An e-mail message making the cyberspace rounds last winter explained why full-fledged golf courses have 18 holes, rather than 20, say, or maybe a baker’s dozen.

Supposedly, during a discussion among the club’s membership board at the venerable St. Andrews golf course in Scotland a senior member noted that there were exactly 18 shots in a fifth of Scotch whisky. By limiting himself to only one shot of scotch per hole, the Scot figured a round of golf was properly finished when the scotch ran out.

It made perfect sense to his golfing chums. So 18 holes of golf became the norm.

I don’t know about you, but were I to follow the old Scot’s rules my round of golf would be pretty much over by the third hole. Maybe even earlier, depending upon whether the mandatory whiskey-shot routine commenced before teeing it up on Number One or after holing out on the first green.

The anecdote came to mind this week while my motley crew negotiated the Bangor Municipal Golf Course and the sight of empty beer cans in tee-side trash baskets caused talk to turn to new legislation affecting Maine golf courses come July 30.

On that date golf course management will be allowed to sell beer to golfers on the golf course from what the law calls “mobile service bars” and golfers everywhere will likely call beer carts.

The legislation restricts alcohol sales to malt liquor, prohibiting the Scotch whisky that allegedly inspired the aforementioned layout of the old St. Andrews course. It remains to be seen if some future Rhodes Scholar golf architect will use the 18 whiskey-shot blueprint to reconfigure Maine’s traditional 9- and 18-hole golf courses to 6- and 12-holers on the basis that there are six beers in a six-pack and 12 in a 12-pack.

In any case, not all golfers welcome the fact that Maine – one of only three states that, until now, has prohibited on-course beer sales – has finally joined the club. Austin Kelly, the club pro at Bangor Muni for 33 years before retiring in 1996, believes the move may be one of the dumber ones the Legislature has made in quite some time.

In an earlier interview with BDN columnist Tom Weber, Kelly suggested there is enough risk on the course as it is without golfers having to worry about being conked on the head from behind by some impatient hacker who’s been swilling beer while thrashing his way around the layout. “There are plenty of golfers who hit the ball bad to begin with, and having a few beers is certainly not going to improve their accuracy, I can tell you that,” Kelly said.

Kelly may not have to worry about beer sales at the city-owned golf course, though. “Right now, we’re not sure if it’s [on-course beer sales] even going to happen here,” Bangor Muni club pro Brian Enman, Kelly’s successor, said Thursday. He said the city’s lawyer is studying the new legislation to determine what the club’s obligations would be in respect to potential liability problems arising from the mobile service.

“We’ve got a couple of months to decide what we’re going to do,” Enman said, adding that the beer-cart concept may be better suited to private courses hoping to improve their bottom line than to municipal courses.

Enman isn’t any more enamored of on-course beer sales than his predecessor. “I would rather not have beer on the course,” he said. “It opens up a can of worms …”

Legislative analyst Danielle Fox explained that a stipulation that “only those engaged in a round of golf” can partake of the mobile beer service is intended to assist in policing the situation. Spectators following golfers around the course must fend for themselves, beer-wise, back at the clubhouse. Golfers caught smuggling beer onto the course would be subject to a stiff fine, not that no-alcohol warnings long posted at many courses have ever stopped dedicated beer-toters, as a peek into most any on-course trash container will show.

When it comes to checking golf bags for the contraband, “don’t-ask, don’t-tell,” seems to be the policy of the typical course management, leery of possible legal and public relations flaps. As long as the beer nuts don’t chew up the greens and don’t wrap their drivers around the ball washer when they duck-hook a ball into the alder swamp, a sort of peaceful co-existence is observed.

On the theory that if it ain’t broke you don’t fix it, this time-honored accommodation probably won’t change a whole lot, mobile bar beer sales notwithstanding.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.