Ben A.
Yelp
Since 2001, my three good buddies and I have gotten together once a year to shoot a round of golf for our annual Turkey Cup. Literally, it's a large glass cup with the word TURKEY emblazoned on it, set atop a trophy, and the winner's name is engraved upon it. Each year, we play at a different course; for 2017, we played the Nay course at Brookside.
Yes friends, for a mere $60, you can enjoy a ride through a drought-forsaken golf course bisected by a massive concrete flood control channel and peppered with large swaths of avian feces left by no fewer than three species of waterfowl. There's nothing quite as satisfying as a chip shot from the fairway that stops short of the green because it landed in a spray of goose poop. Where's the ball washer?
Lots of STUFF lying around on the course-- light arrays for Rose Bowl parking (did I mention they PARK CARS ON THE COURSE for Rose Bowl and events??? I'm sure that keeps things nice around here), machinery, trash in the bushes, superfluous amounts of leaf litter and tree trimmings sort of just thrown along the edges... cluttered looking. One could argue that if I play better, I wouldn't have seen all the stuff along the edges... Alas, I don't play that often or that well. A $60 course should be a little more forgiving in my opinion. I should not have to negotiate a tractor to play from the rough.
We were a slow foursome, admittedly... lost balls and other rusty play made us offer to let the team behind us play through. They declined twice, but still whined like kindergarteners that we were playing slow. So much fun.
The highlight of the round was the 10th hole green that would not hold a putt. No matter where it was hit, unless you sunk it, the ball rolled onto the fringe. If I wanted to play mini golf, I would have gone to Skandia. Even the Marshal said it was nonsense, and told us to take a two-putt score on the hole and play on.
Playing lousy golf like I do, I'm not complaining about my poor game-- that's not the kind of thing I get upset about, and I don't like golf enough to waste entire Saturdays wandering around a park with 18 holes drilled in it. Still, I had an A-OK time playing golf with my buddies, which Mark Twain described as a "good walk spoiled."
I guess what I mean is that even in our drought, I've played at cleaner, greener, and seldom-meaner places. Next year, we will.