The last drive of the season finds the fairway.

It’s been an unusual fall here in Michigan as we approach Thanksgiving with temperatures still hovering in the low 50s. A year ago at this time it was 35 degrees and two inches of snow already had fallen. Lack of cold weather and snow disappoints Mrs. GolfBlogger, the ski patroller, but I am grateful for the extra time. Every day of mild weather (to hardcore Michigan golfers, anything above 50 is mild), shaves the dark period known as The Void—the weeks between the first snow and the spring thaw.

I fear that my good luck has come to an end, though. Weather forecasts suggest that we’ll get snow Thursday evening, and at any rate, the temperatures will fall in the low 40s by Wednesday, with predicted rain. I’m convinced that my last “real” round of the year was at Green Oaks yesterday, and I’m ready to transfer the clubs from trunk to shed. Almost. There’s something sad about that ritual,  and I’m still putting it off.

Still, if Monday’s round was this year’s last, I will park the clubs with only a hint of wistfulness. It was a fun nine. In spite of wind, chill and not a little moisture in the air, I managed to shoot a 44. Drives were straight (though not particularly long), the irons were steady, and my putting deadly. I even managed a spectacular jailbreak on my one wayward tee shot, punching a five wood through a portcullis of trees.

The last drive hit the fairway. And the last hole was a birdie.

I have in recent weeks found myself engaged in a covert war with my students over their clandestine use of cell phones and texting to cheat on tests.

Students apparently are using their phones to record test questions, and then texting them to students taking the exams in later classes. I have suspected this for some time, but have not been able to actually catch one in the act. Young people are extraordinarily clever with those little devices, and can operate them with one hand, without looking at the keyboard. Phones are banned at school and carry a three day suspension for possession, but huge numbers of students conceal them in their clothing—in their waistbands, under sweaters and shirts, and for the girls—in their huge faux-designer handbags. It’s impossible to know whether a kid is scratching his armpit, or texting under the shirt.

A recent email from a concerned parent has, however, confirmed my suspicions of their actions, and I now am preparing for a full scale assault. The problem is how to stop the practice without without being overt, or resorting to more secure, but less equitable and educationally sound procedures.

Every teacher has their students clear the desks before a test and put their material under their chairs. But that doesn’t’ stop the hidden phones. Moreover, simply demanding that they stop and spending my time trying to catch them is just silly. The students will win that war, and a primary strategic rule is never to get engaged in a battle that you can’t win. If I become the cell phone gestapo, they still will manage to sneak them under my nose. And every student that gets away with using their phone just makes me look weak and ineffective—not a good position when you’re in a tank filled with sharks.

Administering different tests to different classes doesn’t strike me as fair. No matter how hard I try, I won’t be able to equalize the difficulty or focus of the material. Even if the material is the same, rewording a question can have an effect on the outcome. Parents these days come with lawyers attached, and if one gets the idea that her kid’s test was more difficult than her neighbors’, I will hear about it from administration.

I’m therefore left with offering different versions of the same test—mixing up the order of the questions, and the answer choices (In this age of high-stakes testing, data collection and disaggregation, all tests now are multiple choice). While that doesn’t solve the problem of question leakage, it at least prevents someone from texting out answer letters for others to memorize. On the next test day therefore, I will have four different versions in play.

I’m saddened that I have to spend such time working on such counter-measures. There always has been cheating in schools but it was for the most part confined to the truly desperate. Moreover, the available methods were well-known and relatively easy to police: crib sheets, writing on forearms, stolen tests and so on. Technology has made it so much easier and thus more widespread.

While the willingness of large numbers of my students to lie, cheat and steal is appalling, it is in no way surprising. After all, they have learned to do so from adults who lie, cheat and steal with impunity. Everyone is looking to cut corners, and cheating is only wrong if you get caught. Our entire culture seems based on the notion of success without effort. Public figures seem to lie instinctively. And our culture is rotten with the notion that—if you want or need something—you have the right to take it from someone else. At any given moment the US Congress and the current occupant of the White House are engaged in wholesale intergenerational theft, borrowing trillions to pay for current desires and effectively taking money from the pockets of children before they have even had a chance to earn it.

The whole affair really makes me appreciate the values of the game of golf. There is nothing easy about golf, and there are no shortcuts to success. Golfers work hard not to take anything away form other players, avoiding putting lines, staying silent when shots are made, and helping “opponents” find their balls. Honesty is at the core of the game. Professionals will call a penalty on themselves, even though it may cost them tens of thousands of dollars—or even their very livelihood, as in the case of JP Hayes, who called a penalty that cost him his Tour card.

How different from today’s populace was the attitude of Bobby Jones, who, having been praised for calling a penalty on himself said “You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank.” Golfers who subscribe to the values of the game realize that in cheating, they are their own victims.

If only I could get my students to understand that. So many of them believe that it’s acceptable to cheat to get good grades, because that will get them into a good college with scholarships. But with a horizon that extends only as far as the next hour, they don’t understand the future costs. At some point, they will be unable to lie, cheat and steal their way through a class or job and will hit a wall, having few actual skills or knowledge to fall back on.

For my own children, my hope is that they absorb more of the values of golf than of American Idol, Wall Street, government entitlement leeches and our political class. Like the game, it won’t always be easy, but it will be rewarding.

Gary Nicklaus apparently is taking another shot at the Tour by entering Q School this fall. The son of the Greatest Golfer Ever previously spent three years on the Tour (2000 - 2002), compiling a record of 122 starts, that one top-10 finish, five top-25 finishes, 33 made cuts and career earnings of $693,571.

Trying to return at age forty after such a lackluster younger career might expose Gary to some ridicule—or at least scoffs—particularly when your father is the Greatest. Golfer. Ever. But I for one admire him, and am glad he’s pursuing the opportunity. That’s not because I expect him to do particularly well; it’s because he’s making the effort. As I too am in my forties, I think I understand what he’s thinking—that you reach the point where soon there will be no more second chances. That at some point you have more yesterdays than tomorrows. And you don’t want to spend all your tomorrows sorry for what you didn’t do yesterday.

So this weekend, in my own way, I’m taking the plunge. I’m driving back to West Virginia University to my college homecoming. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for nearly twenty years, but never seemed to have the time to make a long drive for a short weekend. This year, however, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to make the time.

I frankly don’t care much about high school, but college is a different story. Those years in Morgantown were in some ways my best, and the friends I made there are, and will be, my friends for a lifetime. Ten of us will be there. A couple I see once a year or so. Some of the others I haven’t seen in seventeen years. I’ll also get a chance to see the son of one of my closest friends. I held “stinkybutt” when he was a baby. He’s now attending WVU.

We’ll play golf, see the game, and tour some of the places we did back then—if they’re still standing. But mostly, I’m going to enjoy the moment.

Carpe Diem

With the school year back in full swing, my golf is largely reduced to quick nines on the way home from work. And yet, if anything these rounds seem so much more vital than those at the height of summer. Fall is returning, the leaves are turning and in Michigan winter and snow can come crashing down at any moment. So with each round I play, it feels as though I have stolen yet another long march on my enemy Old Man Winter.

The tragedy of all this is that it is invariably in the fall when I begin to play my best golf. Today, I hit fairways and greens and putted with the casual air of knowing that the ball would trace a line of its own accord to the hole. I was relaxed and confident and enjoyed myself thoroughly.

On rounds such as these, I try not to think of what lies ahead, but as I write and reflect compulsively, there’s no room for deception. As I write this in my notebook, I’m sitting on a bench on the seventeenth, waiting for the twosome ahead and I notice several trees that have lost their summer green. The temperature is in the sixties. The signs are there. Soon the flurries will fly and I’ll face another long winter dark.

I had better enjoy the golf while I can.

There have been a several occasions in my golfing career when I realized that the course I was playing was just “too much.” Whether it was the length, the hazards, or a “bad swing” day (or all of the above), I knew that if I was going to have any chance to enjoy myself, I needed to move up a tee. I’ve also alternated between tees, depending on the hole.

My primary goal on the course is to have fun. And I’m not going to let my ego get in the way.

This past week, I played at The Gailes, behind a group of guys who clearly were overwhelmed by the course—even from the white tees. And ahead of them were a couple of foursomes who had bitten off too much from the blues.

As a result, the round took an inexcusable five hours. There was simply no way I could play through all three groups.

The Gailes is a links golf re-creation, with knee high rough, pot bunkers, fescue mounds, bumpy fairways, double greens and fairways, and trouble everywhere you look. A hole or two will make you realize that its not one of those easy resort courses.

The foursome immediately ahead was composed of four retired guys, playing from the whites. None of them hit the ball more than a buck eighty. As a group, I think they spent more time in the weeds than on the fairway. One of them, with a David Ledbetter hat, never did hit the fairway from the tee. The foursome probably shot a collective five hundred. They could not have been having fun.

A great deal of the problem was that they were swinging with all their might just to get that 180 yards off the tee, and with those out-of-their-shoes swings came exaggerated slices and hooks. Then, having put themselves at a disadvantage in distance and lie, they had to make another uncontrolled swing with a long iron or wood—compounding the problem.

Playing from the forward tees, they would have had much more fun. Not only is the course shorter; the easier angles help keep players out of the rough. Par fours comprise a controlled drive to the fairway and a mid or short iron to the green.

Egos, however, likely kept them at the whites. The red tees, after all, are the “ladies tees.”

I couldn’t observe the groups further ahead as closely, but they also spent an incredible amount of time wandering in the weeds looking for their balls. To get the distance they needed from the blues, they sacrificed any chance of control.

But the blues are the “real men’s” tees, and they surely were determined to play them.

I played the whites, hitting fairways, laying up when faced with a long shot that could get me in trouble, and working to keep the ball in the fairway. I had a lot of fun thinking up creative shots, and shot an 86 in the process. That doesn’t leave me with bragging rights, but I don’t care to brag.

Courses need to do more to encourage players to use appropriate tees. One solution is to add more tees. Many courses have just three: blue, white and red. Having additional tees lets players save face while playing at appropriate distances and angles.

Another suggestion: Courses should get away from the traditional colors and number their tees. The scorecards could then specify that single digit handicappers play from the number one tees; ten to eighteen handicappers from the “two” and high handicappers from “three.” With more tees, there could be more granularity.

When I played Arcadia Bluffs, the starter told my group—in no uncertain terms—that only single digit handicappers would be allowed to play from the back tees. He asked our handicaps and advised which tees to play. We all followed instructions and I had a great time. Had I played further back, it would have been miserable.

In the end, players just need to manage their egos and expectations. Sometimes a course is “just too much.”

I had been having a good round at The Gailes this past week, hitting every fairway and scoring a 41 on the front nine. But on the thirteenth, luck ran out and I drove the ball directly into an island of tall, thick grasses on the right side of the hole’s double fairway (it shares fairway with another going in the opposite direction).

Bad swing; worse result. My ball was sitting down in some of the most dense grass I had ever seen. Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed my six iron, and took my stance, bending my knees far more than usual. My thought was that I needed to dig it out, and bending my knees would help me stay down through the swing.

I took a mighty swing, keeping head down, and my hands and arms moving through. Clubhead caught ball perfectly, and it sailed out into the fairway just a hundred yards or so from the green.

“Brilliant recovery,” said a voice behind me.

I had been concentrating so much that I hadn’t noticed the Ranger approaching in his cart.

“I need it to make up for the one before that,” I said. “It was terrible.”

The Ranger shook his head. “You’ll be a much better golfer if you forget those bad shots and focus on what you do right.”

Then he drove off.

It was a bit of a Bagger Vance moment. I thought about it a bit, and realized that he was right. Thinking about what I did correctly on a good shot is going to get me a lot further than endlessly dissecting every poor one. As a postmortem to a swing, You finished high; do that again likely will lead to more good repetitions than you screwed up because you didn’t finish your swing.

As Bing Crosby sang:

You’ve got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between

You’ve got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium
Liable to walk upon the scene

I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not at all sure what purpose “rangers” serve at a golf course.

It was very slow today at the Lake Forest Golf Club in Ann Arbor. Two groups ahead of us there was a father his young daughter playing as though they owned the joint. Dad was giving lessons to the girl. At each point, she would take a shot and hit it poorly. Then Dad would drop another ball, and another. It was interminable.

There were three groups backed up behind us.

After more than an hour of this nonsense, I was waiting for my partner to tee off when I noticed the ranger driving across two fairways straight at the father-daughter team.

“Good,” I thought. “He’s going to take care of this.”

But he passed them by. And then he passed the group immediately to our front and headed straight for my position. He arrived with an important message: “Your push cart is too close to the tee box.”

I must have gawked, because he quickly said “Its a rule. They have to be ten yards from the tee box.”

“You let three hundred pound guys STAND on the tee box,” I snapped. “That cart doesn’t weigh a fifth of that and it’s not even touching the box. And what about those two holding up every player on the course.”

“Nothing I can do about that,” he said. Then he drove off to search in the woods for balls.

After nine holes, my partner bailed on the course, and I made the turn. I joined a new group at ten. On the fourteenth, the same ranger drove up. This time, he had an important message for another in my group, who was driving a power cart.

“Your cart is too close to the green.”

The guy’s cart was actually at least fifty yards from the green And there were no signs or ropes specifying otherwise. But he apologized and moved his cart back.

And then the ranger headed off to look for balls on the treeline. The ranger never did move the slow players along, and a quick afternoon outing turned into a five hour crawl.

I don’t know what the course is paying him, but whatever it is, it’s too much.