Are You Playing Golf as Often as You Used To?

     F.I.S.H. That's how I feel about the Tiger Woods incident. Time for The Commish to move on.

     Are you playing as much golf as you did two or three years ago? We aren't.

     I enjoy playing but for some reason it is getting harder to justify paying the increasing costs. The BGA used to play every Sunday morning at one of the local munis such as Rocky Point, Longview or Diamond Ridge. We would make tee times two weeks in advance and the four of us would show up at the crack of dawn and play a relatively quick 18. It was fun and on the way home I would pick up some bagels and be home in time for Mrs. Commish to wake up and have a late breakfast. Fees were under $20 and we would pull our walk-behind carts and have a good time. This time was blocked out in our schedules and we had family stuff planned around our golf games.

     Then things changed, and not for the better.

     Greens fees were increased to over $40 but they included a cart. This way Baltimore County could pretend that rates really had not increased very much since before greens fees and a cart were $37. After a year they began letting you walk again, but with no decrease in the fees. Now the Commish prefers to walk but if he has to pay for a cart then he is going to ride in a cart.

     What this has meant is that we used to play 40 to 45 rounds a year as a foursome (at least 160 total rounds every year) and now we don't play at all on the weekends. We tried playing every other weekend or once a month but we could never get all of our schedules synchronized. Once the wives knew that we were not playing every Sunday at 6:00 a.m. they began planning what we would be doing on the weekends. It's not a knock on the wives because we in the BGA are such creatures of habit that we couldn't keep track of when we were to play and when we weren't either. It's a shame but for better or worse, the increased cost off golf has brought about the demise of our much beloved weekly game.

     We have resisted losing our twilight BGA event at Mt. Pleasant Golf Course where we play a 9-hole round every week at 5:34 p.m. (give or take eight minutes). This has been going on since 1991 and even though we have to all take carts (or at least pay for them anyway) we are hanging on to this last vestige of not letting anything get in the way of our golfing. Long live the Race for the Cheeseburger.

     Before going on with the rest of your day, please take a moment to remember this Day That Will Live in Infamy and those that lost their lives in the war that followed. Because of their sacrifice I can complain about the petty thing in life that bug me.