(Photo by Xavier Laine/Getty Images)
“I think everybody pees in the pool,” Michael Phelps told the Wall Street Journal in 2012. “It’s kind of a normal thing to do for swimmers. When we’re in the water for two hours, we don’t really get out to pee.”
A long-time member of the Sunday Morning Group celebrated his 69th birthday in part by beginning chemotherapy. Once that’s finished, a surgeon will remove his bladder and replace it with a new one, fashioned from part of his small intestine. All this is happening in a city far away, so we had to wish him luck by video:
Not long ago, two honorary members of the Sunday Morning Group invited the rest of us to play a round on Yale University’s golf course, whose official name is the Course at Yale. (The U.S.G.A. lists Yale on its GHIN handicap website under “T,” for “the”—an approach to alphabetization that may not be entirely unrelated to the rules mess at this year’s U.S. Open.) Seventeen of us accepted the invitation, and the sign below greeted us when we arrived (I stole it on our way out, so that we could hang it in our locker room at home):
Yale was a collegiate golf powerhouse in the late 1800s and early 1900s — as I learned from Golf at Yale: The Players, the Teams, the Course, by John A. Godley and William W. Kelly. In 1923, the widow of a wealthy alumnus bought a 720-acre estate near the campus and gave it to the university, and Yale hired Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor to design a golf course that would put Princeton’s to shame. The property was rocky and densely wooded, and the construction ended up costing more than $400,000, making Yale’s the world’s most expensive golf course, by far, up until that time. (Augusta National, completed five years later, cost a quarter as much.) The fairways and greens were poorly maintained the first time I played it, in the early 1990s, but everything is gorgeous now. Yale is one of my favorite courses anywhere, not least because it has more interesting blind shots than modern courses ever do. Here’s my brother, John, fiddling with the hole-location indicator on the third, whose green is invisible from the fairway:
We had good weather for most of our round, but shortly after we made the turn it started to rain.
Then it started to rain more:
There was no lightning, though, and when the locals had all run for cover we had the place to ourselves. Here’s what the fifteenth green looked like when we got to it:
And here’s Barney lining up a putt on the sixteenth:
After our round, we were treated to lunch by Mark, our host, who used to be a member of our club but switched to Yale after his wife got a job nearby:
I drove home with the seat heater on high, to dry out my pants. I had to run the defroster, too, because of the steam. Fun day.
I had an issue with the rubber eyepiece on my previous laser rangefinder. But my current rangefinder, a Bushnell Tour X, is great. It’s the same one Rickie Fowler uses:
It’s accurate and fast, it’s easy to focus, and the eyepiece is firmly attached. I can set the LED display to either black or red—a useful feature as light conditions change:
It gives my hand a satisfying “jolt” of haptic feedback when it locks onto a flagstick. And the battery life is seemingly measured in years. That fact alone makes it better than any GPS rangefinder, in my opinion. The Tour X comes with a hard zippered case that attaches to a golf bag and works pretty well, between shots, as a rangefinder holster:
The Tour X is little too big to fit easily into my pants pocket—the only negative I can think of. I usually carry it in the compartment in the handle of my push cart, into which it just fits:
The Tour X has a slope-reading feature. When you aim it at a target that’s higher or lower than you are and shoot the yardage, it tells you how much the change in elevation increases or decreases the effective distance. You can’t legally use that feature (or use a rangefinder that has that feature) in events that allow rangefinders. But you can disable it, making the Tour X legal, by changing the face plate. The red one turns the slope feature on; the black one turns it off:
I’d always thought that measuring slope was kind of dorky, but my friend Ray, whose handicap is 3, told me that it’s actually very helpful. He uses during practice rounds, and says it’s quite accurate:
Just remember to switch face plates before you play in a tournament. Ray forgot to do that before our Professional’s Cup, and he had to disqualify himself.
A Tour X is also useful for looking at stuff that’s too far away to see clearly with just your eyes. I’ve used mine to identify birds and distant golfers whose swings I didn’t recognize, and the other day I used it to get a closer look at a chipmunk that was sitting on a stone wall near our practice green and doing something I’d never seen a chipmunk doing before: eating a mouse:
In 2011, I became an enthusiastic unpaid shill for True Linkswear golf shoes, the most comfortable golf shoes I’ve ever worn. I now own more than a dozen pairs, and I wear them even when I’m not playing golf, and many of my friends have switched to them, too. Last October, though, my most recent pair, called True Motion, basically came apart during the Sunday Morning Group’s annual buddies trip to Atlantic City:
After I wrote about those shoes, I heard from a reader who had had the same problem:
I also heard from a vice president at True Linkswear, who acknowledged that the company had had “past issues” with quality, but said that it had made “a significant switch in factories” and that the next model, called True Elements, would not only correct those issues but would also be “our first breathable & waterproof shoe” and would represent “a remarkable design and construction method” that had been subjected to “rigorous testing standards.” I bought a pair in March, as soon as I could find them online, and wore them several times to make sure they truly were waterproof—as I wrote here:
They passed that test beautifully, so I bought a second pair of Elements and put both pairs away, the newer one still in its box, to keep them pristine for an upcoming buddies trip to Ireland, in early May. And here they are at Ballybunion:
They were the only shoes I took with me on that trip, and they performed beautifully—with one big exception: before the trip was over, both pairs had developed serious holes in their fabric covering at the points where the shoe bends during walking, on either side of the ball of the foot:
I don’t think the holes penetrate the waterproof lining. But they’re big, and every time I wear the shoes they get bigger. That V-shaped dip in the outermost layer seems to act like a tiny pair of scissors:
I wore the newer of my two pairs of Elements only twice on the trip—and I hadn’t worn them before, and I’ve worn them only once since. But one of those shoes already has small holes on both sides, after just a few rounds. Tim D. also took Elements on our Ireland trip, and his shoes have the same kind of holes in the same places:
Now, we played two rounds a day, on foot, on up-and-down terrain—but shouldn’t any pair of golf shoes be tough enough to survive a week in Ireland?
And not long after we got back from Ireland my shoes’ self-destruction opened up a new front, on the vamp, just below the laces:
I sent two emails to the vice president who had told me about the company’s new manufacturing standards, but I haven’t heard back. Maybe I’ll hear from him now. But whether I do or not I’ve bought my last pair of Trues.
Because the Sunday Morning Group has an international reputation in the marketing world, the manufacturers of golf-oriented consumer items—and especially golf-oriented alcoholic beverages—sometimes come to us for help with product positioning. Recently, the people who make Dewar’s blended scotch whisky asked us to test a drink they’d come up with, called Dewar’s Hole-in-One Cold Brew. Here’s what it looks like:
And here’s the official recipe:
3 shots of cold-brew coffee
2 shots of DEWAR’S 12-Year-Old
½ shot of simple syrup
1 dash of vanilla extract (optional)
¼ shot of heavy cream
Add the coffee, whisky, simple syrup and vanilla extract (if using) to a cocktail shaker. Add ice to the shaker to above the level of the liquid and shake for 3 seconds. Strain the mixture into tall glass with ice cubes. Top with heavy cream, optional.
As it happens, my wife is a cold-brew nut. So with her help I mixed up a batch of Cafe du Monde Coffee and Chicory in our kitchen (and allowed it to cold-steep for 24 hours):
Then, on Sunday morning, I took the coffee to the club, along with all the other ingredients—including a bottle of scotch provided by Dewar’s—and set up a “test bar” on the first tee:
The guys gave it an exhaustive work-up:
They even checked the purity of the individual ingredients. Did you know that red Solo cups came this small?
Final verdict: all possible thumbs up. And there is no way that the vanilla or heavy cream should be considered “optional.” I had to leave the scotch out of mine, for personal reasons, but even in its virgin form Hole-in-One Cold Brew is great—like melted Haagen-Dasz coffee ice cream on the rocks. And Hacker (real name) finally had an excuse to wear his red Dewar’s fleece jacket, which he bought for $10 during a promotion of some kind at our liquor store a decade or two ago, before we had a working relationship with the company.
Next: how about something made with Wild Turkey?
We have lots of them in our area—including on the eighth hole, above—even though Reese periodically thins the flock:
Incidentally, when a detachment of the Sunday Morning Group was in Ireland, last month, Reese’s foursome spotted a fox on the third hole at Enniscrone. Reese has a den in his yard at home, and he knows how to speak fox:
He fox-barked at the Enniscrone fox three times, and all three times the fox turned around. And Reese can gobble, too.
I was contacted recently by a lawyer who was looking for someone to serve as an expert witness in a lawsuit involving a hole-in-one prize. After last month, I almost qualify.
Eleven friends and I played Ballybunion, in Ireland, in early May. On the third hole, Addison made a hole-in-one from the back tee: 230 yards, downhill but into a stiff wind. My group was just leaving the fourth tee, and we watched his ball roll into the hole. There’s a plaque on the third tee commemorating a hole-in-one that Payne Stewart made from the same spot in 1998, the year before he died, during a buddies trip with Mark O’Meara and Tiger Woods. Here’s Addison:
We returned home a week later, and in an effort to outsmart jet lag I pretty much went straight from the airport to my home course (after stopping by my house, briefly, to reintroduce myself to my wife). There were five of us, and on the seventh hole, which is slightly more than half as long as the third hole at Ballybunion, I made a hole-in-one:
Two weeks after that, Chris, during his first round ever with the Sunday Morning Group, made a hole-in-one on our twelfth hole, which is 185 yards long. Nobody in his group could see that far, so they weren’t sure his ball had really gone in until they got to the green. In the photo below, which was taken by Mike B., he’s retrieving his ball from the cup:
And in the photo below, which was taken by me, Mike B. is taking the photo above:
You can’t document these things too thoroughly (I learned from the lawyer who contacted me). Here’s my scorecard:
One thing to note: Chris is beaming in his photograph because if you make a hole-in-one during our regular Sunday morning game you receive $500 from the Slush Fund. And Addison is smiling in his photograph because if you make a hole-in-one during an SMG-sanctioned event (meaning one that everyone on the email list was invited to participate in) you receive $250 from the Slush Fund. And I’m sort of frowning in my photograph because that post-Ireland round of mine was a last-minute thing that nobody bothered to invite everyone else to—so my Slush Fund prize was $0.
I hate Father’s Day, for reasons I won’t enumerate. (If you’re curious, go here.) So it makes sense to me that people who insist on celebrating it should have to pay up. That’s just one reason you might want to start dropping hints that the one gift you’re really interested in this year is a $135 golf glove:
Mine was given to me not by my children—who know they aren’t allowed even to mention Father’s Day—but by Pat Morrell, the founder of FitzGerald Morrell, a company sells custom-made leather gloves for a variety of activities, among them golf. “Just ask yourself how many golf gloves you’ve had to buy at the pro shop because your old pseudo-leather glove tore in the thumb or became brittle and flaky in the palm or in between your fingers,” he has explained. “You can buy custom clubs, custom balls, custom shirts, pants and shoes… but you can’t buy custom golf gloves. Until now.” Here’s Morrell himself, wearing some of his (non-golf) products:
Morrell sent me a sizing kit, including a hand diagram, a measuring tape, and a pencil:
After I’d traced my hand, kindergarten-style, I used an enclosed postage-paid envelop to send everything off to a shop in England—which looks pretty much exactly the way you’d guess it would:
There, various craftsmen used various old-looking tools to create a glove to my precise specifications:
They also added the monogram of the Sunday Morning Group, recognized the world over as a symbol of quality and trust. I’ve now used my $135 golf glove exclusively for a couple of months (except when it was raining), including a dozen rounds on a recent golf trip to Ireland:
Gradually, it has acquired a fine patina, like a beloved fielder’s mitt. It has also fully conformed to my anatomy—so much so that, if I ever lose my left hand in an industrial accident, the glove could serve as a mold for a replacement:
I’ve identified just a few drawbacks. One is that, if you want to be sure all your friends understand that you are wearing a $135 golf glove, you have to refer to it as “my $135 golf glove.” Another is that the leather is so substantial that the glove is not pleasant to wear when the temperature and relative humidity are high. A third is that, if you are accustomed to losing your golf glove two or three times a round, you have to constantly watch your back:
I’ve taken to wearing it while I’m putting—like Nicklaus—to reduce my opportunities for losing it, and so far, with occasional help from friends, I’ve been successful. I’ve also been able to tidy up the trunk of my car. It used to look like this:
It now looks like this:
Why, it paid for itself right there.
This past Monday, Bob G., an honorary member of the Sunday Morning Group, invited Peter A., Hacker (real name), and me to join him for a round at his home course, GlenArbor Golf Club, in Bedford Hills, New York. We arrived before Bob did, and when I went into the locker room to take a whiz I noticed that one of the lockers had been reserved for someone named Jason Day.
Amazingly, that Jason Day turned out to be the real Jason Day, the No. 1 player in the world. Nobody at the club had mentioned anything about it to Bob, but Day was there to take part in an outing conducted by one of his sponsors, RBC, the Royal Bank of Canada.
The outing consisted of thirty-two youngish banker types, and the format was a shamble—a best-ball competition in which every player in a foursome plays his or her own ball from the foursome’s best tee shot. Day joined each group for one hole. Here he is, hitting a shot on a hole next to a lake:
That’s not Day on the right, standing in the hazard; that’s Hacker, recovering from an unfortunate drive. Day is on the left, under the red arrow. We got a closer look at him when he and the final RBC foursome played the eighteenth, a 414-yard par 4. The second half of that hole plays almost vertically up a steep hill, toward the clubhouse. Day had to hit is tee shot from the way-back tee, but his drive still flew miles beyond the other drives in the group. Naturally, his drive was the one they chose to use. Here he is, playing his second shot. (He hit it to about three feet, and made the putt).
You have to figure that Day’s appearance was required by a contract he signed before he turned into Superman, but, even so, he seemed to be having a pretty good time. Here he is during lunch, as GlenArbor’s director of golf was announcing things like the winner of the closest-to-the-pin contest:
Actually, I would bet that in some ways the outing was more fun for Day than it was for the bankers—who, after all, were under enormous pressure not to shank, flub, chilly-dip, or yip their ball while the best player in the world stood a few feet away, watching:
We weren’t part of the outing, so I couldn’t do something I desperately wanted to do: grab a handful of soft-shell crabs from a big chafing dish on the buffet table. But we did get to try an awesome feature that GlenArbor added recently, right next to the terrace where the bankers were having drinks and eating lunch. Every golf club in the world should add one of these, even if they have to build a lake and a steep hill in order to do it:
Those are Pro V1s in the range basket. The tee and the floating green haven’t been there for very long, but the director of golf told us that there are 60,000 balls in the lake already, and that a scuba diver will be coming soon to recover them. Here’s Bob, trying his luck:
He missed the green, which is roughly the size of a doormat, but he came pretty close. Jason Day tried, too. Naturally, he stiffed it—and, because he had, he said he wasn’t going to push his luck by taking a second shot. He hit so fast that I didn’t manage to get a picture until afterward, as he was heading back to his table:
Great player. Great course. Great floating green. Great afternoon.
Our regular Sunday game was dedicated to the memory of Prince, who shared a favorite color with the Sunday Morning Group. You had to either wear something purple or rent it from Hacker (real name), for $3.99:
You may not be able to hear it through the photo, but “Little Red Corvette” is playing in the background.
