Category Archives: Golf Courses

Golf Carts: Fairway or Rough?

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The winning team, by a record margin: Chic, Gary, and Doug. Second hole, November 4, 2012.

Beginning November 1, the Sunday Morning Group gives an extra handicap stroke to anyone who wears shorts. Chic and Doug both did this morning—and Doug didn’t wear a hat, and after a few holes he took off his jacket—even though it was 35 degrees when we started. We had three threesomes, and we played two best balls, net, off the low handicap, which was four. Chic and Doug ended up on the same team, along with Gary, our superintendent, but the extra strokes were meaningless because they shot 12 under, which was 16 shots better than the second-place team (mine). That’s a record, as far as anyone can remember. Incidentally, the Sunday Morning Group’s record worst round is 9 over par, net, on one best ball; it was set on October 22, 2001, by Frank D., Rick, and me.

November 1 is also the day the golf shop closes for the year, and that means no golf carts from now till spring. (The carts are stored for the winter in a building behind the ninth green which somehow survived Hurricane Sandy—see the photo below.) The course always looks great once the carts have been put away, because there aren’t tire tracks running everywhere.

Thinking about that made me think about an unresolved controversy at many clubs, including mine: do golf carts do more damage on fairways or in the rough? Gnarly old rough seems “stronger” than manicured fairways, but cart tracks are usually harder to see in short grass than in long. I’ve played courses where players were told to keep their carts off the fairways, and I’ve played others where they were told to keep them out of the rough.

Several years ago, I asked Stacy Bonos, an agronomist in the Turfgrass Breeding Project at Rutgers University, who was right. She hesitated, but when I pressed her she said that, all in all, carts probably probably did less damage to fairways than to rough.

No more carts till spring.

Halloween at Augusta National

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Former Secretary of State George Schultz explaining golf to the mayor of San Francisco in 2005. (Photo by Luke Thomas.)

Condoleezza Rice isn’t the only former U.S. Secretary of State who belongs to Augusta National Golf Club: George Schultz, who ran Ronald Reagan’s State Department, is a member as well. In 1983, Schultz brought his boss and Donald Regan, the White House chief of staff, to the club as guests, and in addition to playing golf they discussed the U.S. invasion of Grenada, which began three days later, on October 25.

During that visit, a forty-five-year-old Augusta resident named Charles R. Harris rammed his pickup truck through a locked gate, took hostages at gunpoint in the golf shop, and demanded an audience with Reagan, who was playing the sixteenth hole. Secret Service agents surrounded the shop, and sharpshooters set up on the putting green. (One of them told a club member that the scope on his rifle was so precise that he would be able to hit a half-dollar coin on the first green, more than four hundred and fifty yards away.)

Harris eventually released all his hostages except David Spencer, the co-professional. Harris kept a pistol to Spencer’s head, and he threatened to shoot off Spencer’s fingers one at a time if Reagan wasn’t brought to see him. To prove that he was serious, he fired a bullet through a window in the front of the shop. (Today, a piece of the window frame with a bullet hole in it hangs on Spencer’s living-room wall.) Spencer was held at gunpoint for two tense hours (not twenty-one, as some Web accounts say). He managed to escape during a moment of confusion when food was sent in for Harris.

“Dave ran out the door and saw Mr. Johnson, the club’s barber, and myself standing there,” Dr. Stephen W. Brown, a member, told me in 1996, “and he more or less collapsed in our arms. I took Dave up to the clubhouse and sat with him awhile, and I told him that his wife knew he was out and all right. He said he wanted to cry. I said, ‘Well, go ahead. Nobody’s here but the two of us.’ He quickly wiped his eyes and turned to me and said, ‘Dr. Brown, I was just as nervous as if I was standing over a three-foot putt and Mr. Roberts told me I had to make it.” That’s Clifford Roberts, of course—the club’s legendary co-founder and longtime chairman.

One October evening fifteen years later—after Schultz had played a round with Nicholas Brady, who served as Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan and the first George Bush and is also a member—Schultz gave  everyone in the dining room a handmade Halloween favor: a small orange-and-black gift bag containing an orange golf ball on which he had used a black marker to draw a smiling jack-o’-lantern face. I got one because I was there working on my book The Making of the Masters. (See photo below.)

Orange and black, not coincidentally, are the colors of Schultz’s alma mater, Princeton University—which he also honored by having a tiger tattooed on his rear end.

Top-Flite jack-o’-lantern, hand-painted by my close personal friend George Schultz. (Collection of the author.)

More About My Awesome Golf Shoes

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In recognition of my services as an unpaid shill for their products, True Linkswear sent me a pair of their newest golf shoes, which are shown in the photo above and will be available to the world at large on November 4. I subjected them to the severest shoe test I know: wearing them in front of my wife. She said, “Those are nice.” (Her No. 1 golf-related footwear rule is “no saddle shoes on overweight middle-aged men.” Her No. 2 rule is “no red laces.”) I then took them for a test walk with the dog. They passed.

I now own five pairs of True golf shoes. I also still own three or four pairs of non-True golf shoes, which I wear occasionally so that I can use them up and get rid of them without feeling guilty about throwing them away. On Wednesday, the course was so muddy that I wore an old pair of Nike shoes, which I used to love, and halfway through the round I noticed that the sole of one of them was starting to come loose: Out they went as soon as I got home.

Six or seven members of my club now own True shoes—including our superintendent. Over the summer, I got to play a round at Quaker Ridge, in Scarsdale, New York, as the guest of the father of the husband of a friend. One of our caddies, a young woman from Germany, was wearing Trues. She said she was worried they looked dorky—and they do, generally, although they didn’t on her—but that she was going to keep wearing them anyway, because they were so comfortable.

Angela the caddie, Quaker Ridge, summer, 2012.

Comfortable shoes are going to take over the game the way spikeless shoes did. There are more choices all the time, from FootJoy, Ecco, Nike, and others. There is no reason, anymore, to own golf shoes that don’t feel good the moment you put them on, or to walk for miles over uneven ground in what are essentially wingtips. My friend Hacker (real name) has a pair of golf shoes that he says he’s been breaking in for four years. Enough!

The Best Way to Watch the Ryder Cup

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No, that’s not a medical office building. It’s the premium grandstand beside the eighteenth green at the 1993 Ryder Cup, which was held at The Belfry, in England.

The best way to watch almost any golf tournament is on TV. That’s especially true of the Ryder Cup, because at any moment there’s hardly anything going on. I’ve been to just one Ryder Cup in person—in 1993, on the Brabazon course at The Belfry, in England—and it was a spectator’s nightmare. The most coveted seats, initially, were in an enclosed multistory grandstand beside the eighteenth green, and people who had passes for it began arriving long before the first match teed off. They then waited for almost twelve hours with nothing to watch except one another getting drunk, because on the first day only one of the eight matches—the afternoon four-ball between Nick Faldo and Colin Montgomerie, for the Europeans, and Paul Azinger and Fred Couples, for the United States—made it to the eighteenth hole.

The Belfry, like most of the courses where the Europeans hold the Ryder Cup, is a dud. The nicest thing that Ron Whitten could find to say about it, in Golf Digest’s 1993 Ryder Cup preview, was that its blandness would prevent it from intruding on the golf—perhaps the faintest possible praise for a championship layout. It’s also the opposite of a stadium course. There are no hillsides or mounds for spectators to stand on, and in 1993 the trees  were way too small to climb. I saw one man standing on a paint can, which he had somehow smuggled past the guards at the gate, and I saw many people standing on small stools, also smuggled. Because the viewing opportunities were so meager, there were crowds surrounding the few available television sets. There was one in the Lloyd’s pharmacy tent, and one in the exhibition tent, and one in a rowdy refreshment tent near the tenth fairway. Medinah Country Club is far more spectator-friendly, but if you’re watching from home you should still count yourself lucky.

You should also be grateful that the broadcast isn’t being handled by the BBC. In 1993, Tom Kite would be putting for eagle somewhere, but on the screen you would see Colin Montgomerie practicing a putt he had just missed, or Nick Faldo standing by his golf bag, chatting with his caddie. The camera operators couldn’t track balls in the air and had trouble finding them when they were on the ground. The producers would suddenly cut to Barry Lane, picking him up in mid-follow-through, and the sound equipment on the course looked like Second World War surplus. The BBC has improved since then, but not enough. In the TV Cup, the USA wins every time.

Back-Roads Scotland: Forfar Golf Club

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Forfar Golf Club, Scotland, May, 2007.

Forfar, Scotland, is a small town about dozen miles northwest of Carnoustie. Its most famous resident may be Bon Scott, the lead singer of the rock band AC/DC, who was born there in 1949 and died, of acute alcohol poisoning, in 1980.

Brian.

Forfar—prounouced FOR-fer—has a golf course, which was designed by James Braid. I pulled in one evening in 2007, to make sure I’d be able to find it the following morning. It was almost time for dinner, and I wasn’t really planning to play, but suddenly I found myself in the golf shop handing my credit card to the wife of the head pro. On the course, I soon caught up to and joined three members: Brian, a local builder, who sounded a little like Sean Connery and carried his golf bag by the handle, like a suitcase; Gavin, a retired local cultural administrator; and Michael, a jeweler. Here’s the sort of golfers they were: all three, despite having played the course regularly for many years, were surprised to learn that the round blue marker in the center of each fairway was 150 yards from the green. Gavin told me that the three of them played together almost every Monday evening because “then there’s no one in front and no one behind.” They took lots and lots and lots of swings, although we still finished in just about exactly three hours.

The next morning (after breakfast and a bucket of balls at the local driving range, on the other side of town), I played a second round at Forfar. A ladies’ medal competition was going on just ahead of me, so I had plenty of time to admire the course, which is well inland and is surrounded by farms but feels very much like a links course, in part because most of the fairways have distinctive undulations, like gentle ocean rollers—remnants of ancient flax furrows, Brian had told me. (You can see the furrows, sort of, in the photo at the top of this post.) And when I finished I still had time to kill, so I went around again. And the following year I came back, with friends from home.

If I were sure I’d return to Forfar as often as I’d like to, I’d accept an email solicitation I received a few days ago:

15 months membership for the price of 12!

New members can join straight away for the 2012 price of £485 (£460 + £25 bar credit) and receive membership of the Club through until 31st December 2013!

To join call now on 01307 463773.

The 2013 subscriptions for the remainder of the year are as follows:

Full Membership: £485*

5 Day: waiting list in operation
Under 25: £260
Family: £970** (2 adults & unlimited children)
Junior: £100 (17 & 18)
            £75 (12-16)
            £50 (8-11)
Country: £310
*includes £25 bar credit
**includes £50 bar credit
You will be assured of a warm welcome so please don’t hesitate to contact us by telephoning or sending an enquiry to our email address.

For more information on the benefits of membership at Forfar Golf Club please see below.

  • Excellent layout for all ability of golfers to enjoy.
  • Comfortable clubhouse with refurbished lounge & dining room
  • Driving Range facilities
  • Competitions every Thursday, Saturday and Sundays
  • Online tee time booking & Members Website
  • Unlimited Members guest tickets
  • Reciprocal arrangements with other Clubs for reduced greenfees and a member of the Association of James Braid Courses
  • Membership categories to meet your needs
  • Monthly Newsletter
  • SKY tv
  • Free WiFi
  • Excellent Catering facilities 7 days a week
  • PGA Pro with fully stocked golf shop
  • Discounted rate for FGC members on the Angus Council ‘Be Active’ scheme

Payment can be made by all the usual methods and the Club offers a Direct Debit scheme through Premium Credit Ltd.

Critical Golf Accessory: Pocket Handkerchief

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There are several New Yorker writers and at least one award-winning novelist in this group. Lido Golf Club, Lido Beach, New York, September 21, 2012.

On Friday, at Lido Golf Club, three members of my foursome had an odd thing in common: we were carrying little packs of Kleenex, in response to a tenacious cold that’s been burning its way through the Northeast. Kleenex isn’t an ideal golf accessory, because it goes airborne in a breeze and doesn’t hold up to rain or even dew. On Saturday, back at home, I remembered to carry a handkerchief. As a result, I never did what I have often done when my nose was running on a golf course: find the least disgusting square inch of my golf towel and blow my nose into it.

Handkerchiefs have fallen out of use in the general population, but they’re good for golfers, especially in high winds, or during cold or allergy season. I paid fourteen dollars for a thirteen-pack of Van Heusen cotton handkerchiefs—just right for a week-long golf trip to Scotland or Ireland. If I had any sense, I’d keep at least one clean handkerchief in my golf bag all the time.

Incidentally, Kleenex facial tissues were introduced in 1924 as a “sanitary cold cream remover,” but sales remained modest until six years later, when Kimberly-Clark re-positioned them as disposable handkerchiefs. Times change.  In 2003, one of my nieces, who was eleven, saw her grandfather using a handkerchief and asked, with astonishment, “Is that a cloth Kleenex?” I had handkerchiefs when I was a kid—some with monograms—but I would bet that neither of my children, who are in their twenties, has ever used one.

Daniel Wexler, in his terrific book The Missing Links, devotes a chapter to the original Lido, which was designed by Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor. Bernard Darwin called it “the finest course in the world,” and Claude Harmon called it “the greatest golf course ever.” Part of the current course—which was designed by Robert Trent Jones in 1965—occupies part of the original property, but suburban tract houses cover much of the old layout, and Jones’s course is nothing special. Anyone interested in golf history should own a copy of The Missing Links—and not only because Wexler was a college roommate of my brother’s.

The modern Lido, with smoke stacks and a landfill on the far shore. JFK International Airport is about nine miles to the left.

Reader’s Trip Report: North Carolina

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Graham Stevens, a reader, sent the following report. He doesn’t name the course, but I’ve encountered the same policy and it drives me bats.

I called a semi-private course I’d never played near the mountain town I was visiting on vacation, and made my usual request: “I would love to be first out. I play fast and I’m a solid golfer (6 handicap). I will play with anyone from any tees as long as they play fast, too. My typical rounds take less than two hours when I play by myself, and I hate playing in more than three hours.”

They said, “No problem. We’ll see you at 7:30 and take good care of you.”

I showed up a little after 7:00 and the guy at the pro shop was great. He gave me tips on which holes were quirky, and told me how to get to the practice areas and the first tee.

At my allotted time, I striped one down the middle. As I walked toward my drive, though, three carts came racing over the tee boxes and down the hill. Their drivers—the entire early-morning staff of the clubhouse—were shouting, “Wait!” “Sir!” “Excuse me!”

The starter, breathing hard, explained that I couldn’t walk. I told him that I had perfectly good legs and that I could walk. He said he couldn’t let me go off first unless I took a cart. I told him I would play faster on foot. He said that wasn’t possible on a mountain course. I said, “I bet you $5,000 I can play faster walking than riding on this course.”

He pleaded with me: “Please, sir, I can lose my job if someone sees you walking.”

I have heard a lot of crazy excuses, but this was a first. 

In the end, I didn’t want to argue. I love this time of day for the solitude, long shadows, and fresh moist air, not for endless irrational discussions. More important, I wanted to play quickly and get back home before my wife and daughter noticed I was missing. I took the cart and played 18 holes in an hour and fifty-one minutes. The starter (still employed!) approached me after I putted out on 18 and he said, “Wow, that was fast!”

I told him, “I would have been in my car ten minutes ago if you had let me walk.”

He smiled and said, “I appreciate you being accommodating this morning and I hope you will come back and see us.”

I said, “You have a great golf course here on a beautiful piece of land, but there is not a chance I will be back unless you change your policy on walking.”

 

 

Improve Your Golf Game by Using Luckier Coins

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As I remove my clubs from the trunk of my car and put on my golf shoes (while being semi-careful not to scrape the bumper), I often agonize about which ball markers to carry that day. I have a huge collection, consisting mostly of foreign coins, and I realized recently that I won’t possibly live long enough to make full use of them. During a typical round, I carry between four and six markers in my pocket, and I try to spread the selection around—although I hate to abandon a lucky marker just to be egalitarian. Coaches face this dilemma. You’d like to play everyone on the bench, but, on the other hand, you’d like to win.

The image above shows some of my current favorites. On the far left is a Moroccan 10-dirham coin. The guy in the pointed hat is King Hassan II, who was a tyrant but also a golfaholic. (He wore golf gloves on both hands, and, before swinging, gave his cigarette to a servant, who held it with silver tongs.) Next is a Colombian 200-peso piece. It’s good because it has aiming lines and round things that look like golf holes and golf balls. Then an old Mexican peso—nice because the guy looks strange but also friendly and wise. (And lucky.) Then a Norwegian 5-kroner coin, which has a golf hole in it—get it? Last, on the right, is an Indian 2-rupee coin, which I sometimes use when I absolutely have to two-putt. (There are aiming lines on the other side.)

Here are some more:

The coin on the far left is an old favorite: an Irish 20-pence piece. If I pointed the nose of the horse at my ball when I marked it, the next putt would almost always go in or come very, very close. I stopped using it, though, when I realized how many unused (and potentially even luckier) coins I had in the trunk of my car. (I keep my markers in a yellow plastic tackle box.) Next to it is an Australian 20-cent piece. The image is of a duck-billed platypus swimming around, and the curvy lines—which represent the platypus’s curvy path through the water—seem to go well with putts that break a lot. Then another Australian coin, a dodecahedral one, which I like because the many tiny athletes depicted on it don’t include a golfer. Next is a Moroccan 1-dirham coin, which is good for one-putts (because of the 1). And last is a huge, magnetic, fake-pewter Golf Digest thing, which I used for a while out of company loyalty but then abandoned because what’s with the lion?

Not all my markers are coins or coin-like objects. I also have several thousand souvenir markers—the kind with the prong thing that you stick into the ground:

Of the markers in the picture above, my least favorite is the Starr Pass one, because I have no idea what Starr Pass is and don’t care enough even to Google it. I’ve never used it. My favorite may be the impossible-to-decipher one near the lower right-hand corner. The symbol on it looks a little like the presidential seal, so maybe it belonged to an important government official, up to and possibly including the commander-in-chief. Not depicted is my all-time favorite in this category: my marker from Morefar Golf Club, which I seem to have lost. The one time I played Morefar, there was only one other foursome on the course, and my foursome was stuck behind it. But the slowpoke was the Sultan of Brunei, and, apparently, you’re not allowed to play through him. My consolation was the marker, which I now can’t find. Oh, woe is me.

Hunting in Hazards

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Two examples, from Monday afternoon. That’s a great blue heron in the photo above. It’s looking for dinner at the junction of two streams on the fifteenth hole. And that’s Rick in the photo below, looking for his drive in the lateral to the left of the thirteenth fairway. He, Adam K., Hacker (real name), and I teed off at 4:00, and we had just about run out of daylight by the time we finished, at 7:00. I missed my first opportunity in several months to play golf in a sweater. Oh, well. More opportunities ahead.

I Bought a New Push Cart!

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Trolleys: Brendan, Tim, Tony, Rick, Hillside Golf Club, Birkdale, England, May, 2010.

Two years ago, during a buddies trip to England, I became a convert to what the British call trolleys. My first was a Sun Mountain Micro-Cart, which I gradually customized:

This is my old push cart. If my wife played golf, I’d give it to her.

I ran it pretty hard, for more than a thousand miles, and a couple of months ago a friend commented that it had started to look like a farm vehicle. That’s not manure in the photo below, but I see his point:

Not manure, but almost.

Anyway, a couple of days ago I did something I’d kind of been hoping I’d do: I busted it beyond repair. I was pushing it up the fourth fairway, and suddenly it started wobbling and making a funny noise. Eventually, I realized that a spoke in one of the wheels had broken.

Busted Micro-Cart wheel–at last!

Replacing the wheel probably wouldn’t be expensive, and I’ve been very happy with my Micro-Cart, but I was itching to try something new. So as soon as I got home I ordered a Clicgear 3.0, from Amazon, for a little less than $200. Unfolding and folding it is tricky, but I got the hang of it out after a couple of tries. I’ll be pimping it a bit in the coming weeks, of course. And there are lots of official accessories, several of which I want to buy. More about that later.

My new ride.

My Clicgear 3.0 weighs more than my Micro-Cart, but it actually folds down slightly smaller. That’s important because this year I also bought a new car, which is slightly smaller than my old car. At the moment, I’m dealing with that by throwing all my extra golf junk into the back seat, along with all my other extra junk. Eventually, though, I’ll have to get the trunk organized. So, really, I had no choice but to buy a new cart.

My new cart is heavier than my old cart, but it’s a teensy bit more compact when folded up. Or so I claim.