I Don’t Get Blisters Anymore, But if I Did. . . .

Posted on September 15, 2014 by David Owen

Golf shoes by True Linkswear, a company for which I am an unpaid shill, are so comfortable that I now wear one or another of my many pairs not just when I play golf but also almost any time I can’t get away with being barefoot. My favorite model at the moment is the “lyt dry” (I don’t pick the names). The photo above shows what they looked like on my feet at the men’s member-guest, back in August. I’m also quite fond of a similar model, called “vegas.” (Again, I wasn’t asked.) Here’s what those look like:

My very first True golf shoes were a little like clown feet, or flippers, but they were so ridiculously comfortable that I didn’t mind. Recent models have been more shoe-like, in both appearance and construction; some of the latest ones even have heels. That’s a good thing if you want to wear golf shoes when you go out to dinner with your wife, as I do, but it’s mildly worrisome if the thing you loved most about your first pairs was that they felt like bedroom slippers. I’m just going to trust True’s designers not to go overboard with the conventional-shoe stuff, and to keep working on whatever technology they use to make the waterproof models waterproof—a technology that, in my opinion, they haven’t perfected.

I haven’t had a single blister since switching to Trues—not even on the two days when my friends and I played more than a hundred holes between sunrise and sunset. If I ever do get a blister, or feel a blister coming on, however, I know exactly what I’ll do: cover it immediately with a Band-Aid Advanced Healing blister pad:

The pads are actually manufactured by a Danish company, and are called Compeed everywhere but in the United States. (The company also makes pads for corns and cold sores.) Each one contains a “hydrocolloidal” gel, which both acts as a cushion and draws moisture from the affected area, helping it to heal. Ideally, you leave the pad on until it falls off—and it stays stuck, even in the shower, and doesn’t slide around the way an ordinary bandage does. I carry several in my golf bag, and issue them to whimpering friends.

My wife uses them with her new hockey skates, which she’s still breaking in. She also uses another Band-Aid blister product, called a Friction Block Stick, as a blister preventative:

It’s basically Crisco in a plastic applicator, as near as I can tell. (The main ingredient is hydrogenated vegetable oil.) But my wife says it works.

Head-to-Head Match Play Against Mosquitoes and Ticks

Posted on September 9, 2014 by David Owen

Last month, at the men’s member-guest, I noticed that Michael U. had a cool-looking gadget attached to his golf bag. He told me that it contained a battery-powered fan, which enveloped him and his golf cart with a cloud of mosquito repellent. I was extremely interested, because I don’t like being bitten by mosquitoes, and I’ve been trying extra hard to protect myself against ticks, ever since coming down with Lyme disease for the fifth or sixth time, back in June.

The device is called a Clip-On. The manufacturer—Off!—sent me some to try, along with a couple of other goodies.

I had high hopes for the Clip-On, but it’s actually not well-suited to golf. “If you move,” the instructions say, “allow a few minutes for the unit to rebuild its personal protection.” Any golfer who isn’t moving more often than every few minutes shouldn’t be playing golf. I attached one to the back of my hat, thinking it might keep bugs from circling my head, even while I was walking, but the fan, at that range, was annoyingly loud. And that’s probably just as well, because, according to some virtually invisible fine print on an easy-to-miss part of the packaging, you’re not supposed to inhale the stuff, a chemical called metofluthrin:

Good luck getting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from the Sunday Morning Group. And then there’s the cost. A single unit, which is supposed to last “up to” twelve hours, sells for ten bucks on Amazon. Each package includes an envelope labeled “refills”—but it contains just one, and it’s really a “fill,” not a refill, since it’s the only one in the box. Off! does sell actual refills, at roughly $4.25 apiece, but metofluthrin is pricey stuff, since that works out to more than $2,600 an ounce.

I also tried Off! Explore, a miniature aerosol can of insect repellent in a “crush-resistant” aluminum case. The case has a built-in carabiner, which you can attach to your golf bag:

It’s very handy. Here’s Addison loading up his hat — and that’s Hacker (real name) in the background:

And here’s Hacker himself:

And Explore works great, like all of Off!’s DEET-based insect repellents. But it costs a fortune. A single unit, with case, sells on Amazon for twenty bucks and contains just 1.2 ounces of bug juice. You can buy refills, but they’re expensive, too. So I shopped around and invested instead in some DEET-based repellent sold by Coleman. It doesn’t have a carabiner, but each can has a locking top, so you can keep it in your golf bag without worrying that it’s going to leak. It’s stronger than Off!, and Amazon sells six-ounce cans, in two-packs, for just a bit more than a dollar an ounce:

How to Create Your Own Inexpensive On-course Sound System

Posted on August 25, 2014 by David Owen

At my club’s member-guest two years ago, Fritz and Klinger showed my brother, John, and me that a golf-cart cup holder acts like an amplifier when you place an iPod or iPhone in it and crank the volume—as Klinger is demonstrating in the photo below with “Send Her My Love,” by Journey. They played Journey in their cart during our match with them again this year, too, and when the tournament was over John mentioned the cup-holder trick to his older daughter, who is starting college this fall, because he thought she would be impressed. She wasn’t. “She said it’s common knowledge that cups, cup holders, ceramic mugs, etc., have that effect,” John wrote me later. She also told him about an even more inventive way to accomplish the same thing. It involves these:

According to my niece, if you don’t have a cup you can turn the interior of your head into an amplifier by sticking your ear buds into your nose:

. . .and opening your mouth:

It works, to some extent. And if someone in the next fairway yells at you to turn down the music all you have to do is close your mouth.

These are the Best Golf Beverage Bottles, and I’m Not Kidding

Posted on July 4, 2014 by David Owen

Usually, the “tee gift” you receive for playing in a golf tournament is something you either don’t want or already have a dozen of, like a bag that isn’t the right size or shape to hold anything you want to carry in a bag, or a vest. Of all the tee gifts I’ve been given over the years, just three stand out: a Club Glove carry-on suitcase, from my brother’s member-guest (now sadly broken); a belt with a beer-opener buckle, from my own member-guest, which is almost the only belt I ever wear; and a Hydro Flask water bottle, from a local tournament last year.

Several of my friends also played in the same tournament and received the same water bottle, and they love it, too. It holds twenty-four ounces and has a screw-on top with a ring thing in it. I like mine so much that I recently bought a second one, just for coffee. It holds 18 ounces and has a wide-mouth with a “flip lid,” for sipping:

As of this week, I own a third, a thirty-two-ounce model, for carrying water on really hot days. It’s big, but it fits in the beverage pocket on my golf bag, and I got it with both a regular screw-on top and a “straw lid,” which lets me drink from it like a baby bottle:

If I hadn’t quit drinking alcohol a decade ago, I would immediately buy a fourth Hydro Flask, called the Growler, which is even bigger, and holds sixty-four ounces of beer:

There are several guys at my club who could really use Growlers. If men ever bought presents for other men, I might get them one, if only to prevent them from doing what they do now, which is to fill old beer bottles with new beer from the Kegerator in the clubhouse storeroom and carry them in their golf bags. They use old beer-bottle tops to reduce spillage:

Among the appealing features of all my Hydro Flask bottles are the finishes, which are tough and non-glossy. They also come in great colors. And unlike the black finish on my four Thermos coffee mugs (which, because of their shape, inevitably pop out of the cup-holder on my pushcart) they don’t chip off:

I love all three of my Hydro Flasks. A golfer would pretty much have to be crazy, I think, to carry a liquid in anything else. There are lots to choose from:

Rangefinders, Ivan Lendl, Lawyer Feet, a Lazy Thirty-Year-Old, a Hole-in-One, and Vegan Burgers for Dinner

Posted on June 29, 2014 by David Owen

My ancient laser rangefinder, a Bushnell PinSeeker 1500 (above, left), finally stopped working. The low-battery warning began flashing and wouldn’t stop, even though I replaced the battery, twice, using fresh spares from my golf bag. As soon as I got home, I ordered a new Bushnell Tour Z6 (above, right), for three hundred dollars. The Z6 is quite a bit smaller than the PinSeeker, and it weighs almost four ounces less—a potential advantage in competition.

The day after the Z6 arrived, I was rummaging in my desk and came across an unopened package of the kind of batteries the PinSeeker used to use. Out of curiosity, I popped one in, and—what do you know?—it worked just fine. I guess that carrying two nine-volt batteries in your golf bag for more than a year isn’t a good idea, as far as the batteries are concerned. So I now have two perfectly functioning laser rangefinders, and I’ll thank you not to mention that to my wife.

I used the Z6 for the first time on Friday, in a match at home. The match was Addison and me against Ray and our Close Personal Friend Ivan Lendl, who belongs to a couple of clubs in our area, including our Enemy Club. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say that I had a short birdie putt on the eighteenth hole to square the match, and missed it. But Addison had a slightly longer birdie putt to do the same thing and made it, so good for us. We’re all square for now, and we will play a rematch at a time and place to be determined.

In the photo above, Ivan is using his own rangefinder, which is Bushnell’s “hybrid” model. It has a laser, like mine, but it also has a GPS unit, which is sort of grafted onto the side. I asked him whether he ever used the GPS part, and he said he didn’t because the GPS part (like all GPS yardage devices) is so power-hungry that if you use it you have to recharge it after every round.

About thirty minutes after our match was over, Addison and I played again, in the Friday-afternoon edition of the Sunday Morning Group. During that round, several unusual things happened. First, Other Gene joined us late and played without shoes or socks, giving the rest of us a close look at something you don’t see on a golf course every day: lawyer feet.

Second, Austin, who is thirty years old and was the second youngest person playing that afternoon, took a cart after nine holes:

Third, on the third hole—a 185-yard par 3—David W. hit a gorgeous 4-iron shot, which landed on the green, rolled toward the flag, and disappeared. Nobody in our group, including David, could see well enough to be certain what had happened, but we had a feeling.

Because this was an S.M.G.-sanctioned outing, David will receive $250 from the Slush Fund. (An non-Sunday-morning outing is considered sanctioned if an email inviting everyone to join goes out in advance over the S.M.G. Listserv.) If David had done the same thing on a Sunday morning, he’d have received twice as much.

That evening, my wife, Ann Hodgman—who has written several cookbooks, and is currently writing one for strict vegetarians—made vegan burgers for dinner. They contained chick peas, barley, leeks, and other stuff. (That’s the mixture, in the photo above.) They didn’t taste like burgers made from beef, but I liked them. And when I got home from playing golf the next morning I ate two more of them, right out of the fridge.

Now who’s a good husband?

Golf Problem Solved: Cool Sunglasses for People Who Wear Glasses

Posted on June 17, 2014 by David Owen

At the PGA Golf Merchandise Show a few years ago, I stopped at the booths of several glasses manufacturers and asked about golf sunglasses for guys who have serious trouble finding their glasses if they’re not wearing their glasses, as I do. The responses were depressing. One woman showed me a pair that looked less like the wraparounds you see on tour players than like something you might wear while welding. Here’s my prescription: The stronger a prescription, the harder it is to make it work without distortion in a lens that has a pronounced curve, she said, and her suggested solution was to switch to contacts and wear non-prescription sunglasses over those. I gave up, and bought a pair of distance-only glasses in my regular frames but with gray lenses. When my daughter, who was in her mid-twenties, saw them, she said, “No!”

[I have a picture of this, but I’m not going to show it to you.]

All that was before I talked with Rob Tavakoli, who is a licensed optician and a marketing guy at SportRX, which sells specialized glasses for all kinds of athletic activities. Takavoli is like a golf nut but about glasses; he told me that he’s been obsessed with sunglasses since he was seventeen, or slightly less than half his life, and that when he was twelve he fudged an eye test so that his ophthalmologist would write him a prescription he didn’t need. Two of Tavakoli’s specialties are sports-specific glasses and sports-specific glasses for people with strong prescriptions, like me. (SportRX employs a technician who specializes in high corrections—a rarity for companies that sell sports glasses, because getting everything right can be complicated and time-consuming.) Thanks to Tavakoli, I now have two pairs, one by Nike and one by Oakley. Both have lenses that are meant for golf—especially for ball-tracking and green-reading—and both are “photochromic,” which means that they lighten and darken in response to changes in ambient sunlight levels. The Nike glasses, whose frames are called Mercurial 6.0, have lenses with a rose copper tint, which becomes quite dark in bright sunlight: The Oakley glasses, whose frames are called Jupiter Squared, have lenses with a lighter, amber-brown tint, and are meant especially for times when sunlight levels are low: early morning, late afternoon, and in the rain—although they darken considerably in bright conditions. (Gray lenses are not good for golf, but they’re good for fishing.) There are other possible frame choices for people like me, and there are many, many additional choices for people whose prescriptions are less daunting. I now consider both my pairs to be part of my golf equipment, and I keep them in my golf bag in hard cases with zippers: An unexpected benefit of using both pairs of glasses is that they provide much better protection from the wind than my old sunglasses did, so that on that on blustery days I no longer seem to me crying over my terrible shots. I was grateful for that during my recent buddies trip to Scotland and Ireland, where the wind blows almost all the time, and it’s also a useful feature here at home, where, at the moment, clouds of pollen explode from the pine trees every time someone shanks one into the boughs. And an unexpected benefit of the darker lenses is that match-play opponents have no idea I’m giving them the evil eye while they’re trying to putt. Here I am in my Nike glasses on a sunny day at Machrihanish last month: If you have a current prescription, you can order glasses optimized for particular activities directly from the SportRX website, with telephone or online help if you need it. (The website has a helpful “Search by RX” utility, which identifies frames that will work with your prescription—although if your prescription is high enough you will need to call.) One thing you have to do before ordering glasses with corrective lenses is to measure your “pupillary distance,” or the space from eye to eye, but that’s easy to do if you have a ruler, a mirror, and a camera or phone: My personal glasses collection is extensive: progressives, bifocals, reading glasses, computer glasses, backup distance glasses, ancient sunglasses just for driving—plus my two new pairs of golf glasses, which are my favorites and which I would wear all the time if I thought I could get away with it.

What’s In My Bag: Lyme Disease Edition

Posted on June 14, 2014 by David Owen

At the U.S. Open at Shinnecock in 1995, a rumor went around that a well-known sportswriter had Lyme disease. The sportswriter was famous for covering tournaments without actually setting foot on the course, and someone commented that the only way he could have gotten Lyme disease was if you could get it from limes.

Now I have it. Lyme is so common where I live that I don’t remember whether this is the fifth time or the sixth. I’ve become pretty good at self-diagnosis, although as I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed that the symptoms of Lyme (including achy joints, fatigue, and tingly arms and legs) can be hard to distinguish from the symptoms of middle age. At any rate, two days after my brother’s member-guest, I developed a fever of 100-plus, in addition to all the other stuff. I’ve been taking doxycycline twice a day since then.

Doxycycline has an annoying side effect: it makes your skin extraordinarily sensitive to sunlight. I learned that the hard way a dozen years ago, when I got Lyme in October. I forgot all about the sun problem, played golf for two days in southern New Jersey without sunscreen, and wondered why my face and lips were burning—a problem that took days, or possibly weeks, to go away. This time, I’m being careful to wear long pants, long sleeves, rain gloves, and a hat, plus plenty of sunscreen.

The long pants are good for tick protection, too. I bought two new pairs: some Nike Dri-Fit pants—in a color called “bone”—which I already owned in black:

And these “insect-blocker” pants, from Columbia, which are impregnated with the insecticide permethrin. I ordered them from REI. One of the reviewers on the REI website had complained that the pants seemed too lightweight to stand up to rugged hiking, but that’s a good thing for summer golf. (REI members receive rebates on purchases. Memberships last for life, and I joined more than 40 years ago, when I was in high school and my goal was to become a mountain man/poet, but I hadn’t ordered anything since. A customer service representative found my membership number almost immediately, by searching for my parents’ old phone number.)

I was worried at first that the other guys at the club would call me “Permethrin Pants” when I showed up without shorts, but so far everybody’s been pretty decent.

Two Useful Sleep-Related Accessories for Golf Trips

Posted on May 30, 2014 by David Owen

My wife can fall asleep in a room in which all the lights are turned on and sunlight is streaming onto her face, while I can be awakened from a deep sleep by the message light on my cell phone. My friend Tony is similarly afflicted. His wife, in sympathy, bought an LED headlamp, so that she could read in bed without bothering him, but every time she turns to gaze lovingly at his sleeping form she zaps him in the eyes and wakes him up.

Hotel rooms can be a huge problem, even when I’m traveling without my wife. During a golf trip to San Antonio last year, I had to use a Kleenex box and two wash cloths to disable the electric eye on the light switch in the bathroom, which blasted me with daylight-level illumination when I got up in the night to take a whiz:

Because it’s hard to knock out all the potentially annoying light sources in a hotel room, I now travel with a sleep mask. I’ve tried several, and the one I like the best is made by Dream Essentials. It comes with a pair of ear plugs and what the company’s website describes as “a complimentary drawstring carry pouch,” and it makes me look like the Human Fly:

It’s especially useful during summertime golf trips to Britain and Ireland, because at that time of year at that latitude the sun never quite goes all the way down. I like it so much that I now use it at home, too.

A sleep mask to avoid, unless you have a hat size of about 5 or enjoy feeling that your eyes are being squeezed flat by an elastic band, is this one, from Samsonite, even though it also comes with ear plugs:

During my recent buddies trip to Scotland and Ireland, I spoke so convincingly about the benefits of wearing a sleep mask that J.P. went out immediately and bought one at a drugstore up the street from our hotel in Campbeltown, near Machrihanish. He now swears by it, too.

Medical Breakthrough: I Operate Successfully on my Laser Rangefinder

Posted on May 5, 2014 by David Owen

Laser rangefinders are sophisticated optical instruments, and should be handled as carefully as cameras. That means no dropping, no freezing, and no storing all summer in the trunk of your car. I was careless with my first one and, when it stopped picking up targets over 100 yards, I mailed it back to Bushnell to be realigned. It was too far gone to be repaired economically, so they sold me a refurbished unit instead—a better deal than buying a new one.

That was three years ago. Recently, the refurbished unit failed to power up, even after I’d changed the battery. (This is an ancient model, which runs on an old-fashioned 9-volt alkaline battery rather than a fancy lithium-ion battery like the one in my garage-door opener.) After a little ignorant trial-and-error, I discovered that I could make it work again, intermittently, by pressing my thumb really hard on the battery door. That made me realize that the problem was probably just that the battery was no longer making good contact with the whatever. To repair it, I did what grackles and bonobos do in National Geographic documentaries: I fashioned a tool from the materials at hand:

I straightened a jumbo paperclip and used a small pair of pliers to make a hook at one end:

Then I stuck the hook into the battery compartment and used it to tug on the metal contacts at the bottom, so that they would stick out more. And it worked!

The only bad thing is that, before going into surgery, I had 95% persuaded myself that my only rational option was to buy a brand-new rangefinder — ideally, the most expensive one available. I can’t justify that now, even to myself, although with luck my refurbished-and-repaired unit will break again before the end of the season.

Awwwww. Have I Told You About My Compression Shirts?

Posted on April 30, 2014 by David Owen

In the April issue of Golf Digest, I have an article about high-technology golf clothing. Among the garments I mention are compression shirts, of which I now own three: one made by Under Armour and two made by a company called IntelliSkin. (When I discovered I didn’t mind the tightness of my first IntelliSkin shirt, I bought a second one that was one size tighter.) Stretchy clothes that squeeze your body are said to have numerous athletic benefits, including improving your posture, making you cooler, making you warmer, helping your muscles recover faster after exertion, and enabling you (in the case of IntelliSkin) to become a “Full Time Human.” Harry Vardon once said that every golfer should play in a jacket and suspenders, to keep the swing compact, and my compression shirts feel something like that.

I wonder also whether they might not reduce the risk of gagging over three-foot putts, in the same way that a gently compressive vest called the ThunderShirt is said to relieve anxieties in nervous dogs and cats. A couple of years ago, my wife, out of curiosity, bought a blanket from a company called Peace Weighted Products. Weighted blankets are used in various kinds of therapy, but they are just about the greatest thing in the world to take a calm, yip-free nap under.

Still, wearing super-tight clothing requires a certain firmness of purpose, even if no one else can see it. In theory, a compression garment should make you look thinner, but the first time I glimpsed myself in a mirror in profile I thought, I really need to start ordering salads instead of fries with my bacon cheeseburgers. You also have to deal with what my sister identified—while wearing upper and lower Spanx “shapewear” at the wedding of her middle son—as the critical interface between your love handles and your muffin top. (Shapewear used to be known as girdles. Spanx also makes shapewear for men—including, I’ve been told, Butch Harmon.)

During the past few months, I’ve developed something in my right shoulder which I have Web-diagnosed as mild rotator-cuff tendinosis. One of the things you’re supposed to do for it is to stop slumping your shoulders like an old lady. My IntelliSkin shirts make good posture semi-automatic, by helping to un-slouch me and keeping me that way once I’ve gotten myself started. The only challenge is peeling the things off without dislocating the joint I’m trying to mend.

John Cook is an IntelliSkin “ambassador.” He talks about the shirts in the video below. (The slightly scary-looking guy in the red hat is the company’s founder.)

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

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