Written by Ried Holien

Frankenstein Mutant Grass Exists and Might Show Up at your Favorite Golf Course. BE ON ALERT!

My favorite Far Side cartoon shows a buffoonish-looking man walking mindlessly through a park above the caption: “Good and Evil Shoes.” One shoe has a voice bubble that reads: “I must protect Bob from the evils of the grass.” The other shoe says: “He, he, he. What can I step in next?” Like most of Gary Larsen’s genius work in that single-caption cartoon series, the joke proved funny on several levels. First, that shoes could be virtuous or vile. Second, what possible evils could exist with grass?

 

Well, today I’m no longer laughing. Grass, I find, creates a huge, hidden world fraught with controversy and crime. For most golfers (including myself a short time ago), their knowledge of grass consists of: a. it’s green, b. you mow it, and c. it’s fun to golf on. The most controversial and comedic thing most know about grass could be highlighted from the scene in Caddyshack where Bill Murray, as the dimwitted groundskeeper Carl Spackler, talks about creating his own hybrid made of Kentucky blue grass and marijuana. “The amazing stuff about this,” Spackler explains, “is that you can play 36 holes on it in the afternoon, take it home and just get stoned to the bejeezes belt that night.”

 

Frankenstein-like Mutant Grass
Surprisingly, strangely and sadly, there is much more to grass than that. There’s big corporations employing scientists to create Frankenstein-like mutant grass so they can sell it and make money. Opposition forces stand against them, destroying property and perpetrating crimes for what they believe in. Meanwhile, golfers continue to three-putt on the stuff, blissfully unaware of the controversy brewing beneath their feet.

 

So, to my fellow golfers, I say: beware the evils of the grass.
I first became aware of a hidden world of grass back in 2001 when I clipped a short newspaper article about some vandalism at a testing facility operated by Pure Seed Company in Oregon. Several people belonging to an extremist environmental group calling itself the Anarchist Golf Association broke into Pure Seed’s lab, destroyed two greenhouses full of experimental grass plots, and spray-painted “Nature Bites Back” on every wall they didn’t wreck. They even left “logo” balls marked with circle-A anarchist symbols.