The person I play the most golf with is Bob Hacker, a.k.a. “Hacker (real name),” on the left in the photo above, which was taken last winter at Pelham Bay Golf Course, in the Bronx. (That’s me on the right.) He is also the person primarily responsible for managing the Sunday Morning Group and its finances, and is therefore widely believed to be the chairman of the Committee, the mysterious but all-powerful body that governs everything we do. He is unique—or so I thought until recently, when Tony, who is the person I play the second most golf with and is the co-inventor, with me, of the Hybrid Lifestyle, sent me a photograph of a starter at the Black Diamond Golf Ranch, in Lecanto, Florida, where he had gone to play golf with his Atlanta friends, who are richer, smarter, and better-looking than we are:
That’s just part of him, obviously. Doug Egly, who is Black Diamond’s general manager, sent me this photo of him in his entirety:
The existence of this second Bob Hacker suggests either that we are living in an episode of the Twilight Zone or that Black Diamond Ranch is a parallel universe of some kind, filled with eerie duplicates of people I know, but with better weather. Photographs of the Quarry Course—one of three on the property, all designed by Tom Fazio—do make it seem otherworldly:
As it happens, the real Hacker and I visited Tony in Atlanta shortly before he went to Florida with those other friends. We played golf at his Atlanta club, about which I’ll probably have something to say at some point, and in the evenings we played the card game setback with Tony’s wife, Teresa, who remained undefeated until we stacked the deck while she was in the kitchen making us something to eat. Anyway, the easiest way to distinguish Tony from his Twilight Zone doppelganger is by checking the trunk of his car, which contains so many golf clubs that he has to keep his golf clubs somewhere else:
Rather cruel to take a picture of a Tony’s boot (sorry, trunk just doesn’t sound or read correctly for a Brit!) for the whole internet to see. And sort of sad in an elephant’s graveyard type of way as well, especially for the Daddy Long Legs………
I’ve got more clubs than that in my trunk plus a pull cart and two more sets in the house. But know a guy, a starter at a local muni course who has six sets – I sold him one – but he needs them all since he is a starter.
Send me a picture! (My trunk looks pretty good right now, because I’ve mostly emptied it for winter cleaning, but as soon as I brought that stuff into the house it expanded to the point where it almost entirely fills my son’s old bedroom. Golf equipment is more like a gas than a liquid or a solid, I think, in terms of its tendency to fill any volume you place it in.)