Could you join The Golf Nut Society?
Published:
I’ve always been mad about golf. This obsession has manifested itself in a number of ways, but the most obvious has been my endless search for the perfect swing. My tinkering amuses my friends, who began calling me ‘the golf nut’ in the early 1980s. The more they used this nickname, the more I realised two things. Yes, I was a golf nut, but not the only one.
I founded The Golf Nut Society in 1986 in a bid to give golf obsessives their 15 Minutes of Fame. But the club wasn’t open to all golfers. Oh no. To get in, you needed to pass an entrance exam titled ‘How Nuts Are You?’. The exam contained 60 questions that were based on my own experiences. Things like: have you ever been threatened with divorce over your golf? Have you ever played 36 holes on Christmas Day? And have you ever shone your car lights so you could practice at night? Entrants were awarded “nut” points for their answers and bonus points for any outrageous golfing tales that weren’t covered in the exam. This was where the fun really began.
The two craziest things I’ve done are: save my golf clubs from a burning car and refuse to stop a round in the middle of a tornado that destroyed several buildings “because I was playing well”. These were soon blown out of the water by other nuts. One guy had played in London, New York and LA... on the same day. Another played six rounds in 24 hours in temperatures of over 100ºF. But the best story belonged to a guy called Howdy Giles. He got 3,000 points because he moved to live near Arnold Palmer and ended up becoming Arnie’s dentist. Every time Arnie came in, he scraped some gold off his fillings. In the end, he had enough to make a gold ball marker, which he keeps in a safety deposit box!
Thanks to stories like these, the society got a lot of publicity and this saw us attract some celebrity members. Clint Eastwood, Bob Hope and Michael Jordan all signed up... Jordan was named Golf Nut of the Year in 1989.
At its peak, the society had over 5,000 members, but after running it from my home in Montana for 20 years, I decided that I needed to devote more time to my golf, so sold the website to someone who managed it for a few years before losing interest. At this point, some of the original nuts asked me to set-up another club. Last winter, I bowed to their pressure and launched the Honourable Society of Golf Fanatics. It’s fun and it’s growing all the time, but it also takes up less of my time, so I’m able to maintain a +1 handicap and hold down a job. Talking of work, I recently attended a conference in Portugal. I flew there via St Andrews, where I played 54 holes in 22 hours. Once a golf nut, always a golf nut.
