Golf Course Pet Peeves

[695MB]

1. Golfers that don't fix their divots on the greens.

2. Poorly marked yardage markers.


3. Rocky sand bunkers.

4. Non-raked thick dead grass clippings that cover the rough! I lost 3 balls in this s*** and if it wasn't for the dead grass clipping I could have found my ball and played it.

[glauser]

None of these annoy me enough to stop playing, but I have a laundry list:

1) Not varying pin locations.
2) Not having a color-coded flag scheme or something to tell me what part of the green the hole is on
3) Uneven tee boxes
4) Martials who do nothing. Or come up to my threesome with people shooting between 75-85 and say we need to speed it up when there is a foursome who is struggling to break 120 ahead of us.
5) Stacking people on the teebox 7 minutes apart
6) Inadequate yardage markers (only 150 markers, really?)
7) Sprinkler heads without yardages
8) When they don't have the back tees on the back tee boxes
9) I could go on, and on, and on, and on...

But again, none of these really upset me. More in hindsight than anything.

[EdgewoodJones]

I love it when they don't line up the tee markers with the fairway / target area. Nothing I enjoy more than walking to the box and finding the markers lined up 40 yards left of the middle of the fairway, but in direct line with the OB stakes and a large patch of trees. Just thinking about it now brings a smile to my face.

[FatSlice]

Useless marshals.

[xabia]

When you are playing a round and the course is preparing for an outing or event later in the day and the course workers and superintendents will not stop making themselves visible on every hole! I had someone driving down the path in my line of sight, idling behind me or inspecting the middle of the fairway on about 75% of the holes I played yesterday. I understand courses need to be taken care of, but on some level golf should be quite enjoyable and my ability to focus should not constantly be intruded upon by mowers or dudes in walkie talkies. I paid a greens fee as well

*I know I know I should be so great that I can block out every distraction and play perfect golf like a PGA pro.. but you know what? I am not

[FatSlice]

[quote name='xabia' timestamp='1316537882' post='3577404']
When you are playing a round and the course is preparing for an outing or event later in the day and the course workers and superintendents will not stop making themselves visible on every hole! I had someone driving down the path in my line of sight, idling behind me or inspecting the middle of the fairway on about 75% of the holes I played yesterday. I understand courses need to be taken care of, but on some level golf should be quite enjoyable and my ability to focus should not constantly be intruded upon by mowers or dudes in walkie talkies. I paid a greens fee as well

*I know I know I should be so great that I can block out every distraction and play perfect golf like a PGA pro.. but you know what? I am not
[/quote]

I ponied up for a round at Pasatiempo and that's exactly what was going on, including tent sponsors driving all over, etc. I wrote the GM and complained and he comp'd me a round. Worked out OK, but, yeah, it's annoying!

[Full Tilt]

I would say hard-pan that is not staked off. Not saying I should have the best lie but come on the pros don't even practice those shots.

[vgagolfer]

[quote name='JAVink' timestamp='1307135957' post='3283064']
I hate, HATE when you don't get important course information when making a tee time or before paying. Played at a local muni for the first time a week ago with my stepfather. After paying, the proshop girl informed us that only 9 of 18 holes were open--due to flooding--and handed us a piece of paper with 9 seemingly random holes on it. She told us just to play those holes twice to get our 18 in. Didn't matter much, I suppose, but I would have liked to know when I called and most certainly before I paid.
[/quote]

LOL, happened to me too. Never went back to the course again. Felt like they were hiding it until after we paid.

[vgagolfer]

Trees in the middle of the fairway! WHAT?!

[StevenF]

[quote name='vgagolfer' timestamp='1316803552' post='3585719']
Trees in the middle of the fairway! WHAT?!
[/quote]

I've learned to love them.

[John3Daly]

[quote name='vgagolfer' timestamp='1316803552' post='3585719']
Trees in the middle of the fairway! WHAT?!
[/quote]

Ironically, that's usually when I'm the most accurate.

[raymo]

For me I'd say

1. Dudes that insist on playing the Blues or Blacks when they drive the ball 150 yards and crooked. They are the same ones who are waiting for the green to clear from 250 out even though theie drive was 150.
2. Marshall's and courses that allow said players above to continue playing from those tees
3. Courses that don't tell you that you are booked behind a ladies tournament or other such outing
4. Courses that forget to tell you they just aerated
5. Casual water everywhere in the middle of summer
6. Sending groups out 7 minutes apart

Like another poster said I'll still play but it would be nice if some of these issues didn't exist.

[ben w]

you guys get 7 minutes apart? around here it's 3-4 it feels like!

[DCSerafin]

Required Carts:Courses that require carts and then for varying reasons, have a "Cart Path Only" rule. That really helps the speed of play. The game was designed to be walked, If I want to walk, let me. I play a couple courses (infrequently because of this) that will not let me walk, even if I say I will pay the cart fee.

Incorrect Flag Placement: Courses with incorrectly placed flag markers. looking from the fairway thinking the hole is in the front only to get to the green to find a 70' putt waiting because it's in the back.... uggh.

Hidden Rocks: I love it when I hit a shot 1 yrd off the fairway and then take a chunk out of my 1 month old 60Deg wedge because I hit a rock hidden under the surface of the turf.

Lousy/inconsistant rough: Courses with rough the is inconsistant from hole to hole. I'll take 3" deep wet rye as long as it's the same everywhere on the cours, at least I know what to expect. Nothing worse then being 1-5 yds off the fairway (and usually within 50yds of the green) only to see your ball sitting in the middle of a bear spot in the rough. Good luck getting up and down from there.

[Jonnybagadonuts]

Iam a guy who will get really pissed off if a group in front me is playing extremely slow, However when it comes down to it i dont say anything to them and just ask to pass.

But i just got off playing eagle ridge golf course in NJ a few weeks ago and i just could not contain myself. This golf course is more of an upscale course so you would expect bad players
to tee it up at local muni's. But not this 30 something year old women wanted she to play at the big boys course.

So iam waiting on the back tees while she tees off from the red. Iall try to break this down as best as possible....


Hole par 4 18th 420yds

Drive 50yds
iron 5yds
iron 5yds into the rough
iron 5 yds
iron 5 yds
iron 5yds

ME= !!!HAY!!! PICK THE BALL UP NOW!!!!!!


gets frustrated throws ball 5 yds in the fairway
iron 5yds
iron 5yds into a bunker
bunker shot =fail
bunker shot=fail
bunker shot= SUCCESS............. 5yds
wedge= skulled 50 yds into rough
wedge
wedge
putt
putt
putt
putt
putt

All in all it took 20mins for me to tee off.



[b]To the lady somewhere out their in the garden state, You know who you are! GET SOME LESSONS!.[/b]

[John3Daly]

Slow play is the only thing that bothers me. The game is hard enough as it is, much less waiting 20 min between shots. I would never make it as a tour player. I'd want to kill mostly all of them.

[dustyshelf]

Groups of 5 to even 7 on my muni course, all thinking they are playing the PGA Championship, taking two to three looks before they putt. C'mon.

[DakineGolf]

The 4some of 15 handicappers playing the tips, 2 hitting provisionals than stopping at the cart girl, than our group being announced next on the first tee. Yikes.

[D2Doug]

the public I played this weekend, they had all the tee boxes set at the most unlevel points. It was almost impossible to get a flat lie with a driver in my hand, and on a par 3, I felt like my feet were falling into a hole behind me. That stinks that they can't do more than that for level box. I mean, these problems been here for years. I guess the new road that cuts through course in a few years, won't require tees though... sigh. I played this course for 30 years, and it looks like the state is going to take the course in a year or few.

[bermuda]

Tees not mowed and bunkers not raked and edged in some way, at least so that fennel isn't growing 2-3 feet tall along the border of the bunker. And when green complexes are watered so much or the areas in front of them drain so poorly that any shot short of the green plugs.

[Binks]

1) Sunflower seeds spit on greens
2) People playing the tips who do not belong there
3) Ball marks left on greens
4) Footprints in bunkers

[FatSlice]

Marshals that drive around ball hawking instead of moving people along.

[where did it go?]

[quote name='Full Tilt' timestamp='1316594006' post='3579306']
I would say hard-pan that is not staked off. Not saying I should have the best lie but come on the pros don't even practice those shots.
[/quote]

Around here because of the drought, they would have to stake off the entire blasted golf course.

[PhilsFanDrew]

[quote name='left handed pull cart' timestamp='1316014123' post='3563696']

Kind of a personal one, but pay per hole, I would rather spend an hour playing 3-4 holes vs on the range, if the course is slow let me go out for an hour, I would gladly spend 15 bucks for this vs 5 for range balls, but to have no 9 hole rates or cart only options keeps me off the course (and these are definitely not during primetime). My course has a perfect 4 hole loop that comes right back to the clubhouse.

I think overall, more flexibility and negotiation in green fees and memberships, I think struggling courses miss out on some opportunities by only allowing full green fees and memberships.
[/quote]

Totally agree with this. There is a local course that unfortunately is closing after this year that after 6PM it was $15 for as many holes as you can play. In June and July you could easily get at least 9 holes in with a twosome if there was no wait time. I am a relatively new golfer and I struggled with hitting balls above my feet and below my feet as well as playing from the rough and playing this course at that rate allowed me to practice on uneven lies that you can't get on the range. The range helped with shot placement and distance control but didn't give me work on my ball striking from lies that can only be experienced while playing a round. That deal was a bargain considering the weekday greens fees were $80 (open - noon).

[mat562]

[quote name='Croacka' timestamp='1307539638' post='3292410']
I hate fairway bunkers that are designed like greenside bunkers
You are 180 yards out, but the lip is so high, the best you can hit is a wedge[/quote]

Funnily enough, I hate fairway bunkers which are just large, flat, effectively lipless expanses of sand which have zero punishment potential and from which you can happily belt a 2-iron or spoon away from pretty much any position within the 'bunker'. Other than using them as aim points from the tee, it seems an utterly pointless waste of sand, to me. A total non-hazard. I don't advocate that every golf course go the St Andrews route and start putting in six feet-deep bunkers that are about half-a-dozen square yards in area, but a bunker should at least be some sort of hazard, in my opinion. A half-a-shot penalty, and all that. Some bunkers should certainly offer up the possibility of reaching the green, but others shouldn't. A good design should have a mix of both. If you're 180 yards out and fuming that all you can hit is a wedge, from a bunker that you knew full well was rather deep, then the moral of the story is that you should have hit a shot from the tee that minimised the chances of the ball finding that particular bunker. What courses shouldn't have is umpteen bunkers that are just there for ornamentation; bits of sandy-hued frippery beside the fairways that are beautifully raked and which just make hitting the green with whichever club you like just a smidgeon more difficult than it is from the turf. What's the point of that? They even do them around greens, now, too. One of my local courses features several greenside bunkers where it's possible to both take and happily escape the 'bunker' (or 'smear') with a putter if your sand play's a bit dodgy. With all due respect to golfers who haven't mastered the splash shot, that's just plain ridiculous.

I also detest internal out of bounds. It looks and feels contrived and I've never liked it. It's just a lazy Rent-a-Hazard that's often used to shore up a fundamentally weak hole design. It also looks a bugger when you've got a row of white stakes running down one side of a hole without the merest hint of a boundary line or some other barrier with some permanence about it anywhere to be seen. Oh, and when you ask a committee member what's going on, they often reply 'It's there to protect other golfers on the 10th hole from players who try to cut the corner or drive the green.' Righto. It's all clear now. I never knew that Star Trek technology was with us already, and we had the capacity to build invisible force fields that extend vertically upward from the turf and are able to stop an errant golf ball in its tracks, mid-flight. It's pointless shouting 'Fore!' really if you happen to waft one a bit right from the tee. The magical white stakes will stop someone getting a ball in the face if I have a waft at the green and cut it wide.

Oh, and 1980s US Open-style set-ups, too. They don't necessarily crop up in Blighty, nor too often in the amateur game, but they were out there for years for the big boys. Carnoustie in 1999 was probably the best British example, but the U.S. has been saddled with loads. You know the ones: where you miss the fairway by six feet and end up hardly able to see your ball, much less have a semblance of a chance of getting to the green. In Tournament conditions, with crowds, the straighter drivers end up worse off than the wayward ones, because they're wide enough to miss all the cunningly placed, horrendous rough - which is exactly where you'd expect it to be, a few paces from the fairway's edge, waiting to catch those woeful drives that just trickle off the rock hard short grass. Those same set-ups also invariably feature greens which are like concrete, which won't hold even well struck shots, and which inevitably have perfectly decent approaches finding ankle deep rough which utterly negates the skills of the accomplished short game men and reduces chipping and pitching to a hit and hope-job with an open-faced wedge. Unless there's some rain, it makes the whole thing an utter nonsense and, from a spectator's point of view, very boring. If I want to watch people struggling round a golf course and lots of scores in the high 70s and 80s, I'll go and watch one of the local PGA Assistants' competitions. It's a stupid way to set up a course, and this tosh about it always identifying the best players? Well, Andy North to that. The real crime of it is that the butchered courses were often wonderful, classic tracks, too, which, if left well alone, would no doubt have produced the desired result - albeit perhaps with an oh-so-unacceptable winning score of a few under par at the end of the week that would have had the USGA blazers crying into their whiskey glasses and begging for forgiveness, prostrate beneath the Ben Hogan portrait in the boardroom.

[bulls9999]

Pet peeves on the golf course?
[list=1][*]People who don't fix their fairway divots...walk right by the scalp that could be replaced and regrow[*]People who don't fix their ball marks on putting greens.... fix yours and one more, but it really gets depressing when you're fixing 3, 4, 5 and you know a foursome just got off in front of you (either they didn't fix their own or didn't bother to fix obvious craters in the green).[*]Uneven tee boxes....especially ones that are slanted uphill 15-20 degrees (I hate teeing off on uphill tee boxes....I would like them to be level forward-to-back more so than left-to-right).[*]Chronic cell phone users. I play to 'get away from it all' and my eyes start turning red when a playing partner seemingly has to take/make phone calls twice per hole....go get a room, err, phone booth.[*]People who originally plan to play 18 holes and then duck out after 9.[*]People who are sarcastic about every shot they're about to make... EVERYONE ONE (oh, I'll probably hit this one out of bounds; I'll probably skull this into the trap; I'll probably top this down the fairway, etc, etc, etc)[*]People who criticize others in the group mercilessly to their playing partners (you just gotta know they'd say the same about you when they're partners are switched).[/list]Other than the above, I'm good to go !!


[quote name='immacook' timestamp='1305944803' post='3251050']
What is your biggest pet peeve on a golf courses design/layout. Mine is uneven tee boxes. I hate teeing off with the ball below or above my feet. IMO, all tee boxes should be LEVEL!
[/quote]

[particleman]

1. Blind tee shots.
2. Holes with severe trouble on one side and another hole's fairway on the other side making it a smart play to bomb it in another hole's fairway . I play a course that has a lot of holes like this and there's one lucky hole that is right between two of them -- it's like being in a war zone when you're on that fairway.
3. Courses with houses that are in play with a bad tee shot. I just won't play these courses.

[nmccarthy94]

Nick's Mile-Long List of Pet Peeves:
1. In course OB
2. Blind par 3s
3. Par 4s where you tee off straight uphill and approach the green straight downhill, or vice versa
4. Holes where you hit a 7 iron off the tee and a 3 iron into the green
5. Golf courses that have no consequence for missed fairways
6. Super duper humongous greens that are flat as pancakes
7. Uneven or poorly maintained tee boxes
8. Par 4s with 90* doglegs
9. Blind tee shots with nothing to aim at
10. Courses with no bunkers
11. Courses that have 5 mile walks from green to tee
12. Courses built on the side of Mountains
13. Courses with lots of forced carries
14. Courses with no driving ranges
15. Courses that hold water like a sponge
16. Holes that are meant to be played around an enormous tree in the center of the fairway
17. Holes that make you hit a 20 yard hook/slice with a driver to stay in the fairway
18. Complaint #18 has been confiscated for your protection

[kg92lefty]

people who play the blacks when they cant break 80 or 90. the course i work at is 7500 yards. the third hole can play 230-250 over water and surrounded by bunkers. The tee box looks like the driving range. People like this not only destroy the course but also slow play waaayyyy down.

[raynorfan1]

I have relatively few pet peeves, but one from today:

When the course doesn't mix up pin locations from hole to hole. Today the pins were middle-middle-middle-middle-front-front-front-front-front-back-back-back (or something like that).

I'm not sure why it annoys me, but it did.