Forward Is More Fun
Play from the forward tees and enjoy
This week’s post isn’t about a particular travel destination. It isn’t about a country, region, resort, or course. It’s about how you can enjoy your vacation rounds—every round of golf you ever play, in fact—a lot more than you do now.
Play the forward tees.
I know I’m preaching to the converted in most cases. But there’s bound to be a number of diehards that still play from the back tees in an effort to “see the whole course.”
I’ve heard some dumb things on golf courses in my time. But insisting that playing from the tips is the only way to see the whole golf course might just be the dumbest of the lot.
I wonder which part of the golf course the 7,200-yarders think the 6,500-yarders are missing. In nearly 30 years of playing the game I’ve yet to find a course where the most interesting features were positioned between the back and front tees. Pretty much all you will find between the forward tees and back tees are…the middle tees.
You don’t see any elaborate Ted Robinson-style water features, no magnificent Mackenzie bunkers, no Pete Dye bulkheads, no hotels (okay, even golfers playing the forward tees at the Old Course in St. Andrews have to clear the Old Course Hotel’s boundary wall).
Just the middle tees.
My phase of needing to play from the tips to feel like I’d played a proper golf course occurred about 15 years ago and lasted maybe three weeks. Even so, I’d long held onto the belief that dipping below 6,500 yards was a bit…well, you know, girly.
As readers of this column know, I recently joined a bunch of northwest golf media at David McLay Kidd’s new course, Gamble Sands, in Brewster, Wash. The only tee-markers available were the colored brushes Kidd and his team had used to mark out various parts of the course during construction. And only two sets were available: Red, setting the course at about 6,600 yards; and yellow, which produced a trip of about 6,000 yards.
At Gamble Sands it was hot, and my back and legs were stiffer than a Scotsman’s dram. So I swallowed my pride and joined the group’s oldest member up at the forward tees.
I shot my best round since about 2005 and, rather than having to deal with a load of male writers giving me grief about playing from the little tees, I actually noticed a couple of them move forward themselves the next morning.
And I did it again during a visit to Alabama last week, playing five rounds, none of them longer than 6,500 yards. A couple of them barely scraped above 6,000 in fact. To prevent anyone feeling the stigma of playing from the…gasp…RED TEES, the forward tee-markers were teal, a color that seemed more effeminate than red, but there you go.
You pay your green fee, so you are perfectly entitled to play from whichever tees you like. I get that. But I urge you to think about moving forward a set, even two. You’ll be hitting 7-irons into Par 4s instead of 4-irons or hybrids, and you’ll probably reach a couple of Par 5s in two.
And those green fees we all pay; they might actually be significantly lower if we ceased this fascination with playing golf courses that are far too long for us.
Do yourself, and everybody else, a favor. Move forward.
RELATED LINKS:
VIDEO: Tee it Forward with Keystone's PGA Head Professional Philip Tobias
Colorado AvidGolfer is the state’s leading resource for golf and the lifestyle that surrounds it. It publishes eight issues annually and proudly delivers daily content via www.coloradoavidgolfer.com.
