Slow play on the golf course has come increasingly under fire both on public courses, and on the Tours. For most of us, pace of play on the Tours is not an issue—Tiger’s complaints not withstanding. But among amateurs on public courses, slow play is being blamed in part for a general decline (or at least stagnation) in the number of rounds played.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the reasons for the five hour round. Experts blame practice swings, not playing ready golf, and course routing issues. But I think the principal one is that amateurs are playing from the wrong tees. The simple fact of the matter is that most golfers are not good enough to play from the tips (or even the blues)—and yet so many do. Consider:

• The average drive of the average male golfer is 192 yards (according to the USGA and major manufacturers). That same golfer, however, thinks that he hits the ball 230 yards on average.
• Only one in 50 golfers routinely hits drives of 250 yards or more.
• The average female golfer hits a drive of 135 yards. Seniors on average are able to drive 180 yards.
• All golfers, in fact, consistently overestimate the length of their shots—both on drives and from the fairway.
• The average score for a round of golf remains at 100—where it has been for many decades. Just 22% of golfers manage to break 90 on a regular basis. Only 5% manage to break 80.
• The average handicap for a man is 16.1. The average handicap for a woman is 28. And considering that it’s only the most dedicated golfers that bother to keep an official handicap, the handicap for the general population is likely much higher
• Less than 1 percent of the golfing population plays to a low single digit handicap.

Here’s why it matters: Playing a short drive from the back tees is going to add at least one shot for fourteen of the eighteen holes on the course. On a par 4, a drive that falls short of the legitimate range of your short to mid irons (wedge to seven) drastically reduces your chance of hitting the green in regulation. You may have the length to cover the distance in two, but with a long iron or wood as your second, chances are that you won’t hit the green. So you end up taking an extra shot or two trying to get up from a greenside bunker or grass.

Further, if you’re forced to hit a driver on every hole to get the distance required, you also increase your chances of landing in the rough, in the trees, or worse. In that case, even if you DO hit it 250 yards, you add a shot getting out of trouble. On a par 5, golfers not only face this risk on the tee shot, but also on the second, where the necessity of playing a long wood to get into scoring range presents a second opportunity to get into trouble.

Then there’s the lost ball issue. When you are forced to constantly hit the big sticks, you’re going to lose balls. And time will be lost looking for them.

All of those shots add up. Assume three minutes for each shot per player (travel time, locating the ball, picking a club practice swings, watching the ball flight, putting the club away, etc.). Multiply that by 14 extra shots per round per player and you’ll find that each player loses 42 minutes to poor tee selection; for the group, that adds up to 168 minutes. Even with some overlap (two players preparing at the same time), and holes where you don’t actually take the extra shot, that adds an hour-and-a-half to two hours to a round.

Poor tee selection thus explains the five to six hour round very neatly.

I’ll add that it’s possible poor tee selection will add a shot on all eighteen, since playing from the back tees also reduces your chances of hitting a green on a par 3.

Playing from the wrong tees (and the insane lengths of courses these days), also may explain why—even as equipment improves—scores have remained constant. Any playing gains in equipment have been more than offset by the added distance (either by the course design, or self-inflicted by playing from the tips). Players purchase a driver that’s “ten yards longer” and then play from tees that are twenty yards further back.

Playing from the correct tees not only will improve pace of play, it also will improve player scores, and thus enjoyment of the game. And all of that can only be good for the game.

This has got to be the worst time of the year for Michigan Golfers.

As the landscape outside has been turned into a frozen tundra, we now are far enough away from autumn that the last drive and putt are but a faded memory. Spring, on the other hand, seems no more near that it did when the first snowflake flew.

To compound the misery, it’s currently five degrees outside. I went out to shovel the snow off the driveway and in fifteen minutes darn near got a case of frostbite. So much for global warming.

I’ve been consoling myself by studying the latest GolfWorks and Golfsmith club component catalogs. My sticks don’t need new grips, but I may change them anyway. And although I can’t really justify it, I’ve considered building a new set of irons—or at least a new driver. There’s a neat new 460cc titanium scoop back model in the GolfWorks catalog that’s caught my eye.

The Buick Invitational and Pebble Beach tournaments these last two weeks have helped. When everything I see outside is frozen and white, a glimpse of green—however remote—is a welcome change. But at some level it just compounds the misery. I envy Californians—that is, until they have a wildfire that burns down half the state, or an earthquake, or mudslides, or smog alerts or a drought.

Ok. So I don’t envy Californians.

In years past, I’ve eased the midwinter blues by reading a good golf book or three. Reading about golf is, after all, the next best thing to playing it. But that too has fallen by the wayside. To renew my teaching certificate, I have to take earn six new college credits, and right now all my reading time is focused on the history of medieval England. Right now, I can’t tell you who’s leading in FedEx Cup points, but I can tell you the names of every Saxon, Norman and English king from Aethelraed the Unready to Richard III.

I’m a mess. It’s a wonder Mrs. GolfBlogger can stand to live with me.

A crazy plan is forming in the back of my mind. I’ve got a week off at the end of February—what the school district calls midwinter break. In my golfing fantasies, I just hop in the car and drive south on I-75 until I find a place where the grass is green—probably Tennessee. I stay overnight at a cheap motel, and play 36 holes the next day. One more night in a hotel, and I head back home. Three days. 36 holes. There’s even a website called Golf-I75 that encourages such madness.

Anyone want to meet me in Knoxville?

Tragedy struck the GolfBlogger’s shirt closet this weekend.

As anyone who owns one knows, boys’ pockets are depositories of treasures that are recognizable to others only as debris: rocks, bolts, pieces of plastic, smashed Hot Wheels, bits of wire and occasionally some live critter. And, thanks to the design of modern pants which—in addition to the usual hip pockets— feature cargo pockets on the sides, the little pack rats now are able to tote more than ever.

The challenge of doing boy laundry is to try to get all of the pockets emptied before you toss them in the machine. Of course, with so many pockets, this often is difficult, if not impossible to accomplish. Mrs. Golfblogger is meticulous about this, but occasionally something slips through (before the feminists out there get their panties in a knot, I’ll point out that while Mrs.Golfblogger does the wash, I do the cooking—a simple division of labor).

So it came to pass this past weekend that a bit of red crayon passed through homeland security and snuck into the wash. It didn’t cause any trouble there; crayons are, after all, non-soluble. But when the little terrorist got into the dryer, disaster struck. The crayon melted and spotted everything with red blotches. It looked like the clothes had a case of the chicken pox.

Among the casualties were the oldest boy’s scout uniform, Mrs. Golfblogger’s Air Force fatigues (worn by one of the boys for Halloween), and a pile of golf shirts. Most of those are replaceable, but losing the one I bought at Torrey Pines in San Diego this past summer was a tragedy. It was—other than memories—my one souvenir of the course.

And the shirt was WAY too expensive to begin with. I generally won’t pay more than $20 for a shirt; I paid at least $60 —maybe even $80—for that one.

Neither of the boys would confess to being the crayon smuggler; indeed, they really have no idea what’s in their pockets at any given moment. So while I read them the riot act about emptying their pockets before throwing them in the hamper, it was a useless gesture. And while Mrs. GolfBlogger feels bad about the whole thing, she really shouldn’t—any more than I feel bad about cooking the occasional dud of a dinner.

Triple Bogeys happen.

I played with an angry golfer yesterday.

Carl recently had been taken in an Arizona real estate scam in which he had lost $250,000. As he told the story, the hustle involved half-a-dozen guys, one of whom was his “best friend.” The first guy had purchased some worthless desert for $30,000. The next bought the land from the first for $50,000. The third bought out the second for $100,000 and so on. Each man, when he sold out, shared the difference in profit with the ones who came before.

Carl, on the end of the deal, was left holding the bag for $250,000. He hadn’t realized that the previous six were in on it. He was convinced by his “best friend” that the rapid rise in price was the result of a hot real estate market.

So now he owns a dozen acres of sand, cacti and gila monsters.

“I couldn’t even build a golf course there,” he said.

But that wasn’t why Carl was angry.

It seems that on the trip to Arizona to complete the land purchase, the same “best friend” had given him a swing tip.

“You need to hit a cut shot,” the friend had told him, and then demonstrated how. Carl tried it, and started spraying his shots. He then tried to go back to his old swing, but couldn’t.

Now, a month later, Carl still was shanking the ball. In the nine holes I played with him, I could tell that he once had been a good player. He was a lights out putter, and had a stellar short game. He hit drives that went nearly 300 yards, and nine irons that went 150.

But his shots were flying in random directions.

“I can make more money,” he said. “But that (insert twelve letter word here) ruined my swing.”

It’s nice that he has the whole thing in perspective.

There’s a hole on one of my favorite local courses where success has eluded me for years. For me, it’s the hole from hell.

On paper, it’s not particularly difficult. A par 3, it has two sets of tee boxes; one to the left of the green and the other to the right. From the tips on the right, it measures 180 and change, while from the other, it’s around 160. The large green is shaped like a ski slope, falling steeply from a height in the rear down to a pond on the front edge. The pond is probably forty yards from front to back and extends well to the left and right. The far edges of the pond are surrounded by trees, so any shot must pass over the pond and through the gap.

Neither of those two distances represents a problem for me. The previous hole— the par 4 sixth – has a green which is guarded by a front greenside bunker. On that hole, following a decent drive, I generally find myself in the fairway a hundred sixty yards out. And on nearly every occasion, a seven iron is sufficient to fly the bunker and land deep on the green. I’m also quite proficient with a five iron or a hybrid from 180.

But on the par three seventh, my usually reliable clubs never deliver predictable distance. From 160, a seven iron invariably falls short, landing in the pond. So does the six. And the five. My hybrid-four always has the distance, but on that hole for some reason slices the ball into the weeping willows (a quite appropriate tree for that hole). And Old Man Willow, of course, dumps the ball unceremoniously into the pond.

When I’m not dumping the ball into the pond, I’m hitting a ballooning shot that lands on the near shore. Or, knowing that my tendency is to fall short, overswing and top the ball fifty yards down the fairway.

The hole had gotten so frustrating that at one point, I adopted the strategy of hitting a three wood off the tee, driving the ball past the green into a stand of trees. From there, I could chip it back and try for a one putt – assuming that I hadn’t parked the ball adjacent to a tree trunk.

It’s the water, I suppose, that is the source of my grief. While I know – intellectually – that the pond should have no effect, the fact that I’ve lost so many balls there weighs on my mind. When I get up to the tee, I immediately start thinking that I shouldn’t’ start thinking about losing my ball.

The good news, though, is that I birdied the hole last week. I hit a pure seven iron off the tee (with a junk ball I had found under a leaf on the previous hole). It landed above the hole, and rolled down to within two feet. After a short tap, the ball was in.

So maybe the jinx is broken. Or maybe it’s just that the ball I found was a lucky one.