sjduffers

Health permitting I will never quit either. I am that close to 60 and still improving (I dropped a couple of points in the index in the last year) and even when I won't at some point, I'll move to the next tee box up and keep playing. My long term goal is to shoot my age so realistically, I't will have to wait for another 20 years or so and I'll be on the furthest up tee box by then...

A welcome change by me. I've grown tired of Johnny Miller trying to read putts from the broadcasting booth: "this one is right edge", when the players lines it up two cups to the right and still misses low! That and the overdone anti-Tiger sentiment. He finally had to relent after the win at Tour Championship, but all year long, it was negative stuff... probably worse than Brandel Chamblee.

Not sure whether it's been mentioned: Lake Chabot in the hills above Oakland, CA. Your first inkling of quirkiness is as you drive your car towards the club house, crossing the side of this seemingly huge hill... until you realize that there is grass on both sides of the road and that you are in the middle of a fairway! Then you have your typical up and down holes, with big doglegs, some blind shots and an overall very hilly track, crossing the aforementioned road several times. At one point, you reach a par 3 and you go: "where is the green?", until you look down, way down, between some trees that you have to go over, and there it is, looking like a postage stamp. There is also a short par 4 with an absolutely incredible view of the Bay and the San Francisco skyline, so much so that you are guaranteed to not pay much attention to your tee shot, and that would be bad with OB everywhere... The icing on the cake, a 650 yards par 6 (yes, par 6), that start going down, way down, a huge hill with switchbacks in the cart path in the middle of the long fairway, then you reach a deep valley and the other side is a huge hill, I don't think a 200 yards from the bottom reaches the top, and it's like a 20 degree slope! You can never see the green until you get close to the top. All in all, a very hilly and quirky course.

The cost of operating a golf course isn’t necessarily linear with the number of holes: yes, mowing and watering probably scale with the number and size of holes, but running the pro shop or the cart barn probably doesn’t as much... Other business overhead like licenses, accounting, human resources, etc don’t scale directly either.

I am on the fence. Yes, courses would be easier to build and maintain, it would take less time to play, it might be cheaper (but don't necessarily count on it), scores would be much lower (about 2/3 lower, ah!), nearly everyone would break 100 and I could easily shoot my age (I am 59 now). On the other hand, 12 holes is kinda short: 9 holes is definitely not enough and 12 is only marginally more. I think 16 is around where I typically start to get tired (I walk most rounds). And I am sure we'd still complain about 4 hours for 12 holes, the same way we have sometimes 6 hours round for 18 holes... We will probably never know for sure.

Nope. You? Because if you are, 5 hours is really slow!

Nobody said a 4-some should play in 2 hours. I didn't say that and nobody else has either. But, if each individual in the 4-some can play a round in 2 hours (by themselves), especially walking, as it is trivial to do in a cart, then they should have no problem playing under 4 hours as a 4-some. QED.

Why add an hour of walking? You are in a cart and are already using 8 minutes a hole. You don't need to add walking time. Or are you saying that it takes you that long to walk from the cart to the green and back 18 times, or nearly 5 minutes a hole? Pick up the pace with your feet and don't look like a (really) old man! That course is nothing special, and as I said it was a one-off: between storms, so nobody was "brave" enough to play that day. I saw a hole in the action on the radar and headed to the course which was empty, just as I thought it would be. I don't expect to play in 2 hours, even when I ride a cart, but 4 1/2 hours (15 minutes a hole) is more than enough for all but the toughest courses, even walking. That story (along with the PGA Tour guy) is good enough to make a point, though. Golf does not have to take forever. People who are slow at golf tend to be slow at everything: I just look how long it takes someone to get their bags out and their shoes on in the parking lot and can predict how fast they are going to be on the course... with pretty good accuracy, even when they ride in a cart.

Dude, you are way off base here. I also live in California and last winter played in between storms with all of 3 people on the course, including me, in 2 hours, WALKING. And I had to wait about 10 minutes under a tree to let a shower pass. I did everything by the rules, except remove the flag when putting, which will be within the rules starting in January, by the way. You may have missed it, but this past year, a PGA Tour player finished a whole PGA Tour round, playing by himself (with a caddie and walking as usual) in under 1 1/2 hours, running only on the last hole to finish under 1 1/2. That is including lining putts, discussing club selection with his caddie, pulling out the flag, etc... on a PGA Tour sized course, i.e. 7000+ yards. Have you heard about provisionals? When applied properly, they save you from having to go back and re-tee maybe 90% of the time. You also can't do math, because 8 minutes a hole is 2 and 1/2 hours. 15 minutes a hole is 4 1/2 hours, and that is a lot, even walking...

Another interesting aspect of this yelling fore business is how loud people do yell it (if they ever do at all). I have seen countless occasions where even being next to the person "yelling", i heard more a whisper than an actual yell, with absolute zero chance of someone hearing it downrange, regardless of wind direction. I tend to yell loudly after them in that case. I believe that some people are really shy or their culture frowns on being loud (because they hail from places with lots of people), and they just can't bring themselves to yell in public. The corollary is that when on the receiving end of a ball when nothing could be heard, they often come to me and apologize, sometimes profusely. I relish in telling them: "the world is fore, not sorry; you can keep sorry when you kill me because you didn't yell fore". The look on their face at that point is priceless, but I don't know if their behavior changes after that... or not.

I duck and cover in place, always. I yell (loudly!) when I don't see where the ball is going relative to people or when I see that people are inline to get hit (I can't necessarily judge the distance very well). I do not yell fore if I can see people might get hit if they heard the yell and started moving in that direction (with some margin). I have thus watched a skulled ball fly head high, only a couple of paces away from someone who was standing still on a green and not yelled fore. If I had said anything, they might have moved: this way, they were out of danger...

I sometimes fix a pitch mark with my putter head (successfully, I might add, so I don't understand the etiquette issue...). I also tend to talk to someone else's ball, in the air and seldom on the green too. So put me down for 1-2 "violations".

Even with experienced golfers playing competent ready golf, a 5-some tends to be slower than a 3-some followed by a 2-some, if for no other reason because it takes longer (sometimes quite a bit longer) for them to all putt out. And that time differential (5 putting out vs 2 or 3 putting out) is repeated on every hole and that is time that gets added up for the total time elapsed of the round, as the time seen by another group playing behind the 5 guys. By the end, it can be 5-10 minutes or maybe 30 minutes, depending on how diligent people are while putting out, e.g. continuous putting vs mark and yield to each other's turns.

Just for the record, I don't use my finger down the shaft, but here is somebody who does (and didn't use to do it), with evidently some pretty good results: Ian Poulter! I am not trolling you, @iacas, as I know you don't like the guy, and this may be yet another reason why, but you have to admit it is working pretty well for him. That said, I agree with you, and besides it looks bad, to my eye. Never mind the guys that have both index fingers down the shaft, on both sides! 😂

Creative way of "interpreting the OB rule", I'll say, but we all know better. Another one: knock a ball off the tee with your driver and they go: "1". Clearly the ball is not in play then until a stroke is made at it (whether a whiff or not), and so it doesn't count.