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.

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.

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.

My Latest Contribution to the Divot Museum

Posted on November 1, 2013 by David Owen

The seventh hole on my home course is a 125-yard par 3. I hit 9-iron the other day, and I took a divot that was just about perfect—uniform depth, playing-card size and shape—except that it began a couple of inches behind the ball and extended a couple of inches beyond it. In addition, my tee peg (a half-length stub I’d found nearby) remained upright near the center of it, untouched. Even so, my ball finished just twenty yards short of the green, meaning that I’d hit what was essentially a 90-yard explosion shot. And they say the long bunker shot is the toughest shot in golf.

If I hadn’t sent my divot to the Divot Museum, I could have used the tee stub to refasten it to the golf course. Believe it or not, a company called McDivot makes biodegradable anchors that do exactly that. Here’s what they look like:

I saw a bowl of McDivots on the counter in the golf shop at Royal Portrush Golf Club a few years ago, and one of the assistants told me that using them prevents wind, rain, mowers, and crows from flipping replaced divots out of their holes. (The same company also makes an industrial-size version, called GreenStakes, which can be used to hold down entire fairways.) I took a McDivot home as a souvenir, and displayed it on my desk for several years. At some point, though, I must have thrown it out, because I just spent almost an hour unsuccessfully searching for it in my office. So the photo above, which is from the McDivot website, will have to do.

Anyway, divots aside, it was a nice day for golf, as you can see here:

International Leaf Rule Now in Effect

Posted on October 3, 2013 by David Owen

All the big tournaments are over now. The club championship has been decided. The kids who worked in the golf shop all summer are back at school. Our Enemy Club has been defeated. The deer eating acorns between the fifth and sixth holes have grown so used to us that they scarcely look up when we play through. The International Leaf Rule is in effect.

I know people who live in places where golf can be played in shorts year-round. To them, the cycle of the seasons is a kind of poverty. But I think they are the ones who are deprived. For them, golf has no beginning and no end. They don’t get to savor a year’s two most consequential rounds: its first and its last. One season blends into the next, and they never reach a point from which they are forced to assess their golf game’s progress or decline.

Hacker (real name) and I had the course to ourselves for our first nine holes on Tuesday afternoon. Barney, who didn’t have to pick up his daughter until four-fifteen, joined us at the turn. We waved to an older member who used to play by himself but now is always accompanied by his son. He uses something called Martini Tees, and when he misplaced one the other day he had his son call the golf shop to report it missing. His son acts as his caddie and navigator, guiding him from hole to hole. Golf is almost over, but not yet.

Report From the 2013 Men’s Member-Guest, Part Two

Posted on September 24, 2013 by David Owen

From left to right: plastic beer cups, Kegerator, ice chest containing non-beer-type beverages.

For the men’s member-guest in 2012, we spent hundreds of dollars on ice, and the beer kegs, after a while, dispensed nothing but foam. This year, we followed the example of Michael U.’s fraternity and bought two Kegerators, for about six hundred dollars each. Each one is a medium-size refrigerator whose only job is to keep a keg of beer cold.

Tony, attempting to use one or our new six-hundred-dollar Kegerators as a chair.

Tony, after being told not to use one off our new six-hundred-dollar Kegerators as a chair.

Tony, after being told not to use one of our new six-hundred-dollar Kegerators as a chair.

While the matches were going on, we kept one of the Kegerators near the clubhouse and the other plugged in to an outlet in the pump house, by the pond on the fourth hole. During the shootout, at the end, we put one of the Kegerators on the back of a maintenance cart and had the golf-shop assistants drive it around:

Nick, Connor, Katie, and a Kegerator.

Later, for some reason, Les took over.

We still needed ice, for soft drinks and so forth, and to solve that problem we rented an entire ice freezer like the ones you see at liquor stores. It had its own trailer and was filled with ice bags, and we paid for just the bags we used. We no longer have the ice freezer, but the Kegerators are ours forever. We keep them in the men’s locker room, of course.

Hat Day, Bumper Stickers, and Playing in Absentia

Posted on September 17, 2013 by David Owen

My Sunday Morning Group has a certain amount of branded merchandise, which is available for purchase by members only. Our wristbands (above) are free if you wear them, five dollars if you don’t. We also have European-style S.M.G. bumper-stickers, which cost two dollars but are currently not in stock. If you have one on your car (and also if you don’t), you can park in the Executive Parking Lot, between the clubhouse and the Dumpster.

Most of all, we have hats. The original ones, which we designed ten or fifteen years ago, are purple and orange, a color combination we selected because we thought it would get on the nerves of some women who had recently complained about our drunken boorishness, and so forth. (When we wore our new hats on a field trip to a golf course in another town, an assistant in the golf shop asked, “Do you guys all work for Federal Express?”) The most recent hats are purple and fluorescent green. You can see both versions in the photo below:

Nick wanted us to have a POW/MIA emblem on our hats, but he settled for an American flag.

Nick (not pictured) thought we ought to have a POW/MIA emblem on our hats, but he settled for an American flag.

Some guys wear their S.M.G. hats fairly often, but most guys wear them only on Hat Day, when wearing them is mandatory. Hat Day takes place whenever Hacker (real name) says, usually once or twice a season. If you come to Hat Day without a hat, you have to buy a new one (for $19.99), rent a loaner (for $3.99), or buy a reconditioned one (for $9.99). The reconditioned hats are loaners that have been reconditioned by sitting in Hacker’s barn since whenever the last Hat Day was. On the most recent Hat Day, Hacker sold three of them.

Hacker (with the last three purple-and-greens) and Greg, Hat Day, 2013.

Hacker (with the last of the new purple-and-greens) and Greg, Hat Day, 2013.

We had twenty-one guys that day, although only twenty were physically present. Peter P.—who had a horrific car accident shortly before Labor Day—was still in the hospital, but Hacker had figured out a way to let him play in absentia, by giving him a score of net par on every hole. We played two best balls, and Peter’s team needed his ball on seven holes, so he was more useful than quite a few of the guys who actually showed up. Peter also won a share of the Money Hole. During lunch, we used colored markers and construction paper to draw get-well pictures for him:

Here are some of the pictures:

That last one, by Tim, shows Peter himself painting a picture of a golf hole. Peter doesn’t actually paint golf holes, but he is a painter. Just a couple of weeks before his accident, he held a reception in his studio, and a lot of us went—a rare opportunity to learn what someone we hang around with does when he’s not playing golf. Here’s Peter that evening, along with some of his paintings:

And here’s where he works:

And here’s another one of his pictures:

We want him back soon, in person, and not only because he draws better than we do.

Further Thoughts on Packing for Golf Trips

Posted on September 16, 2013 by David Owen

Strainer and chamber pot fashioned from German helmets after the end of the Second World War. Resistance Museum, Amsterdam, September 8, 2013.

My wife and I just returned from Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, where we spent ten days celebrating our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. Among the many interesting places we visited was a museum devoted to the Dutch resistance during the Second World War. (See photo above.) For reasons having to do with my desire to remain married for another thirty-five years, I didn’t play even one hole of golf. But I did do some golf-related luggage research, and I wife-tested a few ideas about minimalist packing.

Our luggage. (My wife’s backpack and purse are out of the frame.)

We each took just a carry-on bag and a small backpack (plus my wife’s purse). All the luggage was from eBags, an online luggage company for which I am an unpaid shill. Here’s what we took: two eBags Mother Lode TLS Mini 21″ Wheeled Duffels; an eBags TLS Workstation Laptop Backpack; and a similar, older backpack, which eBags apparently no longer makes but is a lot like this one. My wife not only got along fine without a big suitcase but actually packed lighter than I did. We didn’t carry the carry-ons onto our plane—international flight, one checked bag free—but once we were in Europe our relatively light load made it easy to get on and off trains, climb stairs, take the tram instead of a taxi, etc., while still leaving room for souvenirs. The bags are perfectly designed, and the laptop backpack is like a mobile office—not that I did any work.

Souvenirs, outdoor flower market, Amsterdam.

Although I left my golf clubs at home, I did take two pairs of golf shoes, both by True Linkswear, another company for which I am an unpaid shill. They were the only shoes I took on the trip, and (it turns out) I could have gotten by with just the black ones, a model called Chukka. (I took the others, called Sensei, because the Chukkas look a little spooky when worn with shorts—but then I ended up never wearing shorts.) Chukkas are waterproof; Senseis are not. Both are extremely comfortable, and, by comparison with some of the shoes that Europeans wear, Chukkas don’t look strange at all.

True Chukka (left) and Sensei (right).

Before we left for Europe, I held tryouts for the position of Trip Pants. The pre-competition favorite was a pair of black Nike flat-front Dri-Fit Tech Golf Pants, which are 95 percent polyester and 5 percent spandex. But when I wore them for a test round on my home course I decided that they made too much noise when I walked, and that they felt too much as though they were made of bubble wrap. I had similar issues with a super-cheap pair of no-name pants I found on Amazon. The eventual winner was a pair of black Dockers Advantage 365 Khakis, which are 100 percent polyester microfiber. They don’t wrinkle, they don’t stain, they can be “laundered” in a hotel-room sink, and they look fine in the morning if you leave them in a heap on the floor overnight—yet they remain silent when you cross your legs.

Dockers 365 Advantage microfiber pants, in overnight storage. (Note belt with beer-opener buckle, by Bison Designs.)

I also took a pair of pre-wrinkled 100 percent cotton Dockers in a grayish color, which, unlike the Advantage 365s, don’t look like the bottom half of a limo driver’s uniform. But if I’d been on a golf trip with my pals, instead of a romantic getaway with my wife, I’d have taken a second pair of microfiber instead.

Am I Related By Marriage to the Inventor of the Golf Rainsuit?

Posted on September 8, 2013 by David Owen

My wife’s last name is Hodgman. In 1838, a distant relative of hers—that is to say, a relative not related to her by money—founded the Hodgman Rubber Co., which still sort of exists. In fact, my wife has a Hodgman camo rain jacket (which she never wears). She also has an old box of Hodgman rubber bands, and she claims that the company was once famous for manufacturing horse condoms.

Hodgman Rubber Co., 1913.

In 1913, Hodgman Rubber published a self-celebratory book, on the occasion of its seventy-fifth birthday. “The orderly business man at his desk is lulled by the harmonious music of the rubber band,” the book’s author wrote; “the eager traveler hastens swiftly on his unwearied way in the glad knowledge that not he but his motor car is rubber tired. Rubber is the main spring of sport in football and in tennis. The urgencies of business are sped by messages over telephones that are rubber wired.” And so forth. Also, eventually, rainsuits for golfers.

Hodgman rainsuits couldn’t cure a reverse pivot, apparently (see advertisement above). But they did leave plenty of room for unavoidable age-related increases in B.M.I.

Ann “Distant Relative of Possible Inventor of the Rainsuit” Hodgman and I are currently in Amsterdam, celebrating our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. There was a little rain here this morning, and when we walked to breakfast I wore a golf rain jacket—which, I’m sorry to report, was not a Hodgman. But, at any rate, it’s not raining now.

Will This Umbrella Take Over the Golf World?

Posted on September 5, 2013 by David Owen

People who sell things for a living have a rotten reputation, but I like them. They look you in the eye, use your name a lot, hold your shoulder while they talk to you, and laugh really hard at your jokes.They take you out to expensive restaurants, and when the waiter asks them if they want something to drink they don’t say, “Just water, please.” They send you a Christmas card. They ask you where you went to college and what your kids do after school. They suggest through facial expressions and body language that they would like to marry you. In other words, salespeople treat you exactly the way you wish everyone would treat you—the way you deserve to be treated. Their only tiny flaw is that they don’t mean any of it: they’re just trying to make a sale. But isn’t that really a trivial defect, all things considered? Doesn’t the insincerity of salespeople seem like a negligible shortcoming in comparison with the incalculably opulent richness of their devotion?

Well, I think it does. And I always have plenty of opportunities to agree with myself at the P.G.A. Golf Merchandise Show, which is held in Orlando every January and is full of salespeople. Among the dozens I met there a couple of years ago was Jack Ferenz, a former tour player. (His best year was 1990, when he entered twenty-one tournaments, made five cuts, and finished second at the Deposit Guaranty Golf Classic, two strokes behind Gene Sauers, the same week as the Masters.) He was selling an invention of his, which was then called the Dry Club Umbrella. He described it on a Facebook page (which has two “likes” but doesn’t seem to be active anymore): “We have designed a state of the art golf umbrella that will take over the golf world. Our unique design allows player to carry 2 clubs, handsfree, and remain 75% drier than with standard umbrella.”

Since then, Ferenz has renamed his invention the Carryclubumbrella, and perhaps also tweaked the design. Even after studying the patent drawings and the photographs and descriptions on Ferenz’s website, though, I’m not a hundred percent certain I understand how it works. Then again, I’m not an umbrella guy, so you should check it out for yourself.

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

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