Major Breakthrough: A Better Way to Watch Golf on TV

Posted on December 28, 2014 by David Owen

My wife’s college roommate’s son got married recently. Before the wedding, he and his fiancée were interviewed at length for an episode of a reality show called Something Borrowed, Something New, on the television network TLC, which is to women what the Golf Channel is to men. Three years ago, during the summer before my daughter’s wedding, I inadvertently watched parts of quite a few TLC programs, because during that period the TV in our kitchen was permanently tuned to that channel. For example, I saw parts of several episodes of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, a British reality show about the weddings of gypsies and Irish travelers. From it, I learned that, in planning our daughter’s wedding, my wife and I had made many mistakes, including allowing our daughter to marry a non-gypsy and failing to rent any stretch Hummers or horse-drawn carriages:

Something Borrowed, Something New is about wedding dresses. The episode featuring my wife’s old roommate’s son and his fiancée aired shortly before Christmas, and my wife suggested that our own son, whose name is John, and I watch it with her. John and I consented, out of loyalty to her and her old roommate, whom both of us know, but we worried that sitting through an entire TLC show might permanently harm us in some way. Luckily, we were able to protect ourselves, by viewing the episode through long cardboard tubes from two used-up rolls of Christmas wrapping paper:

Watching through the tubes enabled us to make it all the way to the end while suffering few if any ill effects, and it occurred to me later that the same technique might be useful in other fraught television-viewing situations, such as nerve-wracking parts of important golf tournaments. If a golfer you were rooting for in one of the majors faced a critical putt on the final day, for example, you could use a tube to focus solely on the hole, potentially even helping the ball to drop. Or, during one of those web.com commercials featuring Jim Furyk and his wife, you could use a tube to focus on a blank part of the screen (after first hitting the mute button).

In other golf news, Jed, a member of the Sunday Morning Group, became a father on December 20. Here he is with his brand-new daughter, whose name is Louisa. As you can see, she already has a healthy interest in golf:

My granddaughter, whose name is Alice, is thirteen months older than Louisa. I don’t have a recent picture of her playing golf, but I do have one of her doing a pretty good imitation of most of the guys I play most of my rounds with:

Unbroken (by the Stupid Weather)

Posted on December 23, 2014 by David Owen

My home course has been closed since shortly before Thanksgiving, so we’ve been playing around. I was traveling (without golf clubs) two Sundays ago, but everyone else played at Tunxis Plantation, which is about an hour from where we live, and last Sunday we went back. I rode with Other Gene. Snow was falling when we left home, and it continued to fall as we drove, and when we were maybe fifteen minutes from Tunxis I realized that it was probably going to keep falling and not melt by the time we got there. And that’s what happened. So we held a conference in the parking lot:

We called every golf course we could think of and discovered that Fairchild Wheeler, in Fairfield, was not only open but “with greens.” The Wheel is just an hour from Tunxis, so that’s where we went. Tim showed up as we were pulling out, but he decided to be a good husband by returning home and giving his wife holiday-related opportunities to be angry at him in person. When the rest of us arrived at the Wheel, a maintenance guy with a leaf blower was removing snow from a putting surface:

We played the Black. The young woman at the desk in the golf shop let us go out as a fivesome after Hacker (real name) assured her that we would play faster than any threesome on the course. And he was telling the truth, because there was a threesome directly ahead of us and we waited on pretty much every shot, including this one, on a long par 3:

Hacker and I took on Gene, Gary, and Kevin (who was visiting from law school). We beat them by three shots, but rather than pocketing our winnings we used them to pay for most of everybody’s lunch.

During the cheeseburger course, Gene suggested that we adopt some kind of ongoing off-season competition, analogous to the FedEx Cup, and we all agreed that that was a good idea. Recently, I wrote about some guys in Massachusetts who call themselves the Winter Tour because they play all winter. Borrowing that name seemed easier than making up a new one, so that’s what we decided to do. Hacker, as always, will devise the format and the scoring system; my assignment is to talk to the people who make Jagermeister—the official cold-weather intoxicant of the Sunday Morning Group—and persuade them to become the Winter Tour’s lead sponsor.

If they give us just hats, say, we’ll agree to call ourselves something like “the Winter Tour of the Sunday Morning Group (in association with Jagermeister).”

But if they give us shirts in addition to hats, plus maybe some actual Jagermeister, we’d be willing to go as far as “the Jagermeister Tour (in association with the Sunday Morning Group).” Their choice. And if they’re really accommodating we’ll add their logo to all our other branded merchandise, including our regular hats and our bumper stickers.

The company’s headquarters are closed till after the New Year (when the Winter Tour will be playing at Shennecossett, in Groton ) so the actual negotiations won’t begin until then. I’m assuming there won’t be a problem. I’ll post an update as soon as I have the details.

Let’s Check in With That Guy Who Has Played Every Golf Course in Ireland

Posted on December 21, 2014 by David Owen

Kevin Markham lives south of Dublin and knows Irish golf better than anyone. He has played every eighteen-hole course in the country and written two excellent books about them: Hooked, a course-by-course guide, with ratings; and Driving the Green, the story of the seven-thousand-mile trip during which he played them all while somehow remaining married:

I’ve had the good fortune to join him for rounds on four of the very best: Portstewart and Royal Portrush, in 2012, Royal County Down, in 2013, and the Island, in 2014. Here he is (on the left) at R.C.D., with Kevan Whitson, the head pro:

And here he is at Portstewart:

Recently, Markham wrote to say that the County Sligo Golf Club—which I’ve played, though not with him—has been undergoing significant changes. His report:

County Sligo Golf Club bears the hallmark of the great Harry Colt. His design work in the 1920s helped establish a global reputation for this links course, which is commonly known as Rosses Point. But times change, and in recent years the club’s profile, ranking, and revenues have declined. The response is a three-phase course upgrade under the guidance of the architect Pat Ruddy, a Sligo native. Phase One, which is underway, includes additional tee boxes, new bunkering, and extended greens, as well as one new green. It is a brave move to alter such a classic links course, but, Ruddy has said the improvements will “move County Sligo back to the very pinnacle of world golf.” One goal is to attract a major event. The ultimate prize would be the Irish Open in 2019, the same year that Royal Portrush is expected to host the Open Championship.

Ruddy is sometimes accused of creating courses that are too difficult. I once published a list of the five toughest Irish courses, and three of them were his (the European Club, Sandy Hills at Rosapenna, and Druids Heath at Druids Glen). That said, I adore the European Club, and I rate Sandy Hills highly. My issue with Druids Heath is that you rarely see the landing area from the tee, which I find unrewarding when you hit a good drive.

You can see more of Markham’s photos of the Rosses Point renovations, with informative captions, here.

I myself played Rosses Point in 2011. A club competition was scheduled for the day I wanted to visit—the toughest time to play a visitor round in Ireland (or Scotland or England or anywhere else) is Saturday morning, when tee times are usually reserved for members —but David O’Donovan, the director of golf, told me that he and I could play ahead of the pack if I didn’t mind teeing off at 7:26. To make certain I’d be there on time, I stayed at the Yeats Country Hotel, which, according to the website on which I made my room reservation, is 0.0 miles from the clubhouse. I could see the course from my window, and in the morning I arrived at the golf shop a few minutes before O’Donovan.

Rosses Point had just held a major amateur championship, the West of Ireland (whose past winners include Padraig Harrington and Rory McIlroy), so the course was in great shape. O’Donovan, who grew up in town in a family of excellent players, insisted that we take a golf cart—an Irish first for me. When you’re in a cart, it’s hard to get a feel for any golf hole, but we did make excellent time.

Rosses Point begins with two good holes up a hill, followed by two very good holes back. Then you tee off over a cliff—on a par 5 called the Jump—and work your way around a stretch of linksland that appears flat from above but turns out to be filled with seductive complications. Here’s the view from the tee on the Jump (although the camera flattens the cliff):

We finished in two and a half hours, and then, since the kitchen hadn’t opened yet, we played the club’s third nine, which adjoins the lower portion of the championship course. We caught up to and joined an older member, who gave up golf for twenty years to please his second wife but had now begun playing again (and was in the process of giving up the wife). “My game is coming back,” he said—a man at peace.

Six Surprising Golf-related Uses for Your Camera, Phone, Rangefinder, and Bifocals

Posted on December 13, 2014 by David Owen

During a recent Golf Digest assignment in Florida (at Streamsong Resort—see “Buddy This!”, in the January issue), my foursome was seated so far from the TV above the bar in the grillroom that no one at our table could follow what was happening in the World Series:

To deal with that problem, I periodically took a zoomed picture of the screen and enlarged the image until we could read the score in the lower left-hand corner:

The same trick works at golf tournaments, if you’re standing too far from a leaderboard to see what it says. And you can use it when you yourself are playing golf and can’t quite tell where the flag is on that green way up there.

You can also use it around the house — when (for example) you need to read the serial number on a light fixture on the ceiling but don’t feel like going all the way downstairs to get the stepladder:

I discovered this trick on my brother’s father-in-law’s boat, in Maine, on a day several years ago when we wanted to land at a dock on a small island but couldn’t get close enough to the shore to read the phone number we were supposed to call to ask permission:

Somewhat similarly, if you wear bifocals you can turn them upside down when you need to take a close look at something above your head. (I mentioned this trick to an electrician friend, who told me that he owns a pair of trifocals in which the top and bottom sections are both for looking at things close-up.) And then there’s this, when you’re too old to get out of bed anymore, even for golf:

A laser rangefinder can function as a low-power telescope (mine is 6X). Quite possibly, that’s strong enough to identify the idiot driving his cart along the edge of a greenside bunker two holes away, so that you can call the golf shop and report him. A rangefinder is good for on-course bird-watching, too. A few winters ago, at Lyman Orchards, we noticed a pileated woodpecker demolishing a dead tree directly above the tee on which we were standing. We passed around my rangefinder, and watched.

Tour Players are Great Big Babyish Crybabies (About Cameras)

Posted on December 11, 2014 by David Owen

The pros get upset if a camera on another fairway clicks during their backswing. What babies! During a recent Golf Digest assignment in Florida (at Streamsong Resort—see “Buddy This!”, in the January issue), three other editors and I played six rounds in four days while a photographer and his assistant clicked away, sometimes within inches of our faces. And it wasn’t a problem! In fact, I think it helped.

Most of the guys I play with at home swing better when the rest of us are talking, or even when they themselves are talking. Being distracted keeps you from focusing on the proven impossibility of the thing you’re trying to do. Anyway, here are some photos from our Streamsong trip. If Luke Kerr-Dineen, Ashley Mayo, Alex Myers and I can handle the clicks, why can’t Colin Montgomerie?

Ashley teeing off:

Luke putting:

Caddies, too:

No detail was overlooked:

Not even this:

We even took a few pictures of our own (this is Alex):

And nobody threw a fit!

The Other Golf Course at Royal County Down

Posted on December 9, 2014 by David Owen

A little over a year ago, I traveled to Northern Ireland on assignment for Golf Digest. My account of that trip, called The Adventure of a Lifetime, was mostly about Royal County Down, in Newcastle—the golf course that, if I really and truly had to pick just one, would probably get my vote as the world’s greatest. (That’s the view from the ninth tee in the photo above.) As terrific as R.C.D. is, though, it’s not the only golf course in County Down, or even in Newcastle. There’s a second course on the same property, called Annesley Links, and, although visiting Americans seldom play it, it has plenty of charms. It’s only 4,500 yards from the men’s medal tees, but if you can play it without losing more balls than you did on the championship course you’ll have something to brag about.

I played the Annesley with Shaun Killough and Andy Murphy, whom I met on the first tee. Killough is a retired bank manager, and Murphy is a retired electrician. Murphy was a good friend of Killough’s predecessor at the bank, and, when Killough got the job, Murphy, in effect, came with it. They’ve been golf buddies ever since. That’s Murphy on the left in the photo below, and Killough on the right.

Killough is a member and a past president of Mourne Golf Club, whose clubhouse stands between the Slieve Donard Hotel (whose spire you see in the distance in the first photo in this post) and the first tee of the championship course.

Mourne was established in the nineteen-forties for residents of Newcastle, whom Royal County Down members generally consider to be less clubbable than residents of Belfast. It has three hundred and fifty members, who can play the Annesley course whenever they like and the championship course on any day but Saturday—and all for a little over eight hundred pounds a year. “It’s the best golf deal in the world,” Killough told me.

Killough, Murphy, and I spent most of our round debating our wager. Murphy got so far ahead that on the tenth tee Killough ruled that the first nine holes had been practice only, and that the real match would begin now. But then he and I both lost our tee shots on the tenth, so that hole became a practice hole, too. Murphy got far ahead again. Then I made a birdie on a hole where Killough and Murphy both made net birdies, and I said, “That squares the match, I believe.” Killough agreed, so he and I kept our losses to a minimum.

Mourne, like Royal County Down, is men only. They had advertised a Ladies’ Night not long before, but only nine people signed up so they canceled it.

Killough told me that during his presidency he established a mixed foursomes tournament, which was called the Sorry Trophy because foursomes partners are always apologizing to each other. I saw the trophy, in a case in the clubhouse, where we stopped for a beer after our round. The tournament lasted just a couple of years, he said, but someone, somewhere, should revive the name.

There’s also a Royal County Down Ladies Golf Club, which has a small clubhouse of its own, near the first tee of the Annesley course.

Women are welcome on the championship course, but even from the forward tees some of the carries and elevations can be daunting for shorter hitters, and members of the ladies’ club, Killough said, play the Annesley course almost exclusively. He also told me, with incredulity, that the women’s clubhouse is alcohol-free.

Forty or fifty years ago, there was talk at Mourne of acquiring land north of Newcastle, in Dundrum, and building a golf course that would belong exclusively to Mourne Golf Club. In the end, though, only three members subscribed. After all, who in his right mind would give up the best golf deal in the world?

Five Holiday Gift Ideas for Avid Golfers

Posted on December 6, 2014 by David Owen

Your loved ones have a hard time buying presents for you, so you try to help: “How about some of my favorite golf balls?” You write down the name of the kind you like—the exact name, including the “X” after the “V1”—and your loved ones take the piece of paper with them when they go shopping. And there, in the ball department of the huge golf store at the mall, they see the kind you want.

But, holy cow, those balls cost almost fifty dollars a dozen! That’s, like, four bucks a ball! Luckily, though, on a shelf nearby are some identical balls (equally spherical, equally white) that cost only a quarter as much—and they come 18 to the box, instead of just 12! So your loved ones buy you two boxes of those! Three dozen balls for half the price of one dozen! That’s probably enough to last you for the rest of your life!

Oh, well. There’s nothing you can do about it, except to hit those balls into the woods with your brand-new approach wedge (which you ordered and wrapped yourself).

Alternatively, you could suggest to your loved ones that they shop for you in the past, in the pages of Golf Digest from a little over half a century ago. If they do, they’ll be sure to find lots of (attractively priced) items that any modern golfer would be delighted to find under the tree, including:

Reader’s Trip Report: Bethpage Black and Yale

Posted on December 5, 2014 by David Owen

Alex Nosevich, a reader, is a member of a club-with-a-club at Shining Rock Golf Club, in Northbridge, Massachusetts. “Our group calls itself the Winter Tour,” he told me recently, “because we play through the winter. However, as soon as our home course closes for the year we call ourselves the Arctic Tour. Probably more complicated than it needs to be.” Here’s what Shining Rock’s fifth hole—a long par 3, called Quarry—looks like when it isn’t covered with snow:

It’s called Quarry because that granite outcropping near the green really is the remains of a quarry. According to the club’s website, “The abundance of granite in these hillsides made ready access to materials needed to construct the nearby Blackstone Canal or for foundations for the massive mills which blossomed along the river in the 1800′s.”

Back in October, at around the time the Sunday Morning Group was celebrating the Crystal Anniversary of our annual autumn golf trip to Atlantic City, the Winter Tour took a similar trip to Bethpage Black, Bethpage Green, and Yale. Excerpts from Nosevich’s report:

Twelve guys, two days, seventy-two holes. Beer, whiskey, bourbon, cigars. We arrived at the Bethpage parking lot in a fleet of cars around 10:30 Monday night, and secured the first spots in the lot—critical in getting the opening three tee times on the Black. Bethpage Lesson No. 1: Domino’s delivers to the Bethpage parking lot.

Paul, our President of Domestic Events [far left in the photo above], told us ghost stories all night about how difficult the Black would play. Bethpage Lesson No. 2: If you’re over six feet tall, do not volunteer to sleep across the back bench of a minivan. And remember to bring a pillow.

Bethpage Black is long, but I found it to be very playable. Three guys broke 80, and I was very happy with my 82. Of course, we played from the whites, the rough wasn’t that deep, and conditions were ideal. I played in shorts and short sleeves. Awesome. [That’s Nosevich in the yellow shirt in the back row in the photo at the top of this post.]

After a quick lunch, we played the Green. We finished in darkness, headed for a local place to eat, then drove to a hotel in Connecticut. I have never, ever been happier to see a full-length mattress. The next day, we played thirty-six holes at Yale. I think the consensus favorite hole was the ninth, the famous par 3 whose green is bisected by a tributary of the Grand Canyon. Here’s Darren on that green. He’s the one who got us on the course:

The hole we liked the least was the eighteenth, a par 5 that forced many of us to lay up off the tee with a 3-wood, then hit a blind second shot seemingly straight up in the air. But that’s a minor complaint. We got to play two of the best courses in the country, and my team won the first day’s matches.

This week, the Arctic Tour is headed to Rhode Island. Report to follow if they survive.

Two Easy Ways to Speed Up Golf

Posted on December 1, 2014 by David Owen

My golf course closed for the season on the Monday before Thanksgiving. The day before that, thirteen guys showed up for the final 2014 home-course meeting of the Sunday Morning Group. I wasn’t there, because I was on my way home from a non-golf reporting assignment in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California—poor life-management on my part. The following Sunday, though, Hacker (real name), Mike B., Gary, Ray, three of Ray’s friends from other clubs, and I played at Fairchild Wheeler Golf Course, a 36-hole facility owned by the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut:

The Wheel (as it’s known to friends) is the main winter golf hangout for a lot of guys in our region, because it’s so close to the coast that it doesn’t get much snow. It’s where S.M.G. played last year on New Year’s Day:

The Wheel is also the home of an extremely successful chapter of The First Tee, which served more than 600 kids last summer:

One of the volunteer coaches is Richard Hunt, an honorary S.M.G. member. That’s him at the far left in the photo below, which was taken at Twisted Dune during S.M.G.’s fifteenth annual golf trip to Atlantic City, in October:

Each summer for the past ten years, Richard has spent his Saturday afternoons at the Wheel introducing youngsters to golf. This year, his First Tee chapter named a trophy after him: the Coach Rick Award, which goes to the scoring champions in the Ace/Birdie division. (He’s also pretty good at teaching grownups; he’s a marketing consultant in Manhattan, and he oversees the Venture Creation Program at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, where he is a mentor-in-residence.)

A couple of weeks ago, Richard attended the U.S.G.A.’s Pace of Play Symposium, at which two dozen speakers spent two days talking about how to make golf go faster. “I thought the event was quite valuable,” Richard (who took the photo below) told me. “This is exactly the kind of thing they need to do ‘for the good of the game.'”

Richard’s report:

Turns out, there are way more problems than your buddy plumb-bobbing his third putt. A major culprit is tee-time spacing, which is way too short at most public courses, and even in professional events. The L.P.G.A. did a test this year, and was able to reduce playing times an average of fourteen minutes per round just by moving tee times slightly farther apart, from ten minutes to eleven, and asking players to keep up with the group in front of them. Easy stuff. In addition, course setup, design, and facility management policies are all either part of the problem or part of the solution.

When I was in Arizona, I had dinner with my old friend Shelby Futch, the world’s greatest golf teacher, whose company owns several courses in the Scottsdale area. At one of them, Shelby reduced playing times by offering forty dollars in grill-room credit to each day’s first group if they finished in less than four hours, and by asking the groups behind them to keep up. Easy stuff.

I asked Richard whether the kids he teaches play quickly—and, sad to say, he said they don’t:

Trust me—we don’t teach them to play slow. Yet on late summer Saturday afternoons, during our team matches, my young charges struggle to beat darkness every week. I myself blame CBS, NBC, and the Golf Channel. Maybe Fox will only show golfers in action next year, instead of repose.

Easy stuff.

Uh-oh: What’s That White Stuff on My Golf Course?

Posted on November 25, 2014 by David Owen

There wasn’t much snow to begin with, and most of what there was had melted by Saturday, but Gary, our terrific superintendent, closed the course temporarily, because it was so cold that the remaining snow and the frost were unlikely to go away before dark. That didn’t affect me directly, because I’m traveling without my clubs for a little over a week, on a reporting assignment that’s only tangentially related to golf. It didn’t affect Hacker (real name), either, because he had decided that, paradoxically, playing golf for three consecutive days with a broken finger had made the finger worse, not better. Still— and I think I speak for everyone—I am opposed to any form of weather that causes golf to be suspended. And then, on Monday, Gary closed our course for the season.

Before our mini-storm hit, I had an opportunity to test two new pieces of equipment. Both are from eBags, one of a select group of companies for which I am an unpaid shill. The first item is the eBags Crew Cooler II:

It was designed as carry-on luggage for pilots and flight attendants, but it’s perfectly suited to golf. It has an insulated cold compartment with a removable—and replaceable—waterproof liner, for beer and ice; it has a zippered top insulated compartment for stuff that doesn’t have to be kept super cold, like sandwiches and Snickers bars; and it has lots of other useful features, including two mesh pouches, on the sides, for beverage bottles. It also has a slot on the back that lets you slide the whole thing onto a roller bag so that you can make it do double duty as a carry-on bag when you fly somewhere nice to play golf:

I attached mine to my pushcart by tightening the shoulder strap around my golf bag:

By doing that, I solved an age-old alcohol-transport problem, which Matt Manco, a reader in Louisiana, once addressed from the other direction, using his Sun Mountain Micro-Cart:

Just above my Crew Cooler I attached another recent acquisition: an eBags Padded Pouch—the blue thing in the photo below. It contains my laser rangefinder, and I like it much better than the case that came with the rangefinder, because it’s softer (though padded!) and it doesn’t stick out as much. I used a little carabiner to attach it to the towel ring on my bag, along with (as you can see) a lot of other stuff:

Padded Pouches come in sets of three, and they’re incredibly useful for carrying or packing smallish delicate or annoying items, like phones, cameras, chargers, cables, batteries, power cords, whatever:

I’ve got six, and I traveled with four of them last week, including one that I filled with the CDs of the audio version of Book Three of A Game of Thrones, which I listened to as I spent a week driving through Arizona, Nevada, and Southern California.

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

Author Archives: David Owen