Honor among golfers

Carol Wallace (a nice Scottish name) has an article in The New York Times about the honor system in Scotland:

Progress has always come slowly to Strathtay Golf Club, a picture-postcard nine-hole course in this leafy, well-to-do village about seventy miles northwest of Edinburgh. The club, now celebrating its 100th anniversary, added a vending machine just three years ago and in May it finally started a website to help bolster its roster of two hundred members. Club members, who pay £135 (about $220) in annual dues, are mostly local businesspeople and retirees, and are often neighbors. Henry Murdoch, 45, remembers the days before the management committee placed a combination lock on the clubhouse door. “For years, the key was kept under a rock, and only the members knew which rock,” said Murdoch, who has belonged since 1976.
One tradition is unlikely to be altered. A small sign on the outside of the clubhouse reads Pay Your Green Fees Here. Below the sign is a metal slot, where golfers drop envelopes with their money. The course is run on the honor system, with no attendant in sight. Is this a quaint Scottish custom or a shrewd business strategy? It is both. In the home of golf, honesty has proved to be the best policy for small, rural clubs that are unable to afford full-time staff. “Our little out-of-the-way course does not have a steady stream of visitors,” said Ian Ramsay, 71, a retired English teacher who has belonged to Strathtay since 1963. “An attendant to take in money would be idle half the time. So it’s strictly a practical business decision.” Of Scotland’s 550 golf courses, about a hundred are run on the honesty box system at least part of the time, said Ewan Colville, the North American marketing manager for the tourism agency VisitScotland.
“The system works well because it reflects the traditions within golf of honesty and integrity,” said Hamish Grey, the chief executive of the Scottish Golf Union, which oversees the men’s amateur game here. Yet Alistair Robinson, a tax accountant who is Strathtay’s secretary, estimated that two to five percent of the 1,400 golfers who play the course each year do not pay, costing the club up to $1,500 in lost revenue. “It’s still a lot less than it would be if we had to pay someone to police the course,” Robinson, 67, said. “Any cheating makes you a pariah in golfing circles, and the same goes for the honesty box.” Ramsay added: “We always meet our projected target for fees, so why bother if a few crooks play for free? The tide covers the rocks, as we say in Scotland.” Still, the club cares enough to offer the greenskeeper, its only full-time employee, a financial incentive if he catches any ticketless patrons playing the course.
In Strathtay, the crime rate is low and burglaries are rare. About ten years ago, though, thieves broke into the clubhouse but found an immovable iron safe. “The news must have gone around the thieving community, because since then we’ve never had a problem,” Ramsay said. “We’re not as daft as we look.”
The honor system is not as common in the United States as it is in Britain, but the United States Golf Association confirmed that some of the country’s 15,979 courses have honesty boxes, though it has no records of how many or where they are. The National Golf Course Owners Association said it knew of a sprinkling of honor courses in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, South Dakota, Oregon, Maine, and Florida; most of those are in rural areas. William Baker, the owner of the eighteen-hole Sunnybreeze Golf Course in Arcadia, Florida, first tested the honor system in 1999 at his new nine-hole course. “We thought it would save some money on staff since our clubhouse was a quarter-mile away from the course,” Baker said.
It took three attempts to design an honesty box that could withstand thieves. Today, the box is attached to a heavy steel pole buried in four feet of cement, the course is thriving, and Baker has no regrets. “If you are in a rural community where neighbors know each other and are responsible, it can work,” he said. That describes Strathtay, with a population of about 500. Victorian villas sit opposite the first fairway and green, separated by a single-lane road and a low stone fence. Club members, who pay about $220 in annual dues, are mostly local businesspeople and retirees, and are often neighbors. Strathtay is the antithesis of the big private golf clubs in Scotland. The course’s all-day summer ticket for adults costs about $25 on weekdays, rising to about $33 on weekends. (Turnberry, which hosts next week’s British Open, charges up to $345 to play eighteen holes.) Strathtay’s fairways, where red-legged partridges, rabbits and pheasant roam at their own risk, are groomed, if not immaculate; tee times are first come first served; there is no dress code; and women are welcome, not always the case at Scottish clubs. The small clubhouse, which was once a slaughterhouse for a butcher, makes Tony Soprano’s back room at the Bada Bing seem luxurious. “We don’t do catering, we don’t do high teas, we don’t do drinks,” Ramsay said. “We just dress, show up, and play. It is golf the way it should be played.”
Tour companies tend to guide visitors to the famous Scottish courses with good reason. Colville, of VisitScotland, said demand is high to play the name courses among the 19,000 American golfers who visit annually, pumping some $90 million into the Scottish economy. Quality small courses that are off the beaten path, like Strathtay, are often overlooked. “We can’t advertise it,” Ramsay said. “What are we going to say in the ad? Wood clubhouse, no bar, no carts? Who would come?”
The steep layout, with towering oaks and winding pathways suited more for mountain goats than for humans, is 3,826 yards over eighteen holes and plays to par 63— with different tee positions in and out. Last year The Scotsman newspaper named it one of the best nine-hole courses in Scotland. “The course is loved by everybody who has played it,” The Scotsman wrote. “Strathtay will test your shotmaking and make you use every club in your bag.”
Colville said some tour companies are turning to Scotland’s smaller courses to satisfy the demands from repeat visitors who are searching for something different. “The quality of golf would be surprising to American golfers who think that if a course doesn’t have a big, fancy clubhouse or resort, the golf wouldn’t be enjoyable,” he said.
Owned by the club and managed by a volunteer committee of members, the course is an important asset to the village, where the Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie once spent summers and where J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, has a country house.
“It is not a golf course or the golf course, it is our golf course,” said Ramsay, who lives in a stone cottage about twenty yards from the first green and has had his garden window smashed six times by errant shots. “We love our course and are keenly aware that Strathtay would be far less attractive without it.”
Murdoch, a store owner, considers the course his sanctuary. “Even if I play just three holes, it calms me down,” he said. “If I could, I’d be buried on the course.” That would be illegal. But when Alec de Boys, a former club secretary and youth golfing champion, died in 1997, That would be illegal. But when Alec de Boys, a former club secretary and youth golfing champion, died in 1997, his ashes were scattered on Strathtay’s sixth tee, with panoramic views of the lush countryside.