Let My People Walk

by Nick Seitz, Golf Digest May 1992.

The irony is heavier than a partner who hasn't helped on a single hole. As the world daily becomes more fitness minded, golfers are losing the right to walk and benefit from the life-extending exercise. More and more we're forced into motorized riding carts. Try that for sense.

We've known for a few years that walking the course helps control our weight and blood pressure. Now comes research asserting that walking has a positive effect on golfers' cholesterol ratios, about which you are more conversant than I.

The happy upshot is that walking when we play lowers our risk of heart disease and cancer, the two leading killers in our society. We're only talking life and death here--no big thing.

I have nothing against golf carts, except that they take the exercise out of the sport, ruin the pace of a round and belch nauseous fumes. You don't smell the flowers, you smell the carts.

I appreciate that carts make it possible for a small minority to play, and anybody with a note from a doctor should be allowed to ride. But I'm firmly pro-choice. We should be allowed to put one tarsus ahead of the other and enjoy the game for the healthful recreation its founders meant it to be.

Instead, we walkers increasingly are victimized by a loose conspiracy of real-estate developers, course owners and operators and course designers.

Most developers want to stretch the course to unwalkable proportions to gain housing lots. It isn't unusual during a round of development golf to have to cross four streets and cut through a couple of patios. And if there's a more grating sensation than spikes scraping across pavement I haven't suffered it.

Course owners and operators say they need the extra revenue golf carts generate. Budgets are drawn with an unwieldy dependence on cart fees.
Resorts, with few exceptions, are the worst promoters of "cartball," as former U.S. Golf Association president Sandy Tatum rightfully disparages it.

Course designers share culpability. They seldom stand up for walking tradition when negotiating a project, and par-10 distance between green and the next tee is no longer rare. Courses are being designed for carts. Yes, tighter environmental regulations are a factor, but not the main one.

The main one is--what else?--money. Carts purportedly mean more of it. But we have enough creative financial minds in our industry to figure out how to give golfers an option to walk and not destroy 13,000 bottom lines.

The next time the National Golf Foundation calls a summit, it should make this a key agenda topic. Walking's more important for the game's future than projecting overblown numbers of new courses and golfers.

The alternatives to riding are more viable than we hear. Using a good caddie is still the best way to play golf. We are told repeatedly it's too difficult to put together a caddie program nowadays. Don't tell that to Caves Valley, a new club in Maryland. The president there made caddies a priority, and his professionals recruited at area schools, and then trained the young people, some of whom had never played golf.

The members must take caddies, and are delighted to. They proudly relate the case of Bob Linck, who had a graduate degree in finance but couldn't find a job in the recession and so began caddieing at Caves Valley. Linck carried a couple of times for Trip Dryden, who owns an oil company. Dryden liked Linck so much he found a job for him at Dryden Oil. Linck never could have got a job interview with Dryden, but had him one-on-one for two rounds of golf.

If we want to bring new golfers into the game, and we should, let's bring them in through caddieing. Isn't that how most of us started? It may require a special effort like that at Caves Valley--but not an unreasonable one.

When caddies aren't available, walkers should be able to rent pullcarts (or motorcaddies). The British call them trolleys and use them at British Open site Muirfield and virtually every other venue of note. The exclusive Somerset Hills Country Club in New Jersey, where U.S. Golf Associations executives disport themselves, offers pullcarts, no stigma attached.

I'm assuming that no amount of impassioned rhetoric is going to persuade many courses to let us walk and carry our own slim bags in prime time. But why don't more places at least permit it after, say, 3 p.m.?

Walking is the most advocated, most popular form of exercise for the 1990s.
Let's put it back in golf and be fitter to enjoy the game longer. If God had meant for golfers to ride, he'd have given us wheels.