Take good care of the important golfers in your life - The Digest - Brief Article

We were halfway between dinner and cognac when our host said something that caused me to take a divot out of my creme brulee.

"No cards for me tonight, boys," he said. "I'm off to bed. And you can sleep in tomorrow morning. My back is killing me."

I had worried for a few years that this moment might be coming. Our host--who every summer for a decade had invited the seven of us to join him for three days of camaraderie at one of the four or five rich-guy golf clubs he belongs to--was beginning to show his age. On recent trips I had detected an alarming decline in his enthusiasm for post-midnight putting contests; now he had portentously suggested that he wouldn't be able to handle 36 holes the next day. He winced as he rose from the table.

"Old friend," I said, forcing a cheerful smile, "I know I speak for everyone here when I say that nothing is more important to any of us than your continued good health. In fact, if anything should ever happen to you--well, let's just say that evenings like this one would become a thing of the past."

"Oh, good lord!" one of the other guys cried. The long-term significance of our host's bad back had finally sunk in.

Many golfers have pals like our host. He's what Lorelei Lee--the young gold digger played by Marilyn Monroe in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes"--would call a "gentleman friend." He's wealthier than all seven of the rest of us put together, and he belongs to much nicer golf clubs. The only problem is that he's also a good bit older--which means that he will certainly lose interest in inviting us to play golf with him long before any of us have lost interest in being invited. Ideally, I suppose, a golfer's gentleman friends would always be young and in perfect health, but that's not the way the world works. Just look at the guys Lorelei Lee went out with.

Anyway, after our host had gone to bed that night, my buddies and I put our heads together. We realized that for much too long we had taken our host's generosity for granted, and that we had never adequately thanked him for all the wonderful golf that he had treated us to.

"We should get him something really nice, a real symbol of our affection," one of my buddies said. So here's what we did: We chipped in and bought him a Bowflex exercise machine. The thing cost a bundle, but we didn't mind. The only thing in golf that is more valuable than your health is the health of your gentleman friends.

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