Author Archives: David Owen

Golf and the Second Greatest Game

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A golf-obsessed friend took up bridge a few years ago. He thought his wife would be pleased, since bridge is a game that husbands and wives often freely choose to play as partners—unlike, oh, golf. But she was not pleased. No matter how sensitively he described the intellectual satisfaction he took from this quietly complex card game, which is played and adored by little old ladies all over the world, she responded coldly. “I know what bridge is,” she snarled one evening as he headed out the door to his regular Thursday game. “It’s just indoor golf.”

Ah. Just so. I myself began playing seven or eight years ago, during a rainy vacation at the seashore, and I now understand why bridge used to be as important at some golf clubs as golf was, back before TV and the Internet made it so easy to be not quite bored enough to break open a deck of cards. President Eisenhower, whose love for golf was so deep that it helped inspire an entire generation to play, was equally crazy about bridge. Maybe crazier.

The relationship between bridge and golf is more than accidental. Both games are founded on the most basic male social unit: the foursome. Both displace a player’s entire mental capacity, leaving no room for thoughts about the office. Both are games for a lifetime—and they’re complementary, because four golfers can effortlessly switch to bridge during frost delays, thunderstorms, and darkness. Both games involve the wily outsmarting of opponents, and both reward years of conscientious study. My friend’s wife was right to be angry: bridge is best ball played on a table.

The connection between golf and bridge could be made even stronger if golfers would borrow a couple of appealing concepts from their indoor counterparts. The first is that of trump—which in bridge is a suit that annihilates all others. (If the trump for a particular hand is hearts, say, then any heart, even the lowly two, will beat any card in any other suit, including an ace.) The place to add trumps to golf is on the green, by declaring that all holed putts over twenty feet (say) are trump. If your partner lies four but sinks his twenty-five-footer, he trumps the other side, and the two of you win the hole, even if one of your opponents makes a tap-in three.

The other importable bridge concept is that of the dummy. In every bridge hand one of the four players (the partner of the player who initiated the winning bid) becomes the dummy, turning his cards over on the table and sitting out the playing of the hand. In golf, the dummy on each hole would be the player in the foursome who had just hit the worst tee shot. Like a bridge dummy, a golf dummy would excuse himself by saying, “Good luck, partner.” Then he would retrieve his ball from the bushes, and head off to the kitchen to fill a tray with snacks.

I’ve been thinking about golf and bridge because I gave up opening day at my home course this week in order to play bridge in an American Contract Bridge League tournament in Memphis with a friend from Mississippi. He’s a very good player and I’m not, but one of bridge’s attractive similarities to golf is that it accommodates participants at all skill levels, even as partners. The Memphis tournament is a national championship—a bridge major—although the games we played in were just for choppers. Still, there were stars in the other rooms, and in our hotel. I rode up in an elevator with Lynn Deas, a national champion who dresses colorfully, uses a motorized scooter, and always has a tiny dog sitting in her lap! I even helped her back her scooter over the raised threshold at the door of the elevator! Twice in the lobby I saw Eric Kokish, who is the inventor of a famous bidding convention, the Kokish Relay, and is also the Canadian-born non-playing coach of the Nick Nickell team, which may be the greatest bridge team of all time! I also saw Nick Nickell, talking with someone I sort of recognized but couldn’t think of the name of!

The stars of the Nickell team are Jeff Meckstroth and Eric Rodwell, middle-aged guys who play as partners and are usually referred to, jointly, as Meckwell. As it happens, Meckstroth—who looks like a truck driver—was a scratch golfer as a kid and thought about trying to play on tour, before he turned pro as a bridge player instead. (He has said that he always knew he didn’t want a real job.) He plays bridge in tournaments all over the world but still manages to get in something like 160 golf rounds a year. One reason that he and Rodwell have been so successful—in addition to the fact that they’re brilliant card players and bidding theorists—is that they are very aggressive: they shoot at pins. And that’s what I’m going to do as soon as I get home.

18 Good Things About Golf: No. 5

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5. Its sociability notwithstanding, golf is unusual among competitive sports in that it can be played alone. Teeing off by yourself as the sun is coming up is an intoxicating experience and a good way to settle your mind for whatever lies ahead. Nine holes alone on an uncrowded course in the early evening is as good as a martini at expunging the day’s accumulation of disappointment and regret. Even fifteen minutes on a driving range can transform your outlook—occasionally for the better.

My yips don’t yip when no one is watching. My putts don’t leak below the hole. My arms are ribbons and my head keeps still. I stay behind. I don’t come over. By the time the clubhouse comes back into view, I’m pretty sure I’ll never make another bogey. I could beat all the guys who beat me now if I could play them in absentia.

Solo golf is so easy that you shouldn’t have to turn in your scores. It gives you a glimpse of the golfer you might have been and might still be—a player who goes for it in two, slams three-footers against the back of the cup, and always reaches for the driver. When you play alone, your inner self sits down and lets your better self play through. By the time you finish, your swing is back where it’s supposed to be.  You can face the world again.

Even in a crowd, golf is a solitary contest. Its essence, in the words of  Herbert Warren Wind, is “man’s battle against himself.” Maddeningly, many of the problems that plague poor players are exacerbated by their efforts to prevent them. Aiming farther to the left makes the ball fly farther to the right; flexing arm muscles while swinging makes drives weaker, not stronger; trying to swing harder makes the clubhead move more slowly. The paradox of the golf swing is that one begins to gain control of it only by seeming to let it go.

The best time to play alone is when the course is alone as well—say, late one afternoon very early in the season, when most of the other members haven’t figured out that the course is open again. The parking lot is almost empty. The pro has gone home. You don’t feel tight, so there’s no need to bend or stretch or even take a practice swing.  And you can grab your bag as soon as your ball is in the air:  you know where your drive is going to be.

Coolest Place to Stay in St. Andrews

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A terrific guide to golf in Scotland is Golf in Scotland, by Allan McAllister Ferguson, a personal travel planner. The fourth edition has just been published. If you’re going to Scotland, or if you dream of going to Scotland, you need a copy. You should also get sign up for Ferguson’s newsletter.

I took a golf trip to Scotland in 2008 with eight friends from home. Our best lodgings were in St. Andrews, where we spent two nights in a nineteenth-century house on North Street, a short walk from the Old Course. The house, which was designed by the same man who designed the main part of the R. & A. clubhouse, was recommended to me by Ferguson. It had five double bedrooms, and it came stocked with orange juice and candy bars, and there was a gas grill and a lighted artificial putting green in the backyard. And it set us back just $70 per man per night. If we’d known how cool it was going to be, we might have thrown out our itinerary and stayed there the whole time. Here’s a photo of the backyard:

This is how you're supposed to spend the evening after you've played 36 holes on the Old Course.

Unfortunately, the house doesn’t seem to be available at the moment. Ferguson told me he thinks it may be closed for good, but the house’s website is tantalizing. (It also has more pictures.) You might also try sending a begging email to the owner, Stuart Lloyd, who is an English urologist and an R & A member. (The address is on the website.)

Lloyd loves golf more than you do. He and his wife, who is also a doctor, live in Leeds, five hours away, but they spend a lot of time in St. Andrews. They also own a second house there, and in the backyard of that one Stuart built a three-quarter-scale replica of the Road Hole bunker:

If you can’t talk Lloyd into putting you up in St. Andrews, Ferguson has other suggestions—some of which he saves for his newsletter.

Lawn Care Tips from Augusta National

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From "The Making of the Masters"

Golf fans assume that the Oz-like green of Augusta National during Masters week is achieved by drenching the course with chemicals—or maybe with ground-up hundred-dollar bills—but, as the tournament approaches, the grounds crew at Augusta National actually uses less water and fewer pesticides than many homeowners routinely do, and they don’t fertilize at all. One reason has to do with the season: early April is the sweet spot for growing grass in Augusta, Georgia.  Days and nights are cool, humidity is low, and soil temperature is perfect for producing green, healthy fairways with a minimum of chemical intervention.  Winter weeds have departed or been squeezed out by the club’s annual over-seeding with rye, and summer weeds haven’t taken hold. Of course, it helps to have a tournament-time grounds crew of forty full-time employees and sixty volunteers, but the calendar is crucial. “In April, a yard on Berckmans Road could be as lush as any fairway here,” Brad Owen, the course superintendent (and no relation), told me in 2004. “Other times of the year, we all struggle.” Following are tips for average homeowners based on what Owen has learned while looking after the golf world’s most famous lawn:

  • It’s best to let your yard dry out before watering. Over-watering encourages disease and weeds.
  • You’ll save water and improve your results if you hand-water trouble spots rather than always soaking the entire lawn. Watch the weather forecast and turn off your sprinkler system when rain is on the way.
  • Don’t shorten grass by more than 30 percent in one mowing. Removing too much of the leaf at once causes stress and promotes disease.
  • Sharpen the blades of your mower. Augusta National sharpens all blades daily, because sharp blades cut grass rather than tearing it, and that’s better for the grass. Most homeowners never sharpen their mower blades.
  • Have your soil tested, and ask your local extension service for advice specific to your soil type and your region.
  •  If you can take the time, inspect your yard daily and treat problems as they arise rather than trying to make your yard immune to every potential ill. Your grass will be healthier, and you will won’t use as many chemicals.  The philosophy at Augusta National, Owen told me, is curative rather than preventative: “We don’t fix a problem until it appears.”

The Augusta National property was a nursery before it became a golf course.

18 Good Things About Golf: No. 4

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4. Golf is a sociable game. There’s so much down time during a typical round that playing companions can actually carry on real conversations between shots—something not possible with, for example, tennis. Like most golfers, I play most of my golf with people I know already—guys I tend to think of as my best friends, even though I’m not sure where some of them work or whether they have kids. (My wife: “You and Jim have played golf every Sunday for years. Wouldn’t you like to invite him and his wife to dinner?” Me: “Jim is married?”)

However, I’ve played some of my favorite rounds with strangers, after showing up at an unfamiliar course by myself or with less than a full foursome. At various times over the years, on public courses on four continents, I’ve fortuitously been paired with: a French real-estate developer who had a weekend house in Morocco; a guy from Colombia who owned and operated a souvlaki pushcart in Manhattan; the man who served as the Senate’s chief counsel during the Iran-Contra hearings; a retired Korean wigmaker; three guys who were playing hooky from their jobs on the assembly line at Boeing; a French-Lebanese guy who made his living (in Dubai) importing rough-cut diamonds (from Africa); a guy who was both a beer salesman and the reigning U.S. Mid-Amateur champion; a future chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission; a teacher who had recently started a golf program at an inner-city high school; a guy who, when I told him I’d never played golf in the Philippines, said, “You must!”; a retired cotton broker who had once been a colleague of Paul McCartney’s father; and an unemployed carpenter who looked like George Carlin and told me that the key to golf is to “swing easy as hard as you can.” How many other relatively ordinary activities throw you together for an afternoon with people like that?

Of course, virtually all of the conversing that takes place during golf, whether with friends or with strangers, is about golf. I used to belong to a weekly poker group. When I would come home from a game, my wife would ask me if I had picked up any gossip. “No,” I would say. “We just played cards.” She was appalled that half a dozen friends could sit around a table for four or five hours and never say anything more interesting than “I’m out” or “More beer?” (Most social interaction among men is what child psychologists call “parallel play.”) More recently, my wife asked me what my brother and I had talked about during a long day together at the golf course. “Our swings,” I said, truthfully. The only men I know who don’t talk about golf while playing golf are those who have decided that talking about golf while playing golf hurts their golf.

Back-Roads Scotland: Cullen

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In 2007, I traveled to Scotland on an unusual Golf Digest assignment. I landed in Glasgow without tee times or an itinerary, and I rented a car and set out in a more or less random direction, with the goal of playing only courses I’d never heard of before. You can read my article about that trip here or here.

One of my favorite stops was a quirky course called Cullen, in Aberdeenshire, on the southern coast of the Moray Firth. The original nine holes were laid out by Old Tom Morris, and the course has blind shots, crossing fairways, otherworldly topography, and a cool tee shot that you hit from the top of a cliff. Partway through my round, I joined (as the fifth player) a group of older golfers from a club called Hopeman, about thirty miles to the west. They were on a golf outing, and this was their second round of the day, and they were playing a scramble, in competition with three other groups from their club. Most of them were carrying flasks, from which they were sipping a mixture of something and Drambuie—I couldn’t quite make out the recipe—and their golf bags were so full of empty beer bottles that they clanked when the wind, which was fierce, knocked them over.

They urged me to have a swig from one of their flasks. I declined, because I’d quit drinking about a year before, but they were so relentless that I eventually decided it would be better to risk falling off the wagon than to come to blows. As soon as I’d drunk a capful, though, they began to worry about their supply. “Are you driving?” one asked. His brow was furrowed with concern. When I said I was, he and the others concluded that offering me another swig or a beer would be unwise. Toward the end of the round, one of them asked, in a slurry brogue, “Wha hoe wah noo?” and only I could understand him: “What hole are we on now?” (It was the seventeenth.) Photo below. That’s the eighteenth green in the distance. I went back a year later with friends from home.

The boys from Hopeman: "Wha hoe wah noo?"

The specialty in the clubhouse—at left in the photo above, behind the big rock—is Cullen Skink, a fish soup that has its own Wikipedia entry.

The bent flag shows how hard the wind was blowing.

Looking back toward the clubhouse and the town.

The boys from Hopeman and some of their beverages.

Here’s where my friends and I stayed in Cullen when we went back the following year:

Masters Countdown: Third Hole

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Augusta National's third green, 1935.

Augusta National’s third hole has probably undergone fewer changes than any other hole on the course. Its principal feature today, as was true in the beginning, is a treacherously shaped green, which sits on a tilted natural plateau. Dropping off from the shallow left end of the green is a deep bunker from which pars can be difficult to save. The green is hard to hit and harder to hold, and approaches to it are complicated by the fact that the putting surface is invisible from the fairway.

In 1933, Clifford Roberts, the club’s co-founder and chairman, wrote a letter to Alister MacKenzie, who had designed the course, in which he suggested adding a deep cross bunker in the face of the plateau directly in front of the green. “It was my understanding,” Roberts wrote, “that the deep-face trap located in about the center would make this a definite drive and pitch hole; that is to say, a well struck pitch would be required in order to hold the green and the trap would make it impossible to play a run-up shot.” MacKenzie was vehement in vetoing that idea—which Roberts had admitted Jones didn’t support—and his response contains so much of his thinking about design that it is worth quoting at length:

I am delighted that Bob agrees that the [third] with the one trap is all right. This confirms my impression that Bob knows more about golf and its sound principles than any man I have ever come across.

My own opinion is that a cross bunker would convert it into an ordinary stereotyped hole and would nullify all the subtleties of the undulations of the approach to which we gave so much time and thought.

Consider the many problems which face a golfer approaching the hole. In the first place he can play safely to the right and rely on a long putt going dead to get his four. If he elects to go straight at the flag he must play a perfect pitch or else his ball would hit the bank and come back or run over the green. On the other hand if he tries to run up from the right his shot must be played perfectly as a half hearted run up shot will inevitably run into the bunker on the left, which appears to me to be absolutely perfect both in regard to its position and its construction.

At this hole the super golfer, like Bob, has a most fascinating problem, as to have a reasonable chance of three he will have to attack the hole from the left, where all the slopes help him towards the hole. It is here that the tee-shot bunker comes in as he must make up his mind to play round it with a pulled shot from right to left or a fade from left to right, or, when a strong wind is in his favour, to play over it.

If the approach to this hole is maintained as hard and as true as the green it will make the most perfect hole of its length in the world of golf and any additional bunker would ruin it.

It is holes of this description that keep up one’s interest in golf year after year, stimulate players to improve their game and prevent golf becoming stale.

Jones didn’t think as highly of the third hole as MacKenzie did; his favorite par-fours almost all required long-iron or fairway-wood approaches—shots at which he excelled. But MacKenzie’s conviction has been borne out over the years. Of all the architects who have worked on the course, none has yet made a persuasive case for a major revision. (The single original fairway bunker became a cluster of four fairway bunkers in 1983, but the impact on tee shots didn’t change.) The third hole remains the shortest par-four on the course, yet it was one of the few holes that consistently gave Tiger Woods trouble during his record victory in 1997. (On Friday, he hit a bullet-like drive to within fifteen yards of the green, yet made a bogey.) In fact, the experience of Woods and other long-hitting players suggests that one effective way to “Tiger-proof” a golf hole may be to shorten it.

 

Golf in the Footsteps of the Three Stooges

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On Sunday, twelve of us played  Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx, one of a dozen courses owned by the city of New York. It opened the summer of 1895, six years after my home club, and is the oldest public course in the United States. It also has what may be the world’s coolest locker room, which still contains the original wooden lockers (photos above and below). The Three Stooges considered Van Cortlandt their home course. Other visitors have included Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, and my friends and me. (On Sunday, even though it was 28 degrees when we left home, three of us wore shorts.)

Sunday Morning Group, Van Cortlandt locker room, March 11, 2012.

The original Van Cortlandt golf course was built for $642.80. It had just nine holes, of which the last was more than 700 yards long. For a few years in 1960s, the city operated three ski slopes on the four short, hilly, quirky closing holes, at the southern end of the park. (You get to those holes by crossing under the Major Deegan Expressway, on a concrete walkway with tall fences on either side.) But now the golf course is just a golf course, even during the so-called winter.

Emerging from under the Major Deegan Expressway, on the way to the fifteenth tee.

Van Cortlandt was originally known as the Meadows, and it was very popular, even though in 1895 hardly anybody in America owned golf clubs or knew anything about how to hit a golf ball. In 1899, Tom Bendelow—a 30-year-old Scotsman and former typesetter, who eventually designed 650 courses in North America—expanded Van Cortlandt to 18 holes. By 1920, according to the Parks Department, it was handling 5,000 players a week.

This is what golf in America looked like in 1895, the year Van Cortlandt opened.

Bendelow’s design survived until the 1940s, when Robert Moses began building highways on top of it. Today, the course is divided into four roughly equal-size lobes. They are separated by two highways (the Major Deegan and the Mosholu Parkway) and a fence-enclosed swamp called Tibbetts Brook, which resembles the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings, except murkier.

This way across Tibbetts Brook.

On Sunday, the first of our three tee times was 7:56. That meant leaving home at a little before 6:00, which really meant leaving home at a little before 5:00, since daylight saving time had gone into effect overnight. And that, for me, meant getting up at what my brain still thought was 3:30. It was worth it, though—what else could I have done on a Sunday morning in March, except maybe work on my taxes?—and I was actually awake and waiting when my alarm went off, as I usually am the night before I play golf.

Because we were going to Van Cortlandt, we were able to lure Ferris out of hibernation. The night before, he sent us this email:

My childhood home was at 1 Tibbetts Road, in Yonkers, and our property line was Van Cortlandt Park. My friends and I used to cut holes in the chain-link fence near the fourth green and play the three holes on this side of the Major Deegan and Mosholu Parkway. We would steal the bamboo whips that the ‘parkies’ used to whip the dew off the greens, and occasionally we would also steal the flags, and we would sell golf balls. Since the approaches to some of the holes were blind, we could run out and grab balls that had just been hit and then sell them to the next groups that came by. We did all this while keeping an eye out for the parkies’ pickup trucks. When we saw them come rumbling over the hill, we would scoot back through the hole that we had cut in the fence, and then hide in the woods. The following day, the hole would be wired closed, so we always carried a heavy-duty wire-cutter in one of our golf bags. Of course, most of us had old bags, with hickory-shafted clubs. My house was about two hundred yards from the course. I’ve never paid to play at Van Cortlandt, and I’ve never played the holes on the other side of the highways.

Ferris's fence, with a modern hole, just beyond the fourth green.

For lunch, we went to the Bronx Ale House, just a few minutes away. To see what that was like, check out the photos on this (non-golfer’s) blog. Pay particular attention to the picture of the Alehouse Burger. Here was Sunday’s beer menu:

Bronx Ale House.

You can read an old New Yorker article of mine about playing winter golf in New York City here. The photo below is of the line of golfers at the first tee as we walked off the fourteenth green, on our way to the holes on the other side of the Major Deegan. There were more golfers waiting in front of the clubhouse.

The Slowest Member

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The Slowest Member of my club has the metabolism of a sofa. Standing over his golf ball, he freezes like a frog in a flashlight beam. Five seconds. Ten seconds. An afternoon. Just when you think he must have drifted into sleep, he swings—but it’s a practice swing, the first of two. Each rehearsal spawns a divot. Each divot flies in its own direction. At last, he inches forward and sets his club behind the ball.

Thirty minutes a hole is the pace at which he plays. He moves through our nine-hole course the way a meal moves through a python. You could tee off an hour behind him and play through him twice before he reached the ninth tee. He is absorbed by his troubles and seldom notices other golfers. You are tempted to wait for him to wander into the bushes, then tee off over his head.

The Slowest Member lifts his five-iron as wearily as if it were the hammer of Thor. He pauses at shoulder height to gather his resources, then lunges forward while somehow also falling back. His ball flies forty yards ahead and thirty to the right, and it doesn’t rise above his navel. He slowly lifts his head and looks around. The destination of each shot is first a mystery and then a surprise.

Once, I saw him walk into some pine trees to search for a ball that he had hit there. He didn’t take a club. After a minute or so, his wife hissed at him from the green, which he had missed from twenty paces. Golfers in the fairway took furious practice swings, hoping to be waved through. His wife hissed again. Her impatience merely inflamed his determination not to hurry. If his ball had been your child, you would have given up sooner than he did.

Some years, the Slowest Member plays more rounds than anyone else at my club. Each weekend gapes before him, an empty barrel to be filled one pebble at a time. The rest of us scan the parking lot when we pull in. Is he here yet? When did he tee off? One day, I saw his foursome spaced along the near shore of the pond on the fourth hole, each player with a ball retriever. Trolling the murky waters, happily lost in thought, they looked like fishermen.

In a two-day tournament one summer, the Slowest Member was the only entrant in his flight. His name on a sign-up sheet is preemptive. “Give him the title by default,” someone suggested. “Tell him he can have the cup if he stays home.” Even alone, he moves more slowly than any foursome except his own.

In the end, a playing partner was drafted from a different flight. Their twosome teed off last. The Slowest Member sliced two drives out of bounds before dribbling a keeper over the end of the first tee. The playing partner sighed, his own drive now grown cold in the fairway, a thousand miles away. “At least we’re off,” he must have thought.

But they weren’t off, after all. The Slowest Member walked right past his ball. Moving at the speed of the minute hand on a classroom clock, he set out for the woods to look for the two that he had lost.

Masters Countdown: Second Hole

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Augusta National's second green in 1935, when it had just one bunker.

During Augusta National’s early years, in the 1930s, the second hole had a vast, ragged bunker in the fairway, not far from the tee. A more subdued version of that bunker survived into the mid-sixties, when Clifford Roberts, the club’s chairman and co-founder, replaced it with a smaller bunker farther down the fairway and to the right. “The players all complained when Roberts put it in,” Gene Sarazen, who suggested the change, told me in the late 1990s. “But it didn’t mean a thing when you complained to Roberts. He had his own mind made up.” Among the players who complained was Ben Hogan, whose fade made the sand a genuine annoyance. Sam Snead told me, “Hogan said the bunker should have been placed on the other side, so you couldn’t cut the corner.” But the left side of the fairway was already well guarded, as it is today, by a grove of pines and a deep ravine with a creek at the bottom of it—one of the few spots on the course where a player can hit a truly unrecoverable drive. Gardner Dickinson once suggested that the tournament’s airline office—a Roberts innovation, which enables players and tournament spectators to make last-minute changes in their travel plans without leaving the property—should be moved into the ravine, on the theory that any player unfortunate enough to hit his tee shot down there might as well book a flight and go home. In recent years, the carry from the tournament tee to the fairway bunker has been stretched to more than 300 yards, but some players are able to hit their drives right past it. And hardly anybody employs Hogan’s second-hole strategy: intentionally hitting his second shot into a greenside bunker and trying to get up and down for birdie from there.

The second green in 1948: two greenside bunkers with a broad gap between them.