Source: San Francisco Chronicle
From Ph.D.s to Sunnyvale golf pros, the best and the brightest are pouring forth ideas to help the bombarded San Francisco neighbors of Lincoln Park's seventh fairway, folks who don't go into their backyards when the rainy season ends for fear of getting beaned by golf balls.
The suggestions came in response to last Saturday's Chronicle story about the Outer Richmond neighborhood that the city can't afford to protect by raising a bigger fence to block errant tee shots from the municipal course.
Like the smoothest short-iron swing, the ideas are simple and economic:
Move the No. 7 tee box. Or build a smaller fence closer to the tee. Or shorten the par-4 hole into a par-3 hole. Or forbid golfers from using a driver on No. 7.
Or, in the ultimate example of incentivizing golf's infamous honor system, charge golfers 10 strokes if their shot clears the 30-foot-high chain-link fence bordering Clement Street and breaks glass -- or knocks a head.
Certainly, readers say, there must be a more elegant solution than the 12-story-tall, $225,800 netting that a golf course consultant proposed for a city with a $113 million deficit.
Without a better idea or the cash to pay for the big net, the city will continue picking up the tab for broken glass from house windows and car windshields on Clement Street. And 38th Avenue. And 39th Avenue.
The city has paid $18,760 to victims of hacked Lincoln drives since 2000, records show; fortunately, nothing has gone to someone injured by a plummeting ball. Such personal injury claims can run upward of $100,000.
So before bad golf gets personally injurious and municipally expensive, Aaron Golub proposes a solution: Build a smaller fence, perhaps 15 feet high and movable on wheels or a pivot, and station it much closer to the tee. That should snag more drives than the current fence, he figures.
An analogy, said Golub, who has a doctorate in civil engineering, would be mud flaps on a car.
"You don't cover the car with mud protection -- you just have a small flap at the source of the spray of mud," posits Golub, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley's Transportation Center.
Continuing the analogy, might the fence sport the same sort of suggestively posed woman common to mud flaps?
"Hmm. I don't know about the golf culture," Golub said. "I've never played, myself."
Several readers suggested moving the tee closer to the fence. Then, instead of slicing a ball over the fence, they'll smash one into the fence.
Cheryl Pastore, assistant professional at Sunnyvale Golf Course, suggested shorter, less expensive barriers on either side of the tee box, which she said would force golfers to "funnel their shots" down the middle of the fairway.
"Golfers like to avoid trees," said Pastore, a master professional rank in the Ladies Professional Golf Association, who remembered the problem from when she played Lincoln Park in the 1970s. "The person who slices their ball generally positions their body to the left to prevent that. This problem is easily solvable."
Not really, said Sean Sweeney, golf course manager for San Francisco's Recreation and Park Department.
The tee box is already up against the fence as far as it can go, Sweeney said. And small fences wouldn't do much to curb window-smashing shots, he said, as they usually start out straight, rise slowly and then bend over the barrier lining Clement Street.
"We've already done a ball-trajectory study," Sweeney said -- the one that resulted in the suggestion of a big net.
Dave Tanner, the golf course engineer and consultant who suggested the net, said, "Golfers don't like having their heads pushed up against a wall and hitting from that position. They want to go out there and swing away."
Besides, Tanner said, barriers such as trees "are 90 percent air. Balls can pass through them. Netting is the only material that won't let anything through."
Shrinking the hole into a shorter par 3, as retired Sacramento guidance counselor Pat O'Brien suggested, would mean that golfers wouldn't feel obligated to swing big -- and miss big, Sweeney acknowledged. But, he said, more-seasoned golfers already feel that Lincoln Park is too short, "and if I make (No. 7) a par 3, then I have to make a par 3 a par 4 somewhere else. And I don't know if I can."
Classical violinist Susan Fowle of Hayward suggested banning oversize Big Bertha clubs on No. 7 or forcing golfers to take a 10-stroke penalty if they clear the fence.
Those ideas sounds great, Sweeney said, but aren't enforceable. They rely on golf's honor system, an already rickety proposition for many duffers.
As it is, the city is already struggling to afford enough course marshals to police more onerous sins of course etiquette, such as tearing up a rain-soaked fairway by driving on the grass with a golf cart.
Oakland resident Doug Latimer suggested raising greens fees $2 a round -- a big-net tax of sorts.
"There's not a lot of elasticity in greens fees," said Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin. "We've got studies saying that if you raise them somewhere, people will go somewhere else."
And golfers are already fleeing Lincoln Park. In the 2001-02 season, 58,000 rounds were played at Lincoln Park. That dropped to 41,000 in 2003-04, said Jaci Fong, director of property management for the Recreation and Park Department.
"There's been a general downturn in the number of rounds played, and Lincoln has suffered the most because of that downturn," Fong said.
Part of the reason, say Fong and Sweeney: City layoffs have meant fewer greenskeepers to primp the fairways at Lincoln Park.
While Peskin understands the problem at Lincoln Park, he also understands that it is not a high priority in city struggling to decide whether to cut health and social services.
Said Peskin: "It's not even on the list of the top 100."
Fore sight
Here are some of the ideas readers suggested to help neighbors of San Francisco's Lincoln Park golf course deal with bad shots raining down on windows and windshields from the seventh fairway:
Move the tee box to the right, nearer a fence along the fairway. Responded San Francisco golf program director Sean Sweeney, "It's already as far to the right as it can go."
Build smaller barriers on either side of the tee, forcing golfers to hit straighter. Sunnyvale golf pro Cheryl Pastore pointed out that "golfers like to avoid trees."
Raise greens fees $2 a round to pay for a giant net to catch the balls. Oakland resident Doug Latimer said, "I don't think that would be too much of a hardship."
Shorten the par-4 hole into a par-3 hole. Sacramento guidance counselor Pat O'Brien said, "I don't think they'll lose many golfers if they shrink up the hole."
Forbid golfers from using a driver on No. 7. Responded golf course consultant Dave Tanner, "That's a nice idea. But I think that would be difficult to police. You'd need someone there watching all the time."
Penalize golfers 10 strokes if their shot clears the 30-foot-high chain-link fence bordering Clement Street. Hayward classical violinist Susan Fowle asked, "Isn't golf supposed to be about the honor system?"