Atlantic City Country Club: Great Golf Course, Great Locker Room, Great Bar

Posted on November 1, 2016 by David Owen

Every autumn, the Sunday Morning Group takes an end-of-season golf trip to Atlantic City, which, in addition to being a cesspool of sin, depravity, and despair, is a terrific low-cost, high-quality golf destination. During this year’s trip—our seventeenth—we added a new course to our rotation: Atlantic City Country Club. It’s now one of our all-time favorites, along with Twisted Dune, the Bay Course at Seaview, Renault Winery, and Scotland Run—courses that would stand out anywhere. Here are a few reasons to visit ACCC, which has been open to the public since 2007:

The club was founded in 1897, so next year will be its 120th anniversary.
In the olden days, a bell was rung to warn golfers that the last trolley back to Atlantic City was about to depart. Timing was an issue because high tide sometimes covered the tracks, making the schedule irregular. Also, everyone was drunk.

The term “birdie,” in its golf application, was coined there in 1903, when Abner Smith, a member from Philadelphia, hit his approach stiff on the what was then the twelfth hole. He exclaimed that he had hit “a bird of a shot,” and the term caught on, partly thorough his own encouragement. (That hole, with a different green, is now the second. The original second green has been preserved, for historical reasons, as a remote practice area.)
The men’s locker room is one of the greatest male sanctuaries on earth:

The U.S. Amateur was held there in 1901.
The U. S. Women’s Open has been held there three times. In 1948, it was won by Babe Zaharias, who celebrated afterward by playing the piano in the club’s Taproom.
Arnold Palmer played there often in the 1950s, when he was in the Coast Guard and stationed nearby, and he has an honorary locker (which was shrouded in black, to mark his death, during our visit):

Al Capone, Bob Hope, Willie Mays, and Joe Namath also played there and also have honorary lockers.
Oh, yeah, and the course—which was designed partly by Willie Park, Jr., among others, and was reworked in 1999 by Tom Doak—is swell, too:

My Latest Favorite Golf Accessory

Posted on October 31, 2016 by David Owen

In May, eleven buddies and I spent a week playing golf in Ireland, and one of the guys on the trip, Mike B., brought a travel accessory I’d never heard of: a pair of cigar-shaped electric boot dryers, which he takes on ski trips. When I’m traveling, I usually dry wet golf shoes by balancing them upside down on the shade of a bedside lamp in my hotel room (a method made both less hazardous and less effective by the death of the incandescent bulb) or by wedging them between the dashboard and windshield in my rental car and blasting them with the defroster. At home, I’ve always leaned wet golf shoes against a wall in front of a small portable fan.

We had such great weather in Ireland that Mike never had to use his boot dryers, but they got me to thinking. Recently, I bought a larger, at home-version: a shoe-and-boot dryer made by a company called Peet. It stands just under two feet tall and consists of two cylindrical plastic chimneys mounted on a sturdy plastic base. You place wet shoes upside down on the chimneys, and by morning they’re dry and toasty, inside and out. The device is silent, and it’s so gentle that it won’t harm fancy leather, but it thoroughly dries even shoes you’ve worn while playing all day in the rain.

When I bought my Peet dryer, I expected to use it only on golf shoes I’d worn in crummy weather, but since then I’ve realized that it’s great for shoes and boots of all kinds, and that even on nice days ordinary perspiration can make the inside of your shoes damp to the touch. Dry shoes last longer, and they don’t get stinky. My wife now uses my Peet dryer on her hockey skates, too. In fact, before long we may have to trade up to the two-pair model.

Your Golf Course is Too Long For You

Posted on October 18, 2016 by David Owen

Every October since 2000, the Sunday Morning Group has taken an end-of-season weekend golf trip to Atlantic City.

For the past four years, we’ve allowed every player on the trip to play from any set of tees. Some guys worried at first that our matches and team competitions would be unfair unless everyone was “playing the same course.” But we have discovered that, as long as you calculate the handicaps correctly, the competition actually works better if golfers are able to make rational decisions about the trade-off between course yardage and handicap strokes. And that’s true even when the skill spread is huge. (Handicaps this year ranged from 0 to more than 30.)

Our experience aligns perfectly with the findings of the USGA and the PGA of America, which in 2011 introduced Tee It Forward, an initiative that “encourages players to play from a set of tees best suited to their driving distance.” According to the USGA:

I firmly believe all of that. But there are reasons you haven’t heard much about Tee It Forward since 2011, and the main one is probably the USGA’s semi-incomprehensible two-step system for calculating course handicaps when players compete from different tees. Virtually no one understands how the USGA’s system works, including, in my experience, most PGA of America head professionals. My friends and I are able to do what we do mainly because Tim, who is SMG’s mathematician-in-residence, created an Excel spreadsheet that does all the figgerin’ in the background and eliminates a potentially huge rounding error inherent in the USGA’s method. Every player on the trip, before we leave home, receives a handicap for every set of tees on every course we’re going to play, and is then free to choose:

Another impediment to Teeing It Forward is that most golf courses stigmatize their forward tees by suggesting that they’re intended only for certain players — as at Twisted Dune, in Egg Harbor Township (a course we nevertheless all love):

It’s far, far better to rate all sets of tees for both men and women, and to give the tees gender-and-age-neutral names—as at Wintonbury Hills, in Bloomfield, Connecticut:

One discovery we’ve made during the past four years is that virtually all players, including many with single-digit handicaps, play better and have more fun if they move up — even way up. At Twisted Dune, Addison, who hits his driver 300 yards and has USGA Handicap Index of 0.4, played the black tees, from which the course measures 7,300 yards. But Brendan (8.3), Tim (12.3), and I (7.1) all played the “Senior Tees”—the yellows —from which the course is 1,500 yards shorter. When we started, Addison was so far behind us that we could barely see him. In the photo below, the red V is just above his head:

Addison loves playing from the tips, and he has more than enough game to do it. The rest of us, though, were very, very happy to move as far forward as we could.

Playing Golf, and Counting Steps, With a Microsoft Band

Posted on July 27, 2016 by David Owen

This past spring, eleven friends and I took a week-long golf trip to Ireland. Shortly before we left, Microsoft sent us four Band 2 activity trackers to field-test. Addison, Matt, Peter, and I wore them for the entire trip, then took them home. I’ve worn mine every day since we got back, and the other guys have worn theirs, too. One thing I like about the Band is that it’s sleek and futuristic-looking—a major difference from the Apple Watch, which to me looks like it was designed for preschoolers: My First Wristwatch.

During our Ireland trip, we mainly used our Bands to measure how far we walked. We played 36 holes every day but two, and I was especially interested to know whether longer, wilder hitters (Matt) walked farther than shorter, straighter hitters (me). And they did, by a noticeable amount—although the difference was blurred by the occasional willingness of the shorter, straighter hitters to detour into the dunes to help the longer, wilder hitters look for their ball. Overall, the four of us averaged about 15 miles a day, and roughly 100 miles for the week—a good workout. The longest day was the last (34,250 steps and 17.7 miles during 36 holes at Enniscrone) and the shortest was the fourth (21,336 steps and 11 miles during 18 holes at Connemara plus an afternoon hike along the shore of Lough Inagh).

Lough Inagh. (Photo by Mike Bowman)

Setting up our Bands was pretty easy. You download a smartphone app called Microsoft Health, and pair the Band to the phone. For some of the Band’s functions—email, messaging, current-weather updates, Cortana—the phone needs to be within Bluetooth distance; for tracking walks, hikes, runs, bike rides, workouts, heartbeats, sleep quality, and so forth it doesn’t.

The Band is not waterproof, although it’s something more than water-resistant. I’ve accidentally worn mine in the shower (many times), in the swimming pool (once, for fifteen minutes), in the hot tub (not as often as in the shower, but almost), and in the rain (several times) — and I haven’t destroyed it yet. I’ve gotten better at remembering to take it off, but I do worry that someday I’ll go too far and it will self-destruct, the way my wife’s iPhone did when she dropped it in the toilet. I assume that if there were an economical way to make fancy electronic gadgets fully waterproof they’d all be fully waterproof. If I were in the fitness-tracker business, I’d have a team of geniuses working exclusively on water.

That’s Matt on the right. His Band is the thing on his wrist, not his head.

Microsoft and TaylorMade worked together to create a golf app, which turns a Band into a GPS rangefinder, shot-counter, and golf-related-statistics-compiler. “Stay focused on your game and forget about score tracking,” the website says. “Microsoft Band tracks your shots and measures your performance as you play. Sensors can distinguish between a practice swing and an actual shot.”

That’s all true, sort of. I wore my Band during a round at home, before our trip, and was impressed at how good it was at recognizing real golf shots. But it wasn’t perfect. It doesn’t understand about conceded putts, water hazards, out of bounds, provisional balls, or tap-ins, and if you knock away an opponent’s ball it thinks you’ve made a stroke at your own. That means that you can’t actually “forget about score tracking,” because you have to keep count independently, on a scorecard or in your head, and double-check the Band after every hole. Correcting miscounts is easy, but if you have to do all that anyway why bother with the app? The GPS part worked fine, although it was a little slow. Any GPS device pulls hard on a battery—it’s engaged in a two-way conversation with orbiting satellites—so to use it on a 36-hole day you almost certainly need to recharge between rounds. It does recharge quickly—much more quickly than a phone—and if you aren’t using an app that depends on GPS the battery will easily last two days.

GPS is totally worth using with the app that tracks bike rides, since it gives you lots of information, including top speed, average speed, elevation gain and loss, best split, average split, and heart rate. It also superimposes your route on a map, and shows you exactly where you cruised and where you struggled. There are similar features for runners. I’m not one of those, thank goodness, but if I were I could upload Band data to various popular run-tracking utilities, too. The hiking app also maps your route, although if the GPS is in power-saving mode it makes some funny mistakes when it makes educated guesses about your next moves. I used the hiking app on the golf course one day, and it told me later that I had walked into the center of the pond on the fourth hole, then changed my mind and walked back out. But the big picture was correct.

Strandhill Golf Club, 29,730 steps, 15.3 miles.)

The Band has some quirks. Like some other fitness trackers I’ve tried, it counts bumps and potholes on the Hutchinson River Parkway as steps (and lots of them); you can keep that from happening by taking it off, or turning it off, when you’re driving on rough roads. If I click on the “run” tile before walking my dog, it credits me with having burned more calories than it does if I leave the Band in standard step-and-heartbeat-tracking mode, even though my route and pace are exactly the same. And the difference is bigger still if I click on the “exercise” tile before taking the same walk, or before playing a round of golf. I assume that when I do those things the Band isn’t suddenly detecting some new and previously unsuspected source of energy expenditure, but is simply applying a different formula to the same small number of detectable variables. It’s a handy feature, though. I like being able to double the health benefit of taking a walk simply by clicking an icon. Look! I just earned an entire pint of Cherry Garcia!

This is the thing we’re all trying to delay as long as possible (alongside the first fairway at Ballybunion, 32,282 steps, 15.6 miles)

In lots of ways, I’m a non-ideal user of a sophisticated gadget like a Microsoft Band. I don’t want my wrist to tell me I’ve just received an email, a text message, or a smartphone notification, or to connect me to Facebook and Twitter—all chores that the Band is able to perform but that I don’t allow even my phone to handle. I don’t want to track my sleep every night (although I did do it twice, and was interested in the results, especially my “resting heart rate”). I don’t want to monitor my weight, and not only because I recently decided that from now on I’m going to weigh myself only twice a year, if that. I don’t care how many calories my activities supposedly burn, except as a rough approximation of how busy I was being, because I don’t think anyone really knows what the numbers mean. But all the potential annoyances are easy to turn off, or not to turn on on the first place, or to ignore. And there are many people who truly do love stuff like that.

I do like counting my steps and knowing how many miles I walk when I play golf or walk my dog, and I like the cycling app, and I like to be able to check the local temperature and forecast by glancing at my wrist. I also like the small but surprisingly effective nudge the Band gives me throughout the day. You can even have it remind you to get off your butt if you’ve been motionless for too long. Quantifying even ordinary activities can inspire you to be more active, especially if you like to compete against people who are easy to beat, such as yourself. If I notice that I’m a couple of thousand steps short of some big round number, I’ll grab the leash. And that’s good for the dog as well as for me.

Troon is a Time-travel Wormhole to Machrihanish

Posted on July 13, 2016 by David Owen

Machrihanish is a legendary links course on the Kintyre Peninsula, in western Scotland. Part of the routing was created by Old Tom Morris in 1879, when what was then called the Kintyre Golf Club acquired additional acreage and expanded from 12 holes to 18. Machrihanish has one of the awesomest opening tee shots in golf. Here’s the first tee:

The rest of the course is terrific, too. The only difficulty with Machrihanish is that it’s tricky to get to. The drive from Glasgow Airport can take more than three hours, with little or no hope of golf along the way. But there’s a shortcut, if you do what 11 friends and I did in 2014: charter a boat from an outfit called Kintyre Express. The trip from Troon Harbor (which is just up the road from Royal Troon) to Campbeltown Harbor (which is just down the road from Machrihanish) takes 75 minutes. That means that the round trip saves you more than enough time to squeeze in one entire bonus round at either Machrihanish or Machrihanish Dunes. Here we are getting ready to set out from Troon:

And here’s some of what we saw along the way:

And here’s what Tony looked like when the skipper gunned his engine:

P1120269

And here’s what we saw as we approached Campbeltown:

And here’s where we stayed, just up a long ramp from the dock:

Three days later, we took the same boat to Northern Ireland—which is even closer to Campbeltown than Troon is. All our golf bags and suitcases went into the hold:

Kintyre Express has lots of other routes, too. The Troon-to-Campbeltown trip starts at £500 for up to 12 passengers. Thanks to Brexit, that currently works out to only about $55 a head. Kintyre also operates regular ferry service to a number of destinations in the same region. Ask for Mairi!

My Friends and I Went to Yale (for One Day)

Posted on June 28, 2016 by David Owen

Not long ago, two honorary members of the Sunday Morning Group invited the rest of us to play a round on Yale University’s golf course, whose official name is the Course at Yale. (The U.S.G.A. lists Yale on its GHIN handicap website under “T,” for “the”—an approach to alphabetization that may not be entirely unrelated to the rules mess at this year’s U.S. Open.) Seventeen of us accepted the invitation, and the sign below greeted us when we arrived (I stole it on our way out, so that we could hang it in our locker room at home):

Yale was a collegiate golf powerhouse in the late 1800s and early 1900s — as I learned from Golf at Yale: The Players, the Teams, the Course, by John A. Godley and William W. Kelly. In 1923, the widow of a wealthy alumnus bought a 720-acre estate near the campus and gave it to the university, and Yale hired Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor to design a golf course that would put Princeton’s to shame. The property was rocky and densely wooded, and the construction ended up costing more than $400,000, making Yale’s the world’s most expensive golf course, by far, up until that time. (Augusta National, completed five years later, cost a quarter as much.) The fairways and greens were poorly maintained the first time I played it, in the early 1990s, but everything is gorgeous now. Yale is one of my favorite courses anywhere, not least because it has more interesting blind shots than modern courses ever do. Here’s my brother, John, fiddling with the hole-location indicator on the third, whose green is invisible from the fairway:

We had good weather for most of our round, but shortly after we made the turn it started to rain.

Then it started to rain more:

There was no lightning, though, and when the locals had all run for cover we had the place to ourselves. Here’s what the fifteenth green looked like when we got to it:

And here’s Barney lining up a putt on the sixteenth:

After our round, we were treated to lunch by Mark, our host, who used to be a member of our club but switched to Yale after his wife got a job nearby:

I drove home with the seat heater on high, to dry out my pants. I had to run the defroster, too, because of the steam. Fun day.

My Favorite Golf Shoes Keep Breaking My Heart

Posted on June 22, 2016 by David Owen

In 2011, I became an enthusiastic unpaid shill for True Linkswear golf shoes, the most comfortable golf shoes I’ve ever worn. I now own more than a dozen pairs, and I wear them even when I’m not playing golf, and many of my friends have switched to them, too. Last October, though, my most recent pair, called True Motion, basically came apart during the Sunday Morning Group’s annual buddies trip to Atlantic City:

After I wrote about those shoes, I heard from a reader who had had the same problem:

I also heard from a vice president at True Linkswear, who acknowledged that the company had had “past issues” with quality, but said that it had made “a significant switch in factories” and that the next model, called True Elements, would not only correct those issues but would also be “our first breathable & waterproof shoe” and would represent “a remarkable design and construction method” that had been subjected to “rigorous testing standards.” I bought a pair in March, as soon as I could find them online, and wore them several times to make sure they truly were waterproof—as I wrote here:

true-elements

They passed that test beautifully, so I bought a second pair of Elements and put both pairs away, the newer one still in its box, to keep them pristine for an upcoming buddies trip to Ireland, in early May. And here they are at Ballybunion:

They were the only shoes I took with me on that trip, and they performed beautifully—with one big exception: before the trip was over, both pairs had developed serious holes in their fabric covering at the points where the shoe bends during walking, on either side of the ball of the foot:

I don’t think the holes penetrate the waterproof lining. But they’re big, and every time I wear the shoes they get bigger. That V-shaped dip in the outermost layer seems to act like a tiny pair of scissors:

I wore the newer of my two pairs of Elements only twice on the trip—and I hadn’t worn them before, and I’ve worn them only once since. But one of those shoes already has small holes on both sides, after just a few rounds. Tim D. also took Elements on our Ireland trip, and his shoes have the same kind of holes in the same places:

Now, we played two rounds a day, on foot, on up-and-down terrain—but shouldn’t any pair of golf shoes be tough enough to survive a week in Ireland?

And not long after we got back from Ireland my shoes’ self-destruction opened up a new front, on the vamp, just below the laces:

I sent two emails to the vice president who had told me about the company’s new manufacturing standards, but I haven’t heard back. Maybe I’ll hear from him now. But whether I do or not I’ve bought my last pair of Trues.

Dewar’s Profile: How About Scotch for Breakfast?

Posted on June 12, 2016 by David Owen

Because the Sunday Morning Group has an international reputation in the marketing world, the manufacturers of golf-oriented consumer items—and especially golf-oriented alcoholic beverages—sometimes come to us for help with product positioning. Recently, the people who make Dewar’s blended scotch whisky asked us to test a drink they’d come up with, called Dewar’s Hole-in-One Cold Brew. Here’s what it looks like:

And here’s the official recipe:

http://offroadersblog.com/546/ 3 shots of cold-brew coffee

Northampton 2 shots of DEWAR’S 12-Year-Old

½ shot of simple syrup

1 dash of vanilla extract (optional)

¼ shot of heavy cream

Add the coffee, whisky, simple syrup and vanilla extract (if using) to a cocktail shaker. Add ice to the shaker to above the level of the liquid and shake for 3 seconds. Strain the mixture into tall glass with ice cubes. Top with heavy cream, optional.

As it happens, my wife is a cold-brew nut. So with her help I mixed up a batch of Cafe du Monde Coffee and Chicory in our kitchen (and allowed it to cold-steep for 24 hours):

Then, on Sunday morning, I took the coffee to the club, along with all the other ingredients—including a bottle of scotch provided by Dewar’s—and set up a “test bar” on the first tee:

The guys gave it an exhaustive work-up:

They even checked the purity of the individual ingredients. Did you know that red Solo cups came this small?

Final verdict: all possible thumbs up. And there is no way that the vanilla or heavy cream should be considered “optional.” I had to leave the scotch out of mine, for personal reasons, but even in its virgin form Hole-in-One Cold Brew is great—like melted Haagen-Dasz coffee ice cream on the rocks. And Hacker (real name) finally had an excuse to wear his red Dewar’s fleece jacket, which he bought for $10 during a promotion of some kind at our liquor store a decade or two ago, before we had a working relationship with the company.

Next: how about something made with Wild Turkey?

We have lots of them in our area—including on the eighth hole, above—even though Reese periodically thins the flock:

Incidentally, when a detachment of the Sunday Morning Group was in Ireland, last month, Reese’s foursome spotted a fox on the third hole at Enniscrone. Reese has a den in his yard at home, and he knows how to speak fox:

He fox-barked at the Enniscrone fox three times, and all three times the fox turned around. And Reese can gobble, too.

May Was Hole-in-One Month, Apparently

Posted on June 8, 2016 by David Owen

I was contacted recently by a lawyer who was looking for someone to serve as an expert witness in a lawsuit involving a hole-in-one prize. After last month, I almost qualify.

Eleven friends and I played Ballybunion, in Ireland, in early May. On the third hole, Addison made a hole-in-one from the back tee: 230 yards, downhill but into a stiff wind. My group was just leaving the fourth tee, and we watched his ball roll into the hole. There’s a plaque on the third tee commemorating a hole-in-one that Payne Stewart made from the same spot in 1998, the year before he died, during a buddies trip with Mark O’Meara and Tiger Woods. Here’s Addison:

We returned home a week later, and in an effort to outsmart jet lag I pretty much went straight from the airport to my home course (after stopping by my house, briefly, to reintroduce myself to my wife). There were five of us, and on the seventh hole, which is slightly more than half as long as the third hole at Ballybunion, I made a hole-in-one:

P1180521-001 Two weeks after that, Chris, during his first round ever with the Sunday Morning Group, made a hole-in-one on our twelfth hole, which is 185 yards long. Nobody in his group could see that far, so they weren’t sure his ball had really gone in until they got to the green. In the photo below, which was taken by Mike B., he’s retrieving his ball from the cup:

And in the photo below, which was taken by me, Mike B. is taking the photo above:

You can’t document these things too thoroughly (I learned from the lawyer who contacted me). Here’s my scorecard:

DLO Hole in one 5-11-2018.jpg

One thing to note: Chris is beaming in his photograph because if you make a hole-in-one during our regular Sunday morning game you receive $500 from the Slush Fund. And Addison is smiling in his photograph because if you make a hole-in-one during an SMG-sanctioned event (meaning one that everyone on the email list was invited to participate in) you receive $250 from the Slush Fund. And I’m sort of frowning in my photograph because that post-Ireland round of mine was a last-minute thing that nobody bothered to invite everyone else to—so my Slush Fund prize was $0.

Golf Clothing Tip Inspired by March Madness

Posted on April 20, 2016 by David Owen

ankles started bothering me shortly after the end of the past golf season. Various possible explanations occurred to me: tendonitis, arthritis, my father’s legs (poor circulation), my mother’s legs (peripheral neuropathy), too much deskwork (ha!), advancing age, incipient varicose veins (leading current theory). I read something somewhere about compression socks, and bought a version intended for runners, from a company called Vitalsox. They’re knee-height and they’re a little tricky to put on, but they immediately made my ankles feel 80-95 percent better.

So what the hell? All sorts of athletes wear them, including college basketball players, and they’re supposed to be good for people who are stuck in too-small seats on long flights, like the one that eleven golf buddies and I are about to take to Ireland. I’ve now got four long pairs and four quarter-height pairs (meant for tennis players), and I’m about to order more. The only bad thing about them is that I can’t (that is to say, I won’t) wear them with shorts. But who knows? Maybe I’ll change my mind about that, too.

I’m not crazy about revealing what they look like on my actual legs, so you’ll have to use your imagination.

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

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