Pesky golfers behaving very badly

The first girl I ever proposed to marry was Ngina. She was my best friend in the whole wide world then.

I couldn’t wait to break the news to my mother.

Ngina and I walked to where my mother was sitting and told her that we were going to get married.

My mother smiled gently and told us in a very calm and affectionate way that she would not object to our getting married but we needed to finish school and get jobs.

If we still wanted to get married then, she would gladly give us her blessings.

My mother would have chosen to start with a lecture on how it was socially unacceptable to marry my own sister… yes, Ngina is my sister… yeah, go ahead and judge me!

In my defence, I was an innocent boy of six and Ngina was 4 and half when I proposed to marry her.

There are sins of omission and commission on many golf courses today that many a time leave me opened mouthed wondering at the ignorance of golfers today.

There are people who claim to be golfers of good standing but they are always doing things that can only be considered as abominations.

The worst part is that they don’t even seem to notice that they have done anything wrong.

The greens are the most expensive lawns on any golf course.

To keep them in good condition, green keepers spend so much of their time and resources available to them to maintain these putting surfaces.

It is a pleasant experience when we putt on well maintained greens.

There are a few golfers who need to be exorcised of the evil spirits that give them the impression that they can do as they wish on the green.

Why would anyone step on any other player’s line of putt willy-nilly? Even if you have a six-inch putt left to make par, if your stance is going to be on another golfer’s line of putt, please mark your ball and wait your turn.

The only exception would be if you are invited by the player to go ahead and assault their line of putt while you hole out.

The other abominable act on greens is the lack of concern for pitch marks whether one has made them or not.

Here is something I learnt a few years ago; if a pitch mark is properly repaired within 10 minutes of being made, it will not be noticeable within 48 hours.

Whereas one that is repaired after 24 hours, will take anything between seven to 10 days to heal properly. If you have a scarred green, then you have many golf sinners.

While on the topic of desecrating greens, was I dreaming or did I see a recording of President Donald Trump driving a golf cart on a green recently? I guess being the leader of the most powerful nation on earth gives him immunity from the norms that we all abide by.

The other day I had the misfortune of having my ball in a corner of a bunker that can only be described as the ‘devil’s armpit’.

The ball was in a position where I could not swing my club as it was too close to the edge.

The only reason that the ball did not roll back to the middle of the bunker where I would have had a decent swing was because it was nestled in a footprint.

A fellow had left a nasty footprint without smoothing it out. There will be a special corner in hell for the golfers that do not smooth the bunkers after extricating their balls from these sand traps.

Since we are required to play the ball as it lies and the course as we find it, fellows who don’t repair the bunkers just make the lives of those that follow in their footsteps a misery.

It is a show of bad golf upbringing to continually commit sins on golf courses.

The result of “golf-inbreeding” where new golfers don’t mix with seasoned golfers to learn good etiquette is to be blamed for all the bad habits that we are currently witnessing.

The most unfortunate thing is that clubs are no longer encouraging new golfers to learn the correct etiquette.

Good exposure to the acceptable norms will help us weed out the bad habits.