We Have a Winner; Plus, Good Shoes for Winter Golf

Posted on January 2, 2014 by David Owen

On New Year’s Eve, I challenged readers to identify a golf course and an intriguing locker-room accessory, based on a photo similar to the one above. There were several pretty good guesses regarding the locker-room accessory, but only one (by email) that nailed the golf course, too. That golf course is D. Fairchild Wheeler, known to regulars as the Wheel, a muny owned by the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut (although it’s actually next door, in the town of Fairfield).

The winner was Dave Malloy, a reader in Trumbull (another neighboring town). He wrote: “That’s the locker room at the Wheel. Red Course is open all year. Black Course is a diamond in the rough. Oh, function. Drinks, baby! Ashtrays, too, at one point, I was told. Always loved that locker room.”

There are other uses, too, as the photo above shows. And according to Stephen P. Roach, the head pro, regulars also treat the things as stand-up card tables—a great idea. I asked Malloy to tell me about himself and his golf. He wrote:

I am an 18-handicap hack who can lose balls impressively deep in the woods, both hooking and slicing. Fifty-two years old. Most of my golf is nine holes late Saturday or Sunday afternoon at Tashua Knolls, in Trumbull. Three kids and a full sports schedule kill golf until late June, then sports start up again in September. Grew up in Stamford playing Hubbard Heights and Sterling Farms. Occasionally enjoy away rounds at Smith-Richardson, Longshore, Oxford Greens. Play Highlands and Pines in Dennis, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. Took one lesson, and at the end of it the pro gave me a free can of tennis balls.

As promised, a disappointing prize is on its way to him, Winter Storm Hercules be damned. Meanwhile, my friends and I have played three rounds at the Wheel in the past week, including our final round of 2013 (on New Year’s Eve) and our first round of 2014 (on New Year’s Day).

The Sunday Morning Group visits the Black Course at the Wheel, January 1, 2014.

The Sunday Morning Group plays the Black Course at the Wheel. First tee, January 1, 2014.

When we teed off on New Year’s Day, at 9:30 or so, our cars were still the only ones in the parking lot. Where was everybody else? Home fretting over their New Year’s resolutions, maybe.

Playing golf in bad weather is easier if you have the right equipment. Remarkably, my friend Hacker (real name) and I both received winter golf shoes for Christmas. How did our wives know? It’s like a short story by O. Henry. My new shoes are Nike Lunar Bandon IIs:

They look a little like ski boots, but my winter golf clothes increasingly look like ski clothes, so I shouldn’t complain. They’re not as slipper-like or as comfortable as my beloved True Linkswear shoes, but they seal up tight, and, so far, I have nothing bad to say about them. I also like to wear them when I walk the dog in the snow.

Santa brought Hacker’s new shoes all the way from England. They’re made by a company called Stuburt, and they also look like boots:

Hacker loves them, but when he got home on Saturday, the first day he’d worn them, he discovered that seven of the cleats had fallen out while we were playing.

Cliff Dews.

He emailed the company to complain, and, a couple of days later, heard back from Cliff Dews, a representative of the distributor. “From your description,” Dews wrote, “I can only assume that you did not notice the label on the sole unit which explains that the studs are only hand tight during the manufacturing process and that they should be fully tightened before use.” I love England, but the only other country I can think of where they do things this way is Canada. If you’re willing to go to the trouble of printing up labels and sticking them to the soles of shoes, why not spend another ten seconds and screw the things all the way in?

Besides, as Hacker pointed out, there had been no such labels on the bottoms of his shoes or, indeed, anywhere in the box, which had contained just “the shoes and bubble pack.” At any rate, Dews did the decent thing, “despite our instruction label not being actioned,” and promised to send Hacker a new set of studs. And that’s the end of it—or so I hope.

New Year’s Eve Golf Challenge

Posted on December 31, 2013 by David Owen

A disappointing prize to anyone who can identify the locker room in the photo above and explain the function of the cool-looking things bolted to the ends of the benches. People who played with me there on Saturday (and are returning with me today) are not eligible to guess.

Golf-Travel Update: Hotel-Room Power Problem Solved, Sort Of

Posted on December 27, 2013 by David Owen

My friend Patty recently spent a couple of weeks crossing the ocean on a freighter. That’s her suitcase, in the photo above. She didn’t pack the way I would have packed, but she took everything she thought she would need, as I also try to do when I travel. And the crew of her ship did the same—for example, by packing a squadron of fake armed guards, for scaring away pirates:

One of my own biggest travel issues, as I’ve mentioned before, is finding enough places to plug in all the stuff I need to plug in. Most hotel rooms have way too few electrical outlets, and often the only unused ones are hidden behind huge pieces of hard-to-move furniture, such as beds. Not long ago, I stayed in a hotel in Baltimore that was better equipped than most. For example, it had one of these:

Still, one of the sockets was already being used by the hotel itself (for a lamp), and the spacing was was so tight that if I’d needed to plug in a “wall wart” power adapter I would have rendered the adjacent socket unusable, as had already happened on the three-socket wall receptacle in the photo below. (That space-hogging adapter isn’t mine. I don’t remember what it was powering—maybe the phone next to the bed.)

The room also had one of these, on the desk. It’s called a ChargePort, and it’s sold by a company called TeleAdapt, which does a lot of business with hotels:

I was OK with it, although (since it had to be plugged in somewhere else) it increased the number of available AC outlets by just one. The labels on the USB ports seem unnecessarily inscrutable. (“Standard” actually means “1 amp”; “Tablet” means “2.1 amps.”) Plus, the thing sells for sixty bucks!

The next night, I stayed at a Marriott in Massachusetts. My room there had just one accessible socket within a cable’s length of anywhere I was willing to sit. Luckily, I had recently bought a Belkin 3-Outlet Mini Travel Swivel Charger Surge Protector with Dual USB Ports—and, furthermore, I had remembered to pack it:

It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty small, and it allowed me to leverage that stupid single socket, which was in the base of the desk lamp:

I didn’t go as far as my friend Rex, who travels with a full-size power strip. He also packs a 150-watt incandescent light bulb (for reading) and an old-fashioned full-flow shower head. And, because you can’t replace a hotel shower head with just your hand, he also travels with a wrench and a roll of Teflon plumber’s tape.

Last-Minute Gift Ideas From the Golf Digest Time Machine

Posted on December 22, 2013 by David Owen

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the golf world underwent a Cambrian Explosion of golf-cart designs. (All these advertisements are from issues of Golf Digest.) Lots of different ideas were tried and rejected, and lots of companies went extinct—even ones that had the backing of celebrities:

Bobcats must have been fun (and loud), and until you got yelled at you could hold intra-foursome races. For women, there was a version with training wheels:

Ben Hogan was a fan of the new machines, since (apparently) he believed that walking spoiled golf for many players:

Most early models had three wheels. A few had roofs:

There were many gasoline-powered versions. You turned them off when you got to your ball, the keep the noise down:

This one—for a single golfer—had a “multi-baffled muffler”:

Most one-player gasoline-powered carts were more expensive, as the one below was. But it weighed just a hundred pounds, and it folded so compactly that you could carry two of them in the trunk of your car:

There were also powered carts for golfers who, Ben Hogan notwithstanding, insisted on walking. This one held two bags:

Unless you had one of the folding ones, you needed one of these to get your cart to and from the club:

And if your cart was one of the electric ones you probably were wise to buy a spare one of these, as a backup:

Merry Christmas to all!

World’s Second-Best Golf Club, Part Two: The Engine Whisperer

Posted on December 18, 2013 by David Owen

When I was using Google to search for additional information about the Big Dogs, I came across an obituary of a member known as J. D., who died a little over two years ago, at the age of sixty-nine. The obituary described him as “a man of his word who was content with what he had and always treated everyone the way he wanted to be treated.” It also said that he had “invested in the youth of Bay County, coaching basketball, baseball, and soccer, including the Mosley Girls’ soccer teams.” Mike Riley, who introduced me to the Big Dogs, told me more:

J.D. turned “golly” into about a five-syllable word. Think Gomer Pyle. He owned his own car repair shop, and I knew him as the engine whisperer. One day, I was having trouble with the air-conditioner in my Honda, which had a quarter of a million miles on it. He popped the hood and listened. Then he got a three-foot-long screwdriver and stuck one end of it on the engine and the other end to his ear. After about ten seconds, he said, “Bad compressor bearing.” He was right.

Riley writes: “This is J.D. the day he won exactly a hundred dollars in the Dog Fight. This was a road game because that is not our clubhouse. The guys in the background are paying the winners.”

J. D. was a below-average putter, Riley said, unless he’d had a couple of beers, at which point “he magically became more aggressive than Tom Watson in his prime.” The Big Dogs used to play a supplemental nine-hole game, called the Extra-Nine Scramble, after their regular Saturday Dog Fight. “In one of them,” Riley said, “J. D. putted first and sank it on all nine holes.”

Lubed or not, J. D. had trouble with the shanks. “But not ordinary shanks,” Riley said. “True hosel rockets. But, strangely, he seemed to hit them only on two holes: No. 7, which is our signature par 3, and No. 12, a rather nondescript par 4.” The photo above is an aerial view of No. 7. “The yellow line is the flight path of J.D.’s worst shank,” Riley continued. “It went over a corner of Little Jim’s Shack, then almost hit a house before splashing down into North Bay. The star is where a J. D. shank came within inches of taking out a bicyclist. After that, we allowed him to tee off on No. 7 only after a two-direction traffic check had been completed.”

The photo above—which Riley describes, accurately, as “Zapruder quality”—shows J. D. as he dressed for the Big Dogs’ regular Christmas Eve golf game. Do you have a regular Christmas Eve golf game? Don’t you think you should?

To be continued.

Playing Golf in the Snow

Posted on December 16, 2013 by David Owen

The weather was grim this past weekend, and the Sunday Morning Group didn’t meet. I paid bills, watched golf and football on TV, and thought about my poor, poor clubs, which were entombed in the trunk of my car:

Six or seven of us used to play golf in the snow almost every weekend through the winter. We each carried just one club, usually a 7-iron, and if the snow was deep enough we wore snowshoes. In the photo below, which is from 1996, those dark things sticking up near our feet are the tops of the posts of a split-rail fence that used to stand behind our first tee:

George and I, in snowshoes, with 7-irons.

Carrying just a single club is good for shot-making: You learn how to hit it long and short, high and low, hooking and slicing. We used orange or pink balls—unless the snow was so deep that color was irrelevant.

George, me, Michael J.

It was while playing snow golf that I learned the first principle of the golf swing: the key to power is not effort but ease. Facing a hundred-yard shot and having only a 7-iron to hit it with, I swung easy and launched my ball on a gorgeous left-bending arc into the woods beyond the green.

We walked in single file, to keep footprints to a minimum, and aimed for unspoiled patches, so that the holes our balls made when they landed would be easier to find. I learned that the surest way to track a ball is sometimes with your ears. Even in very deep snow, though, we seldom lost more than one or two.

According to the U.S. Golf Association, snow golf was invented by Rudyard Kipling, who lived in Dummerston, Vermont, for a few years in the late eighteen-hundreds. Kipling used to paint balls red and hit them into tin cans buried in snow in front of his house, which was called Naulhaka.

Kipling’s house in Vermont. He used to hit red golf balls down that snow-covered hill.

Kipling learned about golf from Arthur Conan Doyle, who visited Naulhaka in November, 1894. “I had brought up my golf-clubs and gave him lessons in a field while the New England rustics watched us from afar, wondering what on earth we were at, for golf was unknown in America at that time.” Conan Doyle wrote later. (Golf wasn’t quite unknown; my own club, two states to the south, was already five years old.)

Kipling’s clubs and the rack he stored them in, on display at Naulhaka.

I myself haven’t played snow golf since my friends and I discovered that the golf courses in New York City almost never close. But if the weather stays like this through the end of the year I’ll have to take my snowshoes out of storage.

Rudyard Kipling at Naulhaka, where he created both snow golf and The Jungle Book.

Rudyard Kipling at Naulhaka, where he both invented snow golf and wrote The Jungle Book.

World’s Second-Best Golf Club, Part One: The Big Dogs and their Dogfights

Posted on December 13, 2013 by David Owen

Jim, a Big Dog. Mike Riley writes: "Jim is the only person I have ever seen fall down after a practice swing. In his defense, it was his first practice swing of the day and it occurred after a night at a Mississippi casino." The photo was taken (by Riley) last Christmas Eve. Jim's pants were dragging on the wet ground, so he fixed them."

Mike Riley writes: “Jim is the only person I have ever seen fall down after a practice swing. In his defense, it was his first practice swing of the day and it occurred after a night at a Mississippi casino.” This photo, of Jim’s lower legs and feet, was taken (by Riley) last Christmas Eve. Jim’s pants had been dragging on the wet ground, so he fixed them. “Southerners use duck tape to fix anything,” Riley told me.

The world’s best golf club, I think we can all agree, is mine. Recently—thanks to Mike Riley, a reader—I’ve learned quite a bit about the second best, which is in northwestern Florida and has a course that was designed in the nineteen-twenties by Donald Ross. Riley belongs to a fifty-year-old club-within-the-club known as the Big Dogs, after their standard game, the Big Dogfight. “We play Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, plus holidays,” Riley said. “The number of players varies between twelve and thirty. Fridays and Sundays have larger crowds since college football isn’t competing for attention.”

Mike Riley (right) and the tour pro Boo Weekley, an old friend of his. Riley caddied for Weekley during the pro-am of the FBR Open, in Phoenix, a few years ago.

Riley (right) and the tour pro Boo Weekley, an old friend of his. Riley caddied for Weekley during the pro-am of the FBR Open, in Phoenix, a few years ago.

The format of the Big Dogs’ Dogfights is almost too complicated to explain, but here goes: “The team game is a one-dollar nassau in which every team plays every other team (best one, two, and three balls), with individual skins and rabbits,” Riley told me. “There is also an individual points game based on a formula we created that is somewhat akin to what might happen if you played U.S.G.A. handicaps with Stableford scoring. There are also two-dollar best-ball nassaus in which each two-man-team combination plays every other two-man-team combination. For example, Team No. 1’s captain and ‘2-man’ (the best and second best player on Team No. 1) will play best-ball nassaus against every other team’s captain and 2-man.” Here’s what part of one of their score sheets looks like (Riley is the captain of Team No. 3):

The Big Dogs play in four-, five-, and six-man teams, depending on how many show up. A member known as the Commandant makes the assignments, with help from the club’s pro. “Everyone has their own cart, and everyone rides solo, so they get around pretty fast,” Riley said. “Most carts have portable heaters and are equipped with enclosures for the rare cold days in Florida. The fastest cart belongs to Clay; it has an estimated top speed of 35 m.p.h. Some have XM radio. Almost all have ice chests. One (Jim’s) has a grill.”

Jim's cart. Note grill, cooler, heater, and enclosure. The concrete disk under the grill is a safety measure.

Jim’s cart. Note grill, cooler, heater, and enclosure. The concrete septic-tank cover under the grill is a safety device.

Anybody need a brat?

One day, Jim fell into the lake on the seventh hole while trying to hit a pitch shot from the bulkhead. “The board he was standing on broke,” Riley said. “He toweled off and finished his round. He smelled like brackish water for the next two hours. Here’s a picture of us pulling him out of the water.”

To be continued.

45-Hole Golf Complex Stays Open for 5 Golfers

Posted on December 9, 2013 by David Owen

Golf weather, duh.

Our home greens are closed, so on Sunday four of us traveled a little over an hour to the east, to Tunxis Plantation Country Club, which has two eighteen-hole courses and one nine-hole course—all very nice, all completely open, carts available (although we didn’t use them), $35 walking. The parking lot was empty when we arrived, at 10:30. We teed off at 10:45 and were the only golfers on the entire property. The temperature was only 30 or 32, but there was no wind and the course was in terrific shape. I had brought some adjustable winter tees, which I picked up at the PGA Golf Merchandise Show in Orlando a few years ago:

They’re really meant to be used with mats on driving ranges, but they work pretty well on their own when you can’t get a regular tee into the ground. We didn’t need them, though, because the dirt was still semi-unfrozen.

Tim, Gary, Hacker (real name), Tunxis Plantation, December 8, 2013.

On the eleventh hole, a single golfer caught up to us, and we let him play through (see below). On the previous hole, he had sunk a six-foot putt and made a fist pump, even though he was by himself and didn’t know I was watching. He hit a huge, perfect play-through drive, well past all of our drives, but then he shanked his second shot into the pine trees. That made us all feel better about his big drive.

Hacker and I were both testing some Clicgear pushcart mitts, which we had bought independently at exactly the same time:

They have Velcro straps, and they attach (as a single unit) to the handles of your pushcart, so that you can slide your (gloved) hands into them. Getting the thumbs in the right place takes a little work. Each side has a pocket for a chemical hand-warmer, although the pockets are slightly too small for chemical hand-warmers, we found—an odd design flaw. We liked them, though. On the sixteenth hole, Tim noticed this sign leaning against a tree:

Translation: we shoot cross-country skiers.

We finished in three hours and had lunch at one of our favorite winter clubhouses, Flaggstead Smokehouse. They were out of brisket, but they still had my favorite: pulled rib meat. They were also offering a discount (see below). Only Hacker tried the voice (unsuccessfully), but they gave us the discount anyway, and when we left I bought a pound of pulled ribs and a big thing of beans, to take home.

Bonus Day, Then Tragedy: Our Greens Are Closed for the Winter

Posted on December 7, 2013 by David Owen

P1110218 On Thursday afternoon, Bob G., Peter A., Paul, and I played a bonus round in fog that gradually got worse. We saw Jack, Mike J., and Mrs. Mike on the seventh hole (see photo below), but other than that we had the course to ourselves.

Mrs. Mike practically holed this bunker shot.

Mrs. Mike almost holed this bunker shot. The air in Beijing looked almost exactly like this when I was there.

While we played, some guys with heavy construction equipment were working in front of the clubhouse. The widow of a member had wanted to do something nice for the club, which her husband loved, so she hired an architect to redesign the entire main parking area, which was a mess, and then paid for the construction, tree work, landscaping, and so on. Needless to say, she will be receiving a complete set of Sunday Morning Group branded merchandise for her personal use.

The new parking area, under construction.

Gary, our superintendent, told us he was going to pull the flags after our regular game on Sunday, but then we got “wintry mix” on Friday night and he had to close the greens first thing Saturday morning. Tim, Austin, and I played on Saturday anyway, using the temps. We played cross-country, making up the holes as we went along. We each carried just one club. Because Tim had played nine holes by himself, in the rain, on Friday, he gets solo credit for the last official round of 2013.

Tim & Austin, playing from the No. 6 temp to the No. 4 temp, Saturday, December 7.

December 7, in addition to being the first day of the 2013 post-season season and the seventy-second anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was my dog’s fourth birthday. Happy birthday, Henry.

Hacker (Real Name) Invents Great New Golf Game While Asleep

Posted on December 5, 2013 by David Owen

Recently, I wrote that I’d had an extremely rare dream-within-a-dream, about the rules of golf. Reading about my dream made my friend Hacker (shown above) recall that he, too, had recently dreamt about golf, and that in his dream he had invented a new kind of scramble. (In a scramble, all the players on each team drive on each hole, then choose the best drive and play their second shots from there, then choose the best second shot and play their third shots from there, and so on, until the ball is holed out.) In Hacker’s dream version, each four-man team had to count two balls on each hole. As he explained the rules to me: “All four drive. Pick two balls. Assign two players to play each ball until holed out. Score both balls. No handicap.”

Tim (left) and Paul, Sunday scramble, Atlantic City, October 20, 2013.

Tim (left) and Paul, Sunday-afternoon scramble, Atlantic City, October 20, 2013.

In Hacker’s dream, the purpose of this game was “to screw Tim” (another of our friends, who invented our game Perfect Skins “to screw Gilllen”). But it’s a great idea, no matter whom it screws, and we’re going to try it next fall, during the Crystal Anniversary of our annual golf trip to Atlantic City, if not before. Hacker’s dream format is especially attractive because it prevents a team from depending too heavily on any one player.

I love scrambles, and I’ve put some thought into what my ideal scramble team would look like, in any format. The first thing I want is a guy who can drive the ball really long and really straight. On my dream team, that will be me—but not the me who usually hangs out at my club. The me I want is the me who hits all my provisional drives, after I’ve pumped my first drive out of bounds. The provisional me never fails to find the middle of the fairway, and he is scary, scary long.

Next, I want someone who pures his approach shots, so that we can be sure of getting at least one ball close on every hole. That player will be me, too, but not the same me who’s so awesome with a driver. The me I want for approach shots is the me who, during my regular rounds, hits all my lay-ups. The lay-up me hits nothing but smooth, high draws, and he’s a club and a half longer than the me who hits my tee shots on par 3s.

Pitching, chipping, and bunker play usually don’t count for much in a scramble, because with multiple tries at every approach shot you seldom get into serious trouble, and when you do get into trouble you have multiple chances to get out. Still, it’s important to have at least one guy on the team who’s really good at sticking it tight from fifty yards and in. On my dream team, that will be me—but not the provisional me, the lay-up me, or the regular me. For the short stuff, we’re going to need the me who handles my up-and-downs when I’m playing by myself. That me has the softest hands you ever saw. He can knock it dead from any lie—with backspin!—as long as nobody’s watching.

The truly crucial skill in a scramble is putting. The secret weapon on my dream team will be a guy who is probably the best putter I’ve ever played with: me. In a weekend tournament at my club several years ago, every participant had a floating mulligan, which could be used on any shot. I forgot about mine until I got to the sixteenth green, where I faced a tricky ten-footer. I told myself that that I didn’t have to make the putt, because I’d have a second chance if I missed—and the ball went in. And I never even got to use my do-over, because just knowing I had it enabled me to one-putt the next two greens, too, from about as far away. “Leave your putters in your bags, boys,” the mulligan me will say. With a guy like that on the team, how can we do anything but win?

Ben and Shep, final hole, Sunday-afternoon scramble, Atlantic City, October 20, 2013.

Ben and Shep, final-hole gallery, Sunday-afternoon scramble, Atlantic City, October 20, 2013.

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

Author Archives: David Owen