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I had just made a routine par on the 7th hole, fully settled into a round at an enjoyable resort golf course in South Florida, when a stern warning coming from my golf cart shattered the afternoon's peace.
"YOU HAVE ENTERED A RESTRICTED AREA," its capital letters screamed at me. "PLEASE RETURN TO THE COURSE IMMEDIATELY!"
The trouble was, I was already on the course: pin-high left of the green, all four wheels kissing concrete.
After several beeps (from the cart) and curses (from me), the warning disappeared as abruptly as it had come, while I reached a conclusion I'd been approaching for years:
In-cart GPS systems are one of the worst things in golf. They are an infantilizing nuisance, an obnoxious intrusion and an odious drain on the soul of a great game. To steal a 15th-century turn of phrase from Scotland's King James and his famously futile ban, they should be utterly cryit doun.
Why golf courses should say no to golf cart GPS systems
Each of the big-3 golf cart manufacturers has their own versions of golf cart GPS. They are annoying at best, infuriating at worst.
Don't get me wrong; I understand the idea's appeal. Instant access to information about the hole you're playing - especially on a destination course of limited familiarity - sounds helpful. Practically every car has a touchscreen nowadays, so why not golf carts?
Let me - and many other frustrated golfers - count the ways.
The GPS on the cart stopped working on hole 11 and did not respond to the proper reboot of the system. We then had to guess at the yardage because the sprinkler heads had no yardage information. A staff member who was handing out cold water on the 15th hole was able to diagnose the problem as a dead GPS battery and was kind enough to swap out the battery from his cart to our unit.
For one, golf cart GPS systems tarnish golf's analog charms. For centuries, part of the game's essence has been its ability to transport us away from everyday life to someplace more contemplative, more engaging. Screen time dominates 21st-century life - does it need to infect golf, too?
Besides, it's not as if GPS-enabled golf carts even work well. The technology has improved shockingly little since I first encountered it in the late 1990s. It's metastasized to thousands of courses by now, but measurements are still wrong as often as they're right. How many otherwise great swings have resulted in bogeys or worse because a golfer foolishly trusted the GPS yardage? I don't think I can count that high. I also cannot tell you how many times a course has failed to update the hole locations in its GPS systems, rendering all yardages useless and misleading, turning the almighty screen into an intermittently noisy rotating billboard for the course's snack bar or some local real estate agency. At other times, the best the system can manage is yardages to the middle of each green. Congrats, GPS screen - you're just as helpful than the nearest sprinkler head.
I have heard hushed legends of GPS golf carts helping speed up play, but like a golfer who actually drives the ball as far as he says he does, I have yet to see it with my own eyes. Golfers are getting slower, not faster. GPS screens and Bluetooth speakers gum up the game.
Another loathsome effect of golf cart GPS is how it has decimated the yardage book business. While the screens try (and often fail) to give quick surface-level information to golfers, good yardage books actually deepen a golfer's level of engagement in a shot, hole or round thanks to the richness and detail of the information on offer. Yardages to and from various landmarks and sprinkler heads jump off the page in a way that would take far longer to extract, clumsily, from an overhead touch screen. Reading a yardage book is a golf skill. Interacting with a dumb GPS is a chore. If I had a dollar for every time I asked for a yardage book in a pro shop and was told, "No, we have GPS in the carts," I would have...nearly enough money to buy a GPS-enabled golf cart.
Yes, of course GPS carts are more expensive than their analog counterparts. Because the shallow cool-factor of GPS has created a cascading race to keep up with the neighbors, course operators often pony up without a second thought, putting themselves on the hook for contracts tacking on five figures to already growing annual operating expenses. Even local courses, whose golfers don't really need the service GPS carts provide, are leasing them out of perceived obligation. One operator I talked to who recently made the switch to GPS carts liked knowing where all carts were at all times but lamented how poorly the invisible gate feature of his course's screen systems worked around tees and greens.
Which brings me to the worst of a long list of demerits for golf cart GPS: the way it treats golfers not as responsible individuals, but as untrustworthy toddlers. For years, scorecards would say "Please keep golf carts no closer than 30 feet from greens and tee boxes," and that was that. Nearly all golfers obeyed, and the ones who didn't were warned or stripped of their cart privileges altogether. Setting up artificial, often invisible no-go zones sends a clear message to golfers that managers a) do not believe they can act sensibly, and b) are not interested in personally upholding the rules anyway. They would rather outsource feeble enforcement to technology that is shoddy at best. The resulting atmosphere of distrust and detachment breeds disdainful golfers and compromises the overall experience unnecessarily.
I know cart sales reps are pushing screens hard. I know shallow golfers have come to expect screens in carts, no matter how much they strip soul out of the game. But I also know that any golf course with the backbone to say no to GPS golf carts (especially if they also say yes to yardage books) has my unyielding respect. If a golfer is going to use a cart, the very least he or she should expect is for it not to torpedo the experience of playing the game.
"WOULD YOU LIKE TO USE THE ELECTRONIC SCORECARD???" Just leave me alone - I'm begging you.
