Reader’s Fashion Tip: Insulated Shorts for Winter Golf

Posted on February 23, 2016 by David Owen

The golf courses within driving distance of my hometown have been closed for so much of this winter that I haven’t had many opportunities to take advantage of Sunday Morning Group’s shorts rule: one extra handicap stroke if you wear shorts after November 1, two extra strokes after December 1. If we do get to play again, I’m going to try some shorts I learned about from Tim Kresse, a reader in Oxford, Ohio. They’re called Alpha Shorts, and they’re filled with Polartec insulation. They’re made by a company called Qor, which is practically giving them away.

The company’s website describes them like this:

“They’re super stretchy, don’t look insulated, and are styled like trousers: structured waist with front zip/button fly closure, slash hand pockets on the side, two back pockets (one with a zipper), and belt loops.”

Kresse himself says:

“I’m an administrator at Miami University, the alma mater of Ben Roethlisberger and the place Robert Frost called ‘the most beautiful campus that ever there was.’ I have to agree that it is quite a pretty campus and a good school. The Qor catalog just showed up, but I have to say that the insulated shorts seemed the perfect thing for the winter golf game. I do wonder, though, would that be cheating or does the open air nature of the leg sufficiently offset any insulation value?”

The rules, so far, allow insulated shorts. What they don’t allow is tall socks. Back to Kresse:

“The picture above is of me during a practice round at the Memorial Tournament last year. I bought my daughter (no, really) a tournament flag and got some autographs. Once I realized I had the autograph of the winner of the Memorial, the Masters, the US Open, the (British) Open, and PGA championship, I decided it could stay in my office for a while. She’ll get it one day. I play golf at Hueston Woods State Park Golf Course, just north of town, and Indian Ridge Golf Club, just south of town. Here’s a summer moon over Hueston Woods:”

“During the winter, though, golf is mostly in hibernation, with the occasional trip to the driving range or a trip south. I last played at Great Dunes on Jekyll Island, Georgia, just before Thanksgiving. Here’s a picture of the fifth green and sixth tee, which overlook the Atlantic. It’s a nice nine-hole course, perfect for walking:”

“To keep ourselves busy in the winter, we move to indoor sports, including broomball, and I have found that winter golf gloves are great for for broomball. They are just enough to keep hands warm on ice, improve the grip on the broomball stick, and work great as a goalie gloves (the position I usually play).”

I’d never heard of broomball before, but here’s what it looks like. That’s not Kresse in the net. At least, I don’t think it is. (I found the photo online.)

Broomball players don’t wear skates, but they do get to buy broomball shoes, among other things. You can read all about the game here. Back to Kresse:

“I first played broomball at Ohio University (another very attractive campus) in the early 1990s. Games were almost always late at night, when the ice was free, and we played with a deflated volleyball, our own tennis shoes, and cut-down brooms (both ends) for ‘sticks’. Now games are still often played late at night, but there are specific broomballs, sticks, and shoes, which make it easier to get around the ice (I call them clown shoes). I’ve also bought hockey shin guards to protect from sticks and falls. And, thankfully, we play half-ice (half-rink) and not full-ice games.”

Golf in New Zealand: Cape Kidnappers

Posted on February 18, 2016 by David Owen

I visited New Zealand on a reporting assignment in 2007. I was the guest of the hedge-fund billionaire Julian Robertson and his wife, Josie, who has since died. We spent most of our time at Kauri Cliffs, a huge property Robertson owns at the northern end of the North Island. (You can read about that part of my trip here and here.) On Sunday, the Robertsons attended the early service at the tiny Anglican church in Kerikeri. “If you believe in a deity, you owe that deity an hour a week,” Robertson told me.

This is the church. They spell some things differently in New Zealand, apparently.

Then we headed south, to Cape Kidnappers, Robertson’s other big real-estate holding on the North Island. (He also owns 11,000 acres on the South Island.) The trip takes about ten hours if you go by car, but it’s quicker if you travel as we did: by helicopter to Auckland and then by Gulfstream to Hawkes Bay.

The Gulfstream part of our journey was so short that the plane never really flew level: we went up, then we went down. In fact, the most grueling leg was probably the final one, the drive from the front gate at Cape Kidnappers to the clubhouse, a five-mile trip that, if you observe the posted speed limit and brake for wandering cattle, can take a half an hour.

We made that drive in a rental car, which we had picked up at the little airport in Hawkes Bay. I went into the terminal with Diana McCarty, Robertson’s director of New Zealand operations, to make the arrangements. As we crossed the tarmac, she commented that people inside the terminal would probably be wondering who I was, since I had just emerged from a $40-million aircraft accompanied by a blond who was young enough to be my third wife. A useful rule of thumb, when evaluating any remark made to you by an attractive woman much younger than yourself, is that if you aren’t sure whether the remark was an insult, it was an insult. Nevertheless, I sucked in my gut and walked a little taller.

That little building in the distance is the clubhouse.

That little building in the distance is the Cape Kidnappers clubhouse.

The golf course at Cape Kidnappers was designed by Tom Doak, but it wouldn’t have been if Robertson, back in 2001, hadn’t received what he initially believed to be shabby treatment at Bandon Dunes, which had opened two years before. He was visiting with his sons and had expected to play the already legendary Bandon Dunes course twice. Sorry, he was told; you’ll have to play our new course, Pacific Dunes, first. Robertson was furious—he has a temper, which he has worked for years to control—but his anger vanished after a few holes, and he hired Doak to design a course for him, too.

Doak creates magical golf holes by seemingly doing little more than identifying them in the existing terrain, rather than by dynamiting them out of bedrock. He views a bulldozer as a construction tool of last resort, and he likes brown grass and doesn’t like chemicals. “Cape Kidnappers cost half as much to build as Kauri Cliffs,” Robertson told me, “and it costs half as much to maintain.”

Both courses are laid out on sheep-and-cattle farms on high cliffs above the Pacific, but the climate, topography, and general feel are very different. The most visually impressive holes at Kidnappers, if you view the course from the air, are the ones that run out and back over several finger-like promontories, which reach out toward the water, high above the waves — although the best holes, I think, are inland. (From the ground, the promontory holes don’t really feel as though they’re perched on promontories. You need a helicopter to get the full effect.)

The lodge at Cape Kidnappers is called the Farm, and it’s just as nice as the one at Kauri Cliffs. If you’re pretty rich, you should spend a couple of weeks there with your wife:

It was still under construction, so we stayed in Te Awanga, at a bed-and-breakfast place called Merriwee, which Doak discovered. The Robertsons had stayed there often, and had become good friends with the owner, a divorced woman with grown children who filled in occasionally as a substitute kindergarten teacher, and several of her neighbors. Her house is more than a century old.

Here’s Robertson, sneaking something from the breakfast table:

The Robertsons left the next day, because they had business elsewhere. I rented a car of my own and drove back to Kidnappers for a final round. A huge rainstorm had been predicted for the afternoon, but it disappeared somewhere over the Pacific, leaving only tremendous banks of fast-moving clouds, which the setting sun lit up. I had the course virtually to myself, and got around on foot in just a couple of hours. I had a new driver—one of those big square ones that sounded like fungo bats—and it echoed all over the course. I tried to swing it quietly so that the pro wouldn’t know how many balls I was playing. The only tiny seed of disappointment, lurking in the back of my mind, was my knowledge that, the following evening, I would be on my way home.

Josie and Julian Robertson, Cape Kidnappers, March 11, 2007.

Golf in New Zealand: Post-golf Activities

Posted on February 12, 2016 by David Owen

me of my happiest memories of New Zealand involve activities that weren’t golf—a first for me on any trip for which my luggage includes my clubs. I ate great food and met nice people, and I saw basking seals, a twenty-one-hundred-year-old tree, and stingrays nearly the size of Stingrays. I also saw sharks, from a helicopter. They were feeding near the breakers a hundred feet off Ninety Mile Beach, a strip of sand that runs up the northwestern edge of the North Island. As the pilot took us down for a closer look, I asked whether the presence of large marine carnivores so close to the water’s edge didn’t deter swimmers. “Oh, no,” he said. “Most of the swimmers don’t know they’re there.”

Shark-spotting was just one small part of day-long menu of activities known locally as the Full Julian, after Julian Robertson, the creator and owner of Kauri Cliffs, the resort where I was staying. Four other guests and I traveled by helicopter to the Waipoua Forest, where our Maori guide sang a song of tribute to Tane Mahuta, an enormous kauri tree that predates Christianity:

Then we flew to the northern tip of the island and hovered above a turbulent spot, just off the coast, where Pacific Ocean currents collide with those of the Tasman Sea:

Then we set down for a beach picnic:

And then we raced down dunes on rented ATVs. Here’s our adult supervision, standing at the top of a dune we were about to race down:

And here’s what the same dune looked like from the bottom:

Everyone made it down. I don’t remember how we got back up.

Two nights later, I did something that surprised me by being even more fun: I went midnight possum hunting, under the supervision of a Kauri Cliffs employee who is a veteran of the British equivalent of the Green Berets. All New Zealand mammals, except for a couple of rare species of bats, were introduced to the islands by humans and are thus considered varmints until proven otherwise. Possums—which are bushier and less sinister-looking than American opossums—were imported in 1836 by some Australians who were hoping to establish a fur trade. Now there are 80 million of them, and they eat the eggs of the kiwi, New Zealand’s nearly extinct flightless national bird, and they have no natural predators, except people. I hadn’t fired a gun since summer camp in Colorado, forty years before, and was astonished to discover I have a talent for felling treed marsupials with single shots to the head. I had been a somewhat reluctant participant in our hunting expedition, but if, toward the end, our guide had suggested that we stay out till dawn I would have eagerly agreed. Possum-killin’ was also the favorite Kauri Cliffs activity of the golfers Dave Stockton and Dave Stockton, Jr., who, during a visit shortly before mine, went out every night.

One afternoon, following a round of golf, I toured the entire property with the man in charge of the agricultural side of Robertson’s New Zealand operation. (That’s him in the photo above.) We visited the sheep-shearing shed, climbed over a 9000-volt electric fence, scaled an old volcano whose summit is the highest point on the farm, visited a couple of stunning beaches, saw some cattle that were about to be slaughtered, and ran into the Kauri Cliffs farm manager, who was responsible for twenty-five hundred beef cattle and five thousand sheep. The manager was wearing a golf hat and driving a big ATV, and there were three scruffy farm dogs standing just behind his seat. He said, “Kauri Cliffs is not a golf course with a farm on it. It’s a 6,000-acre-farm with a golf course at one end.” Then he roared off, and the dogs, like surfers, had to shift their weight in complicated ways to keep from falling off.

It’s summer in New Zealand right now. Do you understand what I’m saying?

To be continued.

Golf in New Zealand: Kauri Cliffs

Posted on February 8, 2016 by David Owen

One of the most remarkable things my wife has ever said to me is that, if I ever told her I thought we ought to live in New Zealand, she’d be ready to move that minute. This was highly surprising, both because she doesn’t really even like to travel and because Donald Trump wasn’t running for President yet. I think her interest was based partly on the scenery in The Lord of the Rings movies and partly on the fact that New Zealand is so far from everywhere else that if you holed up there you would no longer have to think quite so much about the world’s most serious problems. I myself might be tempted to move, if I could persuade all my regular golf buddies to go, too.

I visited New Zealand in 2007, in the company of the hedge-fund billionaire Julian Robertson and his wife, Josie—who has since died.

We spent the first few days at Kauri Cliffs, a resort the they had created on a 6,000-acre farm in the Bay of Islands region, near the northern end of the North Island. “I had no idea what I’d bought,” he told me. “It turned out to be one of the most magical pieces of land you will ever see, but when I bought it I didn’t even know that it had waterfalls. I saw it at the worst time of the year, August, and it was nothing but a filthy wet sheep farm, and I really bought it mainly because it was cheaper than a modest New York City apartment.”

In 1997, he hired David Harman, a golf architect he admired, to design a course for the eastern edge of the property, along cliffs that rise high above the Pacific. That course is now No. 49 on Golf Digest’s list of the World’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses. It’s just ahead of North Berwick Golf Club, in Scotland—one of my favorite golf courses of all time. Kauri Cliffs is a terrific course, too, and the views from the ocean holes are spectacular.

P1020466

Josie didn’t see the place until the course was almost finished, and when she did she said they would have to build a lodge, too, in order to attract enough golfers to keep the course in operation. “I said, That’s ridiculous, this is a great golf course and they will come,” Julian told me. “Well, Josie was right; they wouldn’t have come. Kauri Cliffs is about as far away from everywhere else as you can get, so it was a real stroke of genius of hers that we did it. And, as it turns out, the lodge business down here has been very, very good.”

The accommodations at Kauri Cliffs consist of eleven two-bedroom cottages arranged along a secluded walking path, plus the Owner’s Cottage, which is larger, has its own garden and infinity-edge swimming pool, and can be rented (for more than $6,000 a night in the high season) when the Robertsons aren’t in residence. Each suite-size half-cottage has a porch, fireplace, dressing room, and spa-like bathroom, and it looks out over the golf course to the sea. This was the view from my room:

When the resort was being designed, Josie had a big fight with the architect over air-conditioning: the architect argued that no self-respecting five-star hotel could possibly do without it, and Josie argued that it most definitely could. The winner, naturally, was Josie—and she was right. The outdoor daytime temperature at Kauri Cliffs hovers around room temperature virtually all year long, and one of the great pleasures of staying there is waking up to birds and ocean breezes rather than the cold hum of an HVAC system.

To be continued.

Report From the Phoenix Open: Coping With a Ten-Drink Limit

Posted on February 6, 2016 by David Owen

Chic, CJ, Jaws, and Brian—all members or honorary members of the Sunday Morning Group—somehow persuaded the Department of Homeland Security to let them spend four days in Scottsdale without supervision, then paid for the trip by withdrawing money from their wives’ 401ks. Or so I assume. Here are Jaws, CJ, and Chic at the men’s member-guest either last summer or the summer before:

In Scottsdale, they’ve been dividing their time between the Waste Management Phoenix Open and Grayhawk Country Club, a few miles away. Before they left, I swore in Chic as this blog’s official representative in the grandstands on the sixteenth hole. Getting reports from him hasn’t been easy, but here’s one:

“Apparently with the skybox tix u have a 10 drink limit but if u tip the girl enough she doesn’t keep count. So my 10 drinks only counted as 2 in her book.”

All things considered, his photos are remarkably unblurry:

Back to Chic:

“The bleachers seem to be the place to be. Which was below us not below us just fiscally below us. They had guys dressed in Masters caddies outfits. Bubba thru a lot of stuff to the fans. Saturday is green out day. Everyone to wear green and support the waste management cause. Golf now then golf in the am. Then tourney rest of day.”

That was yesterday. When they got to the Grayhawk, Chic discovered that he had an old Uncle Frank ball in his bag. Uncle Frank was a beloved SMG member, who died from lung cancer seven or eight years ago. After the cancer had spread to his brain, he was given a marathon radiation treatment, during which his head had to be immobilized in a halo brace, a birdcage-like contraption that was anchored to his shoulders and his skull. When the session ended, 18 hours after it began, he asked the nurses to take him to the children’s oncology ward before removing the brace. A couple of days before, at home, he had made a basketball backboard out of Styrofoam, and now he asked the nurses to attach it to the back of his head. He let the children in the ward shoot free throws with a Nerf ball, three shots for a dollars. “Hey,” he told me later, “I made twenty-three bucks.” Here’s how he dressed for our first-and-almost-last clubhouse sleepover, in 2002:

When Uncle Frank died, we had his name printed on lots of golf balls, and divided them up among ourselves. The idea was to lose the balls in interesting places, so that his name would keep popping up for years, as a kind of memorial. I myself have lost them on great courses in three different countries. Back to Chic:

“I thought trying to lose the frank ball in Arizona might be a nice send off. Well the ball lasted 6 holes. I tried to lose it but it hung in there. 1 pic from its adventure:”

Incidentally, the thing that Brian is the most famous for, at home, is knowing how to use a beer can to open a beer bottle:

Non-golf Activities for Snowed-in Golfers

Posted on January 30, 2016 by David Owen

In the olden days, settlers in blizzard-prone parts of the country spent the winter doing things like making candles and splitting cedar logs into shingles. My golf buddies and I—on days when we can’t figure out how to play somewhere, somehow—find similar ways to stay busy. Hacker (real name) referees high-school wrestling matches. Tim D. repairs his equipment—for example, by sewing up rips in his golf bag:
I recently used my favorite photo-project website, Mixbook.com, to create a photo album of my personal golf memories from last year:

And I created a long-term supply of my favorite golf-appropriate nutritional supplement, using a kit my wife gave me:

Bacon Kit Box

The kit contained everything I needed:

The only thing not included was a nice big pork belly, which my wife also gave me:

The instructions were easy to follow:

And now I have enough to last at least a couple of weeks.

How to Dress for Sub-freezing Golf

Posted on January 29, 2016 by David Owen

In shorts, obviously. (The Sunday Morning Group gives two extra strokes if you wear them after December 1.) One great thing about shorts is that they complement any outfit:

Last year, because of Addison, we had to add a rule about sock height. He arrived one Sunday in unusually tall socks, which he pulled up almost to his knees and fastened with rubber bands that he’d found in his mother’s refrigerator, on two bunches of broccoli:

Those socks are virtually pants! The new rule is “crew height or shorter”—demonstrated here by Fritz:

On Sunday, Fritz and I got to wondering whether there might not be a non-sock, non-pant, non-cheating solution to the exposed-skin problem (the wind was straight from the North Pole). After the round, I did some research and found this post, on the Fox Sports website. It was written two years ago by Brendon Ayanbadejo, who played linebacker for several NFL teams:

“What allowed me to wear so little in cold games was a cocktail Brian Urlacher and Muhsin Muhammad revealed to me. There is a cream called Warm Skin that we would mix with Vaseline and Tiger Balm. We would mix all these topicals together and rub them into our arms, legs, back … pretty much over our entire body. Make sure you put your jock on before you do this or you will get extremely uncomfortably hot in some of the wrong places.”

So I ordered some Warm Skin and began working on my own leg recipe, using stuff I found in various closets and medicine cabinets in my house. The best combination, so far, is Warm Skin, Musher’s Secret (which my wife bought to protect our dog’s feet from road salt), and capsaicin creme (which is hot, like Tiger Balm, and is usually sold as a topical analgesic for arthritis). I stirred in some Aquaphor, too—what the hell.

Masters Countdown: An Augusta National Member Who Carried Even More Cash Than Phil Mickelson

Posted on January 25, 2016 by David Owen

Dave Shedloski, with help from a squadron of Golf Digest staffers, recently asked a number of tour pros how much cash they carry. The winner was Phil Mickelson, whose wallet, at that moment, contained $8,100. That’s a lot. But one of the founding members of Augusta National routinely carried more. Way more.

W. Alton “Pete” Jones was the CEO of the oil company that’s known today CITGO. He was a close friend of Clifford Roberts, Bobby Jones, and Dwight Eisenhower (who joined the club in 1948), and he was known for his generosity. He insisted on picking up almost any restaurant or bar check that he had anything to do with, and he financed or helped to finance many improvements at the club.

W. Alton “Pete” Jones

Yet he had a number of miserly eccentricities. The first duty of his caddie was to search the grass for usable tees, because he hated to buy new ones. He haggled over handicap strokes—attempting, in Roberts’s words, “to ensure his being a winner on the golf course, no matter how small the stakes.” And he always traveled with heavy hand-cranked metal sharpener, which he used to extend the life of his razor blades. He was determined to get at least 25 shaves from each blade, and he would cheerfully spend 10 or 15 minutes honing an edge on one that was about to expire.

Jones died in a commercial plane crash in 1962, on his way to California for a fishing trip with Eisenhower. (That’s Jones amidships in the photo above, and Eisenhower in the bow.) Also killed in that crash was the mother of Paul McCartney’s future wife Linda Eastman. The accident was fictionalized in the second episode of the second season of Mad Men.

When Jones’s body was identified, he was found to have been carrying roughly $60,000, in cash and traveler’s checks. Some people speculated that he must have been up to no good, and that perhaps he had been on his way to reward Eisenhower for favors to the oil industry. But no one has ever seriously suggested that Eisenhower took bribes, and Jones always carried huge sums—including $10,000 bills, which the government printed until 1946.

Roberts had often urged Jones to leave more of his treasure at home, but Jones, like several early Augusta members—including Roberts—had grown up in poverty, and he liked full pockets. And Roberts had a currency-related eccentricity of his own: he carried only brand-new bills, arranged in his wallet by denomination, and he always made sure to have enough small ones so that no one would be able to give him old bills in change.

The person I know personally who carries the most cash is Rocco Landesman. I wrote a profile of him in The New Yorker in 1994. At the time, he was mainly a theater producer; he later served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. We got to talking about money—actually, about betting on horses—and he said, “You should never carry less than $10,000 in cash at any time.”

Rocco Landesman

When I laughed, he said, “No, it’s true.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a bundle of bills held together with a rubber band. “You’ve got to have cash,” he said, “because you never know where you’re going to be. You know, you might meet someone and decide you want to spend the rest of your life in Argentina.” He handed me the money. “I’ve got more over here.” He reached into another pocket, and pulled out another bundle.

I hefted both bundles, and fanned the bills with my thumbs, like playing cards. They were all 100s, and there were perhaps a 150 of them. It was the most $100 bills I had ever held in one hand at one time.

“Walking around with anything less than $10,000 is completely unacceptable,” Landesman went on. “It’s a necessity of life. It gives you freedom. The most important thing in life is a sense of possibility, and you simply can’t have it with less than $10,000 in your pocket.”

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I Perform Reconstructive Surgery on my Laser Rangefinder

Posted on January 22, 2016 by David Owen

A year and a half ago, I bought a Bushnell Tour Z6 laser rangefinder. It’s not as good at picking up distant targets as its predecessor in my golf bag—an ancient Bushnell PinSeeker 1500—but it’s small enough to fit in a pants pocket, and the battery lasts forever, and I like it. My only beef about the Z6 (as I wrote here) is that the eyepiece, which keeps sunlight off the lens while you’re using it and is the thing you turn to adjust the focus, looks solid but is actually a cheap, floppy rubber tube that’s held in place by not-very-strong glue.

The eyepiece on mine came almost all the way off one of the first times I used it, but I pushed it back on and tried to be careful with it. At some point during a round last spring, though, it disappeared. A reader named Matty wrote to say that he’d had a similar experience:

“I have this problem with my Z6 as well. Only difference is I didn’t lose my eye piece — it just came off. Called Bushnell, and apparently it’s a common problem. He says to just clean the inside and the eyepiece part of the rangefinder with alcohol and use ‘Zap Glue,’ like they use, at the 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock positions so it doesn’t interfere with the focusing part of the rangefinder. There’s a dot on top of the eyepiece where you can make an alignment so that, when you glue the rubber eyepiece back, you can align the red line with it. As for the rubber eyepiece going missing, I’m sure Bushnell would be happy to send you a new one.”

Because I had lazily waited to complain until after my warranty had expired, Bushnell’s happiness about sending me a new eyepiece depended on my sending them $6.00 for a replacement part and $3.10 for shipping, plus a stamp for the order form (which can be downloaded from the company’s website but not submitted there). Worse, the new eyepiece they sent me wasn’t new. It was clearly a cadaver part from somebody else’s busted Z6, because there was lots of old glue stuck to the inner surface of the rubber (which is turned inside-out in the photo below, to make the old glue easier to see):

There was also residual finger crud, presumably from the previous owner, in the indentations on the other side:

Oh, well, forgive and forget.

Since the kind of glue Bushnell uses at the factory clearly doesn’t work very well, I used epoxy glue instead—after first setting the focus at a distance I figured I could live with, since I assumed (correctly) that the eyepiece would no longer turn once I had finished cementing it in place.

Bushnell apparently isn’t the only company whose rangefinders don’t stay together. Here’s my golf buddy Rick’s Callaway LR550, which was made by Nikon and probably ought to have come with a roll of Scotch tape:

Shoe Repair for Lazy Golf Moochers

Posted on January 19, 2016 by David Owen

I work at home, and when I’m not working I hang out mainly with lowlifes, so I don’t have many opportunities to wear what my daughter, when she was little, called my Out Shoes. I do need Out Shoes when I’m invited to play golf at rich-guy clubs, and on those occasions (sadly infrequent) I always wear my sorriest-looking pair, because I know that, while I’m playing, the locker-room shoe guy will miraculously turn them back into something I wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen wearing in a clubhouse. On a weekend-trip to Pine Valley many years ago, I packed three pairs, and set them out for resuscitation one pair at a time.

My oldest surviving pair of Out Shoes are some black loafers, which various locker-room guys kept respectable-looking for almost a quarter-century. Those guys couldn’t do anything about the soles, however. The leather got thinner and thinner, until, finally, five or ten years ago, one sole wore all the way through. The hole grew to the size of a quarter, and when I sat down for drinks after golf I had to be careful to keep that foot flat on the ground. I also had to stay away from puddles.

I’m too cheap to buy a new pair—the last time I splurged on Out Shoes was four and a half years ago, for my daughter’s wedding—but shoe-repair shops in my area, as in much of the rest of the country, are just about extinct. Last month, I finally sent my worn-out loafers to a mail-in repair place, called Resole America, and the result is so awesome that I wish I’d done it a decade sooner.

New leather soles, combination heels, and a complete refinishing of the uppers cost $65, plus shipping—way less than new shoes. The entire round trip took a month, but the wait was worth it. And I didn’t miss out on anything, because, as usual, I had no reason to go Out.

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

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