Berkshire Country Club - No Carts Before Noon

Today (6/19/11) I played at Berkshire Country Club in northeastern Ohio. To a former caddie, the round started off with the most dreaded phrase in golf, "you must take a cart before noon." What? What does that mean? And why before noon? I said, "no, I want to walk." The response, again, but with a more authoritative tone, "you must take a cart; that's the boss's rules." O-kay, the boss's rules, but why? Apparently there is this perception that golfers on carts play faster than those walking. Perhaps, but it is my experience that people take more time. Why? Because golfers are not trained on how to play cart golf. Often times golfers forget clubs in the cart and have to return to get the right clubs. This inevitably adds time to the round. One may say that the cart does speed up play between holes, but on a course like Berkshire, where the holes are all within reasonable distance of each other the cart does not speed up play. This is especially true on father's day when the course is packed from 7:00 am on.

Since I was not by myself, I begrudgingly paid for the cart and green fees, for a total of $46, which is quite steep for a course of this caliber. Having paid for this, and the course website stating that it is an "18 hole Championship Golf Course", I expected a much better groomed course than what I encountered. Although soggy in some spots, the greens were in good shape. The fairways were decent, but many of the tees needed work. Apparently this was to be done shortly as the carts had signs stating that they would be "moving dirt around" in the near future. The sand traps had very little sand if any at all and appeared as if they came through 30 years ago with a bulldozer and in one pass created a small indentation in the ground and then dumped sand from a nearby Lake Erie beach. As to the cart paths, which for this given day gained my attention, were in terrible shape. They had many undulations with tree roots growing through them. And where there was supposed to be asphalt, much of it was missing. The one good thing about the cart paths, which courses that have them should follow, is they are only near the tees and greens. They are not up the entire side of the hole, which many courses usually have. The one entertaining part of the day was the down hill par 4 no. 12, the second most difficult hole on the course. Perhaps, in its effort to be a "championship golf course" the green slopes severely back to front and if you leave your ball above the hole there is little chance to stop it unless you hit the hole. None of the players in my group could stop their ball before it rolled completely off the green. In fact, some people would consider this unfair. The USGA has suffered from similar criticism in previous US Opens. Overall, I rate this course 2 stars out of 5.