The angry golfer - From the Gallery - Letter to the Editor

To: Andy the attendant

My greatest fear in golf is not the 230-yard carry over marshland or the downhill four-footer for bogey, but the bag-drop area you call a workspace. Although your service was designed to enhance the high-end, daily-fee experience, the short journey from car to clubhouse is an essential part of my pre-round ritual. A few minutes of quality trunk time--double-checking the raingear, preparing for five hours without a cell phone, sticking my wallet and keys in a side pocket--is not a routine I feel the need to justify.

Why, then, must you come roaring across the parking lot and arrive at my vehicle before I've shut off the ignition? Have you considered for even 15 seconds that I can make the 70-yard walk without assistance? That if I wanted some help, I would've pulled into your bag-drop zone to begin with?

"I'll get in trouble," is the plea I hear after I've unsuccessfully waved you off. Although I appreciate the offer and wouldn't think of depriving you the right to gainful employment, I'm not sold on the notion that you'll receive 30 lashes if I choose to perform the task myself. In fact, I'll give you two bucks to leave me the hell alone. In case you're still wondering, I'm not a bag-drop kind of guy.

Is that what this is all about, Andy, a lousy $2 tip? You can clean my clubs afterward, and yes, you're welcome to transport my bag back to my car when I'm gone and done with it. For God's sake, you can check my lie angles if the spirit moves you, and I might even grease you with a fiver. But I'm not leaving my 14 best friends at your marble-pillared entrance, only to find out moments later my golf bag has been dispatched to a holding cell near the seventh green. Or worse, that it's suffocating under a pile of eight-year-old knockoffs.