All Fore! fun: with comic relief accompanying every stroke--and there were many--from Charles Barkley and Dennis Miller, there's no calling golfing with these two a good walk spoiled.(Know It All)

Here is what it is like to watch Charles Barkley play golf It's trying to hammer a nail, but missing and hitting your thumb. It's mixing lemonade and toothpaste. It's the blackboard-scratching scene in Jaws. It's a laugh-off between The Nanny and Arnold Horshack. "Watching him is so bad," says Emmitt Smith, "that it makes my game worse just by seeing it."

When the Round Mound of Divoted Ground hits off the tee, golf instructors reach for the Pepto. He pulls his club back, begins his swing, stops one-third of the way through (a pause long enough to eat a ham sandwich or do a load of laundry), then punches through the ball. Barkley's percentage of drives hitting the fairway is not bad. Problem is, he tends to hit fairways of other holes. Some golfers slice. Barkley boomerangs. "I taught myself how to play," Barkley says. No kidding?

But Barkley has a saving grace--he always can find someone worse than him. Dennis Miller, for instance.

For three days, Barkley and Miller were paired at the American Century Championship at Edgewood Country Club on the shores of Lake Tahoe, where they ended up 74th and 75th in a field of 75 finishers. Barkley shot a three-day total of 301; Miller shot 311. The winner, Rick Rhoden, shot 209. The official results were determined with the modified Stableford scoring system, but it could have been done on the Dewey decimal system, and the Barkley-Miller combo still would have been over 300 apiece. As Miller says, "It's celebrity golf. I figured it was some candy-ass tournament. I didn't know these guys would be out here playing like they were at !@#&*% Royal Troon."

On his first drive, Barldey's ball curled toward the cart path before it whacked a spectator on the shoulder and rolled back onto the fairway (nice to see rebounding still is one of Barkley's strengths). That set the tone for the Barkley-Miller weekend. As Miller placed his ball on the tee of the fifth hole, he shouted, "Fore!" then commented, "I thought I would just get that out of the way up front." On one of Barkley's drives, the ball landed so far out of bounds that Miller advised, "We'll have to triangulate that one, Charles."

The long game was not the only shortcoming for Barkley mad Miller. From 20 yards away, sitting in the rough on the fourth hole, Miller pulled out the putter. Barkley told him he was supposed to use a wedge. Miller responded, "I don't trust anything ...