American Golf Prior To The Fall Of Civilisation

Bob Salzberg: “Welcome back to the Compromised Lakes Country Club on this, the most perfect of days. Literally no wind, which is a proven fact because we measured it with our windometer. Meanwhile, some overnight rain has softened the greens up so you have to say the course really is there for the taking. And here we have Brandel Quartz-Feldspar putting for his par on the 12th hole. Nicely done, Brandel. A player is always content when he gets through this hole with a three. And now over to Jim at the 10th.”

Jim: “Good afternoon, Bob. Someone just hit a golf shot of some description but I didn’t see who it was or where it went because I was busy thinking about ways I could be more of a stoic in airports.”

Bob Salzberg: “Thanks for that, Jim. We now have a four-way tie for the lead. Nick Faldo, Curtis Strange, Greg Norman and the rookie outsider DB Newglove all at six under par, heading into Satan’s Antechamber. And as we say every year here, the tournament doesn’t really start until the players reach Satan’s Antechamber on Sunday… In fact, who really knows why they bother playing the previous sixty-five holes at all? It’s thoroughly unnecessary… To 13, and David!”

David Transatlantic-Yearning: “Well, let’s have a look at this tantalising dogleg 13th hole on the graphic. I don’t know what kind of dog the leg originally belonged to. Probably a medium-size dog. One of those breedless dogs I myself tend to favour. The ones that are kind of just a dog. y’know? Generally thought of as the easiest of the trio of holes that make up Satan’s Antechamber, the 13th ideally requires a drawing tee shot due to the trees cutting in on the left side. The second shot needs to carry the creek and preferably use the contours of an undulating green to feed mournfully down to the hole. Over the years we have seen many great players fall foul of the creek, not just because it’s a highly illogical place to hit your golf ball but because it’s haunted by the spirit of a one-eyed Cherokee chief whose tribe, after centuries of living here, were brutally evicted from the land when a wealthy industrialist built the course in 1887. If we pan back up in the direction of the tee where Brandel Quartz-Feldspar is waiting to play his drive we’ll see a new feature that’s been added this year, just behind the second bunker in the middle of the fairway: a nine-bedroom executive asphalt-shingle new-build. The half-hipped gable on the south side directly over the spacious triple carport has been catching a lot of players out on their second shots.”

Bob Salzberg: “David Transatlantic-Yearning, do you remember what happened at this hole during your last performance here as a player, in 1981, prior to your naturalisation as a US citizen?”

David Transatlantic-Yearning: “Haha, well, yes, Bob, I somehow had a feeling you might bring that up again. I certainly do remember that day with piercing clarity. I chunked my third shot into the creek and made quadruple bogey to miss the halfway cut and my career never recovered. In arriving home unexpectedly early, I discovered my wife Margaret, who’d blithely assumed I’d make the cut and stay to compete over the weekend, taking an afternoon nap with Steve O’Crosnick from the NBC commentary team. It all felt a little like a waking dream and I remember that the air suddenly seemed extraordinarily slow and thick as I advanced towards my usual side of the bed where my cuckolder, naked from the waist down but protected on his top half by my lucky Fred Perry polo shirt, knelt frozen to the spot like a stricken all-American Winnie the Pooh. What I recall most clearly was how taken aback Steve and Margaret seemed when I slumped down in the bedside armchair and asked them if they had any thoughts about why American creeks were non-tidal and generally less wide and interesting than those found in Cornwall.”

Bob Salzberg: “Well, your loss was in this instance very much our gain, since it was at that point that you began your new full-time career in broadcasting, and we have been honoured to have you as a member of our on-course team ever since. And speaking of legends, here, on tape from just a moment ago, is Strimmy Meadowfield striding up the 18th hole with his formerly estranged son Strimmy Jr on the bag. Strimmy Jr stepped in to caddy for Strimmy when Strimmy’s younger formerly estranged son, Strimmy Meadowfield III, slipped on a member of the greenstaff outside the clubhouse yesterday and sprained his nose. From the scorer’s hut beside the 18th, in just a moment, Strimmy will head to the Clairvoyance Cabin, where he will join our very own Fax Allgate for post-round analysis. What a credit Strimmy has been to the game of golf since he first started winning tournaments and earned his nickname the Flaxen Moose due to his unhurried leg action, his habit of eating branches that were impeding his shots and the way he would callously chase his offspring from home as they reached maturity. I like his blonde hair, especially. You can see from the top bit that sort of flips up like the lid of a pedal trash can that the wind has unexpectedly freshened in the last few minutes. Isn’t that just the most enduringly radiant image? People are generally prettier when they are blonde, I find. Would you agree, Larry?”

Larry Wankrauski: “You called it, Bob. Take the wives of the last three Ryder Cup teams, for instance. Only three brunettes amongst the whole bunch. And I believe two of those have subsequently been jettisoned for lighter-haired, more aerodynamic women.”

Bluff Quintuplet: “Quickly to Seve Ballesteros on 12, putting for bogey after hitting his tee shot in the water. The water in this case was sparkling, not still, and in a plastic beaker belonging to a member of the crowd, which left Seve with absolutely zero viable shot to the flag… And now to the Clairvoyance Cabin, where Fax Allgate has been fortunate enough to be joined by one of the game’s all-time giants.”

Fax Allgate: “Well, Strimmy Meadowfield, the Flaxen Moose himself, in the flesh. It was way back in 1963 that you first won this tournament. You look different now than the way you did then – less like a disturbingly huge baby in a baseball cap. Shorter, too, it would appear, although our fact-checking team has confirmed that your height has remained rigid at five feet ten inches since puberty’s final curtain. I wondered, as you walked soporifically up to that final putt on the 18th, if I saw a hint of moisture in your eye. Is it possible this could be your last visit to Compromised Lakes? Actually, I know it won’t be but please answer the question anyway.”

Strimmy Meadowgrass: “Well, Fax, I am sorry to disappoint you but that moisture was merely some stray windscreen wiper solution from a fellow competitor’s Humvee, and I believe I will be back for at least one more tournament. There’s a little life in the old Moose yet.”

Fax Allgate: “I can see that. But you will have a tendency to milk it a bit in the future. There’s only so many times you can stand, choked up, on an ornamental stone bridge and offer a fingery royalistic wave goodbye to your fans, worldwide, and be taken seriously. I’m thinking of your own best interests here. Decisions of restraint can still be made and I believe you could benefit from them. For comparison I will, if I may, reference a concert I will go to see twelve years from now by Sting, the former frontman of the pop group The Police. Three goddamn encores. Nobody wanted that. In all honesty, one would have been too many for most of us. And now a word from our sponsors!”

Sponsors: “The word is ‘overmorrow’, which means ‘the day after tomorrow’. We would like to see this returned to popular usage, where it still remains in Scandinavia in the form of the similar ‘overmorgen’.”

Bob Salzberg: “We are here at the final day at the Compromised Lakes Classic and now, due to bogeys by Greg Norman, Nick Faldo, Curtis Strange and a player we’ve deemed anonymous and insignificant because he’s from some place in Asia where they still probably have communism, we have an outright leader: DB Newglove, the twenty-one-year-old rookie from Georgia, competing in just his third professional event. Textbook swinger of the club, with a long row of tiny teeth reminiscent of the exact kind of forest animal you mistake for being cute seconds before it severs one of your arteries. He finds himself paired with the veteran town councillor Windy Miller today, whose hopes of winning his fourth bright blue fuzzy-felt smock are dwindling. Having safely negotiated Satan’s Antechamber, the big question everyone is asking is, ‘How will young Newglove deal with the pressure of the final few holes?’ And now another word from our sponsors…”

Sponsors: “We had quite a bit of debate in-house over today’s second word, which we decided should be a word from around the time of the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbour. Judy in Recruitment wanted to choose ‘dame’ because she’s a big film noir buff who is tickled by the way the American version of the word has such different connotations to the British one. But the rest of us shouted her down and voted for ‘Smackeroo’ instead – a popular way of saying ‘dollar’ in New York in the early 1940s.”

Larry Wankrauski: “Well, if DB Newglove can hold on to win here, he’ll be receiving a total of 280,000 smackeroos for first prize. Which coincidentally is the precise sum Fax Allgate over in the Clairvoyance Cabin informed Bob Salzberg that Bob will be paying his wife annually in alimony and child support after their acrimonious 2014 divorce.”

Jim: “Personally I preferred overmorrow. I think I will start putting that to use more in everyday dialogue. Overmorrow I will be drinking alone in a motel a mile outside Tallahassee, mourning the lesbian daughter I reflexively banished from my life.”

Bluff Quintuplet: “Quickly over to John Marmalade, finishing up at the 18th in his first tournament since being stampeded by a herd of white-tailed deer on his South Florida heliport. A good solid putt, that, from Marmalade, a forgettable player, perhaps best known by fans for being one of only three golf pros to vote Democrat since the PGA Tour’s 1916 inception, who has been doing a lot of work on his hair this year in the studio with his coach Butch Vig.”

Jim: “Greg Norman for a birdie at 16… and, so close, but no luck. The ball grazed the cup and blew it a kiss on the way by. Always such a nakedly emotional player is Norman. He will go to the final two holes just one stroke behind, having hit his tee shot into the trees and been the beneficiary of a free drop due to landing in coyote droppings. It’s caused quite a hold-up here since the coyote droppings were somewhat crumbly and fragmented and had to be officially identified by one of our on-course zoologists. The zoologist then found blood in the droppings, which caused Norman to sob stirringly over the potential state of the coyote’s health, leading to a further hold-up.”

Bob Salzberg: “Forgive me for saying so but you seem to have woken up a little since earlier, Jim.”

Jim: “You know what, Bobby? You are not wrong there. I got out of bed this morning looking and feeling like a potato but just a few moments ago I bumped into an old schoolfriend in the crowd near the greenside bunker. Foxy chick called Darleen about the exact height of the ball washer beside the 5th tee. Always wore a lot of cherry red. Box like the loader hatch of an M1A1 Abrams tank. She said she remembered me as one of the bona fide intellectual brightsparks of the Class of ’68 and that she and the rest of the cheerleading squad often remarked that I was the most plausibly dateable of all the guys on the high school football team. I don’t mind telling you, it’s had an immediate, radical impact on my self-image, really put a spring in my step.”

Bob Salzberg: “David Transatlantic-Yearning, if we can bring you in here for a moment. What are your thoughts on the Rick Coppola redesign of the 16th, and just how much do you think it’s affected the players this week?”

David Transatlantic-Yearning: “My chief thoughts on the redesign are that it is surprising. It’s not often that you’ll see a course designer eschewing pesticides and placing his attention on owl boxes and the replanting of native fruit trees. As for how it’s affected the players, I would say not much, since the redesign is situated a full quarter of a mile away from where anyone plays any golf.”

Larry Wankrauski: “Oh no, DISASTER for DB Newlove at 17: he makes a triple bogey, and that might be good night, lights out, for DB.”

Bob Salzberg: “It’s quite unnerving how quickly things can change here on the infamous back nine at the Compromised Lakes Country Club. I mean, I am glad Jim is feeling better and all, but personally I feel kind of hollow now. There’s a sort of flat atmosphere hanging over the course, like a metaphysical fog. The shift has been quite abrupt. Nobody is doing well, and I always just ultimately want everyone to be happy. It’s kind of ok when some players are doing well and others aren’t but when everyone is not doing well, that’s much harder to cope with for me. I find that it helps in these instances that I’m forty-two and a half and know from experience that things will always get better, which I didn’t when I was twenty-seven and first serving as anchor for the JJB Sports television network. There are, additionally, always positive memories from the past to draw on in such situations. For example, when I was a child we had a cat called Boodles. One day I was talking to my mom about what we might have for dinner that night and she suggested noodles might be a neat idea. And in no time at all there was Boodles, at our feet, looking up at us with a kind of ‘Yes? You called?’ expression on his sweet little face. That’s a moment to cherish, right there.”

Jim: “The whistle on my kettle at home sometimes reminds me of an aggrieved cat. Kind of halfway between that and the noise an embittered wind makes during a film set in a snowy, mountainous location. You know what I’m saying? One of those scenes where you think ‘This can’t be real wind because it sounds far too much like wind’?”

Larry Wankrauski: “I think all of us in the studio and at home know precisely what you mean, Jim. Fax Allgate, over in the Clairvoyance Cabin, can you offer any additional words of wisdom to cheer us up as the tournament draws to a close?”

Fax Allgate: “There is always hope, even in the darkest of times. Economic crisis and war will frequently yield periods of transcendentally great art. The collapse of a fine sportsperson’s career, while seen as a tragedy by many, might lead to a broadening of the mind, a fulfilling new humility, possibly even a dramatic sexual awakening that his or her lust for public success had previously stymied. Everything good is bad. Everything bad is good. The lengthening of golf courses at the dawn of the 21st century will be inevitable, not to mention thrilling for those of a more macho sensibility, but it will also lead to an evaluation of what we have lost in the process, and that will all be part of time’s unstoppable carousel. Sane people laugh at 1995 US Open champion Corey Pavin’s ratty mullet and stupid moustache now but, for young urban men in thirty years, the exact same look will represent the unimpeachable apex of fashion. The arson which incinerates the Clairvoyance Cabin during the first round of next year’s tournament will be an unedifying incident from my perspective but a rewarding one from the standpoint of many others, not least the top players who will have become irritated by my habit of describing to them the ways in which, upon their retirement from competitive play, their lives will lose meaning as they begin to regret the tunnel vision that has taken them to the top of their profession and all the facets of human experience it has cut them off from. I could go on, since being inside this building gives me the most unbelievably complex and fascinating overview of the universe, and even the concept of that which we foolishly call ‘time’, but it’s perhaps best for everyone if I don’t.”

Bob Salzberg: “Well, that’s all from us for another year, here at the Compromised Lakes Classic. Join us next year for an ill-judged comment by Larry Wankrauski about a black caddy, the maiden victory of Brady Kerplunk VI in a play-off with John Marmalade, and the first ever case of unionised arson in the tournament’s eighty-one-year history. And now a final word from our sponsors.”

Sponsors: “The word is ‘anarchonaturism’. This includes many earth-loving activities, including the rewilding of overmanicured countryside – much of it formerly used for the playing of a psychologically taxing sport by obscenely wealthy childmen and the greedy businessmen who help facilitate their intellectually incurious mollycoddled lifestyles – by the renegades of our environmentally challenged future and the transformation of it into a healthier green space where biodiversity can thrive.”

I wrote the above story today and yesterday, after watching quite a lot of 1980s and 1990s golf coverage for research on something else. A long time ago I also wrote a couple of books about golf, including this one from 19 years ago. People tell me you don't have to like golf to enjoy it...