Tom Carey - Teed Off!: A Modern Guide to Golf

Copyright 2006 by Tom Carey

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carey, Tom.

Teed off! : the modern guide to golf / Tom Carey.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4022-0520-0

ISBN-10: 1-4022-0520-1

1. GolfHumor. 2. GolfCaricature and cartoons. I. Title.

PN6231.G68C38 2006

818'.5402dc22

2005025023

Printed and bound in the United States of America

VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my dad, who taught me everything
I know about golf and a good deal of
what I know about life, too.
Thanks, Chop.

The game of golf is a mysterious thing. Its history is shrouded in legend, myth, and lore. It is a game rich in arcane rules and time-honored customs; the traditional pastime of gentlemen and ladies of breeding for more than a hundred years. It is a test of skill, a test of nerve, and a test of imagination.

It is a test of skill when you've got 165 yards left from a flyer lie to a tiny little green, with a pin tucked behind one of those ridiculous Robert Trent Jones, you-gotta-be-freakin'-kidding-me railroad-tie bunkers. It is a test of nerve when you need to drain a sidehill five-footer on some car-hood-fast, 13-on-the-Stimpmeter green to save triple bogey. And it is a test of imagination when you've got to explain to the wife why the new set of perimeter-weighted irons you got was more important than last month's car payment.

Yes, golf has evolved tremendously in the last hundred years. Equipment has changed, rules have changed, and hardly anyone wears a kilt anymore.

This book was written to help today's golfer become a golfer unbound by ancient rules and old traditions. A golfer unafraid to wipe the beer from his face, tee it up with his naked-lady tee, swing from the heels with his brand-new, $600 TaylorMade driver with a head as big as a Volkswagen, and watch proudly as his mighty clout sails into the great beyond. A golfer unafraid, then, to take a mulligan.

The Morrises: Young Tom, Olde Tom, and Other People with Ridiculous Names

The game of golf was invented in St. Andrews, a small seaside village in Scotland, in the late nineteenth century by Olde Tom Morris and his son, Young Tom Morris. (The Scots are notoriously unimaginative when it comes to naming their kids.) They were sitting by Loch Ness one typically dark, rainy afternoon with their cameras waiting for the monster to surface, when Young Tom, bored with trying to keep the rain off his camera lens, absentmindedly took a swipe at a stone on the beach with his walking stick.

As fate would have it, he struck the stone a solid blow, and it flew straight at an old, gnarled oak tree some yards away. The two Morrises were intrigued. As they walked up to the tree Olde Tom said, I'll bet ye five bob ye kin nawt strike the tree wi' another stroke.

An intense look came over Young Tom's ruddy features. Though the rock lay just three feet from the tree, Young Tom began to shake and sweat from the pressure of his father's challenge.

C'mon lad! Et's but a wee bit away! What the matter? Can't ye take the pressure, ya sniveling pantywaist?! Young Tom brandished his walking stick menacingly and growled at his father, Shut yer gob, mon, or I'll shut it for ya! His blood racing, his heart pounding, Young Tom waggled his walking stick at least a dozen times before he was able to swing at the stone again. And of course, he missed the little putt. Furious, he smashed his stick against the tree, breaking it to pieces, and screamed, It's the devil's oon game we've invented, and I'll ne'er play it agin!

Of course, he bought a new stick and was whacking stones on the beach again the very next day. Which is how Young Tom Morris invented the yips and Olde Tom Morris invented the Nassau.

Golf in America: The Plague Spreads

For years the Morrises had the game of golf to themselves. They laid out eighteen holes along the beach at St. Andrews, and they were content smacking stones with their walking sticks and screaming hideous insults at one another.

Then one surprisingly sunny afternoon, as they trudged along the beach looking for a lost ball, they stumbled upon a family of vacationing Americans. Otto Bunker, a tailor, and his seamstress wife, Anita, were sunbathing in the middle of the sixth hole. It was a gruesome sight as the Bunkers were a decidedly chubby pair and they exhibited vast glowing expanses of alabaster skin that had obviously seen no sunshine for years. The Scotsmen were livid.

Shading their eyes from the powerful glare, they approached the Americans. You kin naye lay aboot here, ya stupid gits! cried Young Tom. This is a gahf links!

Otto, who prided himself on having a cheerful demeanor, just nodded enthusiastically and smiled, though he had no idea what it was that the snarling, red-faced Scotsman was screaming about. Still, he felt he should make some kind of reply. Grinning, in what he considered a very friendly way, he looked at the enraged Morrises in their plaid kilts and asked them to pose for a photo.

The folks back home will love a shot of you fellas in those skirts, he said, draping his flabby, sunburned arms across the shoulders of the seething Scotsmen.

Sadly for the grinning American tailor, Young Tom Morris could hold his temper no longer. Just as Mrs. Bunker yelled Say haggis! and clicked her camera, Young Tom clouted the tailor with his club, forever after called a cleek for the sound that it made on Otto's skull. The Bunkers' attorney later used the photograph to win them a large cash settlement and the U.S. rights to the game of golf.

Poor Young Tom Morris was plagued forever after by nightmares in which chubby, pale Americans in bathing suits lay down in his line every time he tried to line up a putt.

The Bunkers: The First Family of U.S. Golf

So it came to be that Otto and Anita Bunker came home to New Jersey the proud owners of two sets of golf clubs, several dozen nice, round stones, and the right to build golf courses in the USA.

The Bunkers had plenty of time for their new hobby because, although they were both expert clothiers, each was unutterably colorblind. Unscrupulous wholesalers had for years forced all their ugliest material on the unsuspecting Bunkers, who were unable to sell a stitch of the awful clothing they made.