Category Archives: Accessories

Winter Golf Gloves

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To play golf comfortably in cold weather, you need good gloves, on both hands. I own about  a hundred pairs of FootJoy RainGrip gloves, which I keep in the way-back of my station wagon. (I stick their Velcro closures to the sides of the luggage compartment, which I think of as my locker room.) RainGrips work well during the winter, too, and on really cold days I wear two pairs, one on top of the other. FootJoy makes actual cold-weather gloves–called WinterSof–and several of my friends use those. Both kinds double as nose-wipers, and when they start to look shiny you can throw them into the washing machine.

At the PGA Golf Merchandise Show, in January, I tried some winter gloves I liked a lot. They’re called HJ Winter Xtreme, from a 40-year-old Korean company called HJ Glove. They look sort of bulky in photographs, but they fit snugly, and the palms and fingers are covered with a honeycomb pattern of grippy silicone, making them seem like something a wide receiver might wear. And they have extra-long cuffs, which you can tuck way up into the sleeves of your jacket.

Snoring Golfers

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Marpac Sound Screen

Nighttime noise is an issue when you travel with grown men.  On a ski trip when my kids were in high school, I shared a room with two other fiftyish dads and spent much of the night trying to decide which was more annoying, the chainsaw-like snoring or the innumerable brief trips to the bathroom. When my friends and I travel for golf, we try to pair the snorers and coughers with the heaviest sleepers, and make sure that the guy with the anti-apnea machine shares a room with someone who likes white noise. I myself employ two snoring-related sleep aids: gumdrop-size silicone ear plugs and a vaguely wishbone-shaped appliance called a Nozovent, which sprongs my nostrils wide open.  (One night, while my wife and I were getting ready for bed at home, I groggily inserted my earplugs into my nose instead of my ears—as the first one went in, I thought, Whoa, time to buy some fresh ones—then realized what I had done and laughed so hard I nearly suffocated.) On a golf trip to Pinehurst in 2006, I shared a room with two friends. One was a world-class snorer, but the noise he made, though extraordinarily loud, was so steady that it was easy to sleep through. What woke me was a fart (same guy)—like exploding a paper bag. My entire body rose about six inches from my mattress, and it took me a while to get back to sleep. At the bottom of this post is a picture from that trip.

After the death of my father, whose snoring was audible throughout our house, my mother gave me his old white-noise machine, a Marpac Sound Screen. My wife and I keep it in the kitchen—for our dog, Henry, who barks in the middle of the night if he hears raccoons knocking over the cat-food dishes on our back step. Half a dozen friends and I are taking a golf trip to Ireland in April. We’ve all decided to splurge on single rooms, but if we hadn’t I’d take the Marpac with me.

Pinehurst golf trip 2006–with Fairbairn’s greeting for new arrivals.

 

Snow Golf

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It snowed here last night–as it’s entitled to. Nevertheless, unless we get a big melt my friends will  have to change our Sunday golf plans. One possibility would be to play in the snow, at home. I own a pair of L. L. Bean snowshoes that I’ve never used for anything but golf, and I have a cache of orange balls.

It’s actually been a while since I played snow golf. I used to do it all winter long, with four old guys at my club who called themselves the Fuckheads, after their favorite term of endearment. They’re all dead now: John, who carried his golf bag by the handle, like a suitcase; Dick, who seldom took a waking breath that wasn’t filtered through a Tiparillo; Ed, who caddied for Titanic Thompson on our course the weekend of the wedding of Horton Smith, who won the first and third Masters tournaments and married a local girl; and Doug, who lived well into his nineties and whose house was up the street from mine. When they were younger, before I came along, they used to end their winter rounds by lighting a fire in the unheated cabin that serves as our clubhouse and drinking scotch while frost formed on the insides of the windows. One bitterly cold January morning long ago, they told me, the liquor froze in a glass that one of them had left on a table a few paces from the fire.

Playing golf in the snow is good for a golf swing. Snow dissipates energy even more than sand or dirt does, so you have to keep still and swing smoothly. Each of us carried only a single club, a limitation that inspired inventiveness in shot-making. It was while playing winter golf that I learned what must be the first principle of the golf swing: that the key to achieving power is not effort but ease. Facing a hundred-yard shot and having only a seven-iron with which to hit it, I swung easily and gracefully and launched my ball on a high, gorgeous, left-bending arc that ended deep within the woods behind the green.

Pinaud-Clubman

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Should a golfer use anything but Clubman toiletries? Arguably not. On and off for a couple of years—during the era of darkness before Google—I tried to tried to track down the company, without success. Well, I didn’t try very hard. But I did ask a couple of pros where the stuff in their locker rooms came from, and they told me they didn’t know. Maybe those bottles of lilac vegetal aftershave lotion had always been there, and had been used so seldom that they’d never needed to be replaced. Anyway, I checked again recently, and here’s what I learned: Edouard Pinaud was born in France in 1810. That’s his name—”Ed. Pinaud”—written sideways on the Clubman talc bottle, next to the guy in the top hat. Pinaud founded a perfume company in Paris in 1830, and he died in 1868, when he was one year older than I am now. The Clubman line must have arisen in there somewhere, although the date on the bottle is 1810, the year of Pinaud’s birth—a mystery we may never solve. In 1900, at the Exposition Universelle, in Paris, the Pinaud company introduced an oily hair preparation called Brilliantine, so maybe golfers should use that, too. Or maybe not, since by then Pinaud himself was long gone. Either way, why not surprise your wife by ordering a full line of Clubman products for your bathroom at home, thereby recreating the ambience of the men’s locker room? The website sells other possibly useful stuff, too, including the Jet Scream Emergency Whistle:

Winter Golf Accessory

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 If you play golf in cold weather, you have to do something about your ears. A knit cap is nice and warm, but it doesn’t have a bill, and you need a bill to shade your eyes when the sun is low in the sky. The traditional solution is to wear a knit cap on top of a regular golf cap. That’s not ideal, though, because unless you pull the knit cap down almost all the way  to your shoulders it will try to pinch-lift the regular golf cap off your head. Recently, I found a solution: the Ball Cap Ear Band, from the Duluth Trading Co., currently on sale for  $7.99. It keeps your ears well covered, and it has a slit for the bill of your golf cap, and the part that goes across your forehead helps to keep your face warm. And if you’re still cold you can wear a regular knit cap on top of it, or add one of those whole-head things that skiers sometimes wear–as I had to do on New Year’s Day in Atlantic City in 2009 (see alarming photo in previous post).