The Pockets in Golf Pants Suck

Posted on October 15, 2015 by David Owen

If you did any slow-dancing in the early 1970s, you recognize the fabric that modern golf shirts are made of: leftover prom dresses. But that’s not the most troubling thing about golf clothes nowadays. The most troubling thing is the pockets in the pants. I’ve got two pairs of Nike Dri-FIT golf pants, and, generally speaking, I like them fine. But the pockets are ridiculous. The seams are so feeble that golf tees and green-repair tools push right through them after not that many rounds, forcing me to do something I’m even worse at than chipping: sewing.

The pockets in golf pants should be extra-strong, not extra-weak. They probably ought to be deeper than normal, too. And they shouldn’t be made of the fabric that the pockets in my Under Armour golf pants are made of—which feels like felted clothes-dryer lint, and snags my rain gloves like Velcro. And they shouldn’t contain mini-pockets, like the pockets in my Vineyard Vines shorts:

I don’t understand why pants still have these things—or, for that matter, why they ever did. Someone told me once that their purpose is “to hold your keys so they don’t poke a hole in your big pocket,” but that can’t be true, because they’re too small to hold more than a couple of keys, and if you ever did manage to cram your keys into one you’d never get them out again. Besides, there’s no reason to keep your keys in your pocket while you’re playing golf. Put them in your golf bag instead.

Those annoying mini-pockets serve no purpose other than to become impacted with golf stuff. Here’s the same mini-pocket with a green-repair tool hopelessly stuck in it:

You would need monkey fingers to get that thing out of there before it was your turn to putt. The only solution is to cut the mini-pockets right out of your pants, like this:

Two Good Accessories for Wet-weather Golfers

Posted on October 14, 2015 by David Owen

The golf team of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro played in a big golf tournament last month (and came in third). Shortly afterward, I spoke with Bob Christina, an assistant coach. “Monday was a 36-hole day, and it rained,” he told me. “You’ve got your umbrella, you’ve got a heavy bag with all this stuff in it, you’ve got everything, and by the time you get through that second 18 you’re having trouble standing up. So we picked up three pushcarts, and the guys loved them.”

There’s still a prejudice against pushcarts in this country, especially among younger players, despite my ongoing campaign to shame all golfers into using them all the time. Still, as Christina says, pushcarts are awesome in the rain, even if you aren’t short enough to take advantage of the umbrella holder that comes with most of the modern ones.

Recently, I acquired two accessories that make wet-weather pushcart golf even easier. Both are made by Big Max Golf, an Austrian company, which made my current ride, a super-compact “push trolley” called a Big Max Blade +. The first accessory is called the I-Dry Rainsystem:

It covers the entire bag, and has a transparent hood that fits over the tops of your golf clubs. The hood opens and closes easily—sort of like, I guess, a breadbox. There are only two drawbacks: it’s expensive (eighty dollars or so, at various places online), and it’s made specifically for Big Max trolleys. In fact, even to use it on mine I had to replace the cart’s existing bag-holding “wings” with two included replacement pieces, which the hood snaps into.

A more economical choice—and one that works on anybody’s pushcart—is the Big Max Rain Safe. You strap it to your golf bag like a miniature parachute:

Then you forget about it until it starts to rain, when you unfurl it:

It’s not as substantial as the I-Dry, but it weighs next to nothing, and it doesn’t get in the way, and you can keep it strapped to your bag even when the sun is shining.

The Golfavore’s Dilemma

Posted on September 29, 2015 by David Owen

I’m not a survivalist, but I sometimes wonder whether I could get by as a golfavore: a person who eats only foods available on his golf course. There are fish in the pond and turkeys in the woods, and I’d always have plenty of venison. Berries near the fourth and fifth tees. Corn in the field you drive through to get to the driving range. And, if the alternative was starvation, tons of acorns.

Recently, I made Golf-Course Apple Crisp, using apples from a tree at the bottom of the second fairway and crab apples from a tree between the seventh green and the eighth tee. I gathered the raw ingredients in the optional “shelf” of my Big Max Blade + pushcart:

And I adapted the apple-crisp recipe from the first edition of my wife’s first cookbook, Beat This, which the novelist Elizabeth Berg once described on NPR as “the book I have probably recommended more than any other”:

I tested it on my wife and me first. It was really, really good: the crab apples, which in our area have been superabundant and enormous this year, added the perfect amount of tartness. Then I made it again, for the old ladies I play bridge with, at our regular Thursday-night potluck dinner and bridge game.

As the bridge ladies and I were getting stuff ready in the kitchen, one of them knocked my apple-crisp pan, which I hadn’t cooked yet, onto the floor, and it landed upside down. So we did exactly what my golf buddies and I would have done: we used spatulas to scrape up the sliced apples and the brown-sugar-and-oatmeal topping, along with unknown quantities of dirt, sand, rug fuzz, dog hair, spilled dishwasher detergent, and who knows what else, and dumped everything back in the pan. Then we baked it and ate it anyway, with Ben & Jerry’s vanilla ice cream, and it was really, really good.

My golf group and my bridge group aren’t all that different, even though in my golf group I’m kind of old and there are no women, while in my bridge group I’m the youngest and there are usually no other men. The language is essentially the same. Carol, who is my mother’s age, was a schoolteacher many years ago. One day, she went to work in a white blouse, red slacks, and blue-and-white spectator pumps. A little boy ran into her in the hall, looked up at her in awe, and said, “Miss, you look like a fuckin’ flag.”

New Pushcart Turns Reluctant Rider Back Into Walker

Posted on September 13, 2015 by David Owen

Almost everybody in the Sunday Morning Group walks. Some of the guys—like Slade, who’s in his eighties—prefer to carry their bag, but a growing number use pushcarts. Until recently, Stanley—who is 77 and, by this point, consists almost entirely of replacement parts—used an electric-powered pushcart called a Club Runner.

Stanley paid fifty dollars for it at a silent auction twenty years ago, when it was already an antique. He replaced the battery once, but replacing it again would have cost double what he paid for the whole thing, so he decided to retire it. The Club Runner originally belonged to a member of our club named Art, a local farmer, who died in 2003. Recently, Stanley told me:

“Art used to play with a few other 20-handicap guys. They were pretty social, but they didn’t spend much on golf. The pro in those days sold tees, so finding one on the course was a rarity. Nelson, one of Art’s friends, played with a weighted metal tee with a chain attached, so he wouldn’t lose it. I remember reading about a golfer spearing himself in the back of the neck with one of those, but, luckily, Nelson never injured himself for anyone else.”

Art wore the same pair of golf shoes for what must have been almost the entire second half of his golf career. By the time I joined the club, the spikes were just shiny metal disks, and they were so slippery that Art had to walk carefully on the clubhouse porch. His old Club Runner is now for sale on Craigslist (for fifty dollars), if you’re interested.

Stanley had to ride briefly, both just before and just after his most recent knee replacement, but he’s back to walking now, and with an unpowered pushcart, a BagBoy Quad Plus:

Here’s Stanley’s review:

“The BagBoy is easy to open and close, and my bag rides without shifting. I like the hand brake better than foot-operated ones. I have yet to try the umbrella holder but it does appear it will keep club grips dry. I find the BagBoy much easier to handle going downhill that anything else I’ve used, and while pushing it up one of the four big hills on our course I realized that part of my weight was resting on the cart and saving me some effort. I like it a lot, and I believe that it will allow me to continue walking for the foreseeable future. I especially like the ease of folding and unfolding. And when it’s folded it’s very compact—certainly more so than the Clicgear.”

Stanley is probably the Sunday Morning Group’s principal innovator when it comes to golf-club transport. During rounds very early and very late in the season, he has often used an aluminum club carrier, which has a spear-like metal point that enables it to stand up by itself:

Stanley told me:

“Some people used those in the nineteen-sixties. It holds eight clubs, and when I started playing I had a seven-club set of Wilson Sam Sneads, which I think I bought at Caldor. The problem with the club carrier is that the aluminum clips which hold the clubs are riveted on and are prone to break. I wrote to the manufacturer, who told me they no longer made the carriers, but when I explained my problem they sent me a jiffy bag of clips, gratis. I drilled out the rivets and replaced them with stainless-steel bolts, and they haven’t broken since.”

My Super-compact New Pushcart

Posted on September 6, 2015 by David Owen

So many members of the Sunday Morning Group showed up recently that we had to use almost all our numbered poker chips when we picked teams. A possible explanation for the crowd is that it was Crappy Chinese Wristwatch Day. Hacker (real name) has discovered that you can buy crappy Chinese wristwatches online for $3 each, including shipping from China and “customs,” and he can’t stop ordering them so he has begun giving them away as supplemental prizes to the guys who win our regular Sunday game. Mike A., so far, has won three.

I didn’t win a watch on Sunday, but I was able to show off my tattoo:

To be perfectly honest, it’s a fake tattoo. But don’t you think that, if we hired a real tattoo artist to come to the men’s member-guest next year, pretty many guys would decide to get a real SMG tattoo, as long as it was free and they were drunk?

Crappy Chinese Wristwatch Day was also the first day I used my new pushcart, a Big Max Blade+.

You can tell the company is European, because they call it a trolley instead of a pushcart. The Blade+ has various awesome features, of which the awesomest is that it folds down to virtually the size of a briefcase.

I also have a Clicgear pushcart, and I love it, too. But getting both it and my golf bag into the trunk of my car requires careful arranging and doesn’t leave much room for my other golf stuff, which I therefore have to cram into the backseat and which causes me to think I should have bought a station wagon or possibly a panel truck instead of a sedan. But I was able to fit my Blade+ into my trunk on top of my Clicgear pushcart and my golf bag. Sliding it in was like sliding a piece of bread into a toaster.

I’ve also got some excellent Big Max accessories, including a strap-on cooler bag:

It drips a little, so if you use your pushcart inside your house you shouldn’t fill the cooler bag with ice, the way I do on the golf course. I’ve also got a Big Max storage basket, which straps onto the bottom part of the pushcart, between the wheels. It’s a good place to stash your custom-embroidered Jagermeister sweatshirt and the putter headcover you’re always losing.

More about pushcarts soon.

We Test-drive the Golf Swing Shirt

Posted on August 24, 2015 by David Owen

Sunday was a big day for the Sunday Morning Group. First, it was Tony’s turn to bring lunch, and he broke tradition by serving sausages and meatballs (on rolls) instead of cheeseburgers and hotdogs:

Second, Barney introduced a new beverage, to be known henceforth as the S.M.G. It consists of a can of Yuengling, a shot of Patron Silver tequila, and a wedge of lime, with an optional dash of beer salt:

Third, we did some preliminary work on our first infomercial. It’s for a training aid called the Golf Swing Shirt, which Padraig Harrington and Jimmy Ballard have both described as the greatest swing trainer ever invented. The manufacturer sent us some to try, and we gave them a good workout:

The purpose of the Swing Shirt is to teach you to stay “connected” as you swing—and it really works. When I tried it in my yard, with a pitching wedge, I hit the ball with such unaccustomed connectedness that I almost took out my wife’s car.

One cool thing about the Swing Shirt is that, while you’re wearing it, you can still hold, and spill, an S.M.G.—as Addison is demonstrating here:

Addison, incidentally, has had a big year. He competed (with Todd) in the first U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship, at the Olympic Club; broke our course record (with a 62); became the first person in the century-plus history of our club to make a hole-in-one on our ninth hole, a par 4; and, almost as an afterthought, won our club championship. We’re terrifically proud of him, because we found him in the woods when he was a baby and raised him ourselves. All he needs now is a job.

The star of our Swing Shirt infomercial is Dougie. We picked him because he’s a teacher and, not surprisingly, is good at explaining things.

Plus, the camera loves him:

Actually, we’re still editing the footage. Here’s some more:

We should have a polished version ready in a few weeks, months, or years. Watch for it on the Golf Channel. Meanwhile, how about that putting contest?

Making Water More Fun to Drink

Posted on August 10, 2015 by David Owen

When I was a boy, I wished I could bring back brilliant people from the past so that I could dazzle them with modern technological marvels. How I yearned to show a moon rocket or a television set to wise old Isaac Newton! Well, I’m quite a bit older now, and I did finally succeed in building a time-transport device. Last week I brought back Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of bifocals and the efficient wood stove. I had given a lot of thought to what I wanted to show him during our five minutes together (the maximum length of visit permitted by the process I invented), and had settled on Times Square at ten o’clock on a Saturday night.

“Well, Ben,” I said. “Here we are in 2015—that’s right, slightly more than three centuries after your birth. This is New York City, believe it or not, and the flashing signs and lighted screens you see on the tremendous buildings all around us are powered by a force you know quite well, if I’m not mistaken. Yes, Ben, they are powered by electricity.”

“Those people over there,” the eighteenth-century sage replied, a look of puzzlement spreading across his features, so familiar to me from the hundred-dollar bill, among other sources. “And over there. And over there. What are those vessels they are carrying?”

“Vessels?” I said. “Why, those are water bottles, Ben. The people are carrying bottles filled with water.”

“Why are they carrying them?”

“They are concerned that they may become thirsty,” I patiently explained. “People nowadays are semi-obsessed with being what we call hydrated at all times. They’re carrying the water bottles so that they can drink from them whenever they want to, Ben.”

Hoping to further spark the imagination of my flabbergasted guest, I pointed to the masses of bright yellow taxi cabs speeding down Broadway, and said, “Ben, have a look at the sleek vehicles racing past us. I don’t see any horses pulling them—do you?”

“Even that old woman has a water bottle,” he ejaculated. “And that child. It’s extraordinary. Virtually everyone is carrying water! For what conceivable reason?”

cnote

That’s enough science for one blog post. I’m not a hydration skeptic, unlike Franklin—who was once described by Firesign Theatre as “the only President of the United States who was never President of the United States”—but I find water sort of boring to drink, and when I’m playing golf in hot weather I sometimes forget to drink enough, with surprisingly disastrous consequences for my golf. I’ve gotten much better about that recently, though, by adding one of these things to my water bottle before I tee off:

They’re basically extra-large Fizzies with electrolytes and other supposedly good-for-golf stuff in them, and Nuun makes several kinds. The ones I’m using at the moment also contain caffeine and B vitamins—but no Advil, I’m afraid. Like most things that supposedly make you better at doing things, they taste slightly weird. (If they tasted really good, you wouldn’t believed they worked.) I tart them up a little by adding a packet of “crystallized citrus,” which I learned about from my wife, the well-known cookbook author:

Storage Problem Solved: What to do With Golf Gloves

Posted on July 12, 2015 by David Owen

My club’s clubhouse isn’t much of a clubhouse. The men’s locker room has a few lockers, but they’re tiny and their only real function is to let guests know that what they otherwise might think was just an old storeroom is actually the men’s locker room. Back in the era before Internet pornography, there were four old guys at my club who played together all the time and kept a falling-apart copy of Playboy in one of the lockers, and nowadays the Sunday Morning Group keeps hard liquor locked up in two of them, but that’s about it. Like pretty much everybody else, I store my golf stuff in the trunk of my car (plus the backseat, the floor in front of the backseat, and the floor in front of the front passenger seat).

To keep my golf gloves organized and easily within reach (both regular and rain), I use their Velcro closures to stick them to the carpet-like lining on the inside of the trunk lid—like this:

The reason I don’t keep golf stuff in the front passenger seat, too, is that that’s where the dog’s car seat goes:

Reader’s Trip Report: The U.S. Open by Periscope

Posted on June 25, 2015 by David Owen

I met Steve Davis, a reader in California, at Tiger Woods’ World Challenge in 2012. He was easy to spot because he was carrying a homemade periscope, which he was using to see over the heads of people standing in front of him. Note the beer holder:

Periscopes used to be common at golf tournaments, including the U.S. Open. These two are from 1988:

Many spectators at the 1993 Ryder Cup, which I attended (at the Belfry, in England), watched the tournament through periscopes that looked like the boxes that bottles of Johnny Walker scotch come in. (Johnny Walker sponsored the tournament.) The Belfry is a terrible course for spectators, because there are few good vantage points. The periscopes made things better for the people who had them and worse for the people who didn’t. (I saw one guy carrying a paint can, which he stood on until he got too drunk to keep his balance.) Davis’s periscope is a big improvement over those old ones, because the mirrors are separated by dowels rather than solid panels: if you’re standing behind him, you can see through it. He has taken versions of his invention to many tournaments, including this year’s U.S. Open:

Davis works for a copier company, and has “wallpapered” his periscope with color copies of golf mementos. His report from Chambers Bay:

I probably don’t have to tell you how great the U.S. Open was this year. The average person walking the course couldn’t see a lot, though. The fairways were so brown that it was hard to pick up the ball off the tee box. If you were lucky enough to be standing close to a green, you were set—but don’t move and think you’re going to find another spot like that one. My periscope saved my ass, because I could go pretty much anywhere and still see. Here I am on the ninth hole, a par 3:

Davis continues:

I let a lot of other people use it on Saturday and Sunday, and they were amazed at how well they could see from where they were standing—including one girl who was happy because she could watch Jason Day putting on No. 10. The periscope I took to Chambers Bay was an improvement over the one you saw at Sherwood Country Club. I changed the mirror angle, to give it a better field of vision, and I removed the belt strap, because I found that it was just as easy to carry without it, by putting my arm through the poles. I kept the beverage holder, though.

The Best Beer-Oriented Belt for Golf

Posted on June 24, 2015 by David Owen

I don’t like the belts that tour players wear nowadays—the ones with gigantic rectangular buckles:

I don’t like them even though they remind me a little of my beloved Mattel Shootin’ Shell Buckle Gun, featuring “exciting secret ‘no hands’ firing,” which I wore when I was a kid until I broke it. It had a built-in derringer mounted on a hinge, and the derringer swung out and fired a real projectile when you pushed your stomach against the back of the buckle — something that was harder for me then than it would be now.

A belt like that could be problematic for golf, because it might go off when you leaned over to line up a putt. But my favorite grown-up belts are perfect, because their buckle is also a beer opener:

They’re made by Bison Designs, and they aren’t expensive. (Prices range from 18 to 27 dollars, plus shipping, depending on what sort of pattern you choose.) We gave them as tee gifts at our men’s member-guest last year, and most of the guys actually still wear them, unlike some of the other crap we’ve handed out over the years. I just bought two more, bringing my collection to three:

The two on the ends in the photo look the same, but they’re not. (The one on the right is for formal occasions.) The buckles really work, too. My brother visited over the weekend, and between golf days we took my wife out to dinner at a Thai restaurant that doesn’t have a liquor license yet. We remembered to bring beer but forgot an opener, so I took off my belt and handed it across the table. Problem solved.

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

Category Archives: Accessories