This is Betty the Cat. You may not be able to tell from the picture, but she’s a big golf fan. Unfortunately, the U.S. Golf Association feels the same way about pets as it does about amateur photography, so she, like my camera had to stay home when I went to the U.S. Open.

You may have noticed in my previous post that I didn’t describe much of the golf action. Well there’s a reason for that…

See, the very thing that makes Pebble Beach a spectacular location for viewing golf also makes it a very difficult place to view golf. The eight holes that run along the ocean are by definition “one-sided” holes, meaning that only one side of the fairway can accommodate a gallery. Add to that the fact that the tees and greens are located very close to each other on these holes, eliminating the possibility of creating viewing areas in between tee and green. Consequently, entire swaths of the golf course are roped off and inaccessible. And lastly, because it is a links course, there is precious little terrain that provides a natural amphitheatre.

In other words, this is the last place you want to go if your heart is set on roaming the course and seeing a lot of golf.

While this set-up played havoc with my desire to watch golf along the ocean holes, I did eventually discover that there were opportunities to get a clear view of play at several of the inland holes – especially if you were patient enough to take advantage of the turnover of people along the ropes. It was this exact scenario that allowed me to see 60-year old Tom Watson, playing in what is likely to be his last U.S. Open, come within inches of holing out his tee shot on the par three 12th hole.

As you would expect, Watson was applauded wildly for his tee shot, as wells as the entire time it took for he and his playing partner to walk to the green and mark their balls. When he tapped in his birdie putt, another long, warm ovation. And as much as the crowd embraced him, he embraced them right back, with heartfelt smiles and waves of appreciation.

As for the rest of the field…not so much. The only other golfer I saw acknowledge the cheers of the crowd with anything other than the drive-by half-wave was David Duval. Otherwise, I was amazed on several occasions by how hard every other player worked at NOT making eye contact with the fans along the ropes offering words of congratulations or encouragement. These guys made Garbo seem downright effusive by comparison.

The USGA, for its part, conducted a clinic on how to scare people off of the sport of golf. It’s a fairly reliable format: Take a course capable of comfortably accommodating “X” number of spectators, then sell 1 ½ times that number of tickets. This would of course be impossible at an arena or a stadium, but with a large expanse of land to work with…voila! All Maximum Capacity constraints become, shall we say…subject to interpretation. Here’s an example.

The course routing for Pebble Beach is pretty much a figure eight lying on its side, which when I think about it, is the symbol for infinity, which is generally how long you wait in line for a hot dog – but I digress. As is the case with anything that is modeled on a figure eight, there is a natural bottleneck where the two loops intersect.

That point at Pebble Beach is right behind the 6th tee, halfway up the 13th fairway. The cart path there is about ten feet wide, with another few feet of grass on either side before you reach the impenetrable border of the gallery ropes. When I crossed that point in the morning on my way to the outer loop, it was fairly congested, despite being still early in the day. I made a mental note – find a different route to come back. Imagine my surprise when a couple of hours later I realized there was no alternate route.

So there I stood, with about 500 other people. The crowd behind the 6th tee had swelled to such an extent that it extended most of the way onto the pathway, and with equal numbers of people trying to head each way, it was quite literally human gridlock. I didn’t know how long this had been going on by the time I arrived, but given that Tiger Wood’s group had fairly recently teed off on the 6th hole, I had to think that it had been a while. And the standoff dragged on for at least fifteen minutes while I was stuck in it.

Equally intrigued and annoyed, I reversed course and spawned back upstream to higher ground to watch the scene unfold. After a time, a cart carrying tournament officials pulled up and inched its way into the crowd, eventually becoming as stuck as everyone else. Then came a larger cart carrying uniformed security personnel. They too became engulfed.

The whole thing would’ve been funny if it weren’t for the tension that started to emanate from deep within the scrum. There were disabled people in small motorized carts and people pushing baby strollers in there, along with the requisite number of people in any crowd who are somewhat claustrophobic by nature. And they were getting panicky.

Finally the inevitable happened. People started to realize that those fairway ropes weren’t actually the equivalent of the invisible fences that pet owners use to keep their dogs in the yard. And people started ducking under the ropes and spilling out onto the 13th hole. Mass hysteria! Dogs and cats living together! Volunteer marshals yelling out to nobody in particular, “You can’t do that! Please return behind the ropes!” It was the golf equivalent of the obligatory Los Angeles riot to celebrate a Lakers win in the NBA Finals.

All of that aside, I’m here to tell you that one of the most innovative ideas in sports is finally a reality! For as long as I can remember, I’ve been wondering why somebody didn’t bring to market a hand-held device that would allow people attending a golf tournament to view what else was going on around the course.

At first I thought that it would be something along the lines of the old Watchman, displaying images from the network television broadcast of the event. Then as Internet streaming technology evolved, it seemed like only a matter of time before a separate narrow-cast could be sent to rented handsets. But years went by and nothing of the like appeared. So imagine my delight when I came across a long line of people who were queued up to secure something called the CourseCast.

I stopped to ask one couple who were standing in line to tell me about it, and they basically relayed the exact concept to me that I had been envisioning for oh so long. But that wasn’t even the part that elicited a low whistle of admiration on my part. For to secure a CourseCast unit, all you had to do was be an American Express cardholder and put a deposit down on the unit – that’s right, the whole thing was free, but only available to American Express customers. Making it potentially the greatest sports sponsorship activation I have ever seen, as evidenced by the following exchange:

My New Friends: “Talk to that guy over there – he’ll scan your card and sign you up.”
Me: “But I don’t have an American Express card.”
MNF’s (wincing): “Oh…that’s a problem. But I but you could probably sign up for an account in one of these American Express tents around here.”
Me: “I’m actually considering that.”

But the best part of the day by far involved not sights or sounds, but smells. The heavy salt air smell of the bay at low tide…the smell of “take the morning chill out” wood fires burning in chimneys…and the true smell of money on this day – charcoal grills that were being fired up in the back yards and decks of the mini-mansions that bordered the course – where true VIP seating was just a generous inheritance away.