I’ve worked part time at a golf course in Oregon for about 15 years. It’s a nice course, and is open to the public. We’ll call it Killdeer Hills. The course is converted farmland, and fairly level, without the dense forests that many golf courses feature.
Instead, Killdeer Hills’ fairways are lined with low hills covered with unmowed Fescue, a dense flowering grass. If you hit a golf ball into the fescue, it sinks into the grass and it’s hard just to find it, much less play a golf shot there. It’s not much better than hitting your ball into a forest.
The fescue is also habitat for a mouse-like critter called Meadow Voles, whom borrow little tunnels through the fescue, and dig underground shelters for their furry families. I’ve studied the Voles and currently have a diary up at Backyard Science, discussing the Voles and their fescue habitat, if you are interested.
However, this diary here is about how the Voles and their habitat helped me give comeuppance to a racist. If you’d like, please continue reading, south of Jackson Pollock’s Work in Orange.
As a golf course employee, I play golf for free, almost every day. Sometimes I’m paired with fellows I don’t know. That’s an opportunity to make new friends. Other times, not so.
Famous golfers are some of the most reactionary persons on the globe. Bobby Jones was a virulent racist. Ben Hogan broke the union at his golf club factory. Seve Ballesteros worshiped Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.
Likewise, while many working class folks love the game, there’s also a high percentage of distasteful people who play golf. Here’s what happened when I got stuck with a couple of them.
One Saturday morning, after I finished my shift, I went to play and was paired with a couple of fellows. We shook hands.
One said,”You sure look familiar. Have we met?”
I was still in my work jeans, and a shapeless cap. So he didn’t quite recognize me, because the last time we’d met I was wearing my tailored $1000 Italian suit and silk tie. But I recognized him. He was Tommy Hyde, one of the Commissioners from Blue Collar County, 20 miles away.
Two years ago, He’d sponsored a huge tax giveaway to a lumber company to build and operate a mill in Blue Collar County. At that time, I was one of several who had spoken to the County Commission, and argued that since the company was getting generous tax breaks, they should agree to legally binding commitments to steer the construction and production jobs to unemployed local workers, at fair wages. The local power plant had just closed, and 1500 union workers were desperate for jobs in Blue Collar County.
Hyde laughed at our requests and the company got its tax breaks with no strings attached. As a result, the mill construction company was from Alabama, and barely a handful of the 1000 construction workers were local. The lumber company imported his new employees from its other mills and didn’t hire locally either.
I didn’t tell him how we’d met. We played our first drives and began walking down the fairway. But then Hyde and his buddy started talking in their just-between-us-white-guys voices, about the construction job at the mill, and they were laughing about how they’d warned the company not to bring in too many of those dumb n----r (pejorative for African-American) workers.
I got madder and madder. But I decided to keep my mouth shut and wait for a chance to throw Hyde and his crony off their stride.
Unfortunately, Hyde was a good golfer. He’d played football in college and was strong. Then, on the 10th hole, he’d topped a poor shot, but it had run onto the green, hit the flag and fell into the hole. Eagle. Hyde was turning a decent round of golf into a great round. I was seething.
We got to the 14th tee. A pond was on the left, and Hyde pushed his drive to the right, into a thick fescue patch. This could be my chance.
The wind had pushed over the unmowed fescue stalks so they lay down like a blanket, a few inches off the ground. The Voles had honeycombed that layer with their tiny freeways. Out of the corner of my eye, I would see flashes of brown as Voles scurried past.
It took a while, but I found Hyde’s ball in that thicket, centered in one of the Vole’s tunnels, but visible.
Hyde looked at it dubiously.
“Just hit a nice wristy 5-wood,” I exclaimed to him cheerfully, “There’s grass under your ball. Swing a little harder.” I was suggesting a physical feat to Hyde about as difficult as running a 3-minute mile.
Hyde frowned.
“Hell,” I said, “Tiger Woods could hit a 7 iron onto the green from here.”
That did it. Hyde pulled out a club and swung vigorously. His club head caught a clump of fescue and he barely hit the ball. It trickled forward a few yards.
“Smack it again,” I urged, “Right at the flag.”
This time he caught it cleaner, and the ball shot away, right on target.
“Got that one, by God!” Hyde exclaimed.
“Hmm,” I responded, “I think you’re in the water.”
“Water?”
“Oh, you didn’t know there was water up there?”
By now, Hyde’s concentration was shot. He had to drop another ball, and take a penalty stroke. He hit that one in the water too. I think he took a 10 on that hole, and his career round was ruined.
A few weeks earlier, my buddy Pete, a golf rules nerd, and I resolved a golf situation in the fescue in a completely different way, for a much different fellow.
We were playing with Tan, who’d lived in Cambodia, and lost his entire family to the Khmer Rouge. He’d fled to the US, worked as a baker for 40 years and was retired. Nonetheless, he was cheery, clearly enjoyed life, and was a pleasure to be with, even if he couldn’t play very good golf.
So of course, he hit a shot into the thick fescue. It took us several minutes, but we finally found it, sunken deep into the grass.
Pete looked it over.
“I think you can invoke Rule 25, the burrowing animal rule,” he told Tan. “If your ball is affected by abnormal ground conditions caused by a burrowing animal, you are entitled to move it.” Pete pointed out that Tan’s ball was in the Vole’s tunnel so he could receive relief.
Tan picked up his ball and began to drop it into another spot of fescue. Pete stopped him.
“You are entitled to place your ball in the nearest location where you’ll get relief. This area is honeycombed with these runways so you’ll have to take your drop outside the fescue.”
Tan dropped his ball into a mowed area.
Then he hit a fine shot, almost onto the green.
I suppose if Hyde had asked about those rules when he’d hit into the fescue, I might have told him the same thing. But he didn’t ask.
I suppose I could have volunteered the information to Hyde, but after his remarks about the Black construction workers, coupled with his sneering rejection of local hire for his County’s own residents, I wouldn’t have pissed on him if he was on fire.
So that’s the story of one small comeuppance, from a working man, to a covertly racist politician, who'd allied with the bosses.