Fore!

Golf has always been a rich man’s game.  Why do you think it attracted the likes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller?  But with friends like that, the game needed to at least pretend it was a sport for the masses.  Hence, the career of Arnold Palmer as the everyman hero.  Before Palmer, in Chicago municipal golf courses did the trick.  Back when they were a couple without kids, my parents played one of these courses not far from the house.  Random clubs found their way into the garage and under the porch when I was a boy.

We now live in times when the good must give way to the spectacular.  Which brings us to the news last week that two adjacent public courses—South Shore and Jackson Park—will be turned into one super course in order to attract major PGA tournaments; Tiger Woods has been enlisted as chief designer.  The project comes with an estimated cost of $30 million, 80 percent of which will come from private funding.  Right.

Somehow, this idea is going to revive interest in golf as well as the South Side of Chicago, to which I can only say, Good luck with that.  People have this way of hanging onto outdated notions about places, especially my hometown.  Chicago, Wrigley Field excepted, was and always will be the playground of Capones past and present.  The White Sox could draw just under three million fans in 2006, and people still whispered the new stadium was in a “bad” neighborhood, whatever that meant.  But maybe Tiger Woods will lead a South Side renaissance, together with the Obama Presidential Library.

What I want to know is how the plan will affect the average duffer.  The winter rate for 18 holes at Jackson Park is $22, with cart, and $13 for 9 holes at South Shore, with cart.  The park district says it wants to keep greens’ fees for the new course under $50.  But, guys, they already are.