By the time John Vogts was a sophomore in high school, he was "running" to the golf course the moment his last class ended. Not to work on lowering his scores. Just to work. Moving dirt, manicuring the grass. Before he was old enough to drive a car on the road, he had learned how to operate just about every piece of machinery in the equipment shed.

"I never really was interested in sports, but I always liked the outdoors," he said. "It didn't take me long to become the crew leader. They had to come out and get me at dark."

Nearly a quarter-century later, he's trying to instill those same passions in another generation of teenagers, many of whom wouldn't know a gap wedge from a titanium driver.

Vogts is the superintendent for a daily-fee course currently under construction by the Glen Mills Schools in suburban Philadelphia, which is in the business of rehabilitating court-adjudicated youths.

When the on-campus facility — the first of any kind in Delaware County in nearly four decades — opens next spring, some 70 students will be responsible for everything from mowing greens to stocking the golf shop. And they won't have much of a commute; they'll be housed in a new dormitory adjacent to the Bobby Weed-designed layout.

Whatever profits the course generates will go back into a scholarship fund for those who need financial assistance once they leave Glen Mills.

"We want to create a vocational learning center, to train these kids in every facet possible," said Vogts, who honed his skills under, among others, the legendary Richie Valentine at Merion Golf Club in suburban Ardmore. "Every year, there's a shortage of people who can be hired to do this kind of work. It's a big field. It's not for everybody. But we can help some of them do something with their lives. If you can drive a tractor, you can run a forklift. So you can work on a construction site. I know — I ran a construction company."

Clarence Sena is 18. He's from Denver, where he never once picked up a club. Now he's one of a dozen students who've already helped Vogts mark out the wetland areas.

"It's a real different experience," he said. "I'm having fun because I'm always learning. It keeps you occupied and focused. And it's hands-on. We don't just talk about it. We do it. This is stuff I never thought about, and probably wouldn't be getting anywhere else. Who knew about plants? It's unexplainable, to think I could do this for a living. Maybe I could even see myself taking up the game."

Angel Melendez is 16. He's a native of Harrisburg, the state capital, which is just a two-hour drive but, in this case, a world apart. His mind has also been opened.

"It's great, being part of something," he said. "I didn't know anything about golf. Now I'm helping to build this beautiful course and I'm getting good at it. You see all these trees, and the next thing you know, there's grass. Soon, people will be playing. And I can say I had something to do with that. I want Glen Mills to be proud. I know I am. I'm part of history."

Giving something back to the game, however, is not without its forced carries.

"These kids are constantly discovering," said Vogts. "Just the other day, they discovered seven-minute itch. Sometimes, they discover the hard way." — Mike Kern

Look, Ma. No hands!

If nightmares still haunt you from the horror film "The Lawnmower Man," then you probably should not come within viewing distance of the Kawasaki Mule.

The Mule is a robotic lawnmower created by engineers at the University of Florida and tested on Gainesville's Ironwood Golf Course. As if possessed by poltergeists, it methodically works its way around the golf course, exacting corners and avoiding any trees, bunkers or other obstacles — even humans — that happen into its path. But an apparition is not the pilot of this free-riding mower. A generator powers all the electronics, including the laptop computer situated beside the steering wheel that controls the system's movement and makes a human driver unnecessary.

"The positioning system has a built-in path," said Carl Crane III, a co-creator of the Mule. "There are maps and the machine follows a path. We don't need a camera to look for the edges. It just knows where to go."

Crane, the coordinator of UF's Center for Intelligent Machines and Robotics, has spearheaded this government-funded operation for seven years with the help of a small assembly of engineering faculty. Since the project's inception, time and costs of making the Mule have diminished from three years and $300,000 to four months and $50,000. Modifications have been implemented that allow the Mule to use latitude and longitude to mow a rectangular field, such as a fairway, to within four centimeters of the corners.

"It goes the same speed as a regular lawnmower, but it has its advantages," Crane says. "Part of the quality is the mow. And you can have multiple units out there with one supervisor. It can also mow in the middle of the night because it doesn't need any lights."

So that the machine doesn't end up over a cliff or in a lake, the Mule also has the capability to avoid obstructions. UF research engineer Dave Armstrong says the system detects motion using sonar, enabling it to stop for human or other obstacles in its path. "They send out a sound pulse and they listen for an echo," Armstrong explained. "If the echo comes back real quick, then it knows something is close."

Early indications point to the Mule becoming much more than a test machine. The Toro Co. of Bloomington, Minn., visited UF last month to assess the feasibility of producing such units.

The current cost for the self-propelled mower is similar to the retail for a fairway mower, which starts at $35,000 for a baseline model. And although these units one day may be commonplace on golf courses and football fields, Crane believes it is unlikely such a unit would be practical for home use. He said small, unmanned mowers do exist, but they roam around the lawn and turn back if they have exceeded their boundaries, instead of being programmed with a set path.

"Electronic engineers have put a small unit on a mower," Crane said. "You put this thing out there and it is like a pool cleaner. It randomly goes all over but doesn't get too near the edge. It's low-cost with some needed capabilities. That system does not have sensors like the Mule." — Tim Walters

Eight Makes the Numbers Right

As a longtime restaurant broker in San Diego, Jim Pagni can handle getting beaten occasionally by the competition, but he can't stand being cheated. The same goes for a lot of the charity golf events in which he plays.

Pagni competes in a dozen or more each year and is tournament director for three others. "Scrambles are supposed to be fun," he says, "but it had gotten to the point where they weren't anymore. I can't tell you how many times our group would grind to get to 11 or 12 under and think we were in pretty good shape. Then we'd look at the board to see 18, 19 and 20 unders winning when we knew those groups and knew they had no way of going that low."

So, just as in any business deal that was going slowly, Pagni came up with a new approach to that problem: eightsomes. The usual scramble rules remain in effect, but instead of having an A and B group on each tee, Pagni has two groups exchange scorecards and play the round together so they can monitor each other. With an open hole left between groups, play tends to move along more quickly — or at least no slower than you'd otherwise find.

Pagni has been pleased with the results, if for no other reason than blatant sandbaggers tend not to enter because they know their cards are exchanged and low scores are honest.

"You've got to run it like a Marine," said Pagni. "You must have effective marshals to keep people moving along. You state in the rules that a second warning brings a one-stroke penalty. The only thing worse than being cheated in a scramble is taking six hours to find out you've been cheated."

Pagni has also discovered there tends to be more camaraderie between groups of eight. A tournament director might want to put together teams of friends or, in a corporate outing, mix groups from departments that might not ordinarily spend much time together.

Pagni hasn't won any tournament using the eightsomes format yet, but at least his 11 and 12 unders make them fun again. — T.R. Reinman All is not OK in Oklahoma

Getting a course ready for the U.S. Open Championship is no easy task. It takes years, not just the few months beforehand, and involves a countless number of man hours, refinements and detail work nearly imperceptible to the untrained eye.

There's no reason to believe playing conditions for the 2001 Open at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Okla., will be anything less than exceptional, although the club certainly would have preferred to get to that point in a more traditional manner.

Late last month, Southern Hills, the site of two previous Opens (1958 and '77) and three PGA Championships, decided to close its course until next spring when it was discovered that vandals sprayed several greens with some kind of poison.

While eight greens on the Open course and four on a separate nine-hole course were affected, the time the course is closed could actually turn out to be a positive.

The club can arrange to repair the recent damage and at the same time tend to other maintenance that would have been required before the Open, including work on some bunkers, drainage areas, trees and the construction of several new tees to be used for the Open. The club has decided to regrass all eight of the greens damaged on the Open course. "Basically," said USGA championship agronomist Tim Moraghan after viewing the damage, "they could have a brand new golf course in eight months."

Tests are under way to determine what was sprayed on the greens. No arrests have yet been made.

Spirit of the Game — John Elway

"Football is such a physical sport. It's a tough sport, so obviously you've got to have somebody that's going to keep the lines where they're supposed to be, whereas golf is more mentally grueling than it is physically. They're both different ends of the spectrum. In football, if guys get a chance, they'll cheat. In golf, it's up to you. If you get caught cheating then, you'll never lose that tag.

"In football, they want an uneven playing field. In golf, it's up to the players to keep that playing field at least equal to where everybody has an equal chance to win.

"Golf, to me, is such a great sport in the fact that every time you go out and play, you never know what's going to happen. You can be striking the ball just perfectly, and there are a lot of things that you can't control that change the outcome of what you do.

"But also, get the enthusiasm up. The enthusiasm for golf gets kind of stifled because we worry that you have to stay within the realm of staying cool, calm and collected. It doesn't have to be a stifled game, one that is stoic, one where you walk around and show no emotion. When you hit a good shot, there's no reason why you shouldn't enjoy it." — Rich Skyzinski

You Go, Girl!

At least 18 colleges and universities are scheduled to participate in this year's Get a Girl Golfing clinics, a program established by the National Golf Coaches Association to increase the number of girls playing the game.

The majority of clinics will be held during the designated Get a Girl Golfing Week, which is scheduled for Aug. 23-29.

Now in its third year, the program consists of between 30 and 40 half-day clinics hosted by women's collegiate golf coaches. The NGCA, founded in 1983, has more than 250 members representing teams in all three NCAA divisions.

The Get a Girl Golfing program introduces girls ages 8 to 14 to the game; there is no charge to attend the clinics, which have as one of their goals to have each girl go home with one club and a golf ball.

Interested participants can obtain the location of the clinic nearest them by calling the Get a Girl Golfing hotline at (800) 509-0535, or by visiting the NGCA's web site at www.ngca.com.

Among the schools scheduled to participate in the program are: University of Arkansas; University of Illinois; University of Iowa; Iowa State; Longwood College; Mississippi State; Montana State; North Carolina; Northern Illinois; University of Ohio; Ohio State; University of Oklahoma; Oklahoma State; Oral Roberts; Penn State; Texas A&M; Texas Tech; and Vanderbilt.

Kids Get First Priority

Youths from inner-city and low-income families in Los Angeles who have a desire to learn the game of golf will no longer have to battle their adult counterparts for space on the driving range or practice greens.

When the new Tregnan Golf Academy at Coolidge is completed later this fall, the facility will become the first of its kind devoted entirely to youth training. Constructed at a cost of $1.5 million through grants from the USGA, the Los Angeles Junior Chamber Urban Youth Golf Program, American Golf and the local Griffith Park Trust, the academy will have a 15-stall driving range, two practice holes and another green set up for chipping and bunker shots.

John Morrison, the director for the Urban Youth Golf Program, said other youth facilities exist — like the Pro Kids Academy in San Diego — but they are connected to a golf course. This project was constructed on a 10-acre property that once encompassed the Coolidge nine-hole course, which closed in the early 1980s due to budget cuts caused by Proposition 13.

"It wasn't a profitable course," said Mary Braunwarth, the director of corporate development for the Los Angeles Parks and Recreation Department. "So the cheapest thing they could do was shut it down." The site remained dormant until the recreation division bantered the idea of building a youth training center. The fund-raising commenced in August 1997 and by mid-November the project will come to fruition.

For a nominal fee of $25, each youth will receive 20 weeks of instruction — classes will be broken down into 10-week sessions — along with clubs and a T-shirt. They also are eligible for highly discounted rates to use the practice facility, along with transportation to one of four nearby courses.

Braunwarth hopes the facility will spawn interest for underprivileged youth, even if it doesn't produce any future champions. "The main thing for me is to see the kids enjoying golf," Braunwarth said. "That's what it is all about." — David Shefter