Better Golf, in Bar Form

Posted on April 20, 2016 by David Owen

Gerry Mullally grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In the early 1970s, his father sent him to the United States to get him away from the Troubles. His first job here was as a caddie at Maidstone, where, among other things, he was stiffed by Juan Trippe, the cheapskate founder of Pan American Airways. Mullally became a food scientist, and worked for several major corporations, and retired last year. In January, he began manufacturing a post-career invention of his: the Par Bar, a nutrition bar formulated specifically for golfers. I learned about him from a friend who belongs to the same golf club he does, and invited him to play with the Sunday Morning Group. He brought treats:

“I created a must-have list of features and benefits and set that as the development goal,” he explains on his website. “It needed to taste really good, it should be made with only natural and healthy ingredients, and it would have to provide sufficient energy for the whole round.” The idea is to eat about a third of a bar roughly 15 minutes before you tee off, then take another bite or two every couple of holes. “The bar I set out to develop was high in protein, high in slow-release carbohydrates and high in dietary fiber,” he continues. “I had become aware of a recently approved food ingredient from green tea leaves called L-Theanine. Its properties seemed tailor-made for the challenges of golf, and clinical studies had already confirmed its ability to increase mental alertness and focus.”

I followed Mullally’s instructions and had my best round of the season so far. Does Par Bar get the credit? I can’t say for sure, but I’ve noticed this sort of thing before. Many years ago, I covered a multilevel-marketing convention for another publication, and one of the exhibitors gave me some bee-pollen tablets. I swallowed one, and a couple of hours later I was stung by a bee. On Sunday, just about everybody played with exceptional mental alertness and focus, except for three guys who had recently watched videotapes of their swings. In the photo below, Mullally and I are on the fourth tee. You’ll notice that there’s still some advertising space available on my jacket:

The Par Bar solves a perennial mid-round problem, to which my solution, heretofore, has usually been either a Snickers or a hot dog. And it tastes good!

Reader’s Trip Report: 2016 Connecticut Golf Show

Posted on March 31, 2016 by David Owen

Mark Beebe, in “visor wig.”

The forecast for two Sundays ago included “up to” a foot of snow. We got about three quarters of an inch, so I guess the forecast was accurate. The day before the big storm, Mark Beebe, an out-of-town member of the Sunday Morning Group, visited the Connecticut Golf Show, at the convention center in Hartford, with his golf buddy Tom. Mark’s report:

“Tom’s wife is recovering from a serious illness, and he’s also been helping another old golf buddy, ‘Lefty’ Bob, who’s in failing health. So it was good to see him and get him out doing something we both like: wasting time doing golf stuff.”

ctgolfshow16

“Pretty much all the major equipment guys were there. I didn’t try any of the clubs, because my March swing is not of club-fitting quality and if I wait until my July swing shows up the same equipment will be available at a higher price—the same strategy I use for investing in stocks.”

“Nevertheless, I did buy a few things. I broke my No. 1 rule, as always, by buying a club without swinging it, a TaylorMade M1 3-wood. I also bought a ball marker with the insignia of Michigan State, my alma mater—which was nice because the Spartans had just gotten bounced from the NCAA tournament, in the first round, the day before. There were no Middle Tennessee State ball markers, but I did pick up a dozen of last year’s Titleist NXT Tours. I went through racks and tables of remnants and leftovers, and noticed that they had great prices for small and medium golf shirts, but hardly anything in XL. There was also a guy selling coffee tables:”

“Does anyone actually keep score with these things?”

“I picked up lots of brochures from golf resorts, and one from the John Casablanca modeling and talent agency, which had a booth. I asked the Casablanca people why they had come to a golf expo, and they said, ‘Because that’s where the people are.’ I took their brochure to give to my daughter, who is studying theater in college.”

“Tom and I stopped for lunch on our way home and got caught up. That was the best part. We’re hoping to tee it up in the next couple weeks, weather and health issues permitting. And when I got home I found a good place to put my NCAA bracket:”

Every Course Should Copy These Awesome Features

Posted on March 15, 2016 by David Owen

On Saturday, Addison, Todd, Hacker (real name), and I took a field trip to Wintonbury Hills, a muny that’s roughly an hour and fifteen minutes from where we live. The course, which opened in 2005, was designed by Pete Dye and Tim Liddy. There are four sets of tees, at 6,700, 6,300, 5,700, and 5,000 yards. As is seldom the case at golf courses of any kind, though, the scorecard at Wintonbury lists ratings and slopes for both men and women from all four sets:

Furthermore, neither the scorecard nor any of the course signage mentions “women’s tees,” or “senior tees,” or “regular men’s tees,” or “championship tees,” or anything else. There are just four different sets, at four different yardages, and the scorecard contains enough information to enable players of both sexes, at all levels, to calculate handicaps for matches of all kinds, in all conceivable combinations.

Every course should do this.

Addison and Todd played from the black tees, I played from the greens, and Hacker played from the whites, and we were able to adjust our handicaps accordingly. (The USGA actually makes doing this much, much harder than it needs to be—but that’s a semi-complicated issue, which I’ll explore in a couple of future posts.) We played three matches, switching partners every six holes, and everything came out virtually even. (Todd and I each lost a dollar.) And if Michelle Wie and my mother had joined us we would have been able to work them into the game, too.

Another awesome Wintonbury feature—and one that should be copied by public courses everywhere—is generous fairways accompanied by challenging green complexes. This is a feature that Wintonbury shares with Muirfield Village and Augusta National, to name two member-friendly golf courses that great players don’t dismiss as too easy. Wide fairways keep play moving. None of the four of us lost a ball.

Addison, Hacker, Todd.

Another awesome thing about Wintonbury: the Bag of Beer, available in the grillroom (which is called the Tap Inn):

That’s what the guy in the photo below was picking up. Weirdly, though, he had ordered just two beers—both Budweisers. What was he planning to drink when he got to the third hole?

The only thing I didn’t like about Wintonbury: they charge you extra if you walk. (They don’t think of it as a walking penalty—in their view, they give away carts, since carts are included in the greens fees—but a walking penalty is what it is, since you don’t pay less if you don’t take a cart.) As far as I could see, though, we were the only walkers, so they probably don’t get a lot of complaints.

Still, it’s a terrific course. We’re definitely going back.

Reader’s Fashion Tip: Insulated Shorts for Winter Golf

Posted on February 23, 2016 by David Owen

The golf courses within driving distance of my hometown have been closed for so much of this winter that I haven’t had many opportunities to take advantage of Sunday Morning Group’s shorts rule: one extra handicap stroke if you wear shorts after November 1, two extra strokes after December 1. If we do get to play again, I’m going to try some shorts I learned about from Tim Kresse, a reader in Oxford, Ohio. They’re called Alpha Shorts, and they’re filled with Polartec insulation. They’re made by a company called Qor, which is practically giving them away.

The company’s website describes them like this:

“They’re super stretchy, don’t look insulated, and are styled like trousers: structured waist with front zip/button fly closure, slash hand pockets on the side, two back pockets (one with a zipper), and belt loops.”

Kresse himself says:

“I’m an administrator at Miami University, the alma mater of Ben Roethlisberger and the place Robert Frost called ‘the most beautiful campus that ever there was.’ I have to agree that it is quite a pretty campus and a good school. The Qor catalog just showed up, but I have to say that the insulated shorts seemed the perfect thing for the winter golf game. I do wonder, though, would that be cheating or does the open air nature of the leg sufficiently offset any insulation value?”

The rules, so far, allow insulated shorts. What they don’t allow is tall socks. Back to Kresse:

“The picture above is of me during a practice round at the Memorial Tournament last year. I bought my daughter (no, really) a tournament flag and got some autographs. Once I realized I had the autograph of the winner of the Memorial, the Masters, the US Open, the (British) Open, and PGA championship, I decided it could stay in my office for a while. She’ll get it one day. I play golf at Hueston Woods State Park Golf Course, just north of town, and Indian Ridge Golf Club, just south of town. Here’s a summer moon over Hueston Woods:”

“During the winter, though, golf is mostly in hibernation, with the occasional trip to the driving range or a trip south. I last played at Great Dunes on Jekyll Island, Georgia, just before Thanksgiving. Here’s a picture of the fifth green and sixth tee, which overlook the Atlantic. It’s a nice nine-hole course, perfect for walking:”

“To keep ourselves busy in the winter, we move to indoor sports, including broomball, and I have found that winter golf gloves are great for for broomball. They are just enough to keep hands warm on ice, improve the grip on the broomball stick, and work great as a goalie gloves (the position I usually play).”

I’d never heard of broomball before, but here’s what it looks like. That’s not Kresse in the net. At least, I don’t think it is. (I found the photo online.)

Broomball players don’t wear skates, but they do get to buy broomball shoes, among other things. You can read all about the game here. Back to Kresse:

“I first played broomball at Ohio University (another very attractive campus) in the early 1990s. Games were almost always late at night, when the ice was free, and we played with a deflated volleyball, our own tennis shoes, and cut-down brooms (both ends) for ‘sticks’. Now games are still often played late at night, but there are specific broomballs, sticks, and shoes, which make it easier to get around the ice (I call them clown shoes). I’ve also bought hockey shin guards to protect from sticks and falls. And, thankfully, we play half-ice (half-rink) and not full-ice games.”

Golf in New Zealand: Kauri Cliffs

Posted on February 8, 2016 by David Owen

One of the most remarkable things my wife has ever said to me is that, if I ever told her I thought we ought to live in New Zealand, she’d be ready to move that minute. This was highly surprising, both because she doesn’t really even like to travel and because Donald Trump wasn’t running for President yet. I think her interest was based partly on the scenery in The Lord of the Rings movies and partly on the fact that New Zealand is so far from everywhere else that if you holed up there you would no longer have to think quite so much about the world’s most serious problems. I myself might be tempted to move, if I could persuade all my regular golf buddies to go, too.

I visited New Zealand in 2007, in the company of the hedge-fund billionaire Julian Robertson and his wife, Josie—who has since died.

We spent the first few days at Kauri Cliffs, a resort the they had created on a 6,000-acre farm in the Bay of Islands region, near the northern end of the North Island. “I had no idea what I’d bought,” he told me. “It turned out to be one of the most magical pieces of land you will ever see, but when I bought it I didn’t even know that it had waterfalls. I saw it at the worst time of the year, August, and it was nothing but a filthy wet sheep farm, and I really bought it mainly because it was cheaper than a modest New York City apartment.”

In 1997, he hired David Harman, a golf architect he admired, to design a course for the eastern edge of the property, along cliffs that rise high above the Pacific. That course is now No. 49 on Golf Digest’s list of the World’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses. It’s just ahead of North Berwick Golf Club, in Scotland—one of my favorite golf courses of all time. Kauri Cliffs is a terrific course, too, and the views from the ocean holes are spectacular.

P1020466

Josie didn’t see the place until the course was almost finished, and when she did she said they would have to build a lodge, too, in order to attract enough golfers to keep the course in operation. “I said, That’s ridiculous, this is a great golf course and they will come,” Julian told me. “Well, Josie was right; they wouldn’t have come. Kauri Cliffs is about as far away from everywhere else as you can get, so it was a real stroke of genius of hers that we did it. And, as it turns out, the lodge business down here has been very, very good.”

The accommodations at Kauri Cliffs consist of eleven two-bedroom cottages arranged along a secluded walking path, plus the Owner’s Cottage, which is larger, has its own garden and infinity-edge swimming pool, and can be rented (for more than $6,000 a night in the high season) when the Robertsons aren’t in residence. Each suite-size half-cottage has a porch, fireplace, dressing room, and spa-like bathroom, and it looks out over the golf course to the sea. This was the view from my room:

When the resort was being designed, Josie had a big fight with the architect over air-conditioning: the architect argued that no self-respecting five-star hotel could possibly do without it, and Josie argued that it most definitely could. The winner, naturally, was Josie—and she was right. The outdoor daytime temperature at Kauri Cliffs hovers around room temperature virtually all year long, and one of the great pleasures of staying there is waking up to birds and ocean breezes rather than the cold hum of an HVAC system.

To be continued.

Report From the Phoenix Open: Coping With a Ten-Drink Limit

Posted on February 6, 2016 by David Owen

Chic, CJ, Jaws, and Brian—all members or honorary members of the Sunday Morning Group—somehow persuaded the Department of Homeland Security to let them spend four days in Scottsdale without supervision, then paid for the trip by withdrawing money from their wives’ 401ks. Or so I assume. Here are Jaws, CJ, and Chic at the men’s member-guest either last summer or the summer before:

In Scottsdale, they’ve been dividing their time between the Waste Management Phoenix Open and Grayhawk Country Club, a few miles away. Before they left, I swore in Chic as this blog’s official representative in the grandstands on the sixteenth hole. Getting reports from him hasn’t been easy, but here’s one:

“Apparently with the skybox tix u have a 10 drink limit but if u tip the girl enough she doesn’t keep count. So my 10 drinks only counted as 2 in her book.”

All things considered, his photos are remarkably unblurry:

Back to Chic:

“The bleachers seem to be the place to be. Which was below us not below us just fiscally below us. They had guys dressed in Masters caddies outfits. Bubba thru a lot of stuff to the fans. Saturday is green out day. Everyone to wear green and support the waste management cause. Golf now then golf in the am. Then tourney rest of day.”

That was yesterday. When they got to the Grayhawk, Chic discovered that he had an old Uncle Frank ball in his bag. Uncle Frank was a beloved SMG member, who died from lung cancer seven or eight years ago. After the cancer had spread to his brain, he was given a marathon radiation treatment, during which his head had to be immobilized in a halo brace, a birdcage-like contraption that was anchored to his shoulders and his skull. When the session ended, 18 hours after it began, he asked the nurses to take him to the children’s oncology ward before removing the brace. A couple of days before, at home, he had made a basketball backboard out of Styrofoam, and now he asked the nurses to attach it to the back of his head. He let the children in the ward shoot free throws with a Nerf ball, three shots for a dollars. “Hey,” he told me later, “I made twenty-three bucks.” Here’s how he dressed for our first-and-almost-last clubhouse sleepover, in 2002:

When Uncle Frank died, we had his name printed on lots of golf balls, and divided them up among ourselves. The idea was to lose the balls in interesting places, so that his name would keep popping up for years, as a kind of memorial. I myself have lost them on great courses in three different countries. Back to Chic:

“I thought trying to lose the frank ball in Arizona might be a nice send off. Well the ball lasted 6 holes. I tried to lose it but it hung in there. 1 pic from its adventure:”

Incidentally, the thing that Brian is the most famous for, at home, is knowing how to use a beer can to open a beer bottle:

Non-golf Activities for Snowed-in Golfers

Posted on January 30, 2016 by David Owen

In the olden days, settlers in blizzard-prone parts of the country spent the winter doing things like making candles and splitting cedar logs into shingles. My golf buddies and I—on days when we can’t figure out how to play somewhere, somehow—find similar ways to stay busy. Hacker (real name) referees high-school wrestling matches. Tim D. repairs his equipment—for example, by sewing up rips in his golf bag:
I recently used my favorite photo-project website, Mixbook.com, to create a photo album of my personal golf memories from last year:

And I created a long-term supply of my favorite golf-appropriate nutritional supplement, using a kit my wife gave me:

Bacon Kit Box

The kit contained everything I needed:

The only thing not included was a nice big pork belly, which my wife also gave me:

The instructions were easy to follow:

And now I have enough to last at least a couple of weeks.

How to Dress for Sub-freezing Golf

Posted on January 29, 2016 by David Owen

In shorts, obviously. (The Sunday Morning Group gives two extra strokes if you wear them after December 1.) One great thing about shorts is that they complement any outfit:

Last year, because of Addison, we had to add a rule about sock height. He arrived one Sunday in unusually tall socks, which he pulled up almost to his knees and fastened with rubber bands that he’d found in his mother’s refrigerator, on two bunches of broccoli:

Those socks are virtually pants! The new rule is “crew height or shorter”—demonstrated here by Fritz:

On Sunday, Fritz and I got to wondering whether there might not be a non-sock, non-pant, non-cheating solution to the exposed-skin problem (the wind was straight from the North Pole). After the round, I did some research and found this post, on the Fox Sports website. It was written two years ago by Brendon Ayanbadejo, who played linebacker for several NFL teams:

“What allowed me to wear so little in cold games was a cocktail Brian Urlacher and Muhsin Muhammad revealed to me. There is a cream called Warm Skin that we would mix with Vaseline and Tiger Balm. We would mix all these topicals together and rub them into our arms, legs, back … pretty much over our entire body. Make sure you put your jock on before you do this or you will get extremely uncomfortably hot in some of the wrong places.”

So I ordered some Warm Skin and began working on my own leg recipe, using stuff I found in various closets and medicine cabinets in my house. The best combination, so far, is Warm Skin, Musher’s Secret (which my wife bought to protect our dog’s feet from road salt), and capsaicin creme (which is hot, like Tiger Balm, and is usually sold as a topical analgesic for arthritis). I stirred in some Aquaphor, too—what the hell.

Reader’s Trip Report: Masters Junior Pass Program

Posted on January 6, 2016 by David Owen

On New Year’s Day, twelve members of the Sunday Morning Group played the Black Course at the Wheel, the best course that’s still open within an hour’s drive of our home club, which shut down the Monday after Thanksgiving. Three of us wore shorts (thereby gaining two extra handicap strokes), and Mike B. wore a tuxedo, which he apparently hadn’t had time to change out of. He kept it on for all eighteen holes, too.

There are many reasons to celebrate January 1. The main one is that it’s the first day of the year during which the next Masters will be held—now just three months away.

In 2013, Will Stegall, a reader in San Francisco, took his daughter, Annie, to her first Masters. (She turned nine on practice-round Monday. You can read her trip report here.) Last year, Stegall took Annie’s younger brother, William, who was eight at the time. Both kids were beneficiaries of Augusta National’s Junior Pass Program, which enables the children of existing badge-holders to attend for free. (Restrictions apply.) William had a great time, and not only because he got Tiger’s autograph.

Here’s William’s report, as transcribed by his father :

“My experience at the Masters was beyond amazing in all ways. It looked beautiful: the flowers, the course, and the trees. Being able to get autographs because only kids can get them is amazing. I got to see the Big Three (Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player) play in the long drive contest that was extra special. I got a Masters visor. You usually don’t see men more excited about shopping than women. I just got a green visor that said Masters on the front. I went to the spot where Bubba Watson hit his amazing curve shot. Everyone had to put a chair down somewhere on the course to watch but of course we could walk around, the people were so nice they would never take a chair of ours or anyone else’s. The pimento cheese sandwiches were DELICIOUS, they were perfect. My family has been going for years but it was my first time so I was very excited when I finally could go. But I never knew how many people went!”

Thanks, William! As it happens, the Sunday Morning Group has a Junior Pass Program, too, and Will, Annie, and William are all invited to join us for our first round of 2017, next New Year’s Day.

Golf With a Broken Neck (and Back)

Posted on January 4, 2016 by David Owen

Rex Hauck is a brother-in-law of Tony’s and, therefore, an honorary-member-by-marriage of the Sunday Morning Group. That’s Rex on the far right in the photo above (and Tony on the far left). Hauck and a girlfriend went skiing in Aspen back in the nineteen-eighties, when he was twenty-eight. They got on a chairlift, and when he reached behind them for the safety bar he was surprised to discover that their chair didn’t have one. Partway up the mountain, the chair struck a tower and began to swing. Rex and his girlfriend were thrown out, and fell forty feet. His girlfriend landed first, in deep snow, and was unhurt; Hauck landed across her legs, on his back, and had to be taken down the mountain on a rescue sled.

“I fractured three vertebrae in my neck, and also suffered a compression fracture of two vertebrae in the middle of my spine,” he told me recently. “I had two operations to repair the damage. Doctors took out bone and muscle from the vertebrae in my neck but could do nothing for the compression fracture in my back.”

A representative of the ski company visited Hauck in the hospital, and offered him a free lifetime lift pass. He declined, and discovered later that the same chair had struck the tower before, damaging its safety bar, and that rather than fixing the problem or taking the chair out of service the lift operator had simply removed the bar. He also learned, to his sorrow, that Colorado law narrowly limits the legal liability of lift operators, to an extent that seems inconceivable to someone whose state’s economy doesn’t depend heavily on the profitability of its skiing industry. (He received a settlement in the low four figures.)

“I don’t ski anymore, but I still play golf,” Hauck continued. “The compression fracture in my back effectively fused those bones, leaving me much less flexibility and rotation in my torso. The surgeons didn’t fuse the vertebrae in my neck, but arthritis and the loss of the discs have limited my ability to rotate my head. I thought at first that having less movement in my neck would help my golf swing, but I still manage to lift my head too much on the way down. I have a fluid, PGA-style swing only in my imagination, but that doesn’t diminish the excitement I feel when I step onto the tee box.”

Hacker (real name) and Hauck.

Here’s a video of Hauck’s swing, made on my home course a couple of years ago. The voice in the background, toward the end, is Tony’s.

Last year, I wrote a column in Golf Digest about Thomas Tami, another golf buddy of mine who plays despite having broken his neck. You can read about him [here](http://www.golfdigest.com/story/man-about-golf-playing-with-a-broken-neck), and watch a video here:

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

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