Brown, brown grass of home
It’s right there. Look it up. Read it. Internalize it.
Rule 8 of the Rules of Golf covers a central principle of the game: play the course as you find it.
While this may also refer to the rules of golf and what you can and cannot do, the spirit behind this rule is still there: take on the course as it is and consider the conditions on the golf course as a challenge to test your skills.
Are the fairways brown and not their usual verdant green? Is the fairway a few millimeters above the normal height? Are the greens playing slow? Forget the optics. Golf is not a game of always perfect conditions.
I think we often forget that playing golf is communing with nature. And nature is not always fair winds and blue skies and green grass. Some days, some months it rains and pours, the other times we are in the middle of a drought. If you want to always have a perfect playing surface, you might as well quit golf and switch to pickleball where they do not need to mow, water and fertilize the court.
Look, I’m not writing this as a General Manager of a Golf Club defending lapses in the maintenance of the golf course. I am writing this as a golfer who understands the realities of the game of golf. Life is not always perfect. Golf is not always what you see on TV.
Augusta (where they play the Masters) has never been built in one day. The perfect conditions you see these professional golfers play on are the result of months of preparation and the number of golfers who are allowed to play during those times are severely restricted.
All these PGA tournaments we watch on television are the result of meticulous maintenance that is geared so everything turns up great during tournament week. Not every golf club can do that, not every golf club can even afford to do that. While setting things up like that is really expensive, there is also the greater hidden cost of lost revenue because the course will need to be closed while those preparations are going on.
But some pro tournaments can also go to the extreme to maintain that image. A few years ago a group of Filipino golf course superintendents played the course where the Tucson Open was being played and came out of the round with green colored golf shoes.
So yes Virginia, they paint the grass green to make it appear that the tournament is being played on a green golf course when actually the grass in that part of the United States is dormant and brown at that time of the year. The point is, grass is a living organism. By its nature it has periods when it becomes dormant and turns brown when the conditions are unfavorable.
Even the famed British Open or “The Open”, as it is pronounced with a nose turned up, has been played on scorched fairways. Look up The 2006 Open and The 2018 Open at Carnoustie. Watch Tiger Woods play those brown fairways in Royal Liverpool.
Did they cancel The Open because the golf courses were dry and brown and “unplayable” in the eyes of pseudo-golfers? Did the best players in the world walk out of the tournament because the course wasn’t in perfect shape? No. They looked at it as a challenge to surmount. They say Tiger only used his driver once during that tournament.
So if you are a real golfer, you should be able to understand: the golf course is never going to be always in perfect condition. The golf course is a living thing has to be nurtured and is subject to nature and conditions beyond anyone’s control. Heavy rains will make it soggy; El Nino will turn it into a desert.
But if you are this pretentious, spoiled brat who expects heaven on earth just because you are charged P5k monthly dues or have paid a green fee, stay home. Turn on the air conditioning and just go watch You Tube where the grass is always green. Or better still, quit golf and sell your golf clubs.
You’re not a true golfer and never will be…
