In Japan, I learned later, they line up like this to play golf. By two or three in the morning, at public courses, they're out there by the dozens, sipping coffee and
swinging "air" golf clubs, waiting for the gates to open and the sun to rise. They shell out plenty of yen for a tee-time around noon, if they're lucky, and I imagine they
dream of someday joining Koganei, or Kawana, or some other ritzy private club where they can play 18 holes after having spent the night in bed, not in line.
In south suburban Oak Forest, golfers line up in the middle of the night too, but at least they're in their cars. If they're dreaming, it's because they're asleep. Usually
around midnight, on weekends anyway, the first bleary-eyed golfer pulls onto the shoulder of Central Avenue, sets the parking brake, adjusts the seat, and shuts his
bleary eyes. By sunrise, another 50 or 60 cars, trucks, and vans--plenty of vans--will line up behind him. Across the street glisten the dewy fairways of Forest
Preserve National.
It's one of the nation's best municipal golf courses, and arguably the world's best bargain in golf. A championship-caliber course carved out of thick woodland in a
major urban area, Forest Preserve could easily demand a greens fee of $50 or $60. At that price the fairways would be filled with non-begrudging golfers from
sunrise to sunset on every nice day from April through October. But the fee is just $10, and a dollar more on weekends.
It's Saturday, July 1, 4:30 am. For a lot of people it is the first day of a four-day holiday weekend. Beautiful dry weather is forecast, and the third round of the
Western Open will be played today at Butler National, in Oak Brook. Chicago golfers are out in full force. I get up at 2, leave home at 3, and hit Oak Forest at 4.
Arriving southbound on Central, the line of cars looks like somebody's having a party. Except there are no houses, no lights, and no music. Just 27 cars in the
moonlight. I take my place at the end of the line.
"I didn't get here first," insists the fellow whose car is at the other end of the line. His name is Ayoto. He's 40, from Schaumburg. He's Japanese.
"I was second, but the line was going north and a guy came and said we had to make a line going south. After we moved, I ended up first," he says, seemingly a little
embarassed.
He got here at 12:30 am. "I had business downtown, and I had nothing to so I decided to come here and make a line. I have a foursome coming. I'll call them and
tell them what time."
Ayoto comes to Forest Preserve for one reason: "Challenging," he says.
Playing, or getting a tee-time?
He smiles.
Other courses are challenging too. The Chicago area has about 160 public golf courses. Four of them, including Forest Preserve, have appeared in Golf Digest's
biannual listing of America's 75 Best Public Courses. The others are Cog Hill, in Lemont; Pine Meadow, in Mundelein; and Kemper Lakes, in Hawthorne Woods.
Kemper Lakes hosted the prestigious National PGA Championship in 1989. "Public golf in Chicago is some of the best in the country," says Lorin Anderson, a
former Chicagoan who writes for Golf Digest. "It's a working class kind of town with a lot of very good courses."
But at golf courses other than Forest Preserve, nobody's waiting overnight to get in. The reasons have to do with reservations. Most privately owned courses grant
tee-time reservations in advance by telephone. If you want to play next Tuesday, phone first. For the six courses owned by by the city of Chicago, tee-times are sold
through Ticketron.
Of the 10 Cook County Forest Preserve District courses, all but one refuse tee-time reservations altogether. Golfers must simply show up, pay their fees, and get in
line. The exception is Forest Preserve, where reservations are sold on a same-day basis. Show up in the morning and you can reserve any tee time that day. That
system, combined with the bargain greens fee, subsidized by taxpayers, accounts for the weekend lines of cars on Central Avenue.
"It's a good course, and people want to play good courses, so you put up with these inconveniences" explains Al Young, 68, a retired banker and real estate
appraiser. His car, a late-model Oldsmobile, is 23rd. Unlike most people in line, he's awake.
"My son-in-law's in town, so I said I'll take you to a course that's GOOD. I get here at a quarter-to-four and you got a line like THIS," he chuckles.
But it's not his first time in line, and he knows the ropes. "I'd like to play about 7:30, but I don't think I'll get that unless a lot of these guys want afternoon times," he
says.
Why is everybody playing golf these days?
"TV has a lot to do with it," says Young. "People see it on the tube and they think, well that must be an easy game--the ball's just sitting there. Baseball, you have to
synchronize your bat and hit it, tennis is the same thing. In golf the ball's waiting for you. So they think it's easy.
"Problem is, the pros wait and line up putts from three different angles. People see that and they go out and do the same thing. They wait for that par-five green to
clear before they hit their second shot. Then they hit it 30 yards. It really slows down the game."
Slow play is the bane of golf everywhere. Most public courses jam golfers onto the grounds as densely as possible. Every seven minutes or so, another foursome
goes off from the first tee. Every minute they spend rooting around in the woods for lost balls, or chatting rather than putting, transfers backwards. It delays
everybody behind them, like an inattentive driver on the Dan Ryan. By an hour or two into the morning, at some courses, things slow to a snail's pace. Playing 18
holes, which should take a proficient foursome little more than four hours, can stretch into five-and-a-half or six agonizing hours.
At Forest Preserve, tee times are spread apart by a full 12 minutes. This interval--more like what you'd find at a private country club--is an unexpected luxury at a
public course. And like most courses, Forest Preserve employs rangers to rove the grounds in golf carts, deterring horseplay and prodding the slowpokes.
Pat Wehr, 23, of Chicago Heights is number 2 in line. He too is a veteran of the scene on Central Avenue. Like Ayoto, he's been here since about 12:30. "All I want
is a tee time around 10, but I fugured I had to get here early. It's a crapshoot. If I got here at 4, I'd be way back there," he says, pointing to the end of the line.
"I'm not a real avid golfer. I play three or four times a year. Today I'll get my time, then go home at get three hours of sleep. You don't get a good restful sleep sitting
in a car all night."
Is it ever a party scene out here?
"No, it's quiet. The only noise is kids driving up and down the road blowing their horns, trying to wake people up. Really, everybody just pulls up and goes to sleep,"
says Wehr.
Other veterans have differing accounts of the scene. Tinley Park resident Bill Tokarz is parked 33rd in line.
"They used to have the line running north into the residential area. People complained about kids in line drinking beer and urinating on houses. Then they moved it
south, going into the Forest Preserve. I don't think it's cut down on the number of kids drinking beer, but it's a lot less of a problem for the homeowners," he says.
In past years, according to Tokarz, people would often show up at 5 or 6 pm the day before they wanted to play, and park their cars in line. Twelve hours later
they'd return. County police responded with tow trucks. Also, they posted a sign banning anyone from parking a car--occupied or not--before 4 am.
By all accounts, however, police enforced the 4 am rule only occasionally. When they have, the result was a worse problem: cars circulating the through
neighborhood like playing musical chairs, until exactly 4 am, when they'd all descend on Central Avenue at once.
Forest Preserve, which opened in 1982, was created as a "companion course" to the older Kemper Lakes. Golf course architects Ken Killian and Dick
Nugent cooperated in the design of both. Killian and Nugent have since split up, establishing separate golf architecture firms in the northwest suburbs.
Forest Preserve and Kemper share design features such as hole routings, particularly the 17th and 18th--strong finishing holes over water on both courses. Greens on both courses are
large, undulating, downward-sloping affairs that accommodate long approach shots. But the devilish placement of hazards, especially fairway bunkers, punishes poor
play. At courses of this caliber, a good round leaves a golfer glowing with satisfaction.
Even so, for a lot of people the prospect of playing Forest Preserve isn't worth spending half the night in their cars. Entrepreneurial Oak Forest-area teenagers
have realized that, and have responded to the marketplace by starting proxy wait-in-line businesses. One person even advertised his services in a local newspaper. For a
fee, he'd have one of his young "employees" park and wait in line for you. The fees varied.
This year, I heard of a kid who was asking $75 per tee time, due in advance. Four a foursome, that would raise the cost of playing Forest Preserve on a weekend
from $44 to $119, or about $30 per person. That's still a very competitive price, even if a kid in Oak Forest is getting 60 percent of the take.
I called the kid. His mother said he was in the shower. He got on the phone a minute later. "I'm standing here soaking wet," he admitted. He quoted his fee, and
assured me he could almost always secure a tee-time within a half-hour of the time I desired, assuming it's 9 am or later. I told him I was interested in playing on the
upcoming Fourth of July weekend. "That's a bad one," he said. "I've got an outing." That day, his entire army of suburban kids with cars--apparently half a dozen or
more of them--was booked.
The number of people willing to stand in line for a fee--teenagers, college students and even some housewives--grew larger, until this year, when a disgruntled golfer
wrote a letter of complaint to the Cook County Board of Commissioners. The board prevailed on Forest Preserve's management to counteract reservationists for
hire. The course started issuing a hand stamp to everyone purchasing tee-time tickets. Throughout the day, at least one member of every foursome must have a
hand-stamp. This way, a kid can't sell his four tickets to somebody else. He could sell three, theoretically, but he'd have to return to the course himself with a set of
clubs at the appointed tee-time, ready to play golf.
No sooner did the hand-stamp system take effect when a countermeasure scam apparently popped up. At 5:35, just 10 minutes before the gates were to open, I
witnessed a woman pull up in a late-model Audi with vanity plates. She parked across the street from the car line. Dressed in stylish golf garb, she strolled over to a
kid in an old Chevy that was third in line. After carefully dusting off the seat, the golf lady got behind the wheel of the Chevy. When the gates opened, she wheeled
into the parking lot and accepted a numbered ticket, then got her hand stamped, just like the masses who had spent the night.
The management got wise to this practice, and again took action. They varied the time they opened the gates. Some days, it was as early as 4 am. Other days it was
not until 7. So the lady in the Audi might have pulled up at 5:35 and found the gates already open and 50 or 60 people inside, or perhaps the course already booked
for the day.
When the gates do open, a slow, orderly procession of cars moves from Central Avenue into the golf course parking lot. As each vehicle passes through the gates,
the driver accepts a numbered ticket--the kind used in raffle drawings--from a course worker badly in need of a shave. The golfers park their cars and line up at a
small booth at the clubhouse. Inside, a surly guy with a microphone asks if anybody wants to go straight out--the 6 am tee time. Somebody says yes, and in five
minutes they'll be watching their drives sail over the first fairway. Meanwhile, the guy in the booth barks out numbers sequentially as people step up to request
specific tee-times.
"Something around seven-thirty?"
"Seven-twenty-four or seven-thirty-six."
"Seven-tweny-four."
"Forty-four dollars."
The holders of higher ticket numbers--people 40th or 50th in line--can't be picky. Requesting a 2 pm tee time might get them a choice between 1:12 and 3:48. The
latest arrivers might be closed out altogether, or forced to pick from the remaining single or two-player time slots.
The course itself is vast and beautiful, carpeted with lush bentgrass and surrounded in forest. It's reminiscent more of a setting in northern Wisconsin than one in south
suburban Chicago. Few courses share Forest Preserve's intangible quality of a serenity, which is partly due to the widely spaced fairways. Eight lakes, all man-made,
come into play on 11 holes. Four separate sets of tees are available, so that the length of the course ranges from 5,535 yards to 7,170 yards.
Is it worth the wait? "People go and camp out in damn cold weather to get tickets to the Bears too," says one man reclining in the front seat of his car. "Here's a
sport that you participate in, and maybe you get more out of it. So it's no mystery to me why people are willing to do this."
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