A BETTER OFFER
Fresh out of college (not that that’s an excuse for not knowing better) my former teammate invited me to play at the course where he grew up, with his father. I was excited to see his “ancestral grounds” and had that Saturday morning circled on my calendar for weeks. Two days before, I got invited to play Pine Valley Golf Club. Yes, then (as now) ranked No 1 among Golf Digest America’s 100 Greatest Courses. I had always figured my chances were greater of getting hit by a bus. I phoned my friend to tell him the incredible news. Despite being a fellow golf geek, he was not as bowled over as I expected. “So you’re not going to play with me and my dad?” I played Pine Valley and felt bad. My friend is a good soul with a high capacity to forgive, and we’re still tight, but ever since I’ve held firm to the sacred covenant that a tee time is never to be broken, certainly not for a better offer.
The Kick-in Head Fake
Two high school players are hitting blind wedge shots to an elevated green.
The first kid hits it six feet from the flag. The second kid, whose coach is waiting up by the green, hits it to six inches. The coach raises his hands high and wide above his head so that when the golfers crest the hill, the first kid is elated, thinking he has a tap-in birdie. Of course, when they mark balls, the kid is just as quickly deflated to discover he has some real work left. Now he has no chance of making the six-footer, and the stroke proves it.
The Faux Tip I once saw a former member at our club, who happened to be a man of significant financial means, pretend to drop a few bucks into the bag-room staff’s tip jug. This is how it went: Waiting just long enough for the young men to become distracted when they started clearing out his cart, the individual stuck an empty clenched hand deep into the container, the walls of the jug hid- ing the fact he was going in empty. Clearly, it’s bad to stiff the good folks who scrub your dirt-caked clubs clean. Sometimes you don’t have a fiver handy, and then there’s nothing wrong with telling the staff you’ll get them next time. But faking a tip is next-level. Even if the staff didn’t realise it, I did. Losing your integrity for just a few dollars is a big price.
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 79
JUNE 2024
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