THE MAN WITH SQUARE BALLS
…or reminiscences of some misspent times on the driving range.
 

    Your editor is a generous soul when he’s issuing deadlines. Flexible as a whippy shaft; they allow a writer time for reflection and contain no actual threat of death. This I like. He suggested my theme for this piece might be “driving ranges, a personal odyssey”. As a golfer of no great merit for fifty or more years, I’ve served my time on the practice ground and have the arthritis to prove it, so misspent times is, I think, rather more appropriate. Thanks to those long hours, honing mind and body to perfection and dedicated purpose, I’ve cultivated a swing that for its comic qualities entertains better than the best of “Seinfeld”. I beg my partners not to laugh until after I’ve hit the ball. Now I prefer just to think about practice, playing great rounds in my mind and the hell with reality.
 
     The life of a sports writer, as my friends constantly remind me, is one long round of pleasure. We are pampered and privileged. Having ranged the world, my boast is that I’ve pitched up at the best and seen the rest. There are just a couple that remain forever indelible. One such, a range located in Scotland’s Kingdom of Fife, stands supreme. For a start, I knew I was going to get on famously when the secretary of the club I was  applying to join told me, straight-faced; “we have a grand scheme here for the lassies; they get to tee up on Thursday’s between 11.30 and noon.”
 
    This was the sixties, don’t forget, the time of Spitfires, Spalding Dots, Slazenger 279s and the faithful Dunlop ‘65’; a ball which came individually wrapped in menacing black cellophane. Unwrapping a ‘65’ on the first tee suggested you meant business; a sensuous, up-staging affair that could put a player one ahead before a single ball was struck. Such seriousness of intent meant also that you simply had to hit a few practice shots. Limber up, as they say.   
 
 
    Picture the scene. An elongated wooden shed divorced from the golf course, a sward of flattish meadowland; a teeing area with the option of bare earth or sisal matting — and a captive audience. What the old pro (we’ll call him Angus) had was a veritable gold mine; fuelled by a steady influx of members, day-trippers, holiday residents staying at the nearby Golf Hotel, summertime wannabe golfers over from Glasgow and Edinburgh and kids encouraged by their parents to disappear for the day. There was interest aplenty and the canny fellow was determined to keep it that way. Sophisticated it was not. For a few coins one bought a basket, or a rusty bucket, or in some instances a cardboard box, all filled with pick-ups. Balls were not counted; rather the issue was guesswork by volume or weight, and it was no bonus if one ended up with six more than the other fellow.
But, like all ranges, balls had a habit of disappeared. If the loss of a ball meant a dip in profit margins, Angus needed a way to ease his pain. There came, in one magical moment of inspiration, the perfect solution. One can imagine the fateful day; Angus rummaging in the shop, grumbling that the range pick-up barrel was getting lighter, and muttering “I’ll show the little buggers I mean business’’. There and then Angus decided he would make his range balls utterly unworthy of the golf course proper; he would make them theft-proof, he would make them square! Well, I malign the man a bit, for they were not exactly square, which would be a trifle silly, but they were not exactly round either. I still have one in my golf memorabilia collection, a treasured conversation piece.
 
    What Angus did, [and what a relief this practice never caught on], was to run a rasp file over each ball a few times, giving each a unique and never to be repeated flight pattern. A few would fly half way decent, while others would dive like seagulls at feeding time. Some would zigzag. None ever could soar majestically, following the straight and narrow. What one believed was a controlled hook, which of course one tried to cultivate, would with the very next shot be a slice or maybe a dive-bomber. These missives not only weaved from side to side, they rose and dipped, like young swallows on their first solo flight. These were man-made wounds that guaranteed absolute security. None ever went missing, except for my single memento…  
 
    My next reminiscence is of a most unusual range located in Seoul, the South Korean capital city that nestles in the valley of Nam San, or South Mountain. Jet-lagged after a tiresome flight, yet wide-awake at 3.00 am, nevertheless I was trying to sleep. Disturbed by a distant rumbling sound, like that of a muted bowling ball, from my hotel room I beheld an area floodlit to the point of bedazzlement. For a moment I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. You’ve guessed it; it was a driving range, but not as we know it. This was no ordinary practice facility, but rather one set in a craggy outcrop of granite mountain face, upward and outward and steep enough to challenge a good climber. Two tiers of some 50 bays each fronted the rock face, which was about 250 yards away, thus every ball struck was uphill and guaranteed to return by force of gravity.  As these balls found their limit they rolled back to base, reaching their destination via man-made channels before being washed and dried on a continuous conveyor belt. Unusual not just for its location, the second surprise was to find dozens if not scores of city business folk, male and female, thrashing away as if there was no tomorrow. Fact is that at three in the morning their tomorrow had arrived, anyway. So, for them a nifty way of passing the night by way of energetic entertainment, followed by a breakfast of sticky rice and the famous cabbage-based delicacy known as Kimchi, before scampering back to their offices before nine.
 
The author, David White, is a freelance golf writer, though perhaps better known these days for his exploits with a variety of aged Porsches, with which he annoys dogs and terrorizes the female residents of Bexhill-on-Sea.