight, swing weight, torque, and so on, which determine the performance. While only 15 per cent of the high handicappers had some general idea of theirs.

Ever wondered why people play golf? The low-handicappers say it is because of personal challenge (48 per cent) and fresh air (14 per cent). Only 26 per cent of the high handicappers play golf because of its personal challenge.

The low handicappers pick Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus as their golf idols. Only 10 per cent pick Tiger Woods. The high handicappers also place Palmer first, but Tiger Woods comes a close second. It appears that for the low handicappers, even their golf idol has to be somebody they think they could beat.

At the start of every game, a large majority of the low handicappers think they would make some money in the wager. On the other hand, for the high handicappers, their only objective is not to lose too much money at the end of the game.

The low handicappers are on the offensive when they play golf, whereas the high handicappers strictly play a defensive game.

It is hard to disagree with these findings. We now have new arsenal of excuses, which are mostly legitimate, of why we are not a better golfer, just yet.

FIRST GOLF IN ENGLAND

When was golf first played in England?

We have a few dates put up by various people. Most of those who made the claims are very firm about the date, and they come with strong conviction. Some others offered dates which they could relate to their golf clubs or other institutions in which they have interest.

The bigger issue is to ask what the date signifies. Can we accept a date, as the instance when golf was first played in England, even if soon after that date, the game faded out, discontinued, and was abandoned? After the game was abandoned, there was a gap, which could be years, before the game was started again and most probably at another location. There was no continuity. Or, should the date be the one when they first played golf in England, and they continued to play the game of golf without interruption, to this day, by succeeding generations, of course.

When golf first came to England from Scotland, they played the game in various locations, and most probably, one location was isolated from another. We believe, in some locations, some time after they started the game, the interest in the game died out, and the game faded out, and eventually, it was abandoned. The pioneers started the game of golf in sporadic manner, and it recurred in irregular instances. They were unable to sustain the interest in the game.

Considering sustainability and continuity, we ought to select only that date when golf was first played, and since then, the game continues to be played there to this day as the date when golf was first played in England. Even then, there are still a few competing dates for us to select.

Nevertheless, the best bet for the first golf in England is probably the date when King James I first played golf in Blackheath near Greenwich, London. But then, after some years, the game was abandoned. Nobody played golf there any more. However, after some gapping years, the game was revived. Still, we must give James I the honour as the pioneer of golf in England.

James I was born on 19 June 1566; he was of Scottish descent. As a matter of fact, he became an infant King James VI of Scotland when he was only thirteen months old, succeeding his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, who was compelled to abdicate in favour of her son. Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned for being entangled in a scheme that ended with the murder of her husband.

Meanwhile, England and Ireland were ruled by Queen Elizabeth I, whose Tudor House was related to James VI’s Stuart House. James VI of Scotland was a cousin of Elizabeth. When it became apparent that Elizabeth was not going to get married, and would not have an issue, James VI, King of Scotland, was made the heir apparent of England and Ireland.

Upon the demise of Elizabeth I, in 1603, James VI, King of Scotland, assumed the throne of the King of unified England, Scotland, and Ireland and styled himself as James I. In 1603, James I, at the age of thirty-seven, took up residence in Greenwich, London, where the royal residence was at the time.

Never mind the complex family history. Instead, we should note that besides blue blood, there was also golf blood running in James I; his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, is on a written record as the first lady to play golf in Scotland. During her trial for the murder of her husband, a piece of evidence was put forward that she was indifferent to her husband’s death, for she was seen playing golf during that period.

In the end, it took a Scotsman, King James VI, who came to England to be crowned as King James I, to bring the Scottish favourite game to England. From the best in our record, we can safely say that King James I and his courtiers and retinues, all Scotsmen, were the golf pioneers of England.

There is a tradition that James I had played golf in the vicinity of Blackheath around 1608. But James I had moved to London in mid-1603. Well, it could be that it takes some time to get used to the place and to get the grounds ready.

We are not able to identify the actual ground where they played their golf. It is obvious that they never had a formal golf course or a golf club, as we would like to imagine. There is no club today that can claim to inherit the golf course that James I had used.

However, if you go around Greenwich, you can still see some large open green lungs, the commons, as they are called. There are also a few golf courses, here and there in this area, today. It is not surprising if the royalty had chosen Blackheath as the place to play golf because Blackheath was also near Greenwich, where the royal palaces and residences of the courtly aristocrats were.

We know that golf had by then been played in Scotland for some 150 years before James moved to London. It is fair, therefore, to presume that James’s entourage would inevitably have consisted of a number of golfers. It is believed that the royal entourage was able to find what space they needed in which to pursue their sport by climbing to the higher ground at Blackheath above the palace.

There is a piece of documentary evidence that affirmed the fact that Henry Frederick Stuart, the Prince of Wales, had been golfing there in 1606.

Henry I, the Prince of Wales, was the heir to James I and was a very popular personality among the people there. Sadly, he died of typhoid fever and predeceased his father at the age of eighteen. It is believed that in the first few years of golf being introduced in England, the Scotsmen, who had moved to London with James, dominated the game.

Records show that the royal Scottish court had arrived in London in larger numbers than might be imagined. There were in excess of fifty noblemen who came south with James I. A large retinue of servants and household officers had accompanied each of them and, therefore, the number must have run into several thousands.

The number of the Scottish party that came from Scotland with James I was certainly enough to make a golf community, another evidence of golf in England being pioneered by the Scottish who came with James. Although James I held both the crowns of Scotland and England, the two countries were not fully united for another 100 years. The old hatred between them was still strong. This meant that the Scots tended to keep their own company in London, and naturally, they kept the game of golf, their common interest, to themselves.

For this reason, it is believed that few, very few, if any, Englishmen at the time would ever have seen golf, let alone played it with the migrant Scottish court party. There is not much evidence if any Englishman had joined them in golf; probably, there were a few.

Indeed, if golf had been played in England at the time of James I, after 1608, it was mostly confined exclusively to the Scottish courtiers and confined to Blackheath. As such, though golf had come to England, in the early 1600s, the Scottish immigrants dominated it. It did not spread among the English people.

It remains doubtful if golf had caught on in England outside the royal court circle during this period. We find no evidence of any form of golf fraternity anywhere else in England during that time. Some people like to date the establishment of the Royal Blackheath Golf Club, the oldest golf club in the world, to 1608 or thereabout, when James I introduced golf to England. Nevertheless, some others doubt that.

However, this claim cannot stand because after James died, the interest in golf had also faded. Golf was discontinued. The Royal Blackheath Golf Club, established in 1608 or thereabout, is the oldest golf club in the world. However, some time later, they deactivated the club and there was a gap. But, later they revived the club again.

Anyway, the idea that the first golf club could be the Royal Blackheath, which was English and not Scottish, is not as impossible as it sounds. In Edinburgh, there were plenty of golfers and arrangements for a game would have been easy to make, whereas Blackheath is several miles outside the City of London, and to get there in the Stuart time, it would have meant significant travel arrangements, such as being ferried by waterman to Greenwich.

Thus, the reduced number of golfers and the demands of geography could easily create a need for organisations like a golf club. There are also things that indicate that golfers of England had gathered formally for a game of golf in Blackheath, in 1745, about a century after James I had struck his first golf shot there.

There is a lacuna in the history of people playing golf in England within the first 100 years. W. E Hughes, in the Chronicles of Blackheath Golfers, ascribes the Club’s foundation to 1787. Somewhere in the Club’s current brochure, one would find the following words:

Indeed, no less an authority than Bernard Darwin, grandson of Charles Darwin, golf correspondent of The Times for 46 years, past Captain of the Royal & Ancient and the most revered of all golf writers, began his introduction to a guide to the Club published in 1940s with the following words:

The Royal Blackheath Golf Club, as the entire world knows, is the oldest golf club in the world.

If we accept that Blackheath Club was established because of the need to have a golf organisation to run the game for the Englishmen, then it must have been established many years after James had introduced golf in England because Englishmen took up golf much later.

The earliest item in Royal Blackheath Club’s museum is a silver club, which was a common medal for clubs during this period, dated back to 1766. This date would still make Royal Blackheath the oldest English golf club and the oldest golf club outside Scotland.

The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers in Scotland was established in 1744. Blackheath was a golf club, whereas the Edinburgh Golfers was more of a society. Therefore, it is a question of semantics: which the first golf club in the world is.

Royal Blackheath Club’s archive mentions that other items in their possession suggest the date 1745 may have been the inauguration of a collection of players into a formalised Club, but they do not give details. The Blackheath Club may have been established in 1608 or a bit later, but there is no evidence of a continuity of its existence until the modern time. There have been breaks in the continuum of its history. So it is, in the case of people playing golf there.

The Royal Blackheath Golf Club and its golf course is now located at Eltham, outside London, a short distance from its original site. If you were to play golf in the historical Blackheath Golf Club, you will not be playing golf on the same grounds that James I and VI had played as the present golf course is in Eltham. It is now a thriving club. It has been at Eltham since 1923, when it took over the Eltham Golf Club, after moving out of Blackheath. It moved out of Blackheath when the commons was no longer suitable for golf because of the expansion of Shooter’s Hill Road that crossed it.

Today, the Eltham facilities include a grand clubhouse, and in keeping with the ever-changing role of a golf club, it also has superb banqueting facilities, very popular with the locales for wedding parties. The Royal Blackheath Golf Club is indeed the oldest golf club (an institution as opposed to a clubhouse) outside Scotland. It is well worth a visit for its historic importance and its magnificent Club House, dating from 1608, if not for the challenge of the course itself.

Many people like to believe that golf began to take a firm foothold in England (that is outside Scotland) only