A crazy idea at Tumbledown that had to backfire

Golf clubs get a bad rap and sometimes deservedly so.

It’s difficult not to be out of touch when the entire set-up is dependent on a splendid isolation from reality. A big expanse of green serenity untouched by the outside world and undisturbed by the inner demons of the frustrated golfers scattered around, mourning lost balls, lost swings and lost minds.

It hasn’t helped their cause this week that a golf club in Madison, Wisconsin, brought widespread ridicule upon itself by offering a special deal for today’s 12th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centre in Lower Manhattan.

As a sign of insanely misplaced respect, some marketing department genius in the appropriately named Tumbledown Trails Golf Course decided players with the correct dose of American values would be enticed by a nine-hole deal for just $9.11. Play the full 18 and you could almost double the price to the even more bizarre $19.11. The golf carts were free.

It didn’t go down well and not only did they withdraw this tacky deal amidst a flurry of mortified apologies, at the time of writing the self-described family-run club was on the verge of simply shutting down for the day, hoping to avoid any repercussions approximating harm to their staff.

And yes, of course they had the added headache of having to somehow honour the bookings made by the almost equally insensitive customers who piled in to take advantage of the offer.

It’s a little simplistic to blame golf’s unique role in society for an error of judgement such as this but I’m going to anyway. Because this is what happens when the clubhouse gives refuge to the sorrows of those golfers who tend to enjoy the loosest tongues and laziest opinions.

Into this strange milieu rolled my soccer club, the New York Shamrocks, on Sunday morning.

I had mercifully made it this far in life without organising a golf outing but that happy run ended these past few weeks when a few of us scrambled together a day trip from Queens to Pelham in the Bronx that bordered on chaos throughout.

My first priority once we got there was to hook up a stream of the All-Ireland hurling final to one of the TV screens in the bar. It was a necessary evil that gave our players pause for thought as to whether they should actually play or not. I was happy to register them, take their money, ignore their questions and watch the game.

Our president, meanwhile, managed to find the fastest golf cart available and headed off around the adjoining courses at breakneck speed, placing the hole sponsors at each tee-box, the result of a last-minute print job from the day before at one of the depressing big box stores in Woodside.

At every juncture we were learning new quirks about what can potentially be a lucrative fundraiser, although one that’s so common both here and at home that we’re surely reaching saturation point.

We should have known the bus driver would get lost while bringing some of the golfers from the Courtyard Ale House, our club pub on Queens Boulevard part-owned by a West Cork man, Pat Burke.

We should have known the All-Ireland final combined with the first day of the NFL season would affect our numbers to some extent.

And we never saw it coming that some of our sponsors would make demands as to which hole they’d like their name to appear on, adding logistical headache on top of logistical headache.

What I never expected was all the experts who suddenly volunteered to help out once the thing was up and running but those are the joys of a club like ours, the heart of which is driven by well-meaning chaos.

The president, an Armagh man with ceaseless energy, remained wound up until, our day’s work almost complete, he eventually collapsed into the passenger seat of my car, immediately dozing off as the sun set in the distance beyond the Manhattan skyline.

That city island seemed a world away from our hours of scrambling around trying to bring cash in to help with the enormous expense of running a soccer club in New York.

The traffic back in along the Long Island Expressway was slow and depressing but the radio crackled with news from around the NFL.

We crawled past Arthur Ashe as Serena Williams got her task done and we finally arrived in Sunnyside where you could still see a Clare jersey here and a Cork jersey there.

Everything else had carried on while our time stood still out in the Bronx.

“We got it done,” mumbled Sean hoarsely as he stirred and slowly came back to life in the passenger seat. “It’s all for the club, all for the Rocks.”

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