Solstice Marathon: 101 Holes in 15 Hours, All Walking

Posted on June 24, 2014 by David Owen

To celebrate the official arrival of summer, my friends and I played golf on Monday from can to can’t—from when you can see until you can’t. Seven of us teed off at 5:00 a.m., when it was just light enough to follow a ball most of the way to the dogleg in the first fairway, and about thirty minutes later we were joined by Peter A., who had just discovered that he didn’t know how to set his alarm clock. He played by himself until he had caught up. Here’s Hacker (real name) getting ready to hit the day’s opening drive:

We had to play around the sprinklers for a while:

Gary, our superintendent, stopped by to see how things were going, and we tried to talk him into joining us:

After the first eighteen holes, we drove to the coffee shop on the village green for breakfast. After the next twenty-seven, we made ourselves cheeseburgers and hot dogs on the grill in the parking lot next to the clubhouse. We also stopped occasionally to change socks, shoes, and shirts. I flipped my socks every time we passed the clubhouse, so that they would dry evenly:

The day was hot, humid, and mostly windless. Several guys came and went. Tim played the first eighteen, then went home and worked, then came back and played the last eleven. (He said that the unusual parts of a solstice marathon are the beginning and the end, and that he already knew what it’s like to play in the middle of the day.) Here’s Tim, during the final nine, carrying a golf bag with the logo of the Sunday Morning Group’s unofficial marathon golf-shoe provider:

We played on foot, and we played fast—my threesome averaged an hour and ten minutes per nine all day long—but I never felt that we were hurrying. The key is that we didn’t fool around: no practice swings, very little ball-marking, no obsessive putt-reading, no brooding about yardages on holes we play all the time, no standing around waiting for someone else to hit. When you play that way, you don’t have time to get in your own way, mentally. And, as is usually the case, everyone played extremely well. My second round was my best of the year so far (72). Addison was 8-under, gross, for the day. Here’s one of Addison’s tee shots on No. 9, a short par 4:

We finished at 8 p.m. Addison, David W., and I managed 101 holes, all walking. (That was roughly sixty-six thousand steps, two hundred and seventy flights of stairs, and thirty-five miles, according to my Fitbit.) Hacker achieved his goal of “walking and carrying my age,” which is about to be seventy. He switched to a cart after seventy-two holes, played nine more riding, and followed us to the end in the staff cart, with Mike A. driving:

The competition was a ringer tournament, in which a player counted only his best net score on each of the eighteen holes—a format that gave an appropriate advantage to those who played the most holes. David W. was first, at -17; I was second, at -16; and Addison was third, at -15. Here’s my scorecard for the day (the pink spots are Powerade):

While we were eating lunch, we got to watch one of the later stages of another golf marathon, featuring our club’s oldest member. His wife had brought him over, and had had a great deal of difficulty getting him from their car to the practice green. She had brought his putter and a Ziploc bag containing about a dozen old balls, which she placed on the green near his feet. Putting the dozen balls took him a long time. When he was finished, I helped her get him back to their car. Then they drove home.

Postscript: Patrick Kroos, a German golfer and blogger whose main current project is persuading non-Swedes to travel to Sweden to play golf, wrote me to tell me about a German tournament called the HundertLochPokal, or HuLoPo, which means “Hundred-Hole Cup.” He wrote: “One of my golf friends made a nice video of the 2013 edition. Even if you do not understand German, you can see the agony.” You can watch the video here.

The Ideal Scorecard for a Tensome, Plus a Record Turnout

Posted on June 20, 2014 by David Owen

We had thirty guys on Sunday, which was both Father’s Day and the final round of the U.S. Open. Thirty is a record for us, so we took a photo (see above). We chose teams the way we always do, by drawing numbered poker chips from a hat, but we had only twenty-four chips, so we had to fudge things. That evening, at home, Rick made us six more.

I was on the lookout for guys who hadn’t been able to play because it was Father’s Day—a sore point for me—but according to my informal investigation there was only one: young Dr. Mike, who was said to be absent for reasons related not only to Father’s Day but also to his wife and tennis. Reese and Addison weren’t there, either, but they (along with Addison’s brother, Harris, who works in the golf shop part-time) were in Pittsburgh visiting their father/grandfather, also Reese, who is ninety-two. He can’t play anymore, but he rode in the cart while his son and grandsons played, so no one missed any golf:

Addison and Harris’s other grandfather is also a golfer. In fact, he was the No. 1 player on the golf team at Wake Forest at a time when the No. 2 player was Arnold Palmer. His name is Ray, and he still plays. Here’s what he looked like in his prime:

Because Sunday was the final day of a major, the Sunday Morning Group used the scorecard from the course where the major was being played, Pinehurst, instead of our own. I won a skin on No. 18 because on the Pinehurst card I get a stroke on that hole, and the stroke turned my miracle eagle (approach shot into the hole) into a miracle net hole-in-one.

So good for me. (Pinehurst, like a number of clubs, assigns handicap stroke indexes in a dumb way, and I will write about that at some point.) This coming Sunday, we’ll be back to using our very own, brand-new Sunday Morning Group scorecard. It was designed mainly by Hacker (real name). Here he is, studying a proof:

Our new card is much smaller than our old card—just 3.25 by 5 inches once it’s folded in half—but it has enough spaces for a tensome, or for a fivesome playing five simultaneous games:

The cards were created for us by PrintWorks, a small graphic-design and printing shop in the next town. This is Doug, who runs the shop with his mother. He cheerfully put up with dozens of picky last-minute design changes:

Doug gave us such a good deal on our scorecards that PrintWorks is now the official provider of graphic services to the Sunday Morning Group. Everyone who reads this should be sure to have something printed there this year, to ensure that they’ll still be in business the next time we need scorecards, business cards, letterheads, envelopes, flyers, brochures, posters, postcards, or any of the other stuff they specialize in. (Doug also printed waterproof scorecards for us, for rainy days, and I’ll tell you about those soon.) Our new scorecards have our rules printed right on the back, for easy reference:

Incidentally, that record score, at the bottom of the card, is nine over par net. No one in SMG history has ever played worse.

Mean Weather and the Value of a Shank-in-One

Posted on April 18, 2014 by David Owen

This is what the ninth green looked like on the morning of April 16. Unfair!

On the day after Income Tax Day, the weather in the Northeast turned vindictive, and my golf course—which had been back in operation for less than a week—disappeared under two inches of snow and ice. I had to travel that day, so I couldn’t have played anyway, but I still felt bullied.

The weather is going to have to win my trust back one day at a time, beginning this afternoon (assuming I can finish a couple of things I’m supposed to be working on). Still, I have less reason to be upset than Mike Reilly, a reader and a member of the World’s Second-Best Golf Club, whose first trip to the Masters, on practice-round Monday, was rained out after two hours. “Their rain-out policy is ‘better luck next year,” he wrote from a motel room in Augusta (the club offered refunds). “I understand why it is that way, but that was a long way to drive to watch eight guys tee off No. 1.”

While the weather was misbehaving, several of my friends conducted an email debate about the Sunday Morning Group’s hole-in-one policy, which Hacker (real name) implemented a couple of years ago. We collect fifteen dollars a man on Sundays, and three of those dollars go into the S.M.G. Slush Fund, with which we pay for things like community service, international relief efforts, and bottle openers. The Slush Fund also underwrites the S.M.G. hole-in-one prize, which is five hundred dollars if the hole-in-one occurs during our regular Sunday game, and two hundred and fifty dollars if it occurs during a sanctioned S.M.G. event on a different day or time. (A sanctioned event is any round of golf that the whole group knows about in advance, including the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday versions of our regular Sunday game.)

No one has ever won the $500 prize, and only Reese has won the two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar prize (which he spent on drinks for everyone—see photo above). That means that, by now, the hole-in-one prize is probably over-endowed, at least in theory. David W. asked whether a hole-in-one on our ninth hole (a short par 4, which long hitters occasionally reach from the tee) would count. The answer to that one was yes, of course. Then Fritz asked about holing out on No. 2 (a par 4) with your tee shot on No. 7 (a par 3). The second green is slightly closer to the seventh tee than the seventh green is, although the shot is probably tougher, because there are pine trees in the way. Addison said he thought the shot ought to count as long as it was a genuine shank. In other words, you can’t just aim for it. Further study.

Meanwhile, the wind on Monday was so strong that it peeled the moss right off a stump:

It also sent Hacker’s pushcart rolling into a bunker and tipped it over. (Maybe there should be a prize for that, too.)

How I Won the Masters, and So Forth

Posted on April 13, 2014 by David Owen

My club’s equivalent of the Eisenhower Tree, on our seventeenth hole. We cut it down last year.

On Sundays during the majors, my friends and I pay homage to the big boys by using scorecards from the course where the major is being played. Usually, Hacker (real name) finds the card online and prints copies, but he couldn’t find an Augusta card with handicap ratings on it. Luckily, I had some old Augusta cards from the nineteen-nineties, when I was working on my book about the club and the Masters, so I scanned one and printed enough for the Sunday Morning Group.

Nineteen-nineties scorecard from Augusta National, used by the S Sunday Morning Group on Masters Sunday, April 13, 2014.

Nineteen-nineties scorecard from Augusta National, used by the Sunday Morning Group on Masters Sunday, April 13, 2014. Check out those last-century tournament yardages.

In 1996, I told Jackson Stephens, who was Augusta’s chairman at the time, that I thought the club ought to print a silhouette chart of the members’ jets on the back of the scorecard, so that a golfer on the course could identify whichever Gulfstream or Falcon or Challenger was passing overhead, on its way to Bush Field, and which friend, therefore, might be available for a second round, in the afternoon.

Stephens didn’t take my suggestion, for unknown reasons, and continued to list the names of the holes instead:

Even so, the Augusta scorecard has some interesting features. One (you will notice) is that all the yardages are given in multiples of five. That’s because Clifford Roberts, the club’s co-founder and first chairman, thought it was ridiculous to claim more precision, given the daily variation in hole and tee locations. Another interesting feature is that the handicap ratings are based on yardage, not on what TV commentators refer to as “difficulty.” I agree strongly—and if you want to have an argument about that I’m ready. One more thing to notice is how much shorter the course was from the Masters tees throughout the nineties. The eighteenth, for example, was 405 yards; today, it’s 465.

Chic (our chairman) and Slade (victorious) at lunch.

Chic (our chairman) and Slade (co-victorious) at lunch.

Anyway, Masters Sunday was the first 2014 home-course meeting of the Sunday Morning Group. Because we never give strokes on par 3s, no one got a stroke on the fourth hole, which is a par 5 on our course but a par 3 at Augusta and therefore a par 3 for us on Masters Sunday. That caused mental problems for some of the guys, who couldn’t help thinking of a 5 on that hole as a round-destroying double-bogey. My group (Mike A., Rick, Slade, and me) had no trouble with that, for some reason—maybe because we weren’t paying attention. Anyway, we won, by a stroke, at 12 under par, no problem. Hacker brought lunch. The kegerator was full. The water was back on in the clubhouse. The course was in great shape, after our worst winter in a decade. And the sun came out while we were sitting on the patio afterward.

From left to right: Fritz, kegerator, Corey (our pro), and the new padlock, installed by order of the Board of Governors.

From left to right: Fritz, beer fridge, kegerator, improvised pitcher, Corey (our pro), and the new padlock, installed by order of the Board of Governors.

Some Shots You Won’t See This Week at the Masters

Posted on April 9, 2014 by David Owen

Kevin, Tunxis Plantation, Sunday, April 6, 2014. That's Hacker (real name) in the red jacket, studying our receipts. You'll hear more about the foursome in the background on the left in a little while.

Kevin, Tunxis Plantation, Sunday, April 6, 2014. That’s Hacker (real name) in the red jacket, on the right, studying our receipts. In a little while, you’ll hear more about the foursome in the background on the left.

We had nine guys at Tunxis Plantation Country Club on Sunday, and we played a game that we invented eight or nine years ago, called Sons, Fathers, and Grandfathers. Nobody was actually related to anybody else (except Barney and Stanley, sort of). We just went by age: the three youngest guys versus the three guys in the middle versus the three oldest guys. We originally got the idea because Nick (who’s in his mid-seventies) often tells waitresses and beer-cart girls that Gene (who’s about eighty) is his father.

I’m four months older than Tim, so I ended up on the Fathers, with Hacker and Barney, and Tim ended up on the Sons, with Kevin and Doug. We must have been goofing around, or something, because the starter let the four guys on the left in the photo at the top of this post sneak out ahead of us. They were the kind of guys who walk fifty yards from their cart to have a look at their ball, then walk back to their cart to get a club, then hit a shank. We ended up doing a lot of waiting:

Two of the guys in the slow foursome were especially slow: the one on the far left and the one on the far right in the photo below:

The guys on the right seem to be looking far into the distance, but this tee shot actually traveled about a hundred feet.

The guys on the right seem to be looking far into the distance, but this tee shot was actually very short–too short to be measured in yards.

On one hole, the drive of the guy in the red jacket and shorts stopped safely in front of a water hazard, which was thirty or forty yards in front of the tee. He drove up to check it out:

A little later, the same guy hit the shot of the day. You kind of had to be there, but the guys on the right in the photo below are laughing hysterically because the guy in the shorts and the red jacket has just hit his tee shot maybe eight yards, into one of the gold tee markers. The guy on the far left, who is partly hidden by the first cart, is bending over to examine pieces of the shattered marker:

If the guy in the red jacket and shorts was actually trying to hit the marker, his aim was above average. I don’t know whether that’s his tee. Could be. If so: again, well done.

We finished eventually, and the winners, as usual, were the Grandfathers, who had complained so much on the first tee that we let them play from the senior tees and have handicap strokes on par 3s. Never again. But everything sort of worked out, because the two oldest Grandfathers either forgot to come to lunch or got lost on the way, so they couldn’t win any skins. Anyway, the good news is that our own course is going to open on Friday, and that means that on Sunday morning we’ll be drinking beer on our very own patio and making lunch on our very own grill.

The driving range at Tunxis. You should never watch strangers hit practice balls, especially when there are still little piles of snow on the ground.

The driving range at Tunxis. You should never watch strangers hit practice balls, especially in early spring.

Golf on the Vernal Equinox

Posted on March 21, 2014 by David Owen

My pushcart at D. Fairchild Wheeler Golf Course, New Year’s Eve, 2013.

My friends and I celebrated the first day of spring the same way we celebrated the last day of 2013 and the first day of 2014: by playing a round at D. Fairchild Wheeler Golf Course, a muny about an hour from where we live. As you can see by comparing the photo above with the photo below, playing conditions had improved dramatically in just eleven weeks:

My pushcart at D. Fairchild Wheeler Golf Course, March 20, 2014.

There were still a few lingering signs of winter, including a large patch of non-liquid casual water along the left side of the ninth fairway:

Pro’s advice: aim right.

Overall, though, the course was in decent shape. The gates were closed when we arrived, a little before nine, but the parking lot had begun to fill by time we finished, and the temperature had climbed to the mid-forties.

The past few months have been truly horrible around here, golf-wise. It’s been so cold that a small herd of local Lyme-disease vectors began spending the night in my backyard:

But in the past few days things have finally started to turn. Last Sunday, Hacker (real name), Doug, Mike A., and Tim played at Pelham Bay Golf Course, in the Bronx—the only open course within a hundred miles of where we live:

Mike A. attempting a rare steeplechase bunker shot. Degree of difficulty: 10.

I couldn’t join them, because I had a work deadline I couldn’t put off, but I did take time out for lunch with nine other members of the Sunday Morning Group. There are six artificial knees in the photo below, if you count all three of Frank’s (one of his had to be redone):

On the equinox, we ate at Fairchild Wheeler, of course—along with these guys, who hadn’t played golf but, apparently, were unable to stay away:

That’s March Madness on the big screen behind them. If we hadn’t needed to get home for our naps, we could have hung around all day.

Gaining Spousal Approval for Golf Trips, Plus the Night My Wife Ate Dogfood on the Tonight Show

Posted on February 8, 2014 by David Owen

That's my wife in the net. Some son-of-a-bitch is about to fire a puck at her.

That’s my wife in the net (wearing the Grateful Dead jersey). Some son-of-a-bitch is about to fire a puck at her!

The wife of one of my regular golf buddies not only encourages him to take golf trips but actually makes his plane reservations and packs his bags. Quite obviously, she’s having an extramarital affair and wants him out of the way—so his golf trips are win-win at their house. For the rest of us, though, the issue of spouse-free golf travel is usually more contentious.

My pals and I at Hillside Golf Club, Southport, England, May, 2010. Hacker (real name) is third from the left.

My kids are grown now, so I can no longer be accused of doing them permanent emotional harm by abandoning them for a week in order to play golf in another country with my friends. But my golf trips nevertheless retain some of their old power to engender domestic resentment. The best approach, I’ve discovered, is direct negotiation, which is both more productive and less emotionally taxing than the simmering psycho-battles that husbands and wives usually engage in. If my buddies and I are hoping to take a spouse-free trip to Myrtle Beach, for example, I might say to my wife, “Honey, this trip is extremely important to me—what’ll you take for it?” (Before trying this yourself, have an attorney vet the wording.)

Same guys, more or less–this time at the Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland. May, 2008.

The best thing that ever happened to me, golf-trip-wise, occurred when my wife, at the age of almost-forty, took up ice hockey. She now goes on buddies trips of her own—to goalie school in Vermont, to an international tournament in Montreal—and she and I have achieved a sort of unspoken sports-travel parity. A few years ago, she visited her brother, who was living in Russia. She took her skates, and one afternoon she joined a pickup game on a frozen pond in central Moscow.

Moscow, March, 2006.

That, in my opinion, turned a family visit into a hockey trip, and therefore entitled me to spend a compensatory week in Ireland with my pals. (Before trying this yourself, have an attorney, etc.)

Speaking of my wife, Jay Leno’s retirement from the Tonight Show this past week reminded me that the first guest on the Tonight Show on June 1, 1989—when Leno was subbing for Johnny Carson, three years before Carson retired—was my wife. She was on by herself for two entire segments, and for the first of those segments she got to sit in The Chair and chat with Leno. Here’s the first segment:

And here’s the second:

Which Hacker is the Real Hacker (Real Name)?

Posted on January 28, 2014 by David Owen

The person I play the most golf with is Bob Hacker, a.k.a. “Hacker (real name),” on the left in the photo above, which was taken last winter at Pelham Bay Golf Course, in the Bronx. (That’s me on the right.) He is also the person primarily responsible for managing the Sunday Morning Group and its finances, and is therefore widely believed to be the chairman of the Committee, the mysterious but all-powerful body that governs everything we do. He is unique—or so I thought until recently, when Tony, who is the person I play the second most golf with and is the co-inventor, with me, of the Hybrid Lifestyle, sent me a photograph of a starter at the Black Diamond Golf Ranch, in Lecanto, Florida, where he had gone to play golf with his Atlanta friends, who are richer, smarter, and better-looking than we are:

That’s just part of him, obviously. Doug Egly, who is Black Diamond’s general manager, sent me this photo of him in his entirety:

The existence of this second Bob Hacker suggests either that we are living in an episode of the Twilight Zone or that Black Diamond Ranch is a parallel universe of some kind, filled with eerie duplicates of people I know, but with better weather. Photographs of the Quarry Course—one of three on the property, all designed by Tom Fazio—do make it seem otherworldly:

As it happens, the real Hacker and I visited Tony in Atlanta shortly before he went to Florida with those other friends. We played golf at his Atlanta club, about which I’ll probably have something to say at some point, and in the evenings we played the card game setback with Tony’s wife, Teresa, who remained undefeated until we stacked the deck while she was in the kitchen making us something to eat. Anyway, the easiest way to distinguish Tony from his Twilight Zone doppelganger is by checking the trunk of his car, which contains so many golf clubs that he has to keep his golf clubs somewhere else:

You Need This Cold-Weather Golf Accessory

Posted on January 18, 2014 by David Owen

In 1991, a Spanish textile manufacturer named Joan Rojas was riding his motorcycle in Catalonia. The weather was cold, and riding made it colder, so he pulled a pair of underpants over his head, to warm his neck. A year later, he introduced an apparel item he called the Buff, a seamless tube of microfiber, which could be worn not just as a neck-warmer but in numerous other ways (though not as underpants):

The notion that you lose ninety percent of your body heat through your head is wrong, and, if you want proof, take off all your clothes except your hat and stand outside in the snow. But, if your head is the only part of you that isn’t fully covered, escaping heat has nowhere else to go, and on cold days you can dramatically improve your comfort level by plugging gaps above your shoulders. I got my first Buff on a trip to Norway in 2012, when a guide in a national park gave me one:

She was wearing hers just as a headband and ear protector, but I used mine to cover pretty much my whole head, and since then I’ve worn it many times while playing golf in bad weather, usually as a supplement to other headgear:

This was a very cold day. Hacker (real name) looks cold because he's wearing just his Yankees knit cap, but I'm wearing a skier's balaclava; a regular golf cap; a Duluth Trading Company eara band with

This was a very cold day at our golf club. Hacker (real name) looks chilly because he’s wearing just his Yankees watch cap, but I’m toasty because I’m wearing a skier’s balaclava; a regular golf cap; a Duluth Trading Company ear-band-with-slit-for-golf-cap-bill (no longer sold, alas, although they do have one without a slit); and my Norwegian Buff. The Buff, in addition to covering a few critical bare spots, helped to keep everything else in position.

Recently, I bought a fancier Buff, called the Cyclone. One half is made of microfiber, and the other half is made of fleece and Gore-Tex, and you can wear it in even more ways than the original Buff:

I now keep my Norwegian one (which weighs almost nothing) in my golf bag all the time, and add the Cyclone when the weather stinks, as it does at the moment. I needed the Norwegian one occasionally last Sunday, after we had driven halfway across the state in our determined search for a place to play. On that day, wet was usually more of an issue than cold, and I’m happy to report that my Nike Lunar Bandon II winter golf boots worked flawlessly:

Winter Golf and a Previously Unknown Type of Cheeseburger

Posted on January 15, 2014 by David Owen

These cars belong to my friends and me. There were no other cars in the parking lot at Tunxis when we got there on Sunday morning.

These cars belong to my friends and me. There were no other cars in the parking lot when we arrived on Sunday morning.

We got what seemed like a foot of rain on Saturday. That was good in one way, because it washed away most of the snow, but it was bad in another, because (apparently) it persuaded the people who make the decisions at Tunxis Plantation Country Club not to open the following morning, even though Hacker (real name) had called the evening before and left a message that we would be there at 9:30, ready to go. I sensed trouble as I approached the clubhouse: of the ten or so greens I could see from the road, only one had a flag, and the parking lot was empty except for cars that belonged to people I knew. Hacker started calling around the state, but the places he tried either weren’t open or weren’t answering the phone. (Suggestion to golf courses that don’t shut down for the entire winter: update your website and outgoing voice-mail message every night with information about the following day.) Finally, he found an open course, and it was just thirty-five minutes farther away. So we caravaned:

And then we spent a very enjoyable day at Lyman Orchards, which, like Tunxis, has forty-five holes. One of Lyman’s eighteens was designed by Robert Trent Jones, and the other was designed by Gary Player. The fifth nine—called the Apple Nine—is new, and is (I would guess) for kids and beginners. There’s also a golf school and a driving range.

Lyman Orchards is also an orchard, and there's a big store in which you can buy apples and apple-themed stuff.

Lyman Orchards is an orchard. There are apple trees in the middle of the course, and there’s a big store, called the Apple Barrel, in which you can buy apple-based and apple-themed products. Maybe your wife would like to tag along some Sunday, and spend a few hours shopping for apple butter while you and your friends are playing golf.

We first played Lyman several years ago, and at that time they kept both eighteens open all winter. Now they shut down the Jones course—which is too bad, because the Player course is definitely second best. It’s also a pain to walk, because you always seem to be climbing to the top of a huge hill in order to hit your ball to the bottom of it, and then walking miles to the next tee. Still, golf.

The conditions weren't what you would call perfect, but the course was open. In fact, it was pretty busy.

The conditions were not what you would call perfect, but the course was open. In fact, it was almost somewhat busy.

On most of the holes, the flags wouldn’t go back in the cups straight, and on some of the holes they wouldn’t go back at all. The reason was that the little holes at the bottoms of the cups were all either partly or entirely full of sand. I tried to clean one out with a tee and a green-repair tool, but that was a fool’s errand. The greens themselves were squishy on top, and some of them had bare patches, but we kept being surprised at how un-slow they were.

Afterward, we decided to eat lunch at a place we hadn’t tried before, the Rover’s Lodge, on Beseck Lake. The house specialty (according to a big sign facing the road) is “steamed cheeseburgers”:

A new form of cheeseburger? How could we not? I learned later that the steamed cheeseburger is “a food so truly regional that it is found in only about a dozen restaurants within a 25-mile radius of Middletown, in central Connecticut,” and that it “was invented in the 1920s, when steamed food was thought to be healthier than fried.” (You can read more about steamed cheeseburgers here.)

This is a steamed cheeseburger, from a restaurant called Ted’s.

It turned out that the Rover’s Lodge serves food of any kind only “in season,” and that the season isn’t winter. There were about a dozen guys in the bar when we went in, and they were interested, up to a point, in the fact that we had just played golf. Later, I found two reviews of the Rover’s Lodge on TripAdvisor—one that said it was “very good,” and one that said it was “a dump.” It’s possible that we’ll never know who is right, because we continued up the road to New Guida’s Restaurant, where we’ve eaten before. Let me say this for Guida’s: their cheeseburgers, however they make them, are very good. Ditto their fries and milkshakes.

Then we drove home to watch the playoff games.

Guida’s. Cash only, please.

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

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