I think Cody has been holding back on us. He didn't even tell us he'd gone down to Florida - for Speedweeks, I guess. Now the truth is out as reported in the Palm Beach newspaper and posted online on YouTube. I hope Cody never tries this stunt at the race track.
Lesson for prank-pulling teens: Dont mess with golfers
Frank Cerabino
Monday, March 5, 2012 | 6:10 p.m.
Apparently, youre not allowed to repeatedly flog somebody with a metal pole if he or she intentionally interrupts your concentration as you tee off on a golf course.
Thought Id pass that on. Just in case anyones tempted.
Im not much of a golfer, so Im not sure if the surprise blast of an air horn would affect my swing for the better or worse. But there are those who take the silence-is-golden bit of etiquette far more seriously.
Im thinking of two golfers in particular, a pair of 71-year-old men who ended up going to jail for their freelance enforcement of this audible breach in decorum on a Florida Panhandle golf course recently.
Ronald Richardson and Donald Nieto were on the ninth tee at Shalimar Pointe Country Club when four teenage boys thought it would be funny to sound an air horn when the two men were swinging, according to an Okaloosa County sheriffs report.
The teens imagined that they were unreachable as they hid in some nearby woods, on private property separated from the course by a chain-link fence.
After the horn sounded, the golfers walked toward the boys, who scooted away. One of the golfers, club still in hand, tried to climb the fence but soon gave up.
The boys didnt make a clean getaway, though. One of them dropped his jacket near the fence. The golfers, spotting the jacket, got their telescoping ball retriever poles from their golf bags.
One of the teens, seeing that the golfers were about to take his jacket, ran back toward them.
Oh, you cannot do that! the teenager kept yelling. Thats stealing!
And when the boy got in range, the two men forgot about the jacket and began walloping him over and over again with their poles, while the teen stood there with his hands near his head as his friends sounded the air horn repeatedly.
The whole prank was videotaped by one of the boys, who left his camera running through the entire incident. He can be heard giggling as his friend is being whacked repeatedly with long lightweight poles, which were bent out of shape by the beating.
The boy posted the video on YouTube, entitling it golf course beating poor Cody, (you can see it above) and put an explanatory note with it:
We were not on golf course property so we didnt think anything bad could happen to us, i guess that wasnt true ... yeah it was a stupid prank and we shouldve thought more about it before we did it, but beating cody with golfball retrievers hard enough to break them wasnt right.
Codys father didnt think it was right, either. And even though the 15-year-old boy wasnt hurt from the beating, the father showed up at the golf course with his son to complain about the golfers. A sheriffs deputy was called, and after looking at the boys video, the golfers were identified.
Richardson, a Canadian snowbird, and Nieto, a local retiree, were still in the clubhouse.
But not for long. After being questioned by the deputy, both men were charged with child abuse, a third-degree felony, and booked at the county jail.
Unlike nearly every other child abuse case, the victim in this one isnt getting a generous outpouring of sympathy.
They should have beaten him harder. And with bigger sticks, one poster to the YouTube video wrote.
Hahaha, you got beat by a couple of old men, another wrote.
Frank Cerabino writes for The Palm Beach Post.
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updated by @dave-fulton: 12/05/16 04:02:07PM