The Pulse, october 26, 2012

Because we’ve seen the words shark and golf course in the same sentence so many times, we’ve been conditioned to wait for the inevitable mention of Greg Norman. We’re like Pavlov’s dogs. We wait and we salivate. But in San Juan Capistrano, California this week, an actual swim-in-the-water shark -- a 24-inch leopard shark, according to an eyewitness -- was found wiggling and writhing on the 12th tee at San Juan Hills Golf Club. “Shark falling from the sky -- kind of odd,” concluded a club official. Odd? More like eerie, I think. What

kind of sinister message was this, and who sent it? Who sleeps with the fishes? . . . It’s not just sharks that are turning up on golf courses. In Sidney, Nebraska, a mountain lion was recently spotted near Hillside Golf Course. And in two golf communities in California -- in Palm Desert and Rancho Mirage -- coyotes have bitten women and attacked a dog. “I want people to know, and I want them to be very, very careful of their young toddlers in the yard, because I do believe that there’s going to be something horrific happening,” said a terrified resident. Just to note: Horrific is a word not often heard in gated communities. . . . Mountain lions and coyotes may prowl golf communities, but they don’t design golf courses. For architectural animals, many in our business place their trust in the legendary Golden Bear and a newcomer to the business named Tiger Woods. As has been well-chronicled, the newcomer has signed three contracts for new courses but not yet built even one. So today he growls happily, because last month construction finally began on a Woods-designed layout. It’s in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, at the Diamante resort community. With luck, by 2014 we’ll know how the eye of Tiger transforms a landscape into a golfscape. . . . Still waiting for that Greg Norman reference? Quit carping. It’s on the way. . . . Coyotes aren’t the only animals making trouble in California’s Coachella Valley. Flocks of American Coots -- I refer to the bird species, not to the collection of old geezers playing poker in the card room -- have become such nuisances that some clubs in the valley have requested permission to shoot them, or at least shoot at them. “Coots are a problem at every golf course in the valley,” reports a superintendent at Indian Wells Golf Resort. “The only way to really deal with them is through harassment.” Harassment? Okay, as long as the club screens The Birds before it loads its shotguns. . . . You may be thinking that the last course you played on is “a dog track” or “a cow pasture.” But don’t say it out loud. Because Golf Club at Vistoso, in Oro Valley, Arizona, has suspended one of its members for describing its golf course as “a goat ranch.” The criticism was apparently too much for the club to bear. . . . You can stop salivating. Greg Norman, the Great White himself, has begun shaping a course on the coast of southeastern Vietnam. The track, part of a casino-focused resort, is being built atop seaside dunes, and its developers say it’ll be “one of the best, if not the best, course in Asia” when it opens roughly a year from now. As for Norman, he says his goal is “to deliver a timeless and memorable golf experience.” As for me, I’m waiting for the day when a bird drops a two-foot shark on the 12th tee.