Category Archives: Tournaments

Normal Golf Guy Sort of Replicates Famous Road Hole Shot

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Mike A. trying to bounce his ball off the boundary wall beyond the first green.

Just six of us showed up this morning. Nobody else was on the course, so we played as a single group. The game was our regular Sunday-morning stuff,  and because we were a sixsome we also played 3-2-1.

Mike A. overshot the first green, and his ball ended up so close to the stone wall that he had to try the shot Miguel Angel Jimenez hit during the 2010 British Open, on the Road Hole at the Old Course at St. Andrews:

Mike, unlike Jimenez, didn’t get his ball onto the green, but he did end up with a better score. (Jimenez made triple-bogey.) I’ve tried Mike’s shot, both successfully and unsuccessfully. It works best if your ball is in front of a stone with a flat side facing the flag.

Even though there were six of us, we got around in a little over three hours. There are several keys to playing quickly in a large group. One is never taking a practice swing. Another is hitting shots when you’re ready, rather than waiting till it’s your turn. Another, on tees, is always having a player “on deck,” in addition to the one actually teeing off, like this:

Gary (left, teeing off) and Mike A. (right, on deck), fifth hole.

 

Five Holiday Gift Ideas for Golfers

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It’s never too early to start shopping for the golfer in your family. These gift ideas are from the pages of Golf Digest in the late 1950s and early 1960s:

This item is from 1957, when golf, cocktail-drinking, and home refrigeration were all ascendant in the United States. U.S. Royal was a trade name of the United States Rubber Company, which renamed itself Uniroyal in 1961. It no longer makes golf balls, although it may still make ice trays.

The reflective metallic golf hat, also from 1957, is an idea that never caught on, for unknown reasons. The hat was probably most useful in match play, since by standing in the right place and tilting your head you could temporarily blind your opponent. The logo notwithstanding, I don’t think anyone ever wore one in the Masters.

Wehrmacht surplus? Somebody must have bought a load of these, because they were advertised all over, and not just in golf publications. This ad is from 1960. Hats like this are still available, although they’re of interest mainly to Third Reich fetishists.

Also from 1960. Golf ball repair is a concept that doesn’t really exist anymore.

This ad is from 1958, but versions of it ran for several years. The price is per week, not per night, and it includes room, golf, meals, tips, and just about everything else. (Dove hunting may have been extra.) Today, you’d pay almost as much at Pinehurst for a dozen Pro V1s.

Don’t see anything you want? More gift ideas soon.

Two Great Golf Recipes

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Bob, eating a cookie.

Last month, my club beat our No. 2 enemy club in a tournament named after our retired superintendent, who is shown eating a cookie in the photo above. (You can read more about him here, in an essay I wrote for Golf Digest ten years ago.) The tournament is named after him because before he came to work at our club, in the mid-1960s, he worked at their club. Our victory gave us a sweep of this year’s majors in our area: our two big annual men’s inter-club matches and a regional senior tournament, in which last year’s winners were so confident they’d win again that they’d already had their name engraved on the cup. Now we have to get that removed.

One of the best things about our match with our No. 2 enemy club is the soup that Dan, who works there, always prepares for the competitors:

Dan, in the tournament kitchen.

Dan’s soup has two ingredients: (1) clam chowder, and (2) hot sauce. You add the hot sauce yourself:

Note the recycled plastic-spoon holder, far right.

Hot sauce keeps clam chowder—which I like—from tasting a little bit like library paste.

My wife, Ann Hodgman—who has written several cookbooks, among many other things—has an even better golf recipe, which is in the 2011 edition of her first cookbook, Beat This! It’s for deep-fried dill pickles, and it’s from Robert Johnson, who used to be a chef at Augusta National. Ann wrote, “Since the recipe the chef gave me might be too challenging for people unused to deep-frying (‘add as much Cholula hot sauce as you will like to use’), I’ve expanded it a bit.” The complete recipe is on pages 122-23. If you give the book to the person in your house who does the cooking, maybe you’ll get to have them for Thanksgiving.

Halloween at Augusta National

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Former Secretary of State George Schultz explaining golf to the mayor of San Francisco in 2005. (Photo by Luke Thomas.)

Condoleezza Rice isn’t the only former U.S. Secretary of State who belongs to Augusta National Golf Club: George Schultz, who ran Ronald Reagan’s State Department, is a member as well. In 1983, Schultz brought his boss and Donald Regan, the White House chief of staff, to the club as guests, and in addition to playing golf they discussed the U.S. invasion of Grenada, which began three days later, on October 25.

During that visit, a forty-five-year-old Augusta resident named Charles R. Harris rammed his pickup truck through a locked gate, took hostages at gunpoint in the golf shop, and demanded an audience with Reagan, who was playing the sixteenth hole. Secret Service agents surrounded the shop, and sharpshooters set up on the putting green. (One of them told a club member that the scope on his rifle was so precise that he would be able to hit a half-dollar coin on the first green, more than four hundred and fifty yards away.)

Harris eventually released all his hostages except David Spencer, the co-professional. Harris kept a pistol to Spencer’s head, and he threatened to shoot off Spencer’s fingers one at a time if Reagan wasn’t brought to see him. To prove that he was serious, he fired a bullet through a window in the front of the shop. (Today, a piece of the window frame with a bullet hole in it hangs on Spencer’s living-room wall.) Spencer was held at gunpoint for two tense hours (not twenty-one, as some Web accounts say). He managed to escape during a moment of confusion when food was sent in for Harris.

“Dave ran out the door and saw Mr. Johnson, the club’s barber, and myself standing there,” Dr. Stephen W. Brown, a member, told me in 1996, “and he more or less collapsed in our arms. I took Dave up to the clubhouse and sat with him awhile, and I told him that his wife knew he was out and all right. He said he wanted to cry. I said, ‘Well, go ahead. Nobody’s here but the two of us.’ He quickly wiped his eyes and turned to me and said, ‘Dr. Brown, I was just as nervous as if I was standing over a three-foot putt and Mr. Roberts told me I had to make it.” That’s Clifford Roberts, of course—the club’s legendary co-founder and longtime chairman.

One October evening fifteen years later—after Schultz had played a round with Nicholas Brady, who served as Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan and the first George Bush and is also a member—Schultz gave  everyone in the dining room a handmade Halloween favor: a small orange-and-black gift bag containing an orange golf ball on which he had used a black marker to draw a smiling jack-o’-lantern face. I got one because I was there working on my book The Making of the Masters. (See photo below.)

Orange and black, not coincidentally, are the colors of Schultz’s alma mater, Princeton University—which he also honored by having a tiger tattooed on his rear end.

Top-Flite jack-o’-lantern, hand-painted by my close personal friend George Schultz. (Collection of the author.)

Do Dogs Make Good Caddies?

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The magazine measured just 8.25 by 5.50 inches back in those days. The “most beautiful golfer,” on the cover, was Elaine Goodman, a junior at Wichita University, in Kansas. She was five-two and weighed a hundred and five pounds, according to the article, and she was selected by a panel of golf writers (chilling thought).

A decade ago, I bought a collection of old Golf Digest magazines in an online auction. Even after ten years, I can tell that the seller didn’t live in what eBay listings refer to as a “smoke-free home.” I don’t mind the smell, though, because the magazines—which are from the late 1950s and early 1960s, and are teensy—are full of interesting material, like this article from 1957:

King, in the photo above, won the first National Dog Caddie Contest, which was held at St. Andrews Golf & Country Club, outside Chicago, in 1956, and was sponsored by the Bee Bindery, a privately owned printing company. King was eleven years old when he won, and had been caddying for ten years. The tournament was founded by Art Biltstein, who is holding the trophy in the photo below. Biltstein owned the Bee Bindery. When he died, in 2006, at the age of ninety-seven, he was survived by his third wife.

Art Biltstein with King, Beau, and Jupiter (who tied for second) and their owners.

Men sure pulled their pants up high in those days. And check out Biltstein’s socks! Dogs looked about the same, though. And a year and a half later Golf Digest ran this:

18 Good Things About Golf: No. 12

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12. Golf confers no necessary advantage on extreme youth. The average age of recent major tournament winners is thirty, a time of life by which professional football players are viewed either as has-beens or as medical anomalies. (The average retirement age in the N.F.L. is twenty-eight.) It’s not unusual for pros in their forties to compete successfully with players half their age. When Raymond Floyd turned fifty, in 1992, he seemed capable of dominating both the regular and the senior professional tours. Phil Mickelson didn’t win his first major until he was thirty-three, which is two years older than Roger Federer is now. Tom Watson nearly won a sixth British Open in 2009, when he was fifty-nine. Youth means less in golf than it does in other sports because golf is as much a mental game as a physical one. It rewards experience, poise, and strategic resourcefulness, just as life does, and it isn’t dominated by adolescent thugs.

Scary Icons Create Tee Times

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Whenever rain is in the forecast, even if it’s only a 20 percent chance of showers, play at my club goes way down. Seeing a thunderstorm icon in their web browser apparently causes many members to make non-golf plans for the day. On Sunday, twenty guys showed up for our regular game—a good turnout—but we had the course to ourselves until noon, I think because the Weather Channel icon that morning had lightning bolts in it. There was enough drizzle at one point to make me put on rain gloves, but there was never any lightning or even real rain, and the sun was shining by the time we finished. Our club’s website has a weather app. Maybe someone could modify it to show lightning bolts all the time.

In honor of the Ryder Cup, we used scorecards from Medinah, which Hacker (real name) had downloaded from the club’s website. (We did the same thing during the PGA Championship with scorecards from the Ocean Course at Kiawah.) The only real effect was to shuffle the holes where the handicap strokes fell, but using the scorecard of a major venue is a respectful way to acknowledge the efforts of the big boys, and, besides, variety is interesting.

We also randomly divided into Ryder Cup teams—ten guys representing the United States and ten representing Europe—and played five four-ball matches, for one point each. I was on the U.S. team, which won, 4½ points to ½. We all assumed that the real U.S. team would win, too, by annihilating the Europeans in the singles matches, in the afternoon. Imagine our surprise. The Sunday Morning Group’s record in using golf to predict important events is now 2-1-0; matches of ours correctly called the outcome of the 2008 presidential election and the 2012 Super Bowl.

We’ll play our Presidential Special game again on Election Day. It was created by Tim, who is the inventor of several core concepts, including negative skins, “shooting your pants,” and the mathematical formula by which we predict the winning team score in our regular Sunday games (13 minus the lowest handicap in the field, times -1). Half the field will represent Obama and half Romney, and each hole will have an Electoral College value equal to the sum of its number and its handicap stroke index.(Our 16th hole has a stroke index of 17, so it’s worth 33 electoral votes—16 plus 17.) An entire golf course adds up to 342 electoral votes—172 needed to win.

Future trivia question: Who made the winning putt in the 2012 Ryder Cup Matches? Answer: It wasn’t Martin Kaymer, whose 1-up victory over Steve Stricker guaranteed only a 14-14 tie (and thus a European “retention” of the trophy). The winning putt was the short par putt that Tiger Woods conceded to Francesco Molinari on the eighteenth hole, because their halved match gave Europe a 14½ -13½ victory. If Tiger had made his putt, 2012 would have been the third tie in Ryder Cup history.

The Best Way to Watch the Ryder Cup

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No, that’s not a medical office building. It’s the premium grandstand beside the eighteenth green at the 1993 Ryder Cup, which was held at The Belfry, in England.

The best way to watch almost any golf tournament is on TV. That’s especially true of the Ryder Cup, because at any moment there’s hardly anything going on. I’ve been to just one Ryder Cup in person—in 1993, on the Brabazon course at The Belfry, in England—and it was a spectator’s nightmare. The most coveted seats, initially, were in an enclosed multistory grandstand beside the eighteenth green, and people who had passes for it began arriving long before the first match teed off. They then waited for almost twelve hours with nothing to watch except one another getting drunk, because on the first day only one of the eight matches—the afternoon four-ball between Nick Faldo and Colin Montgomerie, for the Europeans, and Paul Azinger and Fred Couples, for the United States—made it to the eighteenth hole.

The Belfry, like most of the courses where the Europeans hold the Ryder Cup, is a dud. The nicest thing that Ron Whitten could find to say about it, in Golf Digest’s 1993 Ryder Cup preview, was that its blandness would prevent it from intruding on the golf—perhaps the faintest possible praise for a championship layout. It’s also the opposite of a stadium course. There are no hillsides or mounds for spectators to stand on, and in 1993 the trees  were way too small to climb. I saw one man standing on a paint can, which he had somehow smuggled past the guards at the gate, and I saw many people standing on small stools, also smuggled. Because the viewing opportunities were so meager, there were crowds surrounding the few available television sets. There was one in the Lloyd’s pharmacy tent, and one in the exhibition tent, and one in a rowdy refreshment tent near the tenth fairway. Medinah Country Club is far more spectator-friendly, but if you’re watching from home you should still count yourself lucky.

You should also be grateful that the broadcast isn’t being handled by the BBC. In 1993, Tom Kite would be putting for eagle somewhere, but on the screen you would see Colin Montgomerie practicing a putt he had just missed, or Nick Faldo standing by his golf bag, chatting with his caddie. The camera operators couldn’t track balls in the air and had trouble finding them when they were on the ground. The producers would suddenly cut to Barry Lane, picking him up in mid-follow-through, and the sound equipment on the course looked like Second World War surplus. The BBC has improved since then, but not enough. In the TV Cup, the USA wins every time.

Ryder Cup: Win, Lose, Draw, “Retain”

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The first tie in Ryder Cup history occurred in 1969. It was secured on the final hole of the final match, when Jack Nicklaus conceded a short putt to Tony Jacklin, halving the hole, halving their match, and halving the Cup. After picking up Jacklin’s marker, Nicklaus said, “I don’t think you would have missed it, but I wasn’t going to give you the chance, either.” Ever since, Nicklaus’s gesture has been celebrated as one of the greatest acts of sportsmanship in the history of competition.

On the other hand, it could be viewed as one of the greatest acts of gamesmanship. By giving Jacklin the putt, Nicklaus made the half look less like an accomplishment by the British (who had won the cup only once since 1933) than like a personal gift from Nicklaus. It also left forever hanging the possibility that the reigning British Open champion might have gagged over his eighteen-incher. That’s one of the cool things about match play.

Because the United States had won the previous Matches, in 1967, it “retained” the trophy in 1969. Television commentators and others often speak of “retention” as though it were a form of victory, but it’s not. The only possible outcomes in any match, or in the overall event, are win, lose, and draw. “Retention” is just a housekeeping issue: who will hold the hardware till next time if the two teams tie? Players don’t go to the Ryder Cup hoping to “retain.” They go hoping to win.

Huge Falling Tree Crushes Golf Carts

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On the right-hand side of the photo above—which I took this past Saturday morning, at the beginning of an annual mixed event called the Fall Classic—you can see a huge, ancient, two-trunked oak tree just past the end of the golf shop. About three and a half hours later, toward the end of the tournament, the tree suddenly fell down. My foursome was on the far side of the course when it went, but even from that distance the sound was like an explosion. Here’s what I saw when when I got back to the first tee:

The course was full of golfers, but, amazingly, no one was standing near the tree when it fell, and no one was sitting in any of the golf carts parked beside it. Bob W. and Nick-who-works-in-the-golf-shop were playing a putting game on the practice green, and they watched it go down.

The roots picked up the water cooler near the first tee and flipped it over the split-rail fence, onto its roof:

That’s Margaret’s coffee mug. It was unharmed.

Within an hour, our favorite tree guy, who played with Gene B. in the member-guest this year, was on the job. He and his crew cleaned up everything but the two main trunks, which were too big for the chipper.

The next morning, my friends and I posed on the trunks before we teed off. We’re thinking about turning them into a bench. Or maybe we’ll just leave them where they are. That would definitely be easier. Maybe we’ll leave the squashed golf carts there, too, as a reminder that golf carts don’t last forever.