First day as a starter at Quail Run

Greeting 240 golfers in nine hours as they teed off

With Quail Run course marshal Dale

LA PINE, Ore. - If you play golf, you’ve probably seen these guys on the first tee - they welcome you to the course, give you a few ground rules and tell you to have a great day.

And if you’re a retired guy who likes golf, especially free golf, this is something you think about doing - becoming a starter at a course, which is exactly what I did, and I showed up yesterday at 7 a.m. for my first day at Quail Run Golf Course, located about 20 miles south of Bend.

For the next nine hours, I met 240 golfers and enjoyed the heck out of it. Well, let’s just say I enjoyed it, and leave the heck out of it out of it. There were times between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. when I wondered what I was doing - when you’re retired, aren’t you supposed to stop working? Isn’t that the idea behind the word “retirement?”

Is this really worth it? At Quail Run, you don’t even make minimum wage as a starter, you just get two rounds of free golf for every shift you work. Most of the 240 golfers yesterday paid $75 to $80 to play, so I worked nine hours for free golf that would have normally cost me $160 for two rounds, an average of about $18 an hour.

In the last 15 years, I’ve been lucky as hell to have “worked” as a sports radio talk show host, and while I was standing there in the sun by my starter’s shack, I wondered when I last worked a nine-hour shift.

In the sports radio days, I would typically do show prep for an hour or two. Then the show lasted three hours so that’s what, five hours a day. Now here I am watching the clock crawl like back in the day when I had a Tuesday-Thursday class at Washington State, enduring those hour and 15 minute classes that seemed like they’d never end.

But meeting a variety of golfers every nine minutes was worth it. For the first five hours, I was pretty consistent with giving each group my welcome to Quail Run speech, telling them where the bathrooms were, where they could find ice water on tee boxes and reminding them that they could order hot sandwiches from the menu on the ninth tee box so it will be ready for them at the turn.

Around 10 a.m. I had to add a mosquito warning because those annoying little bastards were concentrated around the fourth and fifth holes. I had cans of repellent on the shelf of the shack for golfers to use to spare themselves from being eaten alive.

At Quail Run they had to get rid of the windshields on all of the carts because people would spray them down to keep the mosquitoes away. But that repellent has something in it that ruined the windshields so Quail Run just decided to get rid of them.

I’m thinking, if mosquito repellent has something in it that can ruin windshields, what the heck is it doing to our bodies when we spray it on and it seeps through our pores?

I had time on my hands for my mind to wander like that. I also had time to do squats and lunges and 100 pushups, 20 at a time, OK, 15 at a time too. I’m so damn torn on doing exercises as I’ve been instructed to do by two physical therapists - when I do them, I don’t see any improvement, and the surgeon who did scar tissue cleanup in my knee in February said it wouldn’t matter if I do the exercises or not.

The real reason why I can’t tie my left shoe or put my left sock on is the deterioration in my hip, where arthritis has taken over like mosquitoes on the fourth and fifth holes at Quail Run. It’s an embarrassing development to not be able to put a sock on, and it’s a challenge to pick something up off the floor. And forget about trying to get a golf ball out of the hole. It’s below ground level and out of my reach.

I used to laugh at those guys who put suction cups at the end of their putter handles, and now I want one too.

Frequently in jobs when you interact with customers, they’re upset about something or need questions answered or whatever else, they’re not truly happy for whatever reason.

I’ve gone from “Moore, you suck” and listeners changing channels in sports radio to “It’s great to see you Mr. Starter, sir, we’re so happy to be here playing golf on a sunny day, whatever you want to tell us, we’ll listen and be on our way, thank you very much!”

I connected with a bunch of Oregon State alums and a few Cougs who came through too. The Ducks, they were well represented. Some were predictably arrogant, others were surprisingly nice, and I must say one blonde haired Duck certainly caught Mr. Starter’s eye with her beautiful smile.

I forget her name, but she told me about a lesson she just had and how the instructor showed her how to hinge her wrists, and how it’s made such a huge difference. She sparkled when she spoke, and I’ll admit I was sorry to see her leave my tee box, hoping she would tell her playing partners “you know what, you guys go ahead, I’m gonna hang out with Mr. Starter Guy today.”

And yeah, there were some Huskies too, blinding me with their obnoxious purple pull-overs. One of the Dawgs, though, I liked him and felt bad for him. He bought a house at Sunriver, a sprawling fun family neighborhood a few miles north of Quail Run, 10 years ago.

Back then Sunriver had three beautiful courses - Crosswater, Meadows and Woodlands - and have those same courses now. The difference? Sunriver’s gone private, and even those who own a house there were asked to pay $15,000 to become members and pay $400 a month in dues.

It’s ridiculous what they’re doing at Sunriver. I used to play those courses all the time when I participated in the Pacific Amateur golf tournament for 17 years. Now if you want to play the Meadows or Woodlands course, you have to be a guest the hotel or one of the Sunriver condos or homes and pay $185 for 18 holes.

See, as I said, it’s ridiculous. But it’s terrific news for nearby Quail Run. “Hey, come play our course for less than half the price and screw those snobs at Sunriver!”

I’m not just saying this because I work there now, Quail Run is top notch. It’s the best bang for your buck course in the entire area, from Redmond to Bend to points south in Central Oregon.

And if you come on a Thursday this summer, you can say hello to me and tell me to save the canned speech I’m giving on the first tee, you’re a golfer who knows the rules of golf, you don’t need someone reminding you to keep carts on the path on all the par-3’s.

When I’m telling people that, I’m reminded that I’m the same guy who DID NOT keep the cart on the path on a par-3 at Palouse Ridge in April and it resulted in the dumb ass decision to go down a steep hill and roll the cart, costing me $450 to fix the damage.

Not only did I enjoy meeting happy golfers, I liked seeing the different swings and levels of players. Some of the guys from the blue tees looked like scratch golfers. Some should have been playing the white tees because the blues were too difficult for them.

Some players were so bad they shouldn’t have been playing at Quail Run. They would have been better off playing at the Old Back Nine in Bend or The Greens in Redmond, courses that are more user friendly than this one.

If you ever become a starter, the thing you’ll really like is noticing that maybe you’re not so bad after all as a golfer. I’m probably around an 18 handicap these days. The lowest I’ve ever had it is a 10. I’ve never gotten it to single digits.

But when you watch one swing after another for nine hours, you realize there are a lot of golfers who are worse than you. I just thought I’ve gotten increasingly terrible over the years, and if that’s the case, I have all kinds of company based off of what I saw yesterday. There were more bad shots than good shots, that’s for sure.

By the end of the day, I was picking and choosing when I would deliver my speech and when I would just say, “Hey thanks for coming to Quail Run, have a good time today.”

Oh, one more thing, if there’s a downside to playing here, it’s this - they don’t have a beverage cart. And you know what that means? When you don’t have a beverage cart, you don’t have a beverage cart girl, which is the best thing ever, better than the signature hole.

When you see a beverage cart girl, I guarantee we all think “thank you God, there she is, I’m playing like shit, I could really use an adult beverage right now.” Or if you’re playing well, she’s still a wonderful sight to behold, and you just might have one anyway because, well, why not?

I’m gonna get to the bottom of this and find out why Quail Run does not have a beverage cart. It’s an extra source of revenue and when it’s in the summertime, can someone give me a good reason why you wouldn’t have one when it benefits everyone, from the course owners to the players?

But what Quail Run does have is the best course marshal around. Dale is a former rodeo guy who has a hard time walking but is grateful that he can walk at all - after breaking his neck rasslin’ bulls, he was told he had a 20 percent chance of walking. He has beaten those odds.

Dale has been here most every day for 17 years, patrolling the place, making sure everyone gets to play Quail Run in four hours and 10 minutes max. He gives slow groups two warnings then tells them to skip a hole or move up to the 150-yard marker on the next hole and play from there.

He’s the one who showed me the ropes in my training session earlier this week and said yesterday that he was “tickled” he hired me. I’m tickled he did too, but I need to get better on writing down cart numbers to give to Dale so he can keep tabs on them all.

He does this because someone damaged a cart once and bolted. Before they recorded cart numbers, Quail Run had no idea who rented out what cart, but now they do.

My problem yesterday, I started talking to the groups and would forget to write down their cart numbers.

“Jim,” Dale said. “Just write down the cart numbers first, then go into whatever you want to say.”

I love the guy so much already that I was disappointed in myself for letting him down.

“That’s OK,” Dale said. “It’s your first day, you’ll get the hang of it.”

When 4 o’clock arrived, I closed up the starter’s shack and headed back to Bend, glad that I got this opportunity and looking forward to doing it all over again next Thursday.