This is Masters Week. Being a born and bred Georgia boy, and from a golfing family, to me The Masters is A Tradition Like No Other and Masters Sunday is a National Holiday. My family used to gather at my and my late wife Marie’s house on Masters Sunday for pimento cheese and chicken salad sandwiches, beer, wine and cocktails. We would put five dollars each into a white Masters porkpie hat and draw the names of every player that had made the cut. Then, we would sit down at 4:00 pm and watch the tournament. Whoever had the name of the player that won would win the pot. And the winner of the tournament would get a green jacket, a lot of cash and his name etched on the big silver trophy and in history.
That being said, in this edition of Car Talk we are going to look at another golfing tradition; The Golf Cart. Or, buggy, as it is called across the pond. When you play a round in the U.K., you don’t get a cart, you “hire a buggy.” I’m sorry, but “buggy” just doesn’t sound right to me. A “buggy” is something you push around the grocery store. Of course, they also call a dump truck a “tipper lorry.” Just doesn’t have the same ring, does it? I mean, let’s face it, “dump truck” just sounds more heavy duty than “tipper lorry.” My grandsons had a big yellow Tonka they kept at my house. They called it their “dump twuck.” I may be wrong, but if they were out playing in the sandbox with some of the neighborhood kids and called it a “tipper lorry” as opposed to a “dump twuck” they probably would have gotten beat up. But I digress…
The first golf carts gained widespread use in the mid Nineteen Fifties. Most were electric. Companies like Cushman, E-Z-Go, Club Car and even Sears and Roebuck produced them. Gas powered models first appeared sometime in the late Fifties.
Today, golf carts are used for any and all things, a truly functional utility vehicle. Many communities are now built with the golf cart as the primary mode of transportation. Peachtree City, Georgia was one the first, employing a one hundred mile network of paths. Residents can get to homes, shopping centers and parks via the paths that wind through the wooded scenery. McIntosh High School even has a parking lot for golf carts.
When I was a child, my Great Uncle Leonard, who lived on a farm in Carl, Georgia, suffered a debilitating stroke. He and Aunt Sabra’s house was about a half mile from the mailbox. They bought a golf cart so that Uncle Leonard could pick up the mail and ride around the property. When visiting, it was always a treat for me to get to drive the golf cart to the road, retrieve the mail and bring it back.
The first golf course Marie and I played regularly was Idlewood, which was a public course in Lithonia, Georgia. Idlewood was a course I could write volumes on, but today we will just stick to the carts that were in use when we first started playing there in the early Eighties. The manufacturer slips my mind, but I think they must have been the originals from when the course opened in ’63. They were the three wheeled jobs that you steered with a handlebar. There were no tops on them so, due to the way Idlewood was laid out, you needed a crash helmet while in the the middle of the course. Seriously, it was not unusual to be lining up a shot and have a ball land next to you, sliced by some hacker two fairways over.
I cannot tell you the number of times Marie tried to kill me in a golf cart. Extremely impatient, it is a wonder she was able to play golf at all, let alone embrace it and excel at it. She always drove because I dawdled too much. After hitting a shot, I simply did not move fast enough getting back in the cart. She was notorious for flooring the gas when I had one foot on the floorboard and one in the fairway, my rear end somewhere between the side rail and the seat. This would work okay with a gas powered cart, where there is somewhat of a delay from when you stomp the gas and the engine responds. In an electric cart that responds immediately, however, it can be deadly. She wrenched my back and twisted my ankles more times than I care to count.
She actually threw me off the back of a cart once. We had played Sugar Creek Golf Course with our friend Bob and one of the assistant pros at the course. Marie and I rode, the other two walked. It was a scorching hot June day and after the round, Bob rode in the cart with us back to the clubhouse, and I stood on the back with the bags, holding onto the frame for the top. In those days, to get from the eighteenth green to the clubhouse, you drove across the parking lot. I had a bottle of Michelob in one hand and held onto the frame with the other. Marie started to swerve back and forth, yelling, “Ooh, doesn’t that breeze feel good!” The swerving threw me to one side because I was only holding on with one hand. I yelled, “Marie, stop it!”, but she gave it one last yank and off I went, rolling across the parking lot. I got pretty skinned up, but, I am proud to say, never spilled a drop of my Michelob. The lesson here? Never ride on the back of a golf cart. Especially with a bottle of beer in one hand and a reckless English woman driving.
I was playing with some friends at Georgia National once, and my partner Donnie told me to pull over after leaving the first tee. He got out of the cart and pulled the hatch door above the motor off. “What are you doing?” I asked. “I’m taking the governor off this thing,” he said. It is amazing how fast a golf cart will go without a governor. A couple of times I almost turned it over. After the round, we pulled over and he hooked the governor back up before we got to the cart barn. “Do me a favor, Donnie,” I said. “What’s that?”, he replied. “Whatever you do,” I said, “don’t EVER show Marie how to do that!” … Still Cruisin’! –J.
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