Author Archives: David Owen

More About My Awesome Golf Shoes

Posted on by
3

In recognition of my services as an unpaid shill for their products, True Linkswear sent me a pair of their newest golf shoes, which are shown in the photo above and will be available to the world at large on November 4. I subjected them to the severest shoe test I know: wearing them in front of my wife. She said, “Those are nice.” (Her No. 1 golf-related footwear rule is “no saddle shoes on overweight middle-aged men.” Her No. 2 rule is “no red laces.”) I then took them for a test walk with the dog. They passed.

I now own five pairs of True golf shoes. I also still own three or four pairs of non-True golf shoes, which I wear occasionally so that I can use them up and get rid of them without feeling guilty about throwing them away. On Wednesday, the course was so muddy that I wore an old pair of Nike shoes, which I used to love, and halfway through the round I noticed that the sole of one of them was starting to come loose: Out they went as soon as I got home.

Six or seven members of my club now own True shoes—including our superintendent. Over the summer, I got to play a round at Quaker Ridge, in Scarsdale, New York, as the guest of the father of the husband of a friend. One of our caddies, a young woman from Germany, was wearing Trues. She said she was worried they looked dorky—and they do, generally, although they didn’t on her—but that she was going to keep wearing them anyway, because they were so comfortable.

Angela the caddie, Quaker Ridge, summer, 2012.

Comfortable shoes are going to take over the game the way spikeless shoes did. There are more choices all the time, from FootJoy, Ecco, Nike, and others. There is no reason, anymore, to own golf shoes that don’t feel good the moment you put them on, or to walk for miles over uneven ground in what are essentially wingtips. My friend Hacker (real name) has a pair of golf shoes that he says he’s been breaking in for four years. Enough!

Beer-Related Golf Infrastructure

Posted on by
4

You can’t drink beer at the golf course if you can’t open the bottle. The Sunday Morning Group has two built-in bottle openers right on the beer-drinking patio, next to the clubhouse. One opener is attached to a fence post (see above—and note the flower pot, for catching caps); the other is attached to the Superintendent’s Chair (see below). The Superintendent’s Chair is where the superintendent always sits, unless he doesn’t feel like it or someone else is sitting there already.

Also, as backup, every member who played in this year’s member-guest has a belt with a beer-opener buckle (see below). Word to the wise: stand up before opening a beer with your belt. (If you’d like your own beer-opener belt—and what normal golfer wouldn’t?—you can order it here.)

Tap-Cap belt, by Bison Designs, proud sponsor of the Sunday Morning Group (or vice versa).

Do Dogs Make Good Caddies?

Posted on by
Reply

The magazine measured just 8.25 by 5.50 inches back in those days. The “most beautiful golfer,” on the cover, was Elaine Goodman, a junior at Wichita University, in Kansas. She was five-two and weighed a hundred and five pounds, according to the article, and she was selected by a panel of golf writers (chilling thought).

A decade ago, I bought a collection of old Golf Digest magazines in an online auction. Even after ten years, I can tell that the seller didn’t live in what eBay listings refer to as a “smoke-free home.” I don’t mind the smell, though, because the magazines—which are from the late 1950s and early 1960s, and are teensy—are full of interesting material, like this article from 1957:

King, in the photo above, won the first National Dog Caddie Contest, which was held at St. Andrews Golf & Country Club, outside Chicago, in 1956, and was sponsored by the Bee Bindery, a privately owned printing company. King was eleven years old when he won, and had been caddying for ten years. The tournament was founded by Art Biltstein, who is holding the trophy in the photo below. Biltstein owned the Bee Bindery. When he died, in 2006, at the age of ninety-seven, he was survived by his third wife.

Art Biltstein with King, Beau, and Jupiter (who tied for second) and their owners.

Men sure pulled their pants up high in those days. And check out Biltstein’s socks! Dogs looked about the same, though. And a year and a half later Golf Digest ran this:

18 Good Things About Golf: No. 12

Posted on by
3

12. Golf confers no necessary advantage on extreme youth. The average age of recent major tournament winners is thirty, a time of life by which professional football players are viewed either as has-beens or as medical anomalies. (The average retirement age in the N.F.L. is twenty-eight.) It’s not unusual for pros in their forties to compete successfully with players half their age. When Raymond Floyd turned fifty, in 1992, he seemed capable of dominating both the regular and the senior professional tours. Phil Mickelson didn’t win his first major until he was thirty-three, which is two years older than Roger Federer is now. Tom Watson nearly won a sixth British Open in 2009, when he was fifty-nine. Youth means less in golf than it does in other sports because golf is as much a mental game as a physical one. It rewards experience, poise, and strategic resourcefulness, just as life does, and it isn’t dominated by adolescent thugs.

Playing Golf for Unbelievable Stakes

Posted on by
6

This is what Shep’s golf swing looks like, in case you’re wondering why Tony and I didn’t win the qualifier.

On Wednesday afternoon, Tony and I played Shep and Ben, straight up, for the championship of the world. They’re way better than we are, but we thought their relative unfamiliarity with our course would give us an advantage. It didn’t. They closed us out on the sixteenth hole, so we introduced an important Sunday Morning Group concept: the Qualifying Tournament. The sixteen holes we’d just finished, Tony explained, had been a qualifier for the day’s real action, a two-hole match for the championship of the universe. The top two pairs from the qualifier—them and us, coincidentally—advanced to the final, and because the two of them had (technically) finished ahead of the two of us we let them tee off first.

Not everyone likes the Qualifying Tournament concept, but rules are rules. And, as it happened, I birdied the seventeenth, putting Tony and me one-up in the main event. “We press you for the fourth dimension,” Shep said. I birdied the eighteenth, too—but so did they. That made Tony and me the undisputed champions of the universe, but it halved the press and, therefore, left the space-time continuum intact.

Can anyone identify the course in the photo above? We played there a couple of weeks ago, thanks to some shrewd favor-trading by Shep, and to get to it we took a boat (see below). Correct answerers, if any, will qualify for the next round.

A College Professor Revisits the Divot Question

Posted on by
4

Divot-replacement advice from “The Rules of Golf Illustrated and Explained,” edited by Francis Ouimet, 1948.

A few days ago, I pointed out that golfers use the word “divot” to mean both a chunk of turf and the hole the chunk leaves behind.  I received a long, thoughtful comment from John H. Jones, who is a professor of English at Jacksonville State University, in Jacksonville, Alabama. (He’s also the author of a book about William Blake, which will be the inaugural selection of the Sunday Morning Group’s book club, if we ever start one.)  A couple of days later, he sent another comment, which I’ve reproduced below.

I asked Jones to tell me something about himself, and in an email he wrote, “I started playing golf when I was about fifteen, after it became unavoidably obvious that a career as a wide receiver in the NFL was out of the question.” He knocked off for graduate school, and didn’t play again for twenty-five years. “Then for some unknown reason, during the summer before last, I decided to pick up a golf club and give it another try.” Now he’s hooked. Anyway, here are his further thoughts about divots:

Looking back at the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] information about the usage of “divot,” I kept thinking that the first usage of the term meaning “a piece of turf cut out with a club” appearing in 1886 seemed awfully late, given the long history of golf. Of course, the game takes off and gets a great deal of publicity in the second half of the nineteenth century, but still, the written use of “divot” as a “slice of turf” goes back to the sixteenth century. Surely, I thought, the golf application must have come much sooner than 1886.

A little more research took me to Peter Davies’s “The Historical Dictionary of Golfing Terms: From 1500 to the Present” (2005), where I found no better historical information for the first usage of “divot” in golf. Davies’s first notice of “divot” is also by [Horace] Hutchinson, coming in the 1890 publication “Badminton Guide to Golf,” where he says, “No golfer is worthy of the name who does not put back his divot” (260), the same year and probably the same publication as the OED’s reference to Hutchinson in 1890. And it also conveys the same sentiment.

But I still had a difficult time believing that “divot” as a piece of turf cut by a golf club did not find its way into writing until that late nineteenth century. That may very well be the case, though, because a random look at other golf terms in the OED puts “mashie” and “dormy” in the same time period. “Putter” appears about a hundred years earlier. I suspect a more thorough examination would find most golf terms finding their way into writing around the same time.

One additional piece of information appears in Davies, however. He gives a second definition for “divot” as “the cavity left by the divot,” and the first usage he notes is very recent, appearing in 1969 in “The Greatest Game of All,” where Jack Nicklaus writes that a ball “ended up in a shallow fairway divot” (160).

I wonder if the fact that the “divot” as cavity definition comes nearly eighty years after “divot” as a slice of turf suggests that instead of heeding Hutchinson, golfers over time gradually became more careless about replacing the slices of turf they cut with their clubs, so a new definition was needed.

Here’s another thought: early golfers probably didn’t take a lot of divots, since they used flat swings, wooden clubs, and crummy balls, and when they did take divots the gouges were probably hard to distinguish from existing features of the cow pastures they played in. So maybe divot replacement is a modern development, and is mainly the product of late-nineteenth-century innovations in golf equipment, swing technique, and lawn-mowing. I also think it’s sort of interesting that Francis Ouimet doesn’t use the word “divot” on the page I reproduced at the top of this post.

Remembering Uncle Frank

Posted on by
1

Every October for the past thirteen years, my Sunday-morning golf buddies and I have driven two hundred miles south, to Atlantic City, for a three-day late-season golf extravaganza (about which I’ll have more to say in a few days). For the past eight years, our trip has been dedicated to the memory of a friend we called Uncle Frank, who died, at the age of seventy, a month before our trip in 2004. This year, we honored him by using (and losing) twenty dozen golf balls with his name printed on them. They should be turning up in the woods of southern New Jersey for years.

Uncle Frank inspired one of the nine local rules printed on the back of our Sunday Morning Group scorecard: “No competitor shall dress in a black-and-white sun suit purchased by his wife.” When we held our first golf-club sleepover, a decade ago, he arrived in a blond wig and a blue feather boa (see photo, below). He smoked cigars as though they were cigarettes, and then he switched back to cigarettes, which he would have smoked two at a time if he hadn’t needed a free hand for storytelling. He discovered that he was sick after waking up one morning unable to speak above a whisper—the ultimate ironic disability for a man who lived to talk. The doctors found lung cancer and said that it had spread to his vocal cords. He died before the golf season ended.

People fell for Uncle Frank. If you needed to play a fully booked golf course, he was the guy you sent into the golf shop to negotiate. He’d come out ten minutes later with four tee times and an invitation to spend Christmas with the family of the pro. A couple of weeks after his funeral, his wife threw a party in his memory, and so many people wanted to come that she had to find a bigger room

Telling stories about Uncle Frank is hard to do because the teller is always aware that Uncle Frank would have told them better—like the one about the Japanese steakhouse in Myrtle Beach where he cracked up the joint by doing an impression of the chefs’ stylized food-preparation routines using a couple of sex aids he had borrowed from a bachelorette party one table over. Nothing about that performance was inoffensive; somehow, though, it didn’t offend. The only possible explanation is that Uncle Frank’s own disarming vulnerability showed through everything he did, even when he was flipping shrimp into his pocket with a dildo. As loud as he usually was, he was narrowly attuned to the feelings of others. When my father died, he was the first of my friends to call.

If Uncle Frank felt sorry for himself as he was dying, he didn’t show it. The nurses in the hospital all had crushes on him; doctors making rounds dropped by to share a joke. After his 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, eighteen 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.”

Three days after the radiation treatment, my friend Jim took Uncle Frank to the golf club for what would turn out to be his final round. I saw them in their cart in the parking lot afterward. Uncle Frank’s face was puffy from the steroids he’d been taking, and he had a bottle of oxygen on the seat beside him, but he was happy. “If this was baseball,” he said, “I’d be batting .750.” Four days later, he was gone.

Uncle Frank, Sunday Morning Group sleepover, 2002.

 

How to Conduct a Golf Playoff

Posted on by
3

That’s Stanley preparing to hit a lob shot over the patio from the bed of Nick’s pickup truck during a playoff in 2007.

The Sunday Morning Group’s games sometimes end in ties. Matching cards would be boring, and playing extra holes would force everyone to walk too far from the beer coolers, so we almost always hold playoffs on or around the practice green.

We don’t have just one format. On various occasions over the years, we have required playoff contestants to: putt balls from the top of a beer can while standing on one leg on the seat of a chair on the patio; throw balls onto the roof of the clubhouse so that they roll down the porch roof, down the porch steps, across the patio, and down a short, steep grassy slope and onto the practice green; chip through the split-rail fence that separates the patio from the parking lot; pitch from the pinnacle of a four-foot-tall pile of dirt in the middle of the first tee, which was being rebuilt; throw balls wrong-handed (overhand only) onto the practice green from the edge of the first fairway; and hit lob shots from the plastic liner in the bed of Nick’s pickup truck, which he had backed up to the fence.

Hacker (real name) improving his lie in the bed of Nick’s pickup truck.

In all our playoffs, we use the stymie rule, which the rest of the golf world abandoned in 1953: your ball stays where it stops, even if it’s blocking someone else’s putt, pitch, or throw. When we have large groups, we sometimes save time by making everyone putt, pitch, or throw at the same time, toward a single hole. Once, in pouring rain, we held a playoff inside the clubhouse, with a long putt that had to run from the (linoleum) floor of the kitchen all the way across the (carpeted) floor of the living room. The target was a beer bottle.

Last weekend, the playoff was a throw to the practice green from the window above the urinal in the men’s bathroom. (The men’s bathroom was designed by Reese, who is an architect and a 12-handicap. The window is ideally situated: directly overlooking the grill on which we cook our cheeseburgers.) The throw from the urinal is tough, because the ball has to miss the recycling barrels and clear a fairly tall fence. Barney went first and almost holed out; nobody else came close. (In almost any playoff format, the person who goes first has a huge advantage, for unknown reasons.)

Rick holding the bathroom window for Chic during last Sunday’s playoff.

Doug holding the window for Les, who is (arguably cheating by) standing in the urinal.

Sometimes, a playoff seems like so much fun that we open it to the whole group—including caddies, if there happen to be any. Other members, getting ready to tee off on the first hole, invariably scowl when they see us standing in a long row with our backs to the practice green, holding a beer in one hand and weighing a ball in the other, getting ready to throw the ball over a shoulder at one of the holes and quietly dreading the moment when, finally, it will be time to go home.

Metaphysical Question: Which is the Divot?

Posted on by
9

John Updike, who, in addition to everything else, was an avid golfer and a terrific golf writer, once described the greatest shot of his life:

It was years ago, on a little dog-leg left, downhill. Apple trees were in blossom. Or the maples were turning; I forget which. My drive was badly smothered, and after some painful wounded bounces found rest in the deep rough at the crook of the dog- leg. My second shot, a 9-iron too tensely gripped, moved a great deal of grass. The third shot, a smoother swing with the knees nicely flexed, moved the ball perhaps 12 feet out onto the fairway. The lie was downhill. The distance to the green was perhaps 230 yards at this point. I chose (of course) a 3-wood. The lie was not only downhill but sidehill. I tried to remember some tip about sidehill lies; it was either (1) play the ball farther forward from the center of the stance, with the stance more open, or (2) play the ball farther back, off a closed stance, or (3) some combination. I compromised by swinging with locked elbows and looking up quickly, to see how it turned out. A divot the size of an undershirt was taken some 18 inches behind the ball. The ball moved a few puzzled inches. Now here comes my great shot. Utterly demented by frustration, I swung as if the club were an axe with which I was reducing an orange crate to kindling wood. Emitting a sucking, oval sound, the astounded ball, smitten, soared far up the fairway, curling toward the fat part of the green with just the daintiest trace of a fade, hit once on the fringe, kicked smartly toward the flagstick, and stopped rolling two feet from the cup. I sank the putt for what my partner justly termed a “remarkable six.”

Anyway, I don’t care about Updike’s shot. What I’m interested in is his undershirt-size divot: what should we call the undershirt-size hole it left behind? Most golfers would call it a divot, too. They “take a divot” when they hit a shot, but they say their ball is “in a divot” if it ends up in the unfilled hole left by someone else’s shot. We don’t treat bathtubs (for example) the same way, since we don’t say “plug” for both the stopper and the drain.

There are many words in English that also mean their opposite: the verb “to dust” can mean either to remove dust from something (such as a piano) or to apply dust to something (such as a sugar cookie); “cleave” means either to split apart or to stick together; “ravel” and “unravel” are synonyms. But is there any word, other than “divot,” that means both itself and the absence of itself?

The Oxford English Dictionary, in its definition of “divot,” mentions only the clump, not the gouge where the clump used to be (and it says nothing about golf—see below). Do we need another term? If so, how about “divot hole”? While you think about that, I can tell you that a reader, in an email, has suggested calling the little scrap of turf that your ball sometimes dislodges when it lands on a green a “wig.”

Good Golf Game: Mrs. Murphy

Posted on by
2

Is this Mrs. Murphy? (Result No. 4 from Google Image search.)

Many years ago, while on vacation with my family in Florida, I managed to qualify for my wife’s stringent Golf Release program. I’d done four days of hard time at two beaches, a nature preserve, a G-rated movie, and a seashell museum, and as a reward I was granted eighteen holes of unsupervised play on the golf course at the resort where we were staying. (That we were staying at a resort with a golf course was proof that this was a minimum-security vacation, but I’d nonetheless had to earn my round.) The starter grouped me with two dentists from Ohio. They were supposed to be playing with friends from home, but the missing pair had been apprehended the night before during an ill-considered alcohol-related escape attempt and were now being held in solitary.

There were just three of us, and the dentists’ handicaps were of uncertain provenance. So how could we gamble? Fortunately, my father had taught me the perfect game for just this situation. It’s called Mrs. Murphy.

In my dad’s game, you turn a threesome into a foursome by adding an imaginary fourth player, named Mrs. Murphy. She’s a kindly old Irish grandmother, who wears a big hat and a long skirt, and she can’t hit the ball more than a hundred and thirty yards, but she still manages to shoot par on every hole. Either that, or she’s a recently divorced former exotic dancer who took up the game just a couple of years ago and is kind of shaky on long putts but still manages to shoot par on every hole. Your choice.

Each of the three non-imaginary players gets Mrs. Murphy as a partner in one six-hole best-ball match against the other two, who play as a team, and everybody plays off Mrs. Murphy’s handicap, which is zero. The key to doing well is to take advantage of her rock-steady play during the six holes when she’s your partner, by aggressively gunning for net birdies, since she’s already covered par. Your opponents, meanwhile, have to play carefully enough to match Mrs. Murphy while looking for reasonable opportunities to score. Sandbagging questions are moot, and wide handicap spreads don’t matter, since everybody gets everybody else as a partner for six holes.

Mrs. Murphy is a good game for three people, no matter where you are or who you’re playing with, and competing against par is a useful teaching aid under any circumstances. In fact, Hacker (real name), Peter A., and I played Mrs. Murphy on Wednesday afternoon. Because there was rain in the forecast (see previous post), the four of us had the place pretty much to ourselves.

Is this Mrs. Murphy? (Result No. 9 from Google Image search.)