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Home · Sports · Golf · Quiet please

Quiet please

Gone are the hushed and reverent golf galleries of yesteryear. Todays golfers compete with attention-seeking hecklers, oblivious coughers, shutterbugs and cell phones. These distractions are proving difficult for golfers whose games depend on single-minded concentration. Some golfers despise hecklers.

But others, like Canada's Mike Weir, manage to maintain their sense of calm. "They can say what they want — they pay money to get in there," Weir says indifferently. CBC Radio's Robin Brown investigates the rise of the rowdy golf gallery.

Quiet please

• Ron Sirak, executive editor of Golf World magazine, believes that a rowdy gallery is good for the game. "As long as they quiet down when it comes time for a guy to hit, what's the problem? The game needs a little energy around it." — in ESPN.com, Feb. 3, 2005
• At many PGA courses, cell phones are prohibited. Signs warn fans to abstain from disrupting play. If fans become too rowdy or loud, course marshals will eject them from the course.

• Shutterbugs need also be mindful on a golf course. Even the small flutter of a camera click can throw off a golfer's game. For example, at the 2002 Palm Desert Skins Game, a fan who snapped a photo of Tiger Woods mid-swing, caused the champion golfer to flinch. Woods' caddy Steve Williams grabbed the camera from the fan and threw it into one of the course's ponds.

• "Miss Manners is shocked to learn that golfers are yelling anything other than 'Fore!' on the golf course, or striking anything other than golf balls with their clubs. Golf is the very last sport Miss Manners would expect to require an umpire, and she hopes everyone out on the fairways will get a grip on their civility before it comes to that." — Miss Manners (Judith Martin), in Golf World, March 2001.

• Canadian golfer Mike Weir was the unlucky target of crowd heckling at the 1999 PGA Medinah PGA Championship. Weir was paired with crowd-favourite Tiger Woods. Rowdy spectators mercilessly jeered at Weir. Fellow golfer Nick Price said that Weir's game was so rattled it likely cost him six shots, or $130,000 in prize money.

Quiet please

Medium: Radio

Guest(s): Mark Calcavecchia, Tim Herron, Sol Miller, Mike Weir


Host: Robin Brown

Duration: 8:28

Credit: PGA

Last updated:
Aug. 5, 2005


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