Reaching for a stogie after you bogey may soon be a thing of the past.

There's a national movement afoot to ban smoking on public golf courses.

So far a handful of cities in California, Minnesota, Hawaii, Indiana, Texas and Colorado have told duffers they can no longer be puffers.

Several weeks ago, the city of Spokane took a shot at this.

With little fanfare and next to no advance notice, the Spokane Parks Board voted to ban smoking in all city parks, including golf courses.

The board figured the decision would be a short putt to the cup.

The board figured wrong.

Not only did the bureaucrats get complaints from smokers, they also got non-smokers all fired up over the notion that depriving a fellow golfer of a cigar was downright un-American.

The uproar in Spokane was so raucous that the parks board quickly backed off the golf course smoking ban while it embarks on further study of the issue.

This whole smoking issue has gone from public health to political control.

It's time for the anti-smoking Nazis to back down and back off.

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