Tales From The Wacky World Of L.A. Muni Golf

As the Northern Trust Open lands in LA, it's probably not well known to most of the country that the area has a thriving and eccentric public golf scene.

Nice to see David Owen found it entertaining, particularly at Roosevelt Golf Course, which I do believe I steered him towards.Though I wouldn't have guessed witnessing a slow play brouhaha was one of the things he'd see:

I also liked Harding (where a member of my foursome made a hole-in-one). But my favorite Griffith course is Roosevelt. It has just nine holes, and most of them are short, but it's fun to play, and it's walking only, and the terrain and the views are dramatic. (From several spots, you can see the domes of the Griffith Observatory, which opened in 1935 on the park's highest point, the summit of Mount Hollywood.) I played one of my three nines there with Paul, who spoke more Korean than English; Lawrence, a former college baseball player and a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects; and Matthew, a young sales rep for a company that sells titanium screws and other trauma-related surgical supplies. Matthew was wearing scrubs, because he had come from a nearby hospital, where he had spent the morning teaching a surgeon to use one of his company's products. He didn't have to be back in the O.R. for a couple of hours, and his clubs were in the trunk of his car, so why not?