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Eisenhower Red cart policy: Take a hike

Erik Boland

July 12, 2007

Perhaps a group of Nassau County politicians experienced one of those plodding, when-will-it-end, six-hour rounds of golf.

Or one of them took a duck-hooked drive from an adjoining tee box straight to the head.

How else to explain the recent inanity that mandates, starting this Monday, the use of carts on Eisenhower Red, which is run by the county?

Really, all involved should label this sham of an idea for what it is: a barefaced money grab. It certainly isn't to speed up the pace of play, as the county claims.

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Anyone who has spent even a little time on a golf course knows one of the game's myths is that carts equal faster play. Plenty of walking foursomes make their way around a golf course in less that 4 1/2 hours. More common are the cart-driving oafs that successfully make the groups behind them feel as if they've entered a golf version of "War and Peace."

Slow play knows no boundaries of sex or skill level. Slow play is slow play, cart or no cart.

We've all trailed golfers who take six practice swings from the fairway, chilly-dip a 3-wood 20 feet, then repeat the ridiculous routine several times before reaching the green in hopes of saving quadruple-bogey. There are plenty of 5- and 10-handicappers with the same mind-numbing habits. These people could be helicoptered from shot to shot and still take six hours to finish.

Then there's the group - which also includes high and low-handicapped players - engaged in a high-stakes $2 Nassau, complete with golfers lining up 3-foot putts as if they're Tiger Woods trying to save par on the backstretch at Augusta.

And there's the collection of spelunkers scouring the deep rough - usually in their carts - for errant shots, rarely finding their ball but quite content to dig out someone else's slice job.

"Hey, I just found three Pro V 1s. Hardly used!"

Meanwhile, the group behind passes time on the tee box pulling out their fingernails.

If the county wants to do something useful for golf, find a way of solving the above nonsense, not penalizing players who walk.

Nassau's incongruity of thinking here is borderline amusing. The county has spent the past few months pushing its "Healthy Nassau" initiative ... then comes up with a plan that actually decreases the physical activity of some of its residents.

Untold numbers of golfers, many of them elderly but not all, choose to walk because of the exercise. According to the county's own Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS), released in early May, 58.5 percent of Nassau residents are overweight or obese. Walking, doctors continually say, is among the more cardiovascular-friendly activities there is. The county should be encouraging rather than discouraging it, but apparently "Healthy Nassau" includes everything except golf on the Red.

Part of the county's party line is this impacts the Red only and that players can walk the White or Blue Courses should they desire. But if this is solely the pace-of-play issue the county says it is, is the message that slow play is tolerable, and by logical extension, desired on the other courses?

Please.

No matter how this mandate gets dressed up, it benefits only the county's coffers, not the county's golfers. Carts have been required on the Red on weekends for the better part of the last year and as that extra money rolled in, the county saw an opportunity. And it wasn't to get more players on Eisenhower's premier course, another ludicrous contention.

Like many in the workforce, politicians presumably like to take an early afternoon on occasion to hit the links.

Fine. Play all the golf you want. Enough with legislating it.