What quirky things about golf do you remember from your youth?

Just_Brad

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What quirky things about golf do you remember from your youth?

What is the most Beat-Down, Odd-Ball, or just plain strange course feature you have seen?

In my childhood I used to always play a course in the country with my grandparents. This course "featured" Sand teeboxes, and sand greens. You would have to grab a mat after you were done putting, and walk in circles on the greens to sweep your footprints and ball markings away from the group. The mat was usually just a large floor mat with rope connecting two ends of it so it could be pulled along.

When I hit my teens, this same course put in artificial greens and tee boxes. The tee boxes were impossible to get a tee into, you would have to smash a club head on the turf to break up the underlying sand so you could shove a tee into the ground. The green were the fastest I have ever played. There was never a hope of holding a green with an approach shot either!
 
My best friend and I playing Goalpost in one at the high school practice field. He stood on one end and I was on the other and we would hit balls and try to make it through the goal posts.

We played a sand greens course during our first year playing, Can't remember where it was.
 
The course I grew up playing was part of a municipal park that had some rough neighborhoods around it and some of the trouble from those bled over into the park/course. Being smart, the course had put several of us locals to work very young doing things like pulling flags at night in exchange for free golf. One night, I was the flag puller and heard a woman screaming from the woods in the dark. It was the days prior to cell phones so I raced the cart back to clubhouse and called the police. Yes, the woman had been raped (in the woods behind the seventh green, the site of my sole hole in one) and then left there. That left quite a lasting impression, especially because I walked home in the dark within a few hundred yards of that spot every night (at least I was armed with golf clubs).

What quirky things about golf do you remember from your youth?

What is the most Beat-Down, Odd-Ball, or just plain strange course feature you have seen?

In my childhood I used to always play a course in the country with my grandparents. This course "featured" Sand teeboxes, and sand greens. You would have to grab a mat after you were done putting, and walk in circles on the greens to sweep your footprints and ball markings away from the group. The mat was usually just a large floor mat with rope connecting two ends of it so it could be pulled along.

When I hit my teens, this same course put in artificial greens and tee boxes. The tee boxes were impossible to get a tee into, you would have to smash a club head on the turf to break up the underlying sand so you could shove a tee into the ground. The green were the fastest I have ever played. There was never a hope of holding a green with an approach shot either!
 
I played a course close to home that is now a corn field that had sand tee boxes. My home course today was once a 9 hole course, but only had 7 greens (2 were shared and were not that big). It was all about the limited land they owned at the time. Some how it worked and no one got killed and the place was busy as all the other close by course were private.
 
And, as I think of those sand tee boxes, we never used tees. We mounded sand with our shoes or hands. The only tees you could buy I think were short, about 1 inch wooden tees (which I still have a few of). Only the rich people used tees.....

This would have been in the late 60's I'd guess.
 
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