[Dr Winston O Boogie jr]

I played with some people last week and we were talking about the bad conditions of the courses in The Villages. One woman told me that Glenview is in perfect shape. So as Father's Day gift to myself, I played eighteen on Stirrup Cup and Tally Ho.

First of all, I arrived at the course an hour an fifteen minutes early to check in, chip and put and hit some balls at the range. I went down to the starter's booth ten minutes before my tee time and was told that my group was "long gone". I told the starter that I was one the putting green and that I was ten minutes early. He said that he called down to make an announcement to call me to the tee. I said that I never heard anything and repeated that I'm ten minutes early. He says to me, "Well, I'm running ten minutes ahead." This has happened to me before in The Villages and I don't know if it's policy or that some starters are just idiots. I worked in the golf business for 35 years. I hired starters and if one of them ever did that to someone I would have fired them.

So I get paired up with this nice guy who was only playing nine holes. I had to rush up the ninth in order to catch my original group for the back nine.

Needless to say, my Father's Day started off on a bad note.

The woman who told me that Glenview is in perfect shape has evidently never been on a golf course in good shape. First of all, I spent fifteen minutes on the practice green to get a feel for the speed. Unfortunately, and this seems to be of The Villages Golf Courses, the practice putting green was nothing like the greens on the golf course. I don't understand how this happens. You have 28 or 29 greens to take care of. They should all be the same. The greens on most of the courses that I've played are very different than the practice green on that course.

The greens were extremely slow and many had big bare patches. Most were very bumpy and some areas were not mowed. The bunkers had not been raked. On the first hole, I was in a bunker and was in a hole. At first, I thought it was a footprint but then I realized that it was simply that the bunker had not been raked properly or at all.

As I was walking into the bunker I noticed that the cape of grass protruding into it was basically all weeds.

The fairways were decent, but many of the tees were very sparse and some were dirt.

Another thing I was talking to a good player about is that The
Villages designed courses to look nice, but they don't care about how they play. Many courses have trees planted where they shouldn't be and many have bunkers that are completely out of play. Those bunkers are placed so that they look nice from the street or the squares.

There is no excuse for these conditions. All Florida courses get a lot of play in the winter. They charge high fees and don't give value for the money for your dollars. What surprising to me is that The Villages does everything else so well. The flowers planted everywhere, the squares are beautiful, the rec centers, pools, tennis courts and everything else are maintained to perfection. I don't know why they don't seem to care about golf which is a huge reason that a lot of people move here.

I'll be looking outside The Villages from now on when I want to play regulation ("championship" is not a proper term for these courses) golf courses.