Report (Including Lunch) From the Olympic Club

Posted on May 18, 2015 by David Owen

Our golf course has just nine holes, and from the tips it’s only a few inches longer than 5,500 yards, and if you want lunch you have to make it yourself. Nevertheless, the Sunday Morning Group managed to send two golfers—Addison and Todd—to the first United States Amateur Four-Ball Championship, which was held at the Olympic Club, in San Francisco, earlier this month.

They qualified by shooting 65 at our state’s qualifier, at Mill River Country Club, back in September. As a matter of fact, we really sent three golfers to Olympic, because the other team that qualified in our state (by shooting 66) was Ben D.—an honorary SMG member by virtue of his having come on one of our annual golf trips to Atlantic City—and his brother, Daniel. Addison, Todd, Ben, and Daniel played their practice rounds together. In the photo below, which was taken on Olympic’s Lake Course, Ben is the one who didn’t listen when the photographer told them not to look at the camera; the others, from left to right, are Todd, Addison, and Daniel.

Addison and Todd didn’t make it to match play, and Ben and Daniel lost their first match, but they all had a great time. Addison’s mother, Vi, took lots of pictures. Here’s Todd and his daughter Amanda, who caddied for him:

Addison’s caddie was his Uncle Lance, who plays in our member-guest with Addison’s father, Reese, and is therefore an honorary SMG member, too:

Here’s Addison’s report:

We were treated like pros by the USGA and the Olympic Club. They shuttled us back and forth between the hotel and the course, and we were able to use every imaginable amenity in the clubhouse: pool, steam room, hot tub, you name it. Everything was complementary except alcohol. We had our own lockers, and our shoes were always polished. The practice facilities were open from 7 to 7 each day, and the range balls were Pro V1xes. I should have just packed my sleeping bag and stayed in the locker room.

The trip gave everyone multiple opportunities to sample an Olympic specialty: the burger dog. It’s a hamburger that’s shaped like a hot dog and served on a hot-dog bun, and it was invented in 1950 by a man named Bill Parrish. It’s served in a little bag, so you can eat it with one hand and not drip mustard on your shirt.

Todd says he’s going to try to reproduce burger dogs the next time it’s his turn to bring lunch for the Sunday Morning Group. Maybe add bacon?

Free Golf Balls! (For My Friends and Me)

Posted on May 8, 2015 by David Owen

At a rich-guy club several years ago, I stopped by the golf shop to buy Pro V1s, and when the assistant behind the counter told me how much they were I said, “Oh, no, just a sleeve,” but—ha-ha!—the joke was on me. I bought them anyway, because I didn’t want some kid to think I couldn’t afford fifteen dollars apiece for golf balls. During my round, though, I played away from trouble, and I never went for anything in two. And when I got home I moved three slightly beaten-up Pro V1s from my shag bag to my golf bag, because by doing that, I figured, I was cutting my average cost in half.

Recently, my friends and I have been using significantly less expensive balls, called Vice Pro. They were sent to us by Vice Golf, a German company, whose founders are shown in the photo above.

The company has just started selling in the United States, and it’s eager to receive the tsunami-like marketing boost that follows any association with the Sunday Morning Group. Vice is the official ball of the German Golf Association, and Vice Pro won a gold rating in Golf Digest’s 2015 Hot List, and Titleist has endorsed the design, in a way, by suing the company (and several others) for copying the Pro V1’s patented dimple pattern.

One of the many lawyers in SMG worked for Callaway during its (successful) lawsuit against Titleist over something similar, and the lawsuit took forever so I know from experience that we won’t have to send our balls back to Germany anytime soon. And that’s a good thing because everybody seems to like them—and not only because the ones we got have our (unpatented) logo on them. (Vice offers several personalization options.)

Vice balls are sold only online. The ones we got were a great price (free); they’re more expensive if have to pay for them ($35 a dozen for the top-of-the-line Pro balls), but they’re still cheaper than the competition, and they’re even cheaper if you’re willing to order more than one dozen at a time. (If you buy five or more, the price drops to $25 a dozen.) The shipping cost ($7) is the same no matter how many you order—a further incentive to stock up. Tim has already re-ordered, and as soon as we’ve got some cash in our slush fund we’ll think about adding the Vice logo to our Jägermeister sweatshirts or our Famous Smoke Shop hats.

Revolutionary New Playoff Format—Now With Bacon

Posted on May 5, 2015 by David Owen

Two teams tied during the Sunday Morning Group’s inaugural outing of 2015, a couple of weeks ago. The playoff format (devised by the Committee) was “foot wedge from the patio to the practice green, closest to the hole.” A foot-wedge shot, to seem realistic, has to be furtive: you can’t look at the ball:

One of the difficulties with the foot wedge is that, if you’re good at it, people assume you’ve used it before, so the best approach is to appear only semi-competent. Meanwhile, lunch was provided by Peter A., who introduced a menu item that will be considered a staple from now on:You don’t have to cook it, but you can, by dropping it on the grill for a minute or so before moving it to your burger and covering it with cheese.

Have a Cigar! Hey, Have Two!

Posted on April 20, 2015 by David Owen

There are two approaches to turning yourself into a human billboard: the single-logo, less-is-more approach, typified by Tiger Woods (Nike) and Jordan Spieth (Under Armour), and the how-much-personal-surface-area-do-I-control approach, typified by Jim Furyk and NASCAR. My friends and I fall into the second category, and, even though by now we have virtually covered ourselves with umlauts (thanks to Jägermeister, the official all-weather intoxicant of the Sunday Morning Group), we haven’t finished selling out.

Recently, we added another major sponsor: Famous Smoke Shop, which sells cigars online, by mail order, and in person (at the company’s headquarters and retail super store, in Easton, Pennsylvania). Famous Smoke is what is known in the business world as a “good fit” with a lot of the guys I play golf with.

Famous Smoke was founded in New York City in 1939 by David and Rose Zaretsky, and it’s owned today by their son Arthur, who, whether he plays golf or not, is now an honorary member of the Sunday Morning Group. The company operates several cigar-oriented websites—not just Famous-Smoke but also CigarAuctioneer (which sells lighters and other accessories) and CigarMonster (which has the coolest golf hats):

When we played at Richter Park two weekends ago, we handed out a bunch of goodies that Famous Smoke had sent us during the courtship phase of our relationship: cigars, hats, shirts, towels, and other stuff. We gave those things to ourselves and also to random strangers, including this guy:

It was like Man Halloween.

Cigars have sort of been in the news recently, because the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba will presumably lead eventually to the normalization of relations between American cigar smokers and Cuban cigars. I asked our new friends at Famous Smoke about that, and learned that Arthur Zaretsky believes that an end to the cigar embargo would be good good for Cubans and for his company (and therefore, by extension, for the Sunday Morning Group), but that, for a variety of mostly legal reasons, he doesn’t believe it will happen soon. Even so, he’s optimistic, long-term; he told a local reporter, “I’ve been waiting 45 years to sell Cuban cigars.”

Recently, someone told me that when the pros sell out they do it for money, not just for hats and shirts with awesome logos on them. Whoa! Maybe we’ll work on that next.

Are These the Best Socks for Golf?

Posted on March 16, 2015 by David Owen

First, a weather update. Here’s what the my patio looked like on March 2:

And here’s what it looked like two weeks later:

Note that the enormous tabletop “snow loaf” in the first photo has virtually disappeared, revealing the handle of a barbecue utensil I forgot to bring indoors before the weather went to hell. You can also make out almost all of my charcoal grill, which, somewhat surprisingly, I remembered to cover up the last time I used it. Meanwhile, Pelham Bay Golf Course, in the Bronx, has announced that it will reopen on Thursday, and, if it really does, the Sunday Morning Group’s winter competition, the Jagermeister Kup, will resume there this weekend. (I’ll be traveling, alas.)

During the lousy weather, I’ve been testing (during dog walks) some socks I learned about from guys who hang out with PGA Tour players. They’re made by a company called Kentwool, which is the official game-day sock provider of Bubba Watson and Matt Kuchar, among others. Charles Barkley—whose feet are so big (size 16) that he may need to wear two on each foot—says, “Even though my golf game is terrible, my feet always feel great in my Kentwool socks.” Here’s what the quarter-height golf socks look like:

And here’s what the tall golf socks look like:

Both kinds are seventy-five percent wool, and they’re padded and hinged in all the right places, and they really do feel great, with shoes or without. A word of caution: the short socks are twenty bucks a pair, and the tall ones are twenty-five, so you probably shouldn’t place an order without first talking to your financial adviser. Another word of caution: a person who works in the clothing industry told me recently that two of the next big trends in golf socks are going to be “big” and “colorful.” On one of my first reporting assignments, more than thirty years ago, I traveled to England with a large group of American Beatles fanatics, among them Charles F. Rosenay!!!, who had had three exclamation points legally added to his last name. Here’s a picture of Rosenay!!! at a rest stop near the birthplace of William Shakespeare:

He was ahead of the curve on both the Converse All Stars and the man purse, so don’t automatically assume that he was wrong about the socks.

The Only Foolproof Way to Preserve Golf Memories

Posted on March 10, 2015 by David Owen

When my wife was growing up, her parents kept the family’s snapshots in, literally, a shoe box. Right now, by contrast, I’ve got many thousands of images spread among four or five personal computers, an external hard drive, an iPad, my smartphone, the camera in my golf bag, two other cameras, and the servers at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Instagram, Carbonite, Shutterfly, Snapfish, Mixbook, and probably a few others—plus an assortment of thumb drives and memory cards, which I’m constantly almost putting into the wash. Storing photographs in digital form is extremely convenient, but there’s a danger. You wouldn’t be happy today if, a dozen years ago, you had decided to archive your children’s baby pictures on Iomega Zip disks.

The solution is to employ a picture-storage format that can’t become obsolete. For more than thirty years, I’ve been a semi-obsessive compiler of physical photo albums, which now fill two large shelves in my living room. The earliest of those albums contain printed photographs glued to paper, but I’ve become a total convert to self-published photo books, which consume less shelf space, are easier to assemble, and can easily be recreated if they’re damaged or lost. The first one I made covered a family trip almost a decade ago. Since then, I’ve made at least twenty, including several that document golf trips abroad.

I’ve used four different online services to make those books, and I’ve watched the technology improve steadily. My current favorite service is Mixbook, which lets you easily edit, resize, crop, and arrange photographs on pages whose design you can customize as much or as little as you like. Here’s what a spread looks like when you’re working on it. The yellow lines are alignment aids; they appear each time you fiddle with a picture:

You can add text. You can scan scorecards and add those. You can invite friends to contribute material, too. You can work on a project a page or two at a time. You can wait to place your order until whatever service you’re using is offering a deep discount—as they all do repeatedly.

If you’re stuck for a tee gift for your member-guest how about giving every player a photo book full of pictures taken during the tournament? You could even give each one a different cover, featuring a photo of the recipient. And, if you’re stuck for a birthday present for your wife, why not give her a book that lovingly documents what you’re up to when you’re not around?

Incidentally, if you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can store an unlimited number of photographs on Amazon Cloud Drive—an easy way to unclog a hard drive.

Making Awesome Golf Stuff Even Awesomer

Posted on March 6, 2015 by David Owen

A group of professional caddies is suing the PGA Tour for requiring them to wear bibs bearing the logos of companies that pay fees to the tour but not to the caddies—and I hope they win, because it’s true, as one sportswriter said, that the tour is forcing the caddies to serve as “unpaid human billboards.” It’s a good thing they didn’t ask me to represent them in their lawsuit, though, because my own first reaction would have been “Wow! Free caddie bibs!” My friends and I not only happily wear logo-covered golf stuff that nobody pays us to wear; we even spend money of our own to add additional logos to our already-logo-covered stuff, the better to emulate Jim “5-Hour Energy-and-Web.com-plus-SunGard-Financial-among-many-other-companies” Furyk and his fellow tour members. You can read more at this blog’s official home, on the Golf Digest website. And if you “subscribe” to myusualgame.com, by filling in your email address in the blank on the right side of this page, you’ll be notified every time I post something new. And, if you’re willing to wait a month or so, you can find complete versions of all my old posts on this site, too, by paging down until you reach them.

These Are Still the Best Winter Golf Gloves — Plus Other Apparel News

Posted on February 11, 2015 by David Owen

My friends and I haven’t been able to play golf in about a month now, so I’ve been wearing my winter golf gloves mainly to walk the dog. The ones I like best are still Winter Xtreme, by HJ Glove. They’re thick but flexible, and they have nice grippy silicone webbing on the palms and fingers. And Amazon has them in stock—something that hasn’t always been true. Meanwhile, our improved-and-personalized Jägermeister sweatshirts are back from the embroiderer:

We went to 1st and 10, our favorite sports bar, to hand them out, and also because it was 50-cent-wings night. Totally coincidentally, the owner of the bar was handing out Jägermeister jerseys with the name of the bar on them to guys on a bowling team that he sponsors:

When he saw that we were, in effect, Jägermeister brothers, he gave us jerseys, too. So when I went to Stop & Shop on the way home, to buy milk, baked beans, corn meal, and eggs, I was wearing two Jägermeister shirts, one on top of the other. And then a couple of days later the embroiderer finished our winter hats:

Now all we need is grass.

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

Posted on February 9, 2015 by David Owen

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

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

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

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

Did Donald Trump Copy His Hairstyle From Nature?

Posted on January 31, 2015 by David Owen

We played Spyglass and Pebble last Sunday, at Maggie McFly’s. Here’s Mike B., holding the stick for me on the second green at Pebble:

The weather had been so bad that playing anywhere but on the simulators wasn’t a possibility. Then the weather got worse. The snowstorm that the Weather Channel had such a cow about earlier this week turned out to be a dud in our part of New England, but we still got six or seven inches Then on Friday morning we got a few more. As a consequence, I’ve spent a lot of time staring at a bird feeder my wife gave me for one of the windows in my office —which our dog has also been interested in. Anyway, I think I’ve figured out where my close personal friend Donald Trump got his hairstyle: nuthatches.

I mentioned in a recent post that Jägermeister’s official sponsorship of the Sunday Morning Group had had a measurable impact on sales because Other Gene’s wife had ordered some in a restaurant and a non-golf-playing bridge partner of mine in Mississippi was thinking about buying a bottle. I’d now like to update those results: my non-golf-playing bridge partner in Mississippi not only did buy a bottle; he also served it to three people he has been teaching to play bridge:

“Each of the guys said he hadn’t drunk any since college,” my friend reported. “The one with the baseball cap said his first and only experience with it had been at a Cornell fraternity party he went to his freshman year. He drank so much that night that he ended up throwing up from a balcony at the front of the fraternity house, and a crowd gathered below to cheer him on. The other guy said his story was similar, but he didn’t tell it.” They’re grown-ups now, though, and I think I can safely put all four of them in the plus column, along with Other Gene’s wife.

Let’s check that bird feeder again:

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