Unbroken (by the Stupid Weather)

Posted on December 23, 2014 by David Owen

My home course has been closed since shortly before Thanksgiving, so we’ve been playing around. I was traveling (without golf clubs) two Sundays ago, but everyone else played at Tunxis Plantation, which is about an hour from where we live, and last Sunday we went back. I rode with Other Gene. Snow was falling when we left home, and it continued to fall as we drove, and when we were maybe fifteen minutes from Tunxis I realized that it was probably going to keep falling and not melt by the time we got there. And that’s what happened. So we held a conference in the parking lot:

We called every golf course we could think of and discovered that Fairchild Wheeler, in Fairfield, was not only open but “with greens.” The Wheel is just an hour from Tunxis, so that’s where we went. Tim showed up as we were pulling out, but he decided to be a good husband by returning home and giving his wife holiday-related opportunities to be angry at him in person. When the rest of us arrived at the Wheel, a maintenance guy with a leaf blower was removing snow from a putting surface:

We played the Black. The young woman at the desk in the golf shop let us go out as a fivesome after Hacker (real name) assured her that we would play faster than any threesome on the course. And he was telling the truth, because there was a threesome directly ahead of us and we waited on pretty much every shot, including this one, on a long par 3:

Hacker and I took on Gene, Gary, and Kevin (who was visiting from law school). We beat them by three shots, but rather than pocketing our winnings we used them to pay for most of everybody’s lunch.

During the cheeseburger course, Gene suggested that we adopt some kind of ongoing off-season competition, analogous to the FedEx Cup, and we all agreed that that was a good idea. Recently, I wrote about some guys in Massachusetts who call themselves the Winter Tour because they play all winter. Borrowing that name seemed easier than making up a new one, so that’s what we decided to do. Hacker, as always, will devise the format and the scoring system; my assignment is to talk to the people who make Jagermeister—the official cold-weather intoxicant of the Sunday Morning Group—and persuade them to become the Winter Tour’s lead sponsor.

If they give us just hats, say, we’ll agree to call ourselves something like “the Winter Tour of the Sunday Morning Group (in association with Jagermeister).”

But if they give us shirts in addition to hats, plus maybe some actual Jagermeister, we’d be willing to go as far as “the Jagermeister Tour (in association with the Sunday Morning Group).” Their choice. And if they’re really accommodating we’ll add their logo to all our other branded merchandise, including our regular hats and our bumper stickers.

The company’s headquarters are closed till after the New Year (when the Winter Tour will be playing at Shennecossett, in Groton ) so the actual negotiations won’t begin until then. I’m assuming there won’t be a problem. I’ll post an update as soon as I have the details.

Two Easy Ways to Speed Up Golf

Posted on December 1, 2014 by David Owen

My golf course closed for the season on the Monday before Thanksgiving. The day before that, thirteen guys showed up for the final 2014 home-course meeting of the Sunday Morning Group. I wasn’t there, because I was on my way home from a non-golf reporting assignment in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California—poor life-management on my part. The following Sunday, though, Hacker (real name), Mike B., Gary, Ray, three of Ray’s friends from other clubs, and I played at Fairchild Wheeler Golf Course, a 36-hole facility owned by the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut:

The Wheel (as it’s known to friends) is the main winter golf hangout for a lot of guys in our region, because it’s so close to the coast that it doesn’t get much snow. It’s where S.M.G. played last year on New Year’s Day:

The Wheel is also the home of an extremely successful chapter of The First Tee, which served more than 600 kids last summer:

One of the volunteer coaches is Richard Hunt, an honorary S.M.G. member. That’s him at the far left in the photo below, which was taken at Twisted Dune during S.M.G.’s fifteenth annual golf trip to Atlantic City, in October:

Each summer for the past ten years, Richard has spent his Saturday afternoons at the Wheel introducing youngsters to golf. This year, his First Tee chapter named a trophy after him: the Coach Rick Award, which goes to the scoring champions in the Ace/Birdie division. (He’s also pretty good at teaching grownups; he’s a marketing consultant in Manhattan, and he oversees the Venture Creation Program at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, where he is a mentor-in-residence.)

A couple of weeks ago, Richard attended the U.S.G.A.’s Pace of Play Symposium, at which two dozen speakers spent two days talking about how to make golf go faster. “I thought the event was quite valuable,” Richard (who took the photo below) told me. “This is exactly the kind of thing they need to do ‘for the good of the game.'”

Richard’s report:

Turns out, there are way more problems than your buddy plumb-bobbing his third putt. A major culprit is tee-time spacing, which is way too short at most public courses, and even in professional events. The L.P.G.A. did a test this year, and was able to reduce playing times an average of fourteen minutes per round just by moving tee times slightly farther apart, from ten minutes to eleven, and asking players to keep up with the group in front of them. Easy stuff. In addition, course setup, design, and facility management policies are all either part of the problem or part of the solution.

When I was in Arizona, I had dinner with my old friend Shelby Futch, the world’s greatest golf teacher, whose company owns several courses in the Scottsdale area. At one of them, Shelby reduced playing times by offering forty dollars in grill-room credit to each day’s first group if they finished in less than four hours, and by asking the groups behind them to keep up. Easy stuff.

I asked Richard whether the kids he teaches play quickly—and, sad to say, he said they don’t:

Trust me—we don’t teach them to play slow. Yet on late summer Saturday afternoons, during our team matches, my young charges struggle to beat darkness every week. I myself blame CBS, NBC, and the Golf Channel. Maybe Fox will only show golfers in action next year, instead of repose.

Easy stuff.

Uh-oh: What’s That White Stuff on My Golf Course?

Posted on November 25, 2014 by David Owen

There wasn’t much snow to begin with, and most of what there was had melted by Saturday, but Gary, our terrific superintendent, closed the course temporarily, because it was so cold that the remaining snow and the frost were unlikely to go away before dark. That didn’t affect me directly, because I’m traveling without my clubs for a little over a week, on a reporting assignment that’s only tangentially related to golf. It didn’t affect Hacker (real name), either, because he had decided that, paradoxically, playing golf for three consecutive days with a broken finger had made the finger worse, not better. Still— and I think I speak for everyone—I am opposed to any form of weather that causes golf to be suspended. And then, on Monday, Gary closed our course for the season.

Before our mini-storm hit, I had an opportunity to test two new pieces of equipment. Both are from eBags, one of a select group of companies for which I am an unpaid shill. The first item is the eBags Crew Cooler II:

It was designed as carry-on luggage for pilots and flight attendants, but it’s perfectly suited to golf. It has an insulated cold compartment with a removable—and replaceable—waterproof liner, for beer and ice; it has a zippered top insulated compartment for stuff that doesn’t have to be kept super cold, like sandwiches and Snickers bars; and it has lots of other useful features, including two mesh pouches, on the sides, for beverage bottles. It also has a slot on the back that lets you slide the whole thing onto a roller bag so that you can make it do double duty as a carry-on bag when you fly somewhere nice to play golf:

I attached mine to my pushcart by tightening the shoulder strap around my golf bag:

By doing that, I solved an age-old alcohol-transport problem, which Matt Manco, a reader in Louisiana, once addressed from the other direction, using his Sun Mountain Micro-Cart:

Just above my Crew Cooler I attached another recent acquisition: an eBags Padded Pouch—the blue thing in the photo below. It contains my laser rangefinder, and I like it much better than the case that came with the rangefinder, because it’s softer (though padded!) and it doesn’t stick out as much. I used a little carabiner to attach it to the towel ring on my bag, along with (as you can see) a lot of other stuff:

Padded Pouches come in sets of three, and they’re incredibly useful for carrying or packing smallish delicate or annoying items, like phones, cameras, chargers, cables, batteries, power cords, whatever:

I’ve got six, and I traveled with four of them last week, including one that I filled with the CDs of the audio version of Book Three of A Game of Thrones, which I listened to as I spent a week driving through Arizona, Nevada, and Southern California.

Late-season Golf Breakthrough: Leaf Stymies

Posted on November 8, 2014 by David Owen

The golf world abandoned stymies in 1963, but the Sunday Morning Group keeps them alive, sort of, by using them in playoffs, which we conduct on our practice green. On New Year’s Day in 2013, we invented a new version, ball-marker stymies, in which the old stymie rule applies on every green, but to ball markers instead of balls:

On Wednesday, we invented yet another new version: leaf stymies. Gary, our terrific superintendent (shown stymied by my ball marker in the photo above, which was taken at Dyker Beach, in Brooklyn), keeps our course remarkably free of leaves, but when the wind blows hard he and his crew can’t possibly keep up, especially on greens with overhanging oak trees. Removing leaves from everyone’s line takes forever, and then the wind just blows them back, so we decided: screw it. From now on, the leaves stay where they are:

Remarkably, having even a lot of leaves in the way does very little to a putt. Here’s Rick trying for birdie on the fourth green:

Check Out Our Revolutionary New Rainproof and Sweat-proof Golf Scorecards

Posted on November 4, 2014 by David Owen

Hacker (real name) was questionable for our Friday-morning game, because he’d broken the middle finger on his left hand while using his wood-splitter:

Also, it was raining. But he played anyway, and so did Barney, Tim, and I. We had the course to ourselves:

Barney and Tim, in the rain, Friday, October 31, 2014.

Hacker discovered that his finger didn’t hurt nearly as much if he used a baseball grip. Here’s a perfectly square divot he took on the fourth hole (that’s his tee in the middle of it):

The rain wasn’t a problem, because we were using one of our new waterproof scorecards. (You can watch a video demonstration at the bottom of this post.) Our waterproof cards look exactly like our regular scorecards, but they don’t get soggy or fall apart, and you can write on them when they’re soaking wet, using a regular pencil—and then you can erase what you’ve written, using the same pencil. In fact, the wetter they are the better they work. Here’s the card we used on Friday, strapped to my pushcart:

Our field test went great, and I double-checked the result by driving home with the card stuck to my windshield:

Our waterproof scorecards were printed for us by PrintWorks, the official stationers of the Sunday Morning Group. We didn’t actually invent them; we stole the idea from Todd Petrey, a caddie at Bandon Dunes. Petrey graduated from the University of Florida 1992 with a degree in sports therapy, and tried to play golf professionally for a while. He began caddying when he was short of cash, and one of the places he worked was East Lake, in Atlanta, where the weather is so disgustingly hot and humid that scorecards sometimes dissolve in perspiration. To deal with that problem, and also with rain, he invented Drycards. (“Like a normal scorecard, only better because you can use it as a coaster.”) Petrey also invented Signsocks, temporary road-sign covers used in highway construction projects.

Ray, Tony, and I first saw Drycards while playing 10 rounds in the rain at Bandon in 2007. Last year, I tried to get in touch with Petrey, to order a batch for S.M.G., but as near as I can tell he’s no longer in business. (He doesn’t seem to be selling Signsocks anymore, either.) So I took an old Bandon Drycard down to my basement and reverse-engineered it —which is to say, I ordered a supply of synthetic paper (the secret ingredient) from Amazon, and Hacker and I took it to PrintWorks. Here’s how it works:

Golf and Condoms in Atlantic City

Posted on October 27, 2014 by David Owen

This year was the crystal anniversary of the Sunday Morning Group’s annual end-of-season golf-only trip to Atlantic City. The first A.C. trip was organized by Barney in 2000, when, for some reason, everyone looked younger than they do today:

Four of the guys in that picture went on this year’s trip, too: Hacker (real name), Rick, Tim, and me. (Hacker and I are the only ones who have been on all fifteen.) Two of the guys in the picture are dead: John and Uncle Frank. John’s son, Mike, was on this year’s trip, and when he laughs he sounds almost exactly like his father. Our main A.C. competition, the Attardi Cup, was named in memory of Uncle Frank:

We always open our A.C. trips to friends from outside our club, and even to friends of friends. This has beneficially expanded our acquaintance with overweight middle-aged men from beyond our immediate geographical area, and has led to some interesting matchups. This year, six of the twenty guys on the trip were from other clubs— including Richard. He and I lived on the same floor of the same dormitory for two years in college, but didn’t meet until last year, at our thirty-fifth reunion. Now he’s an honorary member of S.M.G.:

Our guest policy has occasionally led to problems. One year, one of the guys invited an old high-school friend of his, whom he hadn’t seen in a long time. The old friend, who began drinking as soon as he got into Hacker’s car, bought a dozen condoms at a convenience store during a refueling stop. “I don’t know why I buy these things,” he said. “I never use them.” Then he stashed the box under his seat and forgot all about it. A week after we got back, Hacker’s wife discovered the condoms and—here’s the problem—didn’t believe, even for a minute, that they belonged to any of us. I guess she knew that, even in A.C., our bad behavior is limited to things like ordering beer with breakfast:

And playing as a ninesome:

Speaking of condoms: the first time I bought them I asked for seven, a number that, after virtually endless reflection, had struck me as the sort of nonchalant-sounding quantity that a seasoned purchaser might request. (I was sixteen.) The pharmacist replied that they were sold in either packages of three or boxes of a dozen. I said that, in that case, I would take nine. He said that, in that case, I might as well take a dozen, since the cost was about the same. I said oh, all right, sure, why not, hell, let’s make it a dozen—but I came very close, at that moment, to going back to just being a kid.

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:

A Visit to our Enemy Club, and Jimmy’s Brilliant Idea

Posted on August 20, 2014 by David Owen

Addison, Rick, Other Gene. Enemy Club, August 9, 2014.

Our course was closed for the women’s eighteen-hole member-guest, so Addison, Rick, Other Gene, and I played a round at our enemy club, on the far side of town. We have a semi-reciprocal arrangement with them, and some of their holes have nice views of our state’s second largest natural lake, but I don’t love their course. For Addison, Rick, and me, the visit was partly a scouting mission for our upcoming annual two-day home-and-home match against ten of their guys, but we were happy to return to our own club the next day. Among many other reasons: we don’t necessarily have a rule against groups larger than foursomes.

We also have highly a developed spirit of camaraderie. For example, here’s Addison helping Hacker (real name) search for his second shot in the weeds to the right of the first green (where Addison sometimes hits his first shot):

One day last summer, Peter A. brought Wayne, an acquaintance of his, as a guest. Wayne was on the golf team at a big university many years ago, but hadn’t played much since. He was so rusty that day that he actually missed his ball on his first attempt at a tee shot, but Barney said you could tell he was a player from the quality of his whiff. Afterward, at lunch—hot dogs and hamburgers provided by one of the guys, and cooked on the grill in the executive parking lot, outside the men’s-room window—Wayne asked if it was really true that our clubhouse doesn’t have a restaurant. When we said that it was, he said, “This is the club for me,” and joined. We don’t have a bar, either, unless you count the fridge in the men’s locker room and our two kegerators:

Last Sunday, for unknown reasons, one of the kegerators began serving a sort of accidental microbrew, which, if we had decided to market it, we might have called Old Warm & Flat. The guys decided to deal with it by drinking to the bottom of that keg as quickly as possible, and loading another:

During lunch that day, Jimmy—who is in his early twenties and, as a consequence, usually has trouble getting up early enough on Sunday to play golf with us in the morning—had a truly brilliant idea. I realized as I was writing this that I can’t tell you, yet, exactly what his idea is, except to say that it involves these trees:

The U.S.G.A. and R&A Should Adopt This Playoff Format (Among Other Things)

Posted on July 30, 2014 by David Owen

Hacker (real name) came up fifteen dollars short on Sunday—something that hardly ever happens. He doesn’t count the money when he collects it before the Sunday Morning Group tees off, and he doesn’t keep track of who has paid and who hasn’t, yet the total is almost always exactly right. I know that I wasn’t the one who forgot to pay, because I’ve been on Martha’s Vineyard with my family. I’ve played golf just once, at Farm Neck Golf Club, the course I shared last summer with my close personal friend the President of the United States:

There’s a new sign near the first green:

They used to ask people to play in four hours and fifteen minutes; four hours is better, although three and a half would be better still. I went as a single, and was grouped with a retired guy and two of his grandsons, who were in high school. They hadn’t played much golf before, but both of them were baseball players, and every so often they really clobbered the ball.

I had missed the previous Sunday at home, too, because I was playing in a two-day amateur tournament at Richter Park Golf Course, a terrific muny about forty minutes from where I live. Three S.M.G. guys—Rick, Tony, and I—played in the senior division, and we did pretty well:

After 25 holes, I was tied, for about five seconds, with the guy who eventually won, but then I had some problems, including a quadruple bogey (from the middle of the fairway) on the eleventh hole. Still, the tournament was fun. And the guys who didn’t play at Richter had fun, too, because on Sunday S.M.G. had its first playoff of the year, after three teams tied at 16 under par. I’m kind of sorry I wasn’t there, because our playoff formats are the best in golf. On Sunday, the guys came up with a new one, in which the tied players had to sit in a chair on the patio and throw a ball onto the practice green by bouncing it off a picnic-table bench, closest to the hole:

Hacker (who took the photo above, and the one at the top of this post) sent me a report:

Barney chose the bench to bounce the ball off of, and we made the guys sit on the far side of the round table, about nine feet from the bench. The stymie rule was in effect, as always, and we decided that any ball would count, even if it was off the green. We were worried at first that no one would be able to hit the bench, but that turned out not to be an issue, because Stan was the only one who missed it.

I’ll be back home soon—too late for that playoff, but just in time for the Men’s Member-Guest.

Pink Flags, Black Raspberries, and a Surprise Party for Hacker (Real Name)

Posted on July 14, 2014 by David Owen

On Friday afternoon, all the flags, flagsticks, and cup liners were pink, because that morning the women had held their nine-hole member-guest tournament (with a field of ten). Nine of us teed off at 2:15, when it was safely over. This spring, Gary, our superintendent, switched us to red, white, and blue flags, to show front, middle, and back hole locations, and some of the guys were confused, at first, by the pink flags, which from a distance looked red. The cup liners were a pulsing, electric pink, and they were so bright that they drew my putts into the hole, I felt. But some of the other guys experienced a repellent effect.
Growing near the lower tee on our fourth hole is a big wild-black-raspberry bush:

A longtime member of our club, whose name was Ed, used to pee there regularly, to discourage poaching, but he’s been dead for several years now, so it’s safe to eat them. They’re rich in antioxidants, and so forth.

Our round was timed to keep Hacker occupied while his wife and daughters, against his wishes, made preparations for a surprise seventieth birthday party for him in the clubhouse. We made the turn exactly when we were supposed to, and we merged two of our threesomes into a sixsome when it seemed that we might finish before the guests had arrived.

The only close call came on the fifteenth tee, when Joe and I realized that we could hear Hacker’s wife giving directions to her helpers on the clubhouse porch. (She used to be a gym teacher, as did Hacker, and she knows how to make herself heard.) But Joe and I drowned her out by making a succession of stupid remarks, and the danger passed.

Hacker figured things out as we were coming down the eighteenth fairway. A large group of non-golfers was standing on the terrace above the green, and he realized that the people who for some reason were watching us play golf included his daughters, his wife’s siblings, and all four of his grandchildren.

The party food, which had been planned by his wife and daughters, included french fries, miniature cheeseburgers, and make-your-own ice-cream sundaes—all Sunday Morning Group staples.

There were also sausages, shrimp on skewers, pigs in blankets, big platters of antipasto, and lots of other things. (On one table there was a platter of vegetable-type items, but I believe they were decorations.) Hacker had thought that we were going to order pizza from Nancy’s restaurant and play night golf, so the party surprised him even more than it might have. But the night golf happened anyway, as soon as it got dark, so everything worked out.

My Usual Game: David Owen

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