Fairway surfing anything but rough ride
I think I might start playing golf again.
This is not a New Year’s resolution, nor an epiphany inspired by watching “Caddyshack: The Inside Story” on TV.
It was a reaction to riding this thing called a GolfBoard at Las Vegas National Golf Club on Tuesday morning.
Leo Calabro, director of golf at Las Vegas National, said he has retrofitted the golf carts with windscreens because sometimes, such as Tuesday morning, it’s a little brisk when you get up early to ride the fairways.
You should pay a little extra ($15 for nine holes, $20 for 18) and ride a GolfBoard instead.
It’s so much fun that you won’t mind if you don’t hit the ball straight. If fact, you might even hit it into the rough or onto an adjacent fairway on purpose. Just put me down for a snowman or a nine, Bob. I’ll meet up with you on 17.
These GolfBoards are something new. They were voted Best New Product at last year’s PGA Merchandise Show in Florida. If you have gotten up early to ride the fairways recently and noticed there weren’t a lot of cars in the parking lot, it might have occurred to you the golf game could use some new products to attract a new demographic, as the people at these trade shows like to say.
The demographic the golf business is trying to attract is golfers under 30 or 40, for their money spends well, too. In recent months I have seen 15-inch holes installed at some courses, which is supposed to make shooting par easier. On others, they even are letting kids kick soccer balls from tee to green on slow afternoons.
These GolfBoards are way cooler.
You can ride straight down the middle of the fairway with the wind in your hair — provided you have hair, and are one of those low-handicap types who hits the ball down the middle of the fairway — because Golfboards weigh a fraction of what a golf cart weighs and they won’t tear up the course. They also have four-wheel drive and posi-traction, like in those Beach Boys songs about 409 cubic-inch hot rods and little deuce coupes.
You control the throttle with your thumb.
They sort of look like those Segway things you sometimes see cops ride when there’s a crowd, or racing drivers ride to get from the garage area to the track. Only they have four small wheels instead of two big ones, and they have a board at the bottom, a cross between a snowboard and a surfboard. You ride on the board. You strap your golf bag on front before climbing on the board.
Naturally, the first question I asked before climbing on board was if there was a place for one’s beer.
“Yes,” said W. Coy Wood, general manager at Las Vegas National, pointing to the adult beverage holder. “But only one.”
They make you sign a waiver and whatnot and there’s a brief training session. But I was able to skip the training session and was slaloming around the little evergreen trees like Ingemar Stenmark in no time flat.
Coy Wood is really good at it. Like me, he’s also solidly in the black numbers on the leaderboard when it comes to birthdays. He rode his GolfBoard side saddle, like the kids with the baggy pants do in the half-pipe.
The guys who invented the GolfBoard — a snowboard dude and a surfing dude — call it “Surfing the Earth.”
The only place one can currently Surf the Earth is at Las Vegas National. It’s the only place in the entire U.S., besides the GolfBoard test track up in Oregon, that offers them.
“We are always looking to attract new players to the game, and bring new excitement to golfers who love the game, and offering the GolfBoard is a perfect way to accomplish our goals,” Coy Wood said. “The GolfBoard can speed up the game in addition to being just plain fun. So we are embracing the future while we still honor the tradition of the game.”
Las Vegas National might be the perfect place for that, because if I had to guess, they probably won’t be renting out GolfBoards at stodgy Augusta National anytime soon. But Las Vegas National has a proud history, too — the Rat Pack used to play there, and one year Frank Beard beat Arnold Palmer for the win, and the next year Don January beat Julius Boros.
People also forget that Tiger Woods won his first PGA title at Las Vegas National in 1996, or partly won his first title there, when Las Vegas National was part of a three-course rotation used at the Las Vegas Invitational.
Jack Nicklaus won four Sahara Invitationals at Las Vegas National in one its many iterations. How cool would it have been to see big Jack with his crewcut tooling around the back nine on a GolfBoard?
Pretty cool, one thinks. But perhaps not as cool as seeing John Daly or Craig Stadler, whose nickname was “The Walrus,” do it.
They have two models of the GolfBoard at Las Vegas National, the standard model that will go 5 mph, and a souped-up version that will go 12 mph.
Coy Wood said it’s possible to get air on the 12-mph GolfBoard but that he wouldn’t advise it, especially if you are built like Craig Stadler.
Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.
