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I hear you Todd, I drove past on the way to the Murray GC on Sunday morning. Strangely I didn’t notice anything except some body letting his dog stretch by the road side. I didn’t see the damage until CTV showed the incident on the boob tube. They had started the repairs to the fairway. I played the new 9 only once this year and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are a few things I’d like to do to those little punks — only a couple of them are legal…
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how about your back yard???(behind the dorm)
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There’s no upside to this story, no happy ending – unless you count that they caught these guys.
On a related note, my wife related an interesting story of damage and retribution yesterday. She was playing alone behind two 20-something guys in a cart, and on the 5th hole noticed a cloud of dust rising from behind the green and spotted the pair doing donuts in a cornfield behind the green in their cart. I’m sure the farmer, who planed that field last week, just loves the golf course. The two losers proceeded to the 6th tee, which requires a long shot over a marshy area that is often dry enough to walk through, though roped off to carts at all times (there is a paved path around it). After hitting they took off straight into the marsh in spite of the fact that there was standing water in it left over from a flood last weekend. The cart splashed to a stop in the first puddle. They got out and pushed, up to their ankles in mud, drove it a few feet deeper into the marsh and finally gave up and hauled out their heavy tour-style bags. This is naturally the point on the course fartherst from the clubhouse. After stumbling through the remainder of the 6th hole they simply hiked in. They did not look like they were having fun any more. I have no idea what they told the guy in the pro shop, but when my wife came in there was one more sticky note with two more names on a list of people who would not be getting future cart or equipment rentals. (I don’t know whether it’s the fact that I live in a college town or just general crazyness, but in the past year since I’ve been playing regularly I’ve seen carts run into ponds, left down a steep bank and almost in a fast flowing river that runs through the course, and flipped on their sides. The greenskeeper just sighs and hooks up a winch to the tractor/mower and pulls them out, probably glad the jerks weren’t doing donuts on the greens.) — http://home.att.net/~wamontgomery )
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BUMMER!
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Friday night, some small-dicked cocksuckers took a small wheelbase truck with muddin’ tires and turned that hole into WWII-era Europe, complete with trenches. They started by doing donuts on the back tee box, proceeded to use the first fairway bunker as a jump ramp a la Jackass: the Movie, tore up every inch of the fairway they could, and then…god, the green. The green was *beautiful*. Subtle swails, gentle breaks all over the place; held everything from a long iron to a wedge; and bumped your ball into the bunker if you hit it where you knew not to.
A few years ago some kids (I presume) wrote "golfers are pigs", "class warfare" and various leftist and obscene phrases over the greens of at least 3 golf courses in Santa Cruz. I think they used gasoline. Whatever it was, it killed the grass and took several months to grow back. The funny thing (if you could call it funny) was that these courses were all muni’s. Not too many upper class golfers playing there.
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A few years ago some kids (I presume) wrote "golfers are pigs", "class warfare" and various leftist and obscene phrases over the greens of at least 3 golf courses in Santa Cruz. I think they used gasoline. Whatever it was, it killed the grass and took several months to grow back. The funny thing (if you could call it funny) was that these courses were all muni’s. Not too many upper class golfers playing there.
The kids weren’t interested in class warfare, they were interested in graffiti. It was more of a "what shall we write", than "Where do we make our statement".
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There’s no upside to this story, no happy ending – unless you count that they caught these guys. There are a bunch of farms around my course, and it looks like the boys buried the truck in an unmarked stream – got it stuck to the axles and couldn’t get it out, and were frantically trying to get it out (with shovels they stole from the farm) when the cops arrived. So they got arrested, and…well, nobody knows what they’ll be charged with. Rick, one of the greenskeepers, estimates the damages at at least 150K, and that’s if they manage to repair the green. It’s gonna go way up if they have to do the green from scratch. Word around the campfire is that it was minors in a stolen truck. I hope that’s just rumor, ’cause if it’s true, they’ll get off light – and have their records sealed at 16.
While minors may get a shorter sentence under less onerous conditions, most courts will still impose full restitution regardless of age. IOW, they’re gonna be poor for a long time… As they deserve… Eliyahu
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I’d love to talk big, talk about what I’d do to these kids if I got my hands on ‘em…hell, all of us would. Best suggestion I heard was that they’d be made to pick range balls by hand the entire summer – while the range was in use. But those are empty threats, empty promises.
When some jackass decided that the 13th green was a great place to practice pitch shots, complete with divots, my first thought was the guy ought to be staked down while the greenskeeper practiced chip shots on his face, but in thinking about it I think the real problem is these people don’t realize just how hard it is to fix the damage, and the punishment ought to be simply to have to fix the thing — not to pay someone to fix it, but to actually have to go out there and fix it themselves, smoothing out the damage, reseeding, watering every day, and generally being chained to that plot of earth until it is indistinguishable from what it started as. Never find a judge that creative though. As a side note one of the things you might do while the anger is hot is try to get the local community to ban the machines that caused the damage. The things might serve some purpose on a farm, but they serve no purpose anywhere else. — http://home.att.net/~wamontgomery )
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So I’m out for my usual 18 on Sunday morning; little heathen that I am, it’s my flavor of church. I get hooked up with three of the members and we’re sent off onto the new nine that just opened this year. So as we’re walking off #1 green (where I’ve managed to take a triple bogey 7 thanks to one deadly sh*nk in the greenside trap that kinda flew the green and landed in the swamp behind), Wayne turns to me and says "You hear about what happened to number two?" I shrug, say "Nope", assuming that maybe that patch of grass that was dying by the second set of traps finally hardened over. Something minor. He says "You’re not gonna believe it", and leaves it at that. When I saw the slashes of brown crossing over what is usually a very lush and long fairway (612 yards), and the obvious donut on the back tee box, and the white maintenance truck unloading the pounder up by the green…I thought I was going to be sick. Friday night, some small-dicked cocksuckers took a small wheelbase truck with muddin’ tires and turned that hole into WWII-era Europe, complete with trenches. They started by doing donuts on the back tee box, proceeded to use the first fairway bunker as a jump ramp a la Jackass: the Movie, tore up every inch of the fairway they could, and then…god, the green. The green was *beautiful*. Subtle swails, gentle breaks all over the place; held everything from a long iron to a wedge; and bumped your ball into the bunker if you hit it where you knew not to. It now has foot-and-a-half deep tire ruts cut into it. That green is never going to be the same, unless they tear the whole thing out and start from scratch…which means that hole may be on a temp green for at least this year. Right now they’re trying to repair it. If the repairs ‘work’, it won’t be the same; if the repairs don’t work, they’re wasting time. I don’t know. There’s no upside to this story, no happy ending – unless you count that they caught these guys. There are a bunch of farms around my course, and it looks like the boys buried the truck in an unmarked stream – got it stuck to the axles and couldn’t get it out, and were frantically trying to get it out (with shovels they stole from the farm) when the cops arrived. So they got arrested, and…well, nobody knows what they’ll be charged with. Rick, one of the greenskeepers, estimates the damages at at least 150K, and that’s if they manage to repair the green. It’s gonna go way up if they have to do the green from scratch. Word around the campfire is that it was minors in a stolen truck. I hope that’s just rumor, ’cause if it’s true, they’ll get off light – and have their records sealed at 16. Tor Hill did this new nine *right* – it’s as if Stanley Thompson designed Royal Birkdale. You’ve got well-placed traps, you’ve got fescue and junk that you can still try to hit out of, you’ve got to deal with wind…it’s up there with my favorite places to play. They spent two years building it when they could have done it in one, ensuring that it’d be both a true test of golf and in pristine, utterly playable shape from day one. Hole two lasted three weeks. I’d love to talk big, talk about what I’d do to these kids if I got my hands on ‘em…hell, all of us would. Best suggestion I heard was that they’d be made to pick range balls by hand the entire summer – while the range was in use. But those are empty threats, empty promises. It’s not going to make us feel any better in the long run, anyway, ’cause every time we step to that tee box, we’re gonna remember. Every time a ball kicks funny, our fault or not, we’re gonna curse ‘em out. They’ve established a legacy in somewhere around twenty minutes. Sorry about the ramble…but I figured you folks’d understand. Todd McGillivray – http://cplhicks.tripod.com/ Emailing me? tmcg at sasktel dot net "I heard this quote the other day which I think sums it up: there’s plenty of room at the top, but there’s nowhere to sit." – Padraig Harrington