Golf courses are supposed to be sleepy on a Sunday morning: pristine fairways, quiet scorecards, sarcastic banter over a missed putt, nothing louder than a bad swing. This weekend in San Antonio, an argument between two men in the same playing group ended with one of them stabbed. These courses were never built to handle that.
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As reported by News4SA, the police officials responded to an emergency alert on Saturday afternoon in San Antonio. Around 4:20 p.m., at The Quarry Golf Course, a disagreement between two men in the same playing group turned physical.
The older of the two, a 56-year-old, allegedly struck the younger man, 37, with a golf club before the confrontation escalated further. The younger man was stabbed and has been taken to the hospital, while the older man was held at the crime scene. No arrest has been made as of Sunday afternoon. Officials have not shared any details on what set off the dispute so far.
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This isn’t an isolated case, either.
In March, at the Players Championship, the tournament was disrupted by violence near the TPC Sawgrass. A domestic dispute in a Walgreens parking lot roughly a mile from the course boiled over into gunfire, leaving two people dead. The shooter ran onto PGA Tour property afterward, according to ESPN and CNN, crossing paths with groundskeepers and security staff before he was caught.
Golf courses have become social hubs as much as sporting ones. Vandalism, theft and property damage have all crept upward at these venues in recent years right along with that shift.
TPC Sawgrass in March, Omaha and Routenburn within two weeks of each other, and now San Antonio this weekend — four incidents in under five months, on two continents. Nobody tracks golf course crime as its own category, so police blotters and course operators are left to piece it together one incident at a time.
Golf courses are becoming a new target
Vandals used a machete to gouge deep cuts into the turf at Omaha’s Westwood Golf Course a few days ago. Five greens, sprinklers, fences, and two windows were damaged, according to 3 News Now.
The damage looks more like a crime scene than a golf course, and the repairs are estimated to be $8,000 to $10,000.
In a similar spate of attacks, Routenburn Golf Club was attacked by four young boys carrying sets of golf clubs. They were captured on CCTV as they made divots on the 4th and 14th greens, and allegedly stole tee markers before a car reportedly waited outside the course to pick them up.
Different circumstances, same weak spot. Golf courses are big, open, and largely unguarded, which makes them easy to wander onto and easy to tear up. Fixing that will take real changes: more patrols, cameras at entrances, and faster communication between courses and local police when trouble is nearby.
Written by
Edited by
Pulkit Prabhav