You understand that if you're nine up after nine holes and the TV men say the tape hasn't gone right, we have to rub it out and start again. "If the TV technicians do not catch the action or if a match goes over our allotted 21 minutes, we have to play the match over. In a trailer on the eve of the final matches, Clayton explained the procedure to the eight remaining contestants:
This year he elected to make the last rounds of the World Championship serve as his TV show.
#Lets play putt putt series
Each year for the past eight, Clayton has staged a Parade of Champions TV series of seven pretaped matches that are shown on more than 70 stations around the country. In its pursuit of recognition, the PPA has abandoned itself, by financial necessity, to the whim of the television camera.
"If I could swing away once in a while, or go out on a fairway and mix up the routine, it wouldn't be so bad. "The pressure in Putt-Putt is unbelievable on every shot," he says. Randall, a girls' basketball coach in Rossville, Ga., says there is a big difference between PPA and PGA play. The Putt-Putt people claim they lost on grass but won on the carpets. five members of the PGA-Dave Hill, Randy Glover, Lou Graham, Don Massengale and Rex Baxter-faced five PPA members in a putting match, half on Putt-Putt and half on a regular green. Moreover, last December in Pompano Beach, Fla. Bobby Mitchell, a PGA tour regular, is a former city champion of Putt-Putt in Danville, Va. Freddie Haas of New Orleans, who was once a leading money-winner on the PGA tour, played in a couple of Putt-Putt tournaments a few years ago. Putt-Putt is not without relations to the PGA. Holes are standardized on every Putt-Putt course around the country and are given names like "Water Hole," "Sidehill" and "Drop-Off." Most of the holes require the putter to angle his shots off wooden, orange-painted bumpboards to avoid obstacles such as pipes, bricks, water and wrought-iron letters that spell "Putt-Putt" and "PPA." Because of this aspect of the game, Putt-Putt resembles billiards or pool as much as it does golf. PPA members-who play their tour only in the summer and are otherwise bankers, clerks, teachers, students, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers-use the same clubs and balls, and most of the same stances and strokes, as regular touring golf pros. The game of Putt-Putt is indeed one of skill and finesse acquired over a long period of time and practice.
PPA members are identified only by the names and cities on their shirts, and they are forced always to answer such questions as, "Putt-Putt? What are you, motorboat guys?" They are men-in the storied tradition of pathfinders, deerslayers and boccie aficionados-who dwell on the outskirts of sport, breathe the musty air of anonymity and search for recognition in the darkest of corners. They don't stroke the ball so much as they bang, angle and ricochet it off boards and through pipes to get it into the cup. They don't read the carpets but memorize them. They are men who don't putt on grass but on carpets.
#Lets play putt putt professional
The field in Fayetteville was made up of members of the Professional Putters Association, a subsidiary of an organization that has franchised its Putt-Putt game into an exploding financial bonanza throughout the world. It wasn't a prior commitment that kept the Archers and Caspers away from challenging Smith in a pastime in which one might consider them to be expert.