From David M., an honorary member of the Sunday Morning Group. That pushcart is a Big Max Blade.
Good Seasonal Use for Golf Pushcart
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Category Archives: Accessories
On Wearing Hats Indoors
When I was a lad, I was told that polite men don’t wear hats inside buildings, and I must have internalized that concept because I almost always reflexively take off my golf cap when I pass through a door. Or so I believe. But it would be hard for me or anyone else to argue that indoor hat removal—unlike, say, rescuing kittens or not stealing other people’s rangefinders—has obvious, inherent social value. It’s just a custom that some people in some cultures have decided they care about, probably because someone at some point told them they ought to care about it (but not why). And in some other cultures covered heads have an entirely different significance, which supersedes the broodings of golf-club house committees.
One golf-related difficulty with indoor-hat prohibitions is that they can make it hard to spot the stranger you just played with, when you try to find him in the bar after your round. (“Were you bald on the golf course, too?”) Another problem is that wearing a hat for several hours on a hot day can do terrible things to the hair of people who do have hair, even if they try to repair it in the locker room before going to lunch. Still another is that posting signs about hats, as a couple of clubs I’ve visited in recent years now do, seems less civilized than forgetting to take them off—like putting up signs that say “Chew with your mouth closed” or “Shake hands when you meet someone new.” It may be true that “gentlemen” generally remove their hats when they go inside, but if you visit gentlemen’s houses you won’t find signs reminding them to do it.
A friend of mine once took three guests to his golf club, and after their round they reconvened in the grill room for a beer. The guests were still wearing their golf caps, in violation of the club’s “no-covers-under-cover” policy, which they didn’t know about, and, before their host could warn them, the club president “walked over, stuck his head between mine and theirs, and loudly asked me to ask them to remove their hats.” In doing so, he ruined what until that moment had been a terrific day for four people, and to what end? No matter what you think about the wearing hats indoors, pointlessly creating humiliating spectacles is worse. As the etiquette authority Amy Vanderbilt wrote in 1952, “Some of the rudest and most objectionable people I have ever know have been technically the most ‘correct.’”
My Favorite Golf Hat Ever
Allan Stark, in the photo above, went to the same high school I did, in Kansas City. He was way, way older than I was then, but we’re the same age now—how did that happen? Almost a decade ago, he and his golf buddy Chuck Hunter started a small tournament, called the 1502. They also created a website, through which, among a few other things, they sell golf hats like the one in the photo above.
What’s the meaning of the logo on the hat? In 1457, the Scottish parliament, at the request of James II, banned golf (and football), out of fear that Scottish soldiers weren’t spending enough time practicing their archery. This wasn’t the first indication that James was a dangerous demagogue; five years earlier, he had dealt with a rival, the 8th Earl of Douglas, by stabbing him twenty-six times and throwing his body out a window.
The golf ban was affirmed twice during succeeding decades. But in 1502 James’s grandson James IV lifted it. (Later the same year, he spent fourteen shillings on golf equipment for himself.) Allan’s hat therefore celebrates the year in which golf ceased to be illegal in Scotland—a turning point in world history. The hats are nice, too! I’m wearing mine right now.
I have one suggestion for Allan and Chuck: add a line of 1457 hats, for people like my wife.
The Ideal Food for Golfers, Made by Former Caddies
My third favorite food, after bacon and coffee ice cream, is jerky—and of those three only jerky remains edible after being forgotten in a pocket of your golf bag for an entire season. I am theoretically capable of making my own jerky, because a couple of years ago my wife bought a dehydrator. Her intention was to use it to dry sliced fruits and vegetables, which she would then sprinkle on salads and so forth, but it can make jerky, too.
In truth, though, the only thing we’ve used her dehydrator for, so far, is rescuing her iPhone after it spent almost an hour soaking in a grande latte, which she had spilled into a cake pan on the floor of her car. When she finally realized what she’d done, she put the phone in a bowl of uncooked rice, the way people always say you’re supposed to. Suddenly, though, I thought of her dehydrator (which by then was in storage cabinet in the basement). I baked the phone for a week—and it recovered! The dehydrator she owns is currently selling on Amazon for sixty bucks. That makes it almost worth buying just so you’ll have it on hand the next time you drop your phone into a toilet.
Even if you own all the right equipment, the easiest way to acquire jerky is to buy it. My favorite brand at the moment is Chef’s Cut, a company started by two caddies, who virtually overnight went from making jerky between loops to being pretty rich. Hundreds of golf clubs now stock their products, and if yours doesn’t do that yet you can look for Chef’s Cut at the grocery store or order it online. My favorite version is Chipotle Cracked Pepper, but there are others.
And, if you are one of the many men who prefer to take their nourishment in Slim Jim form, Chef’s Cut offers that, too:
Every Golf Club’s Men’s Locker Room Should Have Urinals Like This One
The best pizza within half an hour of my house comes from Bohemian Pizza, in Litchfield, Connecticut. One of the keys to the greatness of the pizza is that they bake the crusts ahead of time. (My favorite combination, a creation of my own: bacon, chicken, andouille sausage, caramelized onions, sun-dried tomatoes, and artichoke hearts, with olive oil instead of tomato sauce.) I’d always simultaneously loved the restaurant and wondered how they passed their health inspections. Then, last summer, the owner demolished virtually the entire structure and rebuilt it with new everything, including plumbing (see photo above). Why would any man ever want to pee into anything else? The only way to improve it would be to fill it with shaved ice from the bar.
The photo above, from someone’s Instagram, is a little fuzzy. Here’s the same idea implemented at another restaurant not far from here, El Coyote. I haven’t peed there, but Hacker (real name) has, and he sent me this:
And here’s a truckload of raw material, which I spotted at Ballybunion, in Ireland, on a buddies in May, 2016. If we go to work now, we could have a complete inventory ready by spring:
This Golf Accessory is a Ripoff, but it Kind of Works, So Far
I’ve owned or tested a number of pushcarts, and so far the one I’ve liked best and would recommend for most golfers is the Clicgear 3.5+. It’s a substantial piece of machinery, yet it folds down into a reasonably compact unit, which I have no trouble fitting into the trunk of my car as long as there’s nothing much in my trunk other than my golf bag and my pushcart.
The Clicgear does have an annoying design flaw, though—as you can sort of see in the first and third golf carts in the photo above: some bags sit so low on the cart that they come very close to the front wheel, and even scrape. The reason is that each cart’s bag rest, a padded metal loop, doesn’t stick out far enough and is at least an inch too close to the wheel. Clicgear has acknowledged that this can be an issue for “tour and large size golf bags,” but it actually affects small bags, too. I’ve got a lightweight Sun Mountain carry bag, and after about a year the wheel began to rub. I dealt with the problem at first by resting the bottom of the bag not on the bag rest but on the little folding arms above it, which are meant to secure the bag to the cart, but when I did that the bag wouldn’t stay put. More recently, I gave up and spent ten bucks for Clicgear’s solution: a “booster clip” that clamps onto the bag rest and is supposed to add an inch of clearance.
At least part of the issue with Sun Mountain and similar carry bags is that their bases are beveled, to accommodate the lever that pops out the legs, and the Clicgear bag rest doesn’t extend far enough past the bevel: it’s too short to engage the actual bottom of the bag.
I hate the idea of spending ten dollars on a piece of plastic that must have cost a millionth of a cent to manufacture and that wouldn’t be necessary if Clicgear had ever bothered to correct its own design flaw. (The bag rest has been the same since the beginning, in models 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5+.) And even the booster clip is poorly designed, since it has a rounded front that reduces its effective thickness for bags like mine. A much better solution would have been to redesign and replace the bag rest itself. But the clip does lift my bag just high enough that it no longer scraps—for now. We’ll check back in a year.
A Back-Yard Putting Green in Brooklyn
I have a story in the current New Yorker about building a putting green in the back yard of an executive editor at the book publisher Simon & Schuster. The photo above is of the owner chipping to the finished green from a “teeing area” below his deck; the photo below is of the construction site when the project was nearing completion.
The green was built by Michael Lehrer, whose company, Home Green Advantage, has built hundreds of greens, golf holes, and other artificial-turf surfaces in the metropolitan area—including this one, on a terrace on a high floor of a tall building in Manhattan:
Lehrer also built the awesome floating green at GlenArbor Golf Club, in Bedford Hills, New York—which I wrote about here. (That’s Bob G., an honorary Sunday Morning Group member, in the photo below.)
Frank Discussion of Testicles During LPGA Tour Broadcast
Among the advertisers on the Golf Channel broadcast of the current LPGA Tour event is the Duluth Trading Company, which is promoting its Ballroom Jeans. Those aren’t jeans that are nice enough to waltz in; they’re jeans that have extra room for your balls. A women’s sports event may seem like an odd place to advertise a product intended for overweight middle-aged men—but keep in mind that the main viewing audience for LPGA Tour events is overweight middle-aged men.
How to Mark Your Golf Ball for a Senior Tournament
Easy Way to Gain Unbelievable Power
Wrestling match held in 1938 in Sikeston, Missouri, a legendary power vortex.
My right hand felt heavy when I woke up one morning, and my fingertips tingled. The tingling persisted through breakfast. I shook my hand, did a few pushups, and squeezed a rubber ball. The tingling persisted through lunch. I consulted a medical website and discovered that I was suffering—as I had suspected—from poor circulation, heart attack, stroke, diabetes, a herniated disk, a tumor, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and multiple sclerosis.
I paced nervously through my house, and thought about how much I love my children, my wife, and our furniture. I fretted about whether to call my doctor. It was Sunday afternoon, and he was probably playing golf. Should I page him on the course or drive directly to the emergency room and schedule my own M.R.I.?
Thinking about golf and my doctor made me think of something else. With a flash of insight possibly comparable to Pasteur’s realization that moldy bread can cure pneumonia, I was suddenly able to diagnose my malady as pseudo-carpal-tunnel syndrome brought on by sleeping in an awkward position while wearing one of those copper wristbands that Seve Ballesteros used to endorse. I removed the wristband—which was crimped against the underside of my arm like a staple in a stack of papers—and within an hour all my symptoms had disappeared.
Despite the side effects, I loved that wristband. It was made by a company called Sabona of London, whose headquarters are in Sikeston, Missouri, a legendary American power vortex. (Also in Sikeston: Lambert’s Cafe, “The Only Home of Throwed Rolls,” where waiters throw fresh-from-the-oven dinner rolls at customers all the way across the restaurant.) Pretty many of the golfers I saw on TV wore copper wristbands; wearing one myself seemed like an easy way to become exactly like them.
When my wife first saw my wristband—which she called a bracelet—she laughed out loud, and I took it off for a while. But then I put it back on. I lost it eventually, but several years ago, at the P.G.A. Golf Merchandise Show, in Orlando, I persuaded various merchants to give me new wristbands, and ever since then I’ve worn them in rotation, with occasional replacements. Most are made of “surgical-grade silicone,” rather than plumbing-grade copper, (One, which a woman in Bogota, Colombia, gave me after I’d admired hers, looks liked barbed wire.) Several have proven power-boosting components, among them magnets, titanium pieces, ion-emitting discs, and holographic images like the ones on credit cards (also a well-known source of power). The effect on my golf game has been, quite literally, unbelievable, as you will see in the video below, which we made at the show.