Stupid Golf Problems: This short-game area pet peeve might strike a nerve<\/a><\/p>\nSurely, this single yelled \u201cFORE!!\u201d, right? He did not.<\/p>\n
Does anybody anymore? I\u2019ve played golf for 20-plus years, so I feel confident in saying this: \u201cFORE\u201d etiquette has never been worse, and while it seems too easy to chalk it up to the COVID boom of new golfers who don\u2019t understand etiquette, I think we all know that\u2019s precisely the reason. Nobody taught these people the very, very simple concept of the \u201cFORE\u201d yell. My simple advice \u2013 when in doubt, just yell it.<\/p>\n
This single didn\u2019t even whisper it, and my buddy was pissed. He started yelling back at the guy, \u201cNothing??? Nothing??\u201d Unfortunately, for me, a person who shudders at confrontation, the single made his way over to his ball. \u201cYou don\u2019t yell fore?\u201d my buddy asked. The guy was practically mute. \u201cHow about \u2018sorry\u2019?\u201d The single finally obliged, but in a \u201chey man, calm down, I\u2019m sorry, OK?\u201d manner, which is more loathsome than the non-FORE call. And which brings me to the question posed in the headline of this piece. How mad should you be at a non-FORE call?<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t condone fighting on the course (big-time #shrink), and, like I said, I hate confrontation, but you have every right to be raging mad, especially if the ball actually hits you, like it hit my buddy. And he was raging mad. I usually tell friends to just chill out over stuff like this, but I let him go at the guy. Not physically. Just verbal berating. I enjoyed it, even. A non-FORE call just cannot happen. It\u2019s the simplest thing to do, and something you should err on the side of doing TOO much. We\u2019ve all hit one in the general direction of another group and had the brief thought of \u201coh, that has no chance of hitting them.\u201d You should STILL yell it in this case. You should always yell it.<\/p>\n
We should have known it was going to happen again based off the single\u2019s reaction to my buddy\u2019s anger. It did \u2026 on the very next hole. Now, this time it did not hit my buddy, and we were probably 50 yards away from it entirely. But the single, who clearly has a case of the driver yips, literally shanked a drive onto the green of the hole we were playing, and we were not that far back in the fairway hitting chips \/ wedge shots. No call. Nothing. Again my buddy went at him, only for my other buddy, his twin brother, to diffuse the situation. And he\u2019s not a situation-diffuser. He prefers escalation. Which gives you an idea of how pissed my one friend was.<\/p>\n
He was right to be. The guy was clueless. Very likely a \u201cCOVID\u201d golfer. The type who joined after 2020 and thought he was going to bounce around the back 9 as a single on one of the most beautiful days of the summer to date. I have no idea if that\u2019s true or if he\u2019s a longtime golfer who has a case of the driver shanks, but it\u2019s fair to assume given he jumped in on the 10th hole in between a foursome and a threesome and went 0-for-2 on \u201cFORE\u201d yells, one of which hit a member of our group.<\/p>\n
So when in doubt, scream it at the top of your lungs. Nobody will be mad that you did. And when someone doesn\u2019t do it, everything but physically attacking them is on the table \u2026 and honestly if it happens more than twice in the same round from the same person, all bets are off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[Photo: Boston Globe] Over the weekend, during a round with two buddies, we cruised through the front nine…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[459,44,1047],"class_list":["post-45187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-article","tag-golf","tag-stupid-golf-problems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}