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Golf and Humble Beginnings

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Elbow Jobertski

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I started babbling about my youth golf experiences in that penalty stroke thread. I feel like posting about more low rent stuff so I figured I'd start a thread so myself and others who came at golf from humble salt of the earth blue collar working class backgrounds can tell a few war stories.

I started golfing because one day my baseball coach was angry at me for swinging at a low pitch, and yelled at me that "If I wanted to swing at s*** on the ground, go play golf." I had a pretty strong sense of the absurd when I was nine. So I pestered my dad about it until he took me to the executive length par-3 that happened to be in the same park as the baseball field, rented me some clubs, and the experience took. I found some old clubs and a cloth bag in an uncle's basement, and the year pass to that par-3 (within walking distance from my house) was $50, so an unhealthy obsession was born.

Our sophistication and understanding of rules and etiquette can be summed up with one quick story.

When I was 11, there was a small group of kids that were often around the course. We gambled, but sort of like with marbles we just played for golf balls. If you had the lowest score on a hole you won everyone's ball. We spent half the time in the woods looking for balls so it wasn't that big of a deal.

Anyway, one day myself and a slightly older lad got into a rules dispute. He claimed that on shots from off the green if the ball hit the flagstick and didn't go in the hole it still counted as holed. I strongly disagreed. Unfortunately he won the rules dispute by kicking the crap out of me and as far as I know if those guys still play (the ones who aren't in prison, obviously) they still think that's the rule. I soon moved on to slightly more sophisticated opponents, like the adult day-drinkers.

I can clearly remember being personally involved in five on-course fights, and witnessed another twenty. I lost all five, but it is sort of worth it to have the experience of having to take a mouthful of sand from the bunker I was face down in because if I didn't the guy who had me in a painful hold would try his best to break my arm. It is an interesting story that I try to tell whenever I happen to be a guest at a private club with at least a 10K initiation fee.
 
This sounds like the sandlot of golf

Not jealous of the fights/beatings, but jealous you started playing at such a young age

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk
 
Elbow Jobertski said:
I started babbling about my youth golf experiences in that penalty stroke thread. I feel like posting about more low rent stuff so I figured I'd start a thread so myself and others who came at golf from humble salt of the earth blue collar working class backgrounds can tell a few war stories.

I started golfing because one day my baseball coach was angry at me for swinging at a low pitch, and yelled at me that "If I wanted to swing at s*** on the ground, go play golf." I had a pretty strong sense of the absurd when I was nine. So I pestered my dad about it until he took me to the executive length par-3 that happened to be in the same park as the baseball field, rented me some clubs, and the experience took. I found some old clubs and a cloth bag in an uncle's basement, and the year pass to that par-3 (within walking distance from my house) was $50, so an unhealthy obsession was born.

Our sophistication and understanding of rules and etiquette can be summed up with one quick story.

When I was 11, there was a small group of kids that were often around the course. We gambled, but sort of like with marbles we just played for golf balls. If you had the lowest score on a hole you won everyone's ball. We spent half the time in the woods looking for balls so it wasn't that big of a deal.

Anyway, one day myself and a slightly older lad got into a rules dispute. He claimed that on shots from off the green if the ball hit the flagstick and didn't go in the hole it still counted as holed. I strongly disagreed. Unfortunately he won the rules dispute by kicking the crap out of me and as far as I know if those guys still play (the ones who aren't in prison, obviously) they still think that's the rule. I soon moved on to slightly more sophisticated opponents, like the adult day-drinkers.

I can clearly remember being personally involved in five on-course fights, and witnessed another twenty. I lost all five, but it is sort of worth it to have the experience of having to take a mouthful of sand from the bunker I was face down in because if I didn't the guy who had me in a painful hold would try his best to break my arm. It is an interesting story that I try to tell whenever I happen to be a guest at a private club with at least a 10K initiation fee.
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This all happened in WV?
 
I take pride in beating people I play with who belong at 30K clubs . I played the formative years of my golf at Ponkapoag GC which may be one of the worst courses in Massachusetts.
 
OGputtnfool said:
This all happened in WV?
Click to expand...

Brooke Hills Park 4 Life.

The bunker incident happened just over the border in PA, and wasn't as bad as it sounds. Except for the mouthful of sand. It turns out the guy who wins the state title at 119 pounds can take out the guy with no wrestling experience even if that guy is 6'4", 250, and can bench almost 3X the weight of the wrestler. This is why when you gloat over coming back from 6 down with 7 to play to win $100 off of someone there is no need to mention his sister. Way out of line.
 
To be fair to BHP, it is nothing like that now. It's still an incredible course for a par 3, and about the same price as back then, but the crazier and drunker heavy gambling regulars were run out of there long ago, and there are less kids running loose in that area...
 
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PatsFan said:
hey at least no one got a finger bitten off!
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Nah. The worst injury I saw was one of two idiots I'd never seen before who got into a divot fight on the 7th tee. They were literally trying to hit each other with divots, which, seriously, why? The tee still hasn't full recovered, and this happened in I think 1986. Eventually, one of them hit the other in the eye with a rock smaller than an eye socket and it was gruesome. I saw them when I came to the adjacent 11th tee but was afraid to stop them because I try not to antagonize insane people I don't know who are swinging clubs at one another, but I was the one that had to run to the clubhouse to call an ambulance.

I think the tee never recovered because there are a lot of trees shading it and the course really isn't into the resodding thing. I don't know what happened to the guy. Its one of those things that 30 years later I still remember that "What the **** is wrong with you" feeling when I saw what they were doing, and that from a kid that thought fistfights in golf were normal.
 
Golf and Humble Beginnings

dduarte85 said:
I take pride in beating people I play with who belong at 30K clubs . I played the formative years of my golf at Ponkapoag GC which may be one of the worst courses in Massachusetts.
Click to expand...

Im pretty sure I read a book that took place at that course.


Edit: Similar name: Ponkapogue which the author claims is one of the worst courses in the country.
 
I got started at around 12 at a Country Club in name only since it was in Eastern Ky. I think it was like $1000 a year and my dads bank paid his membership. Anyway I started out just getting dropped off at the pool everyday during the summer. Soon enough I made some friends that also played golf. There was a group of about 10 who basically got dropped off every morning around 10 at the pool with our clubs. We would swim, go play 3 or 4 holes and come back and swim some more and then go play some more. Through the years we played more golf and only swam if one of the pretty girls from our school was hanging out. When I turned 15 I started working in the pro shop (mainly just picking range balls and cleaning members clubs), but I would show up every day and work 1/2 the day and play 18 the other 1/2 of the day. I did that through my first summer of college. After that year I started serving tables in Louisville, KY where I went to college and still love. I got 3 or 4 of my college buddies started on the game and met some guys bartending that played and we still play together to this day. I love this game. I really want to go back and play the course I grew up on, but my dad says they have let it go a bit and I don’t want to ruin the romantic view I have of the place in my head so I probably will just let it be.
 
dduarte85 said:
I take pride in beating people I play with who belong at 30K clubs . I played the formative years of my golf at Ponkapoag GC which may be one of the worst courses in Massachusetts.
Click to expand...

If you're talking about course 1, I strongly disagree. Have you played it recently?
 
Wow, now that's a golf story. An awesome golf story.

I started playing in my mid-20s (1991) after a divorce. Most of my long-haired musician friends had already been playing for a few years. My best friend talked me into giving it a try, so I bought a mixed set of used clubs for $25 at a resale shop and started hitting the driving range. The range we went to also had a 9-hole par 29 course next to it, so we started playing there. We also played all of the inexpensive public courses we could find. Most were awful, and one had fairways that were like hitting off asphalt. But, we were playing golf and enjoying it. No fighting on courses stories here, but a lot of great memories of those days when we were learning the game.
 
dazeedmonds said:
Im pretty sure I read a book that took place at that course.


Edit: Similar name: Ponkapogue which the author claims is one of the worst courses in the country.
Click to expand...

That's a great book "Missing Links" by Rick Reilly
 
No brawls on the course for me either.

Grew up next to a Par 32 course. Got some old clubs from my Grandfather...he golfed a LOT...never took us, but we never asked him to either. This was back in the mid-to-late 60's. This was "His" time, and no one dared cut into it.

Anyway, there was this Church that butted up to the course. We'd practice there in the "Churchyard" as we called it.

We'd walk the ditches and the cornfield along the edges of the course scrounging up balls. A couple times, we'd hide in the cornfield. When golfer hit their drives, we'd run out of the corn, steal the balls, and go back into the corn. Hilarious then, but looking back, criminal. Lucky we never got beat with a driver.

As we got older, we'd go into the driving range at night, then hit the balls back into the course from the Churchyard. Walk to the clubhouse for a soda and a candy bar, and hear the owners b!tching amongst themselves about finding range balls all over the course.

Pretty much juvenile delinquents growing up.
 
I've been around golf courses all my life and have never seen a fight. Sounds made up.
 
dduarte85 said:
I take pride in beating people I play with who belong at 30K clubs . I played the formative years of my golf at Ponkapoag GC which may be one of the worst courses in Massachusetts.
Click to expand...

Course 1 is fantastic and growing in nicely.

mpeterson said:
If you're talking about course 1, I strongly disagree. Have you played it recently?
Click to expand...

Course 2 is on the mend from what I've heard recently, not course 1, but improved.
 
My beginning? 1987, college roommate asks if I want to go. I said OK, and after beer and other stuff, went to the course. Three holes in, the skies opened, and we finished drenched. I also fell down. A couple of times. It was because the ground was so slippery, I'm sure.
 
I started playing at 50. Never seen, or been involved in, a fight on the golf course.

ps: too bad about Ponky #1. Great Donald Ross layout. A number of years ago there was talk of having a US Open there.
 
My grandpa and my dad both played so it was natural that at one point I would start playing. I started playing with a set of cheap wal mart clubs when we moved to Pinehurst, NC. I was involved with a tee time program there and would go for instruction every weekend I believe. I wish I would have taken it more seriously but I was in middle school at the time. We only lived there for a year and a half before moving to Indiana where I am now. In Indiana, through all of the middle school and high school, I rarely touched a club. Maybe played at a local par 3 course a few times. In my 3rd year of college, I split up with my daughter's mom and moved out to live on my own in an apartment. This is when I became more and more interested in playing. I ended up having my parents (who had moved away to Augusta at the time) bring up that old set of clubs and I started using those at the driving range. From there the addiction grew to me getting better clubs. I met my wife and now play at least monthly with my father in law and try to get out when I can on my own.
 
Single income family, dad was a teacher...NOT a recipe for disposable cash...

"Grew up" on a local Golf Club, got hooked playing with baseball buddy, and we ended up getting reasonable enough to start betting old men for money...played a lot for about two summers, then really didnt play much again till about 10 years ago...

First set of clubs were a used set of Northwestern Blades (garage sale)...with persimmons...Those were NOT easy!!!

and we too gamed every ball we found, our favorite that were higher currency on the course were the two tone Ping balls...

s-l1600.jpg
 
Those two-toned ping balls were definitely the gold standard.

I think every kid that I knew whose parents bought them a junior golf club set had the same Chi-Chi Rodriguez Northwestern set that had a 2 wood, 3-5-7-9 irons and a putter in a white cloth bag. Most of us had discarded adult clubs tho...

I had a shamrock one iron, a wilson staff seven iron, a Blue Ridge PW, a sand wedge that was basically rust on a stick, and a blade putter. I found some other clubs that I never used but carried once I was playing in High School so people would stop asking why I only had five clubs.

I was as far as I knew the only person at that par-3 that understood that hitting down on the ball makes it go up. I was playing with kids and adults that would tee the ball up two inches so they could better hit up at it, and who were hopeless off the ground. They'd swing as hard as possible and not get the distance I would by just taking a smooth swing and taking a small divot. They thought I was some sort of wizard. That sort of thing can go to a kid's head. Which explains some of the fights.
 
I remember way back to 3 months ago when I started playing golf. I went to the store and bought some good clubs and a bag and balls and took pro lessons. I then played multiple times every week and practiced on days I didn't play, along with some lessons sprinkled in here and there.

Having a good amount of disposable income helps.

But going back to my childhood, I was raised on welfare, section 8 housing and food stamps by a single mother with substance abuse problems. Having come from that background to being in a place where I can take up a sport that requires some cash infusion makes me proud.
 
One of the things I miss about cheap golf in those days was the lack of fairway irrigation, and spotty irrigation overall.

Pretty much all the available full length courses available to me back then were like this. Rock hard and brown in the summer (especially during a few drought years) and offering tons and tons of roll. There was a links quality to it in that you had to find ways to roll the ball onto the green as flying even a wedge to the hole often resulted in seeing the ball bounce high into the air and well past the green. It was fun stuff, keeping the ball on the ground and trying to get a feel for just how hard you needed to punch a seven iron into the hill left of the green so the ball would come back to the surface because going straight at the flag was madness as anything right with any speed would roll 80 yards down to the next fairway...

Also, those 300 yard tee shots were ego boosters. Right until I had to play a more posh course when damp and all of a sudden my 300 yard screaming 1-irons were now 200 yards of carry and a violent pitch mark.
 
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