Gentlemen,
I'll assume that any ladies stupid enough to lurk here have long ago abandoned this website for back issues of Cosmo - except for the Redhead, who occasionally amuses herself with our self-absorbed, pseudo-important pedantic pontificating.
For years, since the matrimonial roof collapsed, the new and improved female (actually, the original model, circa 1977 in Switzerland) has long maintained that walking and observing a great golf course is nearly as interesting as testing your puny skills against its mystical arrangements.
This discussion can be divided between two camps, one of which carries the evil Leprechaun (Huckster) on its masthead, the other Tom Doak, Bahto and those of their ilk. The dividing line rests in whether you view the game as . . . well . . . a game to be played for enjoyment and challenge. By contrast, there are those who have evolved so far beyond striking a ball towards a distant landing pad that the joy rests in the sort of clinical detachment endemic to art critics or other static evaluators of aesthetic excellence.
Brad Klein would like to think of himself as a savant with a foot in both camps, but it is necessary to actually compress the ball at impact to grasp the full value of the experience. Thus, watching Brad Pitt shag the aforementioned Jennifer Aniston as a voyeur and having a go yourself is a bit different.
At one point - before I blew up my back, got divorced, had kids, developed the yips and began to fear the eventual need for Viagra (whether impotence or Alzheimer's gets me first is a question best left to my psychiatrist), my preference was to walk a golf course first and then tee it up in the late afternoon with nobody around but a close buddy and an extra couple pelotas in my pocket. The ball went where I commanded most of the time before the age of 43, now I try to pull the trigger between shakes of my hands.
I cannot blame it upon whiskey fingers. Some people are bulletproof and rise to the challenge like Pat Mucci; others have a finite number of 3-footers in their gut before the dam bursts and all that is left are mud hens and algae that the environuts pretend has some unspecified value. In this case, my golf game could be expressed on the weather page as 'low tide.' The smell is difficult to ignore. Thank gawd my old friends are the merciful sort who only use the needle on the congenitally arrogant.
So - to return to the point - as if there was actually a destination in this sort of tequila-soaked disquisition, I am prepared to acknowledge that the Redhead has been right all along: Eventually, *looking* has as much value as *doing* in the appreciation of high art. She will be happy to know this - although there is rarely a need to reaffirm her prescient Carnac-osity.
Thus, I am not prepared to sell my daughter - who has turned out to be 'me with a skirt' - into sex slavery in Sonny Barger's lair, even for a full membership at Georgia's most famous cadaver. What is the difference? Every April after The Masters, they strike the set and redesign it while pretending that little, if anything, has changed. Horseshit. Give me a press pass for the practice rounds - and then I'll drive over to Chechessee Creek for some golf far away from the green circus tent.
Better to caddy for the assistant barkeep (and amateur historian) at Cruden Bay than pay $300 to play with a stiff asshole at Muirfield.