Geezer Golf
They Call Him Mr. Cartpath
An Ode Sung to the Tune of Mr. Touchdown
Eons ago, the torrents of the glacial melt water slammed into the rocky ridges of the Appalachian Mountains and coursed south through what is now North Georgia. Ahead of them surged mounds of soil and rocky debris that as the water made its way toward the ocean left behind the hills and dales upon which land the eighteen holes that comprise Magnolia Greene Golf Course are set.
As time went by the indigenous peoples of these forested hills created pathways as they made their way to summer on the Golden Isles of the Atlantic shore to gather the bounty of the sea. The people who would become the Cherokee could not imagine their lands turned into open fairways lined with bunkers filled with the self-same sand upon which they shucked oysters and clams. Even if they had, no doubt they would have questioned how the newly- arrived white people, those who would soon subjugate and evict them from their lands could begin to think of themselves as superior beings. These new arrivals, after seizing the land would in later generations spend hours chasing little white balls up and down over land the Cherokee knew was more suited to the growing of corn, beans, and squash.
But no matter where you come down on the wrongs of history, they cannot be undone. Now, in this twenty-first century the forests have been trimmed back and the land cleared to make way for the duffers and hackers and the ever-present Geezer Golfers.
Unlike the pristine golf courses that dot the Carolina and Georgia low country, where the land remains generally flat and hills are created by bulldozers and excavators, the contours of the Magnolia Greene course remains much as it was in the time of the native peoples. The builders of the course, beset by the need to maintain a tight control of their budget chose not to do much to realign the natural landscape, but to fit the links into what nature had created.
As compared to several neighboring links that were created atop long-cultivated farmland, Magnolia Glenne is more difficult by five to ten strokes. Those members who try to keep track of the more obtuse statistics like greens in regulation or how many fairways were hit from the tee are often thwarted in their attempts by the sheer orneriness of the place. Normal golf statistics seem to go out the window.
Magnolia Glenne was built to fit into the contours of the land as well as to accommodate the burgeoning array of homes for which it was the center piece to which many homeowners were lured. As a result, the course designers were forced to install a network of pathways not only to allow golf carts access, but to provide the homeowners with routes for walking and jogging. For golfers, the presence of these paths permitted access to the course even after periods of torrential rain. Though the fairways might be saturated, the die-hard members were able to play even if they had to wade through sodden rough in order to reach their balls.
Among the members, who for our purposes are known as Geezer Golfers, playing a round when the cartmaster put up the Cart Path Only sign was anathema. Walking any extra distance on the course was not to the liking of the Geezers many of whom wheezed and huffed just getting from cart to tee, let alone struggle fifty to a hundred yards to find their mud-spattered ball sunk into soft turf. So it was by mere fluke that Rigby Eliot, prominent Geezer and retired owner of Rigby’s Restorations, a moderately successful furniture business that sold what purported to be restored American colonial era furniture but were in reality knockoffs imported from Taiwan, discovered that these cart paths could improve his game.
Now, for those who have played a round with Rigby they have witnessed that among his other playing attributes, old Rigby has a very pronounced slice and upon occasion a significant hook. These traits become especially pronounce whenever he is using his driver. Rigby has tried to correct the problem, but most often, if he has sliced on one drive, he is likely to hook the next. The result is a lot of lost time on the course looking for lost balls along the fringe of the fairway.
Now it so happens that the network of cart paths run along these fringes and every so often crisscross the fairways to provide access for the rambling homeowners. For Rigby, this facet of course geography quite by accident soon became a major asset to his game. It all came to light for him on a miry Monday morning while he was playing a round on his regular group.
Rigby had grown weary of the chaffing that his Geezer friends had been giving him at their usual nine-thirty round. This group of seventy- and eighty-year-old men were known to the guys in the pro shop sarcastically as the Pacesetters. The group had earned this label because of the speed with which most of its members moved. Survivors of multiple joint replacements and wracked by arthritis, the so-called Pacesettersemblazoned their carts with handicap flags and were granted exemptions to allow driving up to the tees and almost on to the greens. Like watching climbers nearing the top of Everest, taking each step slowly and deliberately, any group following them on the course would curse their luck seeing these men moving slowly ahead of them. Worse still if the pacesetters were themselves stuck behind another slow-moving group of female golfers.
Several of the Pacesetters, those who had once been low handicappers and because of age and infirmities, were of late into the high double digits, offered Rigby unsolicited advice as to his putting, driving and overall course management. In some cases, these same Pacesetters would offer conflicting comments on each successive hole.
Now, if truth be told, Rigby did have his problems with his game. It wasn’t that his swing was bad, it was what it was. Much like Arnie’s swing could not be duplicated, Rigby simply moved his club through an arc that accommodated his increasingly flaccid arm muscles and the multiple points of arthritis in his shoulders and back. Of course, the fact that his right hip had been replaced some years before added to his issues in hitting the ball.
No, Rigby’s real problem was with his stance. He had often read in the sagest of golfing instruction books that the stance was key to everything in golf. That the books and their accompanying videos were written and demonstrated by lithe twenty and thirty something golfers with the flexibility of a Hindu Fakir made Rigby see red.
After his latest hip surgery, he struggled to find where he should keep his feet, especially on the tee. He found that if he used the set up ascribed by most of the prognosticators of the game, he sliced the ball. Shifting to a stance that for Rigby was most comfortable resulted in a hook. Distance was about the same in either shot, it was only his direction that was called into question.
So it was one early morning, after mounting the first tee, that Rigby’s insight began to glow. Taking his stance as the books decreed, he drew back on his ten and a half degree Ping 410 driver, the one with the senior flex shaft and let loose. With a thwack and solid pinging sound the ball shot forth and soared up and to the right. Further and further it went, for Rigby had done his best Bryson imitation. As he watched his heart sank the ball crested the hill to his right and slammed into the cart path. For a moment he thought he had lost the ball, but then with a second ping the ball sprang up into the air and launched itself to a point fifty yards short of the green. Rigby muttered to himself that he had really lucked out and went on to bogey the hole with a three- putt.
On the second tee he set up in his comfortable stance. The second was a devious hole in that the left half of the fairway was flattish bordered on the left by a few trees and the cart path that descended to a few yards from the green. To the right however, the fairway sloped down into a sodden tangle of unmown rough. Get your ball down there and it might take three strokes just to reach the green.
Rigby set up and again there was that classic sound that his Ping driver made when making decent contact with the ball. This time the ball began straight but as if the golfing gods had blown on the white orb from above, the thing moved off to the left, between the trees and with a sharp crack hit the cart path. Rigby sighed.
However, upon reaching the spot where he was sure that his ball had made contact, he looked forlornly at the ground. There were several miss-hit balls lying in the leaf clutter, but not his Vice #2. He sighed again, knowing he would have to drop a ball and take an extra stroke. Just as he reached into his pocket for another, he noticed something slowly moving down the cart path. Like the stone of Sisyphus, his Vice #2 was slowly descending the cart path to where golfers parked alongside the second green. A chip and a two-putt later and Rigby had parred the hole. Amazing.
The third hole was a straightforward par three which required a long arcing shot over one of the crevasses left by the ancient glacial flood. He got over the hazard and managed to bogey the hole.
On number four the cart path ran down the left side of the fairway and Rigby thought he might experiment. He assumed the same stance as on number two and swung away. Voila! The ball arced to the left and smacked down on the macadam path like an F-18 onto a runway. The ball slowed slightly on impact but ran down the hill to where Rigby could take relief and he was able to bogey number four.
Holes five and six had slopes on the right upon which the cart path wound through low trees. Remembering his luck on number one, Rigby set up as instructed and hit the path on both occasions. The balls landed as if they were aimed and ran down the opposite sides of the hills to within easy reach of the greens. Taking relief, he was able to get on parring one and bogeying the other.
On hole number seven, Rigby reached the cart path on the right, but as the land there was flat, the ball just bounced a few yards into the fairway. Still, he made a double and was happy for it.
Eight was a short par three and he didn’t need the cart path. On nine, he went for the left-hand cart path to avoid the fairway bunkers and ended up with a forty-five for the front nine. Rigby was elated and for the first time that he could remember the others in the Pacesetters had nothing to say.
Ten was one of the most difficult holes. Long and undulating, there was no chance of using the paths. He had to just do his best, resulting in a seven. On the short eleventh, he was rewarded with a birdie. Now he thought he was cooking.
Holes twelve and thirteen are bisected by deep ditches which seem to grasp balls in midair and like some being from Greek mythology grab and consume them. On twelve, Rigby went for the right-hand path and was able to scoot the ball down the line where it dribbled across the cart bridge to the other side. “Over in one”, he shouted.
Another bogey after getting on the green and then the expanse of thirteen loomed. On this hole the path was of little use to him and Rigby, like the others knew a layup was in order before the third shot over the chasm. He was on in four and made a double.
The fourteenth is an uphill par 3 and Rigby used his seven-iron on a teed-up ball to make par. But then it was the Pacesetters turn on number fifteen. Everyone at Magnolia Glenne complains about fifteen. It is a blind right-hand dog leg with no view of the green until one reaches the one-fifty pole. The cart path is more of a detriment than a friend as it runs to the left, far from the pin.
The wise player, according to the Pacesetter sages must hit his drive to the middle right of the fairway and hope it dribbles down to a slight upslope. If one is lucky enough to land in that area, then the golfer is confronted by not one but two bisecting ditches each of more than twenty feet deep, fringed with overgrowth and surrounding an ovoid patch of open ground known as the island. Land your second shot there, (a difficult feat) and one can use a high-lofted iron to reach the green that rises up a forty-five degree slope some thirty feet above. Of course, this approach is still chancy as the pair of ditches are strewn with golf balls that seem to have been snatched from midair and left to rot in the turbid waters below. Getting on to the fifteenth green in less than three is a rare event.
For Rigby, standing on the fifteenth tee, he had to do all he could to get his drive straight, or as straight as he could. A bright thwack and his ball arced up and drifted downward toward the target area. After several of his companions managed to add their balls to the litter at the bottom of the creek, Rigby pulled a three-wood and fired off a shot that went slightly right hitting the curb of the cart path where it climbed the hill and bounced to the green. Another bogey.
Sixteen was a par three, that resulted in a four on Rigby’s card. That left seventeen and eighteen, both holes with a steep right side off the tee that are topped by the cart path. Rigby did a quick calculation and knew that he needed a five on each of these holes and he could break ninety, something he had never done.
Rigby sliced off the tee on seventeen and hit the cart path. He met his ball at the bottom of the hill about a hundred yards from the hole. Hitting a five-hybrid he was on in two and bogeyed for a five. He was halfway home.
Eighteen, the final hole was another thing entirely. Here the cart path ran up the right side, over a hill and down to where it crossed over the fairway and ran down to a place but thirty yards from the pin. Rigby did his best to avoid hitting anything but straight. His drive went out in a direct line toward the green and landed just short of the bisecting path.
At this point Rigby was just over one hundred and fifty yards from the pin which was just visible around to the left. Rigby would have to make a big decision. He needed to par this hole to break ninety. He drew a deep breath and pulled the wedge. With a gentle chip he tapped his ball off the fairway and onto the cart path. The ball skipped along and striking the curb on the far side began its roll. Faster and faster, it began its descent. The ball bounced over pebbles and hit the curb like a Luge heading for the finish. Finally, it rolled out onto a patch of flat grass.
Rigby drew in his breath and went to his ball. The pitch shot was uphill. He hit well, but the ball upon reaching the green rolled back a few feet to the fringe.
Rigby in looking back on that round supposed that he had tempted the golfing gods a bit much that morning. They had by helping him find the cart paths when he needed them score his personal best. Still a double bogey on the eighteenth at Magnolia Glenne is not shabby.
Rigby carded a ninety-one that morning earning him a dollar from all the other players and the title Mr. Cartpath.
