Won’t Anyone Think of the Golfers?

As we’ve noted several times, the Longfellow Bridge is being held together with Silly Putty and prayer. The Red Line continues to catch fire at an alarming rate. As I crossed the border into Massachusetts yesterday, the car I was in was nearly swallowed up in a gigantic pothole.

But all those issues are minor compared to the infrastructure issue that made the front page of the Globe today. It seems the Ponkapoag Golf Course is in dire need of repair.

The horror!

A short golf cart drive away from the parking lot, the desert gives way to a bog. This is the third hole on Course No. 1, where 4-foot-tall reeds sway in the breeze along the mucky fairways. It is closed to golfers, as are the fourth through eighth holes and the 11th through 13th, which are badly unkempt and prone to flooding. Off-limits to golfers, all the closed holes were designed by [Donald] Ross but now are so overgrown that they are havens for hikers and birdwatchers.

Birdwatchers! How did things ever get so bad? It seems it’s because the golf course is in Canton, not Wellesley.

“This [course] is for the working-class person,” [regular Frank “Cementhead” Oliverio] said. “If this course was in Wellesley and played by the rich, they’d have it fixed in two seconds.”

The cost to fix the course? As much as $35 million.

Hey, we love a good walk spoiled as much as the next person. But a shiny new golf course won’t do you any good if the roads you take to get there are impossible to traverse.