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Golf fans have it easy these days

By David Lauderdale
Published on
Golf fans have it easy these days

This golf tip comes from my wife.

After watching the RBC Heritage Presented by Boeing years ago, she chipped in this free advice to the PGA Tour:

"Those players need to wear numbers."

NASCAR comes to the country club.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

It was hard to divine who was playing in each group as they walked through the trees of Sea Pines. When Harbour Town Golf Links opened in 1969, Atlanta sports columnist Furman Bisher joked that the fairways were so narrow, Jack Nicklaus couldn't fit on some of them.

But short of a problem like that, it was virtually impossible to know who was in the group or how they were doing in the tournament.

But the royal and ancient game has changed.

Golf fans are now the most plugged-in group in sports.

Fans still get a pairing sheet as they enter the grounds, and they're still made of actual paper and ink.

It's probably how many fans knew to be at the first tee at 12:40 p.m. Thursday to see Jordan Spieth, Matt Kuchar and Patrick Reed tee off. Volunteer Henry Pratt said that in about 20 years of announcing the golfers at the first tee, he's never seen a larger gallery.

"I could see them lined from the teebox all the way to the green," he said.

After the tee shot, fans were pretty much on their own in the old days.

Golfers can be identified by the color of their caddie's vest, if you're really paying attention.

And we still have standard-bearers. They walk along with each group, carrying a sign with golfers' names and scores.

A scoreboard hand-written in calligraphy stood outside the Harbour Town Clubhouse. Volunteers at each hole would send scores in by specially-trained carrier seagulls. Then a few fans could gawk at the results and pass the word.

But now, slow old golf has leaped ahead of other sports.

I went to a football game last season between South Carolina and Georgia. These programs are worth more than many small countries. But don't try to get any information in the stadium other than what down it is, maybe.

In golf, electronic scoreboards around the course now give real-time scores. They tell what hole the players are on. They tell how far each player's ball is from the hole. When a players studies a putt, the fan can see the odds of him making it, and what the tour average is for sinking a putt like that.

The fan can see a color picture of Spieth on the scoreboard, in case they have forgotten what he looks like when he isn't wearing green.

And this doesn't include what can be accessed on the cell phone, where you can get everything but the player's iTunes playlist. Or what you may catch on a television in the 19th Hole concession stand.

Golf fans today have it made. But it would still help if the players wore numbers.

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This article was written by David Lauderdale from The Island Packet Online and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.