Golf’s Big Three: Beer, Golf, Beer

Posted on August 22, 2015 by David Owen

I haven’t had a drink more than ten years, but I’m nevertheless one of the world’s leading experts on the effect of alcohol on the golf swing.I’m the originator of the Beer Draw Hypothesis—the difference between a slice and a draw is a certain number of beers—and the author of a lengthy article on the topic which was published in either a distinguished scientific journal (I’m pretty sure) or Golf Digest. I also happen to be a member of the Sunday Morning Group, an all-male golf-club-within-a-golf-club, which contributed to my early research and has made many significant additions to it in the years since I left the field. Among our resident experts are Mike A., in the photo above, and Klinger and Fritz, at this year’s member-guest, in the photo below:

Recently, the Sunday Morning Group had an opportunity to review the products of GolfBeer Brewing Company, which was founded by a threesome of well-known tour players: Keegan Bradley, Freddie Jacobson, and Graeme McDowell. Their slogan is “Crafting the Perfect Round.”

GolfBeer sells three products, tailored to the inborn taste preferences of the founders: a “Scandinavian style” blonde ale called Freddie’s (Jacobson is from Sweden); a “Celtic style” pale ale called G-Mac’s (McDowell is from Northern Ireland); and a “New England style” lager called Keegan Bradley’s (would this be an appropriate place to ask Bradley to abandon his bird-looking-for-a-worm pre-shot routine?).

After golf on a recent Sunday, the boys tried all three. The verdict: big thumbs-up all around, (although Howard wasn’t fond of Keegan Bradley’s).

Sad to say, GolfBeer isn’t available in our area yet. We had to import our samples from Florida, where the company is based, and to be on the safe side we had them shipped as “salad dressing.” But we hope to be able to buy it here soon—ideally, in bulk, so that we can load it into our clubhouse kegerators.

How to Make a Golfer Choke

Posted on July 21, 2015 by David Owen

UNIVERSITY PLACE, WA - JUNE 21: Dustin Johnson of the United States watches his missed birdie putt on the 18th green during the final round of the 115th U.S. Open Championship at Chambers Bay on June 21, 2015 in University Place, Washington. (Photo by David Cannon/Getty Images)

(Photo by David Cannon/Getty Images)

When Dustin Johnson screwed up on the final green at Chambers Bay, avid golfers all over the world wept for him. After all, how many of us, at some point, haven’t three-putted from twelve feet to lose the U.S. Open? My friends and I were especially sympathetic, because we have just about perfected choking. In several of our regular games, we play an add-on feature on the eighteenth hole called All Balls Count—and that does it.

Our eighteenth (which is also our ninth, played from slightly different tees) is theoretically a pushover: a very short par 4, just 250 yards or so, slightly uphill:

But it can be diabolical, because there are trees on both sides, and the green is a redan, and there are lob-devouring bunkers both in front and behind, and out-of-bounds is in play from the tee and the fairway and even the bunkers, and when the hole is cut in the front left corner getting close from almost anywhere can be virtually impossible.

Note the expression of agony on Howard’s face:

Shots like that become even harder when guys are sitting on the picnic benches above the green, watching:

And they become harder still when Hacker (real name) announces on the first tee that, even though we’re playing just one best ball that day, on the eighteenth hole all four scores in every foursome will have to be counted. That can be enough to make even a very good player slice his tee shot into the pine trees on the right, then pound his second shot straight down into the pine straw, then have no choice but to take an unplayable lie (still in the pine straw), then skull his fourth shot into the bunker over the green, and so on.

Meanwhile, all three of his teammates—who are feeling even more pressure not to screw up, since they now know that their team score on the hole is virtually guaranteed to be at least four or five over par—are finding their own ways to implode.

Try it.

Lyme Disease Central: Report From the Field

Posted on July 11, 2015 by David Owen

Hacker (real name), David W., and Peter A.’s wife, Denise, have Lyme disease, and Reese has ehrlichiosis, which my wife and I both had several years ago and which can be thought of as Lyme disease delivered by sledge hammer. (You can get Lyme and ehrlichiosis from the same tick bite, as I did—a nasty combination.) The standard treatment for both diseases is the antibiotic doxycycline; all three are taking it.

When you’re being treated for Lyme, you have to be extra careful about the sun, because doxycycline can make your skin extremely vulnerable to burning. Gene P.’s daughter once went skiing while she was taking it, and even though she wore tinted goggles the sun made the whites of her eyes turn brown. They stayed that way for a few days, too. Reese played golf while he was in treatment—what else was he supposed to do?—but he was careful to wear lots of sunscreen, and he covered up everything he could bear to cover up:

Appropriately, I guess, we declared last Sunday Lip Balm Day, because the people who make Golfersskin, the official sunscreen of the Sunday Morning Group, had sent us a bunch of tubes to try:

I got careless about sunscreen during one of my bouts with Lyme, because it was mid-October and I wasn’t thinking about the sun, and midway through a round of golf I suddenly felt as though my lips had burned off. Never again. Here’s Stanley, who is also a veteran of both Lyme and ehrlichiosis, putting some Golfersskin on, even though it looks like he’s just pulling on his lip:

We had to tee off at 6:30 on Lip Balm Day—an hour early—because our club had created a new event, called Family Day, to encourage more people to become interested in golf, and had scheduled it for 10:00. That was annoying. Still, there were just sixteen of us and more than seventy of them, and getting home earlier than usual turned out to be a good thing because if you fall asleep before noon you’re not taking a nap—you’re just going back to bed. Here are the people who showed up for Family Day:

It’s never too early to teach golf etiquette. The thing we emphasized to the kids is that, if they serve themselves from the Sunday Morning Group’s kegerator, in the storeroom next to the men’s locker room, they need to leave two dollars in the beer-money box. You would not believe how many people “forget” to do that.

A Miraculous Shank, a New Playoff Format, and a Burger Breakthrough

Posted on June 15, 2015 by David Owen

Getting a head count of the Sunday Morning Group is tough, because nobody stands still. Recently, it occurred to me that counting bags might be less confusing than counting heads. On Sunday, we tried it. And it worked! Twenty bags, twenty numbered poker chips in Chic’s hat, five teams of four, two best balls per hole.

The other guys in my foursome were Ben, Hacker (real name), and Tim. On the thirteenth hole, a par 5, Tim shanked his third shot, from 120 yards away. His ball squirted over the wall and into the woods, out of bounds:

We assumed that it was lost forever, but after what seemed like an impossibly long time it ricocheted not just back into play but onto the green, and ended up maybe five feet from the hole:

Tim missed the putt, a side-hill slider, and he figured the miss had cost him a skin, but it turned out that net eagle wouldn’t have been enough, because Mike A., after hitting a lousy second shot, holed his third from 180 yards away, for a net albatross. And those weren’t the only birds we had to deal with:

My teammates and I played so poorly on the first nine that we gave up all hope, and, probably because we had stopped caring, we began to play really well. (Despair is the poor man’s confidence.) We ended up in a tie for first place, at -18. The playoff was lob wedges off a ketchup-bottle lid, from the little patio near the grill to the putting green, closest to the hole. As always, the stymie rule was in effect. Here’s Ben, holding his finish:

And here’s Tim, hitting what turned out to be the winning shot (worth $25 to each of us). His ball ended up just inside the ball of Corey, our terrific pro:

Lunch was provided by Reese, who didn’t play because he’s coming down with what we diagnosed over beers as Lyme disease. He served burger dogs, which he learned about at the Olympic Club a month and a half ago, when Addison (who is Reese’s son) and Todd played in the 2015 U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship. Burger dogs are an Olympic specialty. They are burgers that are shaped like dogs:

Making the patties takes work, Reese said, but fitting them onto the grill is easy:

You have to cut slices of cheese to fit:

You need just one kind of bun, plus mustard, ketchup, pickles, and onions:

We may insist on them from now on.

Is This the World’s Greatest Golf Course?

Posted on June 1, 2015 by David Owen

On Memorial Day weekend, I played Friday afternoon (lost five dollars), Saturday morning (came in third in a two-man scramble, playing with Tim), Saturday afternoon (advanced to the final in the member-member, also playing with Tim), Sunday morning (won six dollars), Monday morning (won low gross in the nine-hole Memorial Day mixed shamble, playing with Madeline—my golf wife—and an actually married couple), and Monday afternoon (lost five dollars). Then I played again on Friday (lost five dollars) and Saturday morning (won the member-member, one-up, playing with Tim.) That was a pretty good eight-day run, so I wasn’t totally bummed when we had thunder, lightning, and heavy rain just before 7:00 the following morning.

I sent an email to the Sunday Morning Group saying I’d bring a couple of decks of playing cards, and Hacker (real name) suggested that we eat our cheeseburgers and hot dogs (supplied by Barney) for breakfast, instead of lunch. But the lightning had stopped by 7:30, so we played golf instead of setback. One very good thing about rain is that it scares away slackers: twenty regulars showed up, and we had the course to ourselves.

Getting soaked was better than inhaling pine pollen—something we’ve done a lot of this spring:

Because I was up early on both Saturday and Sunday, before I left for the club I watched some of the Irish Open — by which, of course, I mean the Dubai Duty Free Irish Open Hosted by the Rory Foundation. The D.D.F.I.O.H.R.F. was held this year on a course that many golfers would pick as the best in the world: Royal County Down, in Newcastle, Northern Ireland.

Among its many memorable features are its bunkers, which are maintained by vengeful demons:

During a round at Royal County Down in 2013, my playing partner and I waded into a jungle of whins and briers near the eleventh tee to look for a century-old relic that a caddie had told me about two years before: the remains of a small stone building, which the maintenance crew had uncovered during an aggressive gorse-removal project. We found it, at some risk to our clothing, although it was so overgrown that we couldn’t see much more than one corner.

Later that day, Harry McCaw—a past captain of both Royal County Down and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews—told me that he thought the structure might once have served as the literal “club house”: the place where early players stored their clubs.

I had driven to Newcastle from Dublin, a hundred miles to the south, and during part of the trip I followed Mourne Coastal Route, a scenic highway. Irish roads are narrow under any circumstances; they become narrower if your eyes are repeatedly drawn to the hills and out to sea—a danger that day, because the sky was so clear that I could see the Isle of Man, halfway to the English mainland.

My parents once visited Ireland with another couple, and on an especially harrowing stretch of road my mother, who was sitting in the back seat with the other wife, yelled at my father to stop steering so close to the edge. He innocently raised both hands, to remind her that, in Ireland and the U.K., the driver sits on the right, not the left. During my own trip, I knocked the cowling off the passenger-side mirror of my rental car. I told the clerk at Avis when I returned the car, but she said it happened all the time, and not to worry about it.

Will the Open Championship ever be held at Royal County Down? Fingers crossed.

How to Hit a Lob Shot From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Posted on May 25, 2015 by David Owen

Recently, the Sunday Morning Group held a shootout in which the prizes were some stuff sent to us by Famous Smoke Shop, our tobacco sponsor and smoking connection, which sells cigars online, by mail order, and in person (at the company’s headquarters and retail super store, in Easton, Pennsylvania). The format was lob wedge over the patio to the practice green, closest to the pin, from the bed of Fritz’s pickup truck. The prizes were a cutter, a butane lighter, a humidor, and a handful of cigars. The cutter, the lighter, and the humidor had the awesome logo of one of Famous Smoke Shop’s subsidiary websites, CigarMonster, which sells cigar-related gear. The cigars were Infernos.

Fritz backed his truck up to the fence and dropped the tailgate. The truck’s bed has a plastic liner—good for spin. Climbing into the truck while holding a wedge, a ball, and a beer took some doing. Here’s Hacker (real name) using the bumper as a step:

And here’s Nick P., taking a shot:

Nick’s ball didn’t stay on the green, so he didn’t win anything, but he did earn points for bringing lunch, including an SMG semi-first: barbecued chicken.

Mike A. and Peter A. came in first and second in the cigar shootout, and took the cutter and the lighter, respectively. Chic came in third and took the Cigar Monster humidor:

Chic is our golf chairman. One Sunday, he came close to shooting his pants: waist size on the front, inseam on the back.

After the shootout, we held a quick meeting to decide whether to play a second eighteen or go home and do chores (i.e., take a nap).

How He Hit That: My Pitching Wedge from Jimmy Kimmel’s Teeth

Posted on February 9, 2015 by David Owen

A dozen years ago, in an effort to scientifically determine the effect of alcohol on the golf swing, Golf Digest sent me and three of my regular golf buddies—Barney, Jim, and Hacker (real name)—to Las Vegas for four days, and gave us unlimited access to golf, casinos, and beer. They also recruited a second foursome, whose members included Jimmy Kimmel (then of the Man Show) and Carson Daly (then of MTV).

The format was nine-hole scramble. On the fourthtee, Barney made a rude noise in my backswing, and Kimmel said, “If Sal had asked me beforehand, ‘What are the chances that one of them will fart before one of us?’, I would have said a million to one.” After that, we were pals. On the fifthtee, Kimmel asked me, “Do you meet a lot of lesbians in your line of work?” On the seventh hole, he drove a cart onto the green, parked it next to the hole, and asked, “Am I in anyone’s line?”

Playing nine holes took four hours, during which the average intake was a dozen beers and a couple of Bloody Marys. My friends and I won the match (five-up, two under par), and when it was over Hacker threw a pair of golf shoes belonging to one of them into the lake. Then Kimmel lay on the ground, placed a ball on a tee clenched between his teeth, and let me hit it with a pitching wedge:

Here’s how I hit that shot: I don’t remember. You can read about the whole adventure here.

Is This Idea So Crazy That It Just Might Work?

Posted on January 24, 2015 by David Owen

Not long ago, I received a promotional email from a golf course my friends and I have often played during the winter, called Lyman Orchards. That got my hopes up—but the email wasn’t an announcement that the course had re-opened; it was an invitation to celebrate “National Pie Day” with “a Free 6-inch Pie.” And the pie wasn’t really even free, since you had to buy twenty-five dollars’ worth of other crap in order to get it. And then the weather turned almost vengeful: driving rain and sub-freezing temperatures. And then we got snow.

I’ve been passing this golf-free period by working—or “working”—and, when I think of it, throwing birdseed onto the hill outside my back door. And one day I noticed something interesting: the birds, with all their frenzied wing-flapping and hopping-around as they pushed and shoved each other to get at the seed, had cleared almost all the snow from the area where I’d been feeding them:

That made me wonder: could bird power be harnessed to keep golf courses open during the winter? Spread birdseed with crop-dusting planes, which can’t have anything better to do until spring, and let birds take it from there? Fairways and greens only, to keep costs down? I don’t know; I’m not an ornithologist. But let’s try it.

When my wife was in third grade, her Brownie leader didn’t believe her when she said there was a bird with “tit” in its name, but my wife was right, and the photo above is proof. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, on a day when there was no functioning golf course within a hundred miles of where we live, the Sunday Morning Group went out to dinner, at a sports bar called 1st and 10.

Hacker (real name) ordered something that isn’t on the menu anymore but that the chef will make for you if you know to ask for it:

It’s two hot dogs split the long way and wrapped in a tortilla with chili, bacon, cheese, and some other stuff, then dipped in batter and deep-fried—and it comes with fries. I asked our waitress why it wasn’t still on the menu, and she said they took it off because no one but Hacker had ever ordered it.

Quite a few guys showed up that night. One who didn’t was Stanley. The day before, he had reported, by email: “Had a golfer’s knee installed on Monday. Now rehabbing. Legs the same length.” Hacker visited him a couple of days later:

Golfers who have knee replacements often figure they ought to get more handicap strokes. But shouldn’t they actually lose strokes, to make up for how much better they feel? When I suggested that to the group, Stanley disagreed. “I have no doubt that the U.S.G.A. will soon ban this device,” he wrote from the rehab center. “However, my knee was installed prior to the change and is therefore grandfathered.” We’ll see.

The other thing we’ve been doing this winter is working on our relationship with our first (and, so far, only) official sponsor: Jagermeister. Our sweatshirts are at the embroidery shop right now, because we’re having our names and some other stuff added to them. Even so, we’ve had a measurable impact on sales. A bridge partner of mine in Mississippi, who doesn’t play golf but does read my blog, wrote to say that he is seriously thinking about buying a bottle. And Other Gene’s wife, Diana, recently ordered some in a restaurant.

Just the beginning, my friend. Just the beginning.

Beating the Snow, Plus Exclusive Footage of a Rare 86-stroke Penalty

Posted on January 4, 2015 by David Owen

The forecast for Sunday was terrible, but the one for Saturday was pretty good—“snow and ice, then rain; fog”—so we shifted our Sunday game to Saturday. There were several guys standing around outside the golf shop at Candlewood Valley when we arrived: never a good sign:

The problem was that the temperature was only a few degrees below freezing, and the superintendent was worried that the greens might not be frozen solid enough for him to ignore the frost. He went out to inspect the course, and we went out for breakfast, at a diner down the road. Then we came back and hung out in the golf shop, to await the superintendent’s verdict:

We also chatted up some of the other guys who were waiting. This guy, whose name is Greg, showed me a gadget called a PutterDart, which he sells and may have invented. It has lots of uses. There’s no PutterDart webpage, and Greg doesn’t seem to be on Facebook, but if you’re interested in learning more you can get in touch with him at PutterDart@aol.com.

We got the all-clear, finally, at 10:00. Ed Slattery, the head pro, said we could play as a fivesome. He also let us start on the tenth hole, so we had plenty of empty golf course ahead of us.

Addison was wearing shorts, so, in accordance with our winter rules, he got to be a 2 instead of a 0. But his socks were so tall that they functioned almost like pants, and to keep them from sliding down to his ankles he was holding them up with the rubber bands from two bunches of asparagus—which provided exactly the right amount of tension, he said. At some point, I guess, the Committee will have to rule on maximum sock height, as well as on artificial support.

The Housatonic River, which runs through the course, was flowing, but the puddles and ponds were all frozen:

On our ninth hole, Other Gene incurred a rare 86-stroke penalty, for repeatedly grounding his club after hitting his tee shot into a hazard:

We kept a weather eye on the weather with Raindar, my favorite Android precipitation monitor:

And, luckily, despite our one-hour frost delay, the snow didn’t reach us until we were making our way up the fairway on our seventeenth hole:

Even on our eighteenth, putting was still possible:

A final swig of Jagermeister, the official cold-weather intoxicant of the Sunday Morning Group, in the parking lot:

Then lunch at the Cookhouse —where, once again, we ran into the PutterDart guy. He was hard to recognize without that hat:

Can Ski Gloves Cure the Yips? How to Dress for Sub-freezing Golf

Posted on January 3, 2015 by David Owen

On New Year’s Day, fifteen of us played the Red Course at the Wheel. The temperature was 20 when I woke up and 25 when we teed off, and it never got to more than a degree or two above freezing. Our cars were virtually the only ones in the parking lot when we started, so the guy at the desk (who took the photo below) said we could play as five threesomes, three fivesomes, two seven-and-a-halfsomes, whatever. We played as three fivesomes.

The festive cardboard glasses that everyone’s wearing in the photo above were a seasonally appropriate gift from Chic, who is the chairman of our golf club:

The ground was so hard that getting tees into it was a problem. Shouldn’t there be a power tool for this?

We always award two extra handicap strokes to anyone who wears shorts after December 1. Only Fritz did on New Year’s—a seemingly reckless decision, but a profitable one, because his team won:

Fritz said later that only has face had been cold. If I’d worn shorts, I’d have gotten a handicap stroke on the Money Hole, so dressing rationally cost me ten bucks. I don’t regret that, though, because I was comfortable for the entire round. After many years of playing golf in bad weather, I’ve figured out what I need to wear to stay warm. As always, I dressed in layers, so that I could take stuff off if I got hot and put it back on if I got cold again—although on New Year’s I didn’t take anything off until we were finished.

I wore three long-sleeve shirts, the first of which was very thin and two of which were turtlenecks. All three were made of synthetic stuff. Here’s the one I wore on top, by Under Armour:

On top of that, I wore my brand-new Sun Mountain Tour Series Rain Jacket, which I love. There was no rain in the forecast, but rainsuits are good for wind, too, and we had plenty of that: 20 miles per hour all day:

My Sun Mountain rain jacket reminds me of my Galvin Green rain jacket, which I also love, but the Sun Mountain jacket sells for less than half as much. One of its best features is that it’s extra long, so that it can’t ride up, We’ve had a fair amount of rain so far this winter, in addition to the other stuff, and I’ve happily worn the jacket many times. I like everything about it:

On top of the rain jacket, I wore a Uniqlo Ultra Light down vest. Wearing a down vest over three shirts and a jacket made me look like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, but the vest really is ultra light, and because it doesn’t have sleeves it doesn’t get in the way of a golf swing. I keep it in a Ziploc bag in my golf bag all winter, for emergencies. It squishes down to such a tiny package that last year I forgot to take it out when the weather got warm again:

I own long johns in three different “weights.” On New Year’s Day, I wore the mediums. They aren’t really long johns; they’re actually running pants, or something, for men who don’t mind being seen in public in tights. They work like long johns, though:

On top of those, I wore rain pants. One of the keys to successful rain-pants-wearing, I think, is to wear them as pants—over bare legs if it’s warm, over long johns if it’s not. Another key: suspenders. Wearing suspenders with rain pants keeps the pants from sliding down when you stuff a gloved hand into your pocket to retrieve a tee or a ball marker. In fact, rain pants should have built-in straps. My suspenders have plastic grippers, which I think are gentler on expensive waterproof fabric than metal grippers are. They also supposedly won’t set off airport security equipment, should you choose to adopt a totally suspenders-based lifestyle:

On my neck and part of my head, I wore a Gore-Tex Buff, which may be my single favorite cold-weather accessory. A Buff is a tube of fabric. You can wear it in a million different ways, and if you get really cold you can pull it up (or down) over your face. The guy who invented it got the idea after wearing a pair of underpants on his head to keep his ears from freezing while he rode his motorcycle:

On top of my head I wore a regular golf cap, and on top of that I wore a bright orange knit cap from Cabela’s, which sells stuff to hunters:

On my feet, I wore two pairs of wool socks, one of which was pretty thick. The kind I like best are made by SmartWool. The great thing about wool, whether it’s smart or not, is that it keeps you warm even if it gets wet:

I had room for both pairs of socks because I was also wearing my super-comfortable True Linkswear Chukka golf shoes — a style the company seems to have dropped, I’m sorry to say. (True Gent Chukkas, which the company does sell, are not the same.) I now own eight or ten pairs of True golf shoes. I love them all, and the Chukkas are among my favorites, except when I’m wearing shorts:

On my hands I wore two pairs of golf gloves: a pair of FootJoy Rain Grips, which are thin, and, on top of those, my favorite winter golf gloves ever, HJ Winter Xtremes.

You might think that wearing two pairs of gloves would reduce your so-called “touch,” especially on the greens, but if it does anything it probably has the opposite effect. Debbie Crews, who is the sports-psychology consultant for the women’s golf team at Arizona State University and the chair of the World Scientific Conference of Golf, sometimes tells golfers with the yips to try putting (in her lab) with ski gloves on. They usually putt so much better that it’s amazing,” she told me, “because they can’t manipulate.” I wrote about Crews and her research last year, in an article about the yips for The New Yorker. You can read it here.

Afterwards, lunch, of course.

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

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