The Downhill Lie (4 page)

Gimme Shelter

F
or the solitary, anxiety-ridden golfer, public links are slow torture. One solution is to have your own backyard golf course. In Bridgehampton, New York, somebody is selling a sixty-acre retreat with a twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion, fourteen gardens and a nine-hole layout complete with a pro shop. Price: $75 million.

A less extravagant option is to join a country club, then sneak out to play in off-hours or foul weather, when the course is nearly deserted.

The summer and early fall are prime in Florida, because that’s when the heat becomes so suffocating that most club players flee north. Those who remain venture out while the morning dew is still on the grass, and hurry to complete their rounds before the sun gets high. By mid-afternoon, most private courses are as barren as the bleachers at a Marlins game.

Soon after we moved to Vero Beach, my wife learned of a club called Quail Valley, which offers tennis, yoga, a fitness center, two good restaurants and a large swimming pool for the kids. It also features a golf course designed by Nick Price and Tom Fazio, which guarantees a degree of difficulty far beyond what’s advisable for an aging second-timer. The regulars call it “Gale Valley,” which, I would soon discover, was not hyperbole.

The course was carved from a flat 280-acre orange grove, sculpted with two million cubic yards of fill and elevated to heights of forty feet. The dirt was excavated on site, the ensuing craters converted to a daunting network of ball-eating lakes, ponds and sloughs.

Bill Becker, a friend and a first-rate player, gave me a tour of the layout on a breezy December day. I hadn’t seen so much water since Hurricane Donna swamped the state in 1960.

Noticing the dread in my eyes, Bill tried to calm me. “The fairways are actually pretty wide,” he kept saying.

Yet all I could think was: I must be out of my frigging mind.

From the blue tees at Quail, the USGA Course Rating is 71.4 and the Slope is 133. Not a cakewalk.

Still, the place was pretty and, more importantly, quiet. Bill promised I’d be able to play a quick and solo nine holes practically any afternoon, even during the winter season. It was an enticing pitch.

Later we visited the clubhouse, where taxidermied heads of elk, moose and other deceased ungulates gazed down from the walls. Upon entering the men’s locker area, I was startled to see a stuffed African lion, as well as an upright brown bear, its face locked in a somewhat befuddled snarl. Bill assured me that the mounts were only decorative, and that bagging large game was not a requirement for membership.

I liked that Quail Valley was freestanding and wide open, not pinched inside a residential development. Its rural, agriculturally zoned site had been selected specifically to minimize the possibility—or at least forestall the day—that it will be surrounded by houses and condos, a depressingly common fate.

In Florida it’s rare to find a new golf course that was built purely for the experience of the sport. Most courses are conceived as the centerpiece excuse for some mammoth high-end real-estate project, the mission being to wring every last dime of profit from every square foot.

Not far from Naples is an 868-acre “community” called West Bay, supposedly “dedicated to preserving the surrounding environment.” Indeed, developers have set aside about five hundred acres of woods and wetlands, and built an ecologically copacetic golf tract that earned a coveted “sanctuary” designation from Audubon International.

Yet within this setting are no fewer than eight subdivisions offering single-family houses, estate homes and compact crossbreeds called “carriage homes,” meaning they are small enough to be pulled by horses. None of the units are cheap, and the developers have gotten rich.

But not rich enough, as they’re now topping off two twenty-story towers on the shore of Estero Bay—just an elevator ride and a short stroll to the first tee.

I take the old-fashioned position that golf was not meant to be played in the shadow of a high-rise; that high-rises don’t belong on the banks of an estuary; and that whoever is responsible for such abominations should be pounded to a permanently infertile condition with a 60-degree lob wedge.

Some golfers don’t seem to care about the crimes committed against nature in the name of the game. They see nothing offensive about a two-hundred-foot wall of cold concrete and glass looming over the fairways. How better to shield a tee shot from those pesky Gulf breezes? And, really, who cares about blocking out the horizon? Seen one sunset, seen ’em all.

Welcome to paradise, suckers. Prices start in the mid-400s.

Many of the top names in course design—Nicklaus, Robert Trent Jones, the Fazios—shy away from vertical monoliths in most of their developments. However, there’s no escaping the fact that untold thousands of acres of wild habitat in this country have been sacrificed for the dubious cause of recreational golf. The one positive thing to be said about the proliferation of these projects is that, in fast-growing communities, the alternative can be worse.

Newer golf courses often use recycled water and less toxic fertilizers, and even the older layouts are relatively easy on the ecology compared to the waste and pollution generated by the average suburban housing development. Mapping eighteen or thirty-six holes requires large, contiguous expanses of open land. As a result, residential density levels in golf communities tend to be significantly lower than that of large-scale subdivisions. That’s beneficial in a place such as Florida, which is filling up at the absurdly self-destructive rate of almost one thousand new residents per day.

In a sane world, conscientious officeholders would have put a halt to this stampede by enforcing sensible growth-management laws. But in the corrupt, whore-hopping reality of Tallahassee politics, that hasn’t happened. Growth-for-growth’s-sake is the engine that drives the special interests controlling the legislature, and greed is the fuel. Except for the withering Everglades and a few state preserves, every last unspoiled acre of my home state is up for grabs.

Interestingly, the new-golf-course business isn’t thriving so well in the rest of the country. In 2006, more courses shut down than opened in the United States, the first time that’s happened in sixty years. The downturn hasn’t yet affected the Sunshine State.

Whenever I see another golf club under construction (and Florida must have more per capita than anyplace else on the planet), I have to remind myself that the fate of that lost land might otherwise be two thousand new “zero-lot-line” houses, with roads, sewers, a freeway exit and almost certainly a strip mall. In a sad but ironic way, the boom in golf courses is actually keeping greener what’s left of Florida. Loblolly pines and Bermuda grass are better than concrete and asphalt, and infinitely more hospitable to wildlife and humans alike.

Nonetheless, it’s a mystery why anyone would want a house with a fairway running past the backyard. If you can afford prime golf-course frontage, you can afford to live on a lake, a river or a mountainside—settings with tranquil, natural vistas, where squadrons of riding mowers don’t show up at dawn.

A woman who married an heir to a newspaper fortune once went out of her way to tell me that she and her hubby divided their leisure time among five homes, all located on championship golf courses. I restrained myself from suggesting that she needed a brain scan.

Evidently, some folks’ idea of easy living is to slurp martinis on their porch deck while brightly garbed strangers in cleats stomp through the shrubbery in search of lost balls.

Years ago I wrote a newspaper story about a retiree who, though not a golfer, had purchased a small condominium at a club in Pompano Beach. The fellow soon got fed up with duffers breaking his windows or topping tee shots into his flower beds, so he launched a one-man insurgency. Every time a golf ball landed in his yard, he’d scuttle out the back door and snatch it.

One morning he was intercepted by an uncommonly fleet-footed player, and there ensued an ugly confrontation involving swordplay with a driver. Lawsuits were filed, and shortly thereafter the ball stealer was informed that the condo association had initiated eviction proceedings. The man defiantly presented himself as a crusader for the civil rights of non-golfers and, when I interviewed him, proudly displayed his stash of purloined golf balls, which filled a hallway closet. I don’t recall how the case was settled, but I’ve always wondered what led the old guy to imagine that he could live on a golf course and not have to contend with golfers.

As the commercials on the Golf Channel make evident, beer drinking and prostate problems are core components of the male golfing experience. Recently, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a family with a fairway view from their windows installed video cameras because so many golfers were stopping to urinate on their property. More than forty offenders were recorded hosing down the trees and flowers, and in some cases ignoring posted signs that implored them to hold their bladders. Because the club was public, the pissers were not expelled or even admonished by name. However, after the videotapes aired on television, the Oak Ridge city manager hastily announced a campaign to install extra portable toilets on the course.

That no homesites were being hawked at the Quail Valley Golf Club was a major lure. It meant there were no human neighbors to offend when nature called and, more importantly, no chance that I’d ever have to hit a 6-iron from the patio of a surly stranger.

Better yet, actual wild quails nested on the land at Quail Valley! Such truth-in-advertising is rare—and highly discouraged—in the Florida real-estate racket. The tradition among developers here is to name their projects after wild creatures that they’ve exterminated or chased away, typically fox, bear, falcon, hawk, otter or panther. Not far from where I grew up was a course called Eagle Trace, upon which no trace of an eagle could be found. This was entirely expected.

The few hardy critters that have adapted to human encroachment are considered too prosaic to be exploited for sales-marketing purposes. The last time I checked, there were no luxury golf developments called Possum Ditch or Rat’s Landing.

Before applying to Quail Valley, the only sporting clubs I’d ever joined were notable for their genial lack of exclusivity; if your check cleared, you were welcomed with open arms. Quail was different. Not only was the check much larger, references were required.

My wife wasn’t worried, but I figured we had no chance if anyone on the membership committee was familiar with my writing. With their acid humor and derailed characters, the novels could hardly be described as mainstream establishment literature. Worse, for twenty years I’d been writing a newspaper column that at one time or another had infuriated just about every big shot in the state, regardless of race, creed or political alignment.

Lately I’d been raging, as had many columnists, about the bloody fiasco in Iraq. Polls showed that most Americans had come around to the same point of view—that the war was a colossal fuck-up—but little Indian River County still stood largely behind the president. Almost everywhere else in the nation, disgruntled Republicans armed with razor blades were slinking out in the dead of night to scrape off their Bush-Cheney bumper stickers.

Not in Vero Beach; not yet, anyway.

As we waited for our membership interview, I feared a prickly cross-examination….

Didn’t you once write that the vice president’s pacemaker should be attached to a polygraph machine? And did you not also malign our commander in chief for “grinning like a Muppet” during a press conference about Iraq, and for conducting the war in a “delusional fog”?

But the meeting at Quail Valley turned out to be laid-back and totally painless. There was no steely-eyed screening committee; only affable Kevin Given, the chief operating officer, and he was gracious enough not to mention the columns or the books. It was more of a social chat than an interrogation—how long have you lived in the Indian River area? What do you think of the schools? Do any of your kids play golf or tennis?

Wisely I let my wife do most of the talking, leading Kevin to conclude that her charms vastly outweighed any of my as-yet-unrevealed personality disorders.

A few weeks later, the acceptance letter arrived; we were officially country clubbers. Now I had to go out and play that nut-cruncher of a golf course.

Day 117

My first lesson with Steve Archer, the director of golf at Quail Valley. He’s mild and good-natured, as patient as a bomb defuser. Afterwards he fills out a note card for me to keep in my bag:

“Posture—less knee flex…Spine should tilt 90 degrees to golf club.

“Wider stance. Inside heels, shoulder-width apart…

“Arms + body work at same pace—time out right hand, club head and right side.”

That’s a lot to think about before hitting a golf ball, but I’ve got thirty years of rust to shake off. My goal is to play two or three times a week until I break 88, or rip a tendon trying.

Day 119

Freakishly, I manage to birdie that savage par-5 at Sandridge upon which I took a 9 two weeks ago. However, I quickly piss away the found strokes (and more), finishing the nine at 13 dismal strokes over par.

When I was young, I would have stalked off the course boiling mad after blowing so many opportunities. Today I merely trudge, which I choose to view as a sign of maturity, not fatigue.

Day 120

My first round at Quail Valley—and also my first time playing with a caddy, which has me nervous. I’m prepared to overtip shamelessly if I offend him with my cussing, or my game.

His name is Delroy Smith and he’s from Kingston, Jamaica, where he played cricket and soccer. He is a calming presence and, more importantly, a diplomat. Having looped on some of the toughest courses in the Northeast, Delroy is familiar with American profanity in all its gerundives, and nothing I say draws a flinch.

For the first fifteen holes I avoid embarrassing myself. Then, on the 16th—a long par-3—I banana-slice a 4-iron into a water hazard on the adjoining hole. Next shot overflies the green into a different lake, and so begins the skid. I finish with a 97.