Woman Uncovers Corporate Golf’s Darkest Secret

Posted on December 20, 2015 by David Owen

Nobody else could play on Saturday, so I decided to do chores and pay bills. But then I noticed that the temperature was almost 60, so I took the dog for a quick walk and went to Candlewood Valley as a single. The starter sent me out with Barbara, who had followed a similar logical path to the golf course. We were joined by Kevin and Steve:

Steve was trying to master a new 65-degree wedge, which he had ordered from an infomercial. It’s the ideal club if you want your ball to end up either almost exactly where it started or in that pond over there, on the other side of the green. Kevin started playing golf just this year. Pretty quickly, Barbara and I learned that when he was hitting the best place to stand was either a little bit behind him or to the left. Nevertheless, he did hit a few good shots, including this tricky one, on the seventh hole:

Barbara is the technology person at a private school for special-needs kids. She began her career, in the late nineteen-seventies, at IBM, and she took up golf when she realized that most of her male coworkers played. More recently, a friend from work invited her to fill in for his regular partner in his weekly golf league, which was all men. Some of the regulars grumbled, but the pro told her to ignore them, and after she had subbed a few times they invited her to join the group. Because of her experience in the business world, she understands one of golf’s darkest secrets: most of the men who play in corporate outings suck, and a women who can hit her driver even a hundred yards can end up being her foursome’s most valuable player, since she gets to play from the forward tees.

Barbara recently switched from women’s shafts to senior men’s shafts, and when she did, she said, she picked up twenty-five yards with her driver. Her mother, who is 90, also plays golf. She took it up in her fifties, and when she was in her mid-eighties she won the women’s nine-hole championship at the club she belongs to, in Florida. “I would put her chipping and putting against anybody’s,” Barbara said. Barbara has four grandchildren, and she is trying to get them interested in playing, too—so far without much success.

I went back to Candlewood the next day, with the Sunday Morning Group.

We played an old game of ours, called Fathers & Sons: the four oldest guys versus the four youngest. It was the second round of our winter-long competition, the Jagermeister Kup.

The course was crowded and slow, and we were pretty sure we were going to going to have to finish in the dark, with glowing balls, since at this time of year the sun is basically gone by 4:15—and when we made the turn, at 2:45, we saw that there were three groups on the tenth hole, which is only about three hundred yards long. But then the starter suggested that we replay the front, which was now empty except for a single two holes ahead. Plus about a million geese:

We ended up playing a four-hour round the hard way: two hours and forty-five minutes for the first nine, an hour and fifteen minutes for the second. Everybody played better, because there was less time to think between shots. And on the last hole we caught up to the single. Out of the way, pal!

The Sons beat the Fathers by a stroke, after making a miraculous charge on the second nine. Damn. But we had fun, and in the parking lot, as we were leaving, I spotted a solution to my car-clutter problem:

We’re going back on Friday, unless winter suddenly arrives.

Reader’s Trip Report: Tarandowah Golfers Club

Posted on December 15, 2015 by David Owen

When my friends and I look for places to play during the winter, we usually go south—to Bridgeport, Brooklyn, or the Bronx—but maybe we should go north instead. John Wilson, a reader in Canada, wrote recently to say he had just played a round at Tarandowah Golfers Club, in Springfield, Ontario, a few miles north of the northern shore of Lake Erie, about halfway between Buffalo and Detroit. Pictures of the course made me want to jump in my car.

Tarandowah was designed by Martin Hawtree, who has done big projects at Lahinch, Portmarnock, Formby, Royal Liverpool, and Royal Birkdale — all among my favorite courses in the world. He also designed Trump International in Aberdeen, Scotland, and has done a major renovation and redesign at Trump International in Doonbeg, Ireland. His firm, Hawtree Ltd., was founded more than a century ago by his grandfather Fred; it’s the oldest continuously operating golf-architecture firm in the world. (All three generations of Hawtrees have worked on Royal Birkdale.) Tarandowah is very much in the spirit of all those great old links courses. Here’s a photo Wilson took during his recent round:

And here’s another:

His report:

“I work on the greens crew at St. Thomas Golf & Country Club, in Union, about half an hour away. It closes every year after the third weekend in November, so it has been shut down for a while. Tarandowah is one of several public courses in this area that stay open as long as the weather permits. I played with a St. Thomas member I see every day when I am working but rarely get to make a game with. We played in three hours (walking) at a cost of $25 per person — not bad for a Hawtree design.”

St. Thomas, which was founded in 1899, has a heck of a course, too. Here’s the third hole, on which nearly every shot has a decent chance of ending up in that creek:

During the past three winters, St. Thomas has undertaken a major tree-thinning project — something many old golf courses need to do. “Joe Vargas, from Michigan State University, and David Oatis, from the U.S.G.A., were the primary consultants on the project,” Wilson told me, “and my superintendent, Wade Beaudoin, wrote an article about it.” (You can read Beaudoin’s article here.) So far, more than a thousand trees have come down. Here are some of them:

During a round at Tarandowah a little over a year ago, Wilson noticed that a sorry-looking dog was following his foursome. “I assumed she was a stray, because she was covered in burrs and thick mud,” he told me. “My friends thought I was crazy to rescue a dog during a round of golf, but I took her home and cleaned her up. Later, I learned that she belonged to a farm near the golf course. I shed a few tears when I dropped her off with her rightful owners. During my round last week, she came running across the fields, and my smile was a mile wide. Her name is Gracey.”

“The forecast for next week calls for temperatures in the mid-forties,” he continued, “so there’s still more time for December golf in Ontario. On Tuesday, though, I’m heading to L.A. for a family visit. I already have a tee time for Rancho Park, which I haven’t played yet. Hopefully, the round will be less than five hours.”

Well, good luck with that one. Maybe less than six.

The Muny Life: Country Club of Woodbridge

Posted on December 10, 2015 by David Owen

In my part of the country at this time of the year, avid golfers become migratory. Some fly hundreds of miles south and don’t return until spring, but most of us circle the ground closer to home, like Canada geese searching for open water. We study the sky and the Web and the Weather Channel, and when we hear rumors of snow-free fairways we hit the phones. Over the past decade or so, my friends and I have assembled an extensive portfolio of all-season golf courses, in three states. This past Sunday, we added a new one: Country Club of Woodbridge, about forty-five minutes southeast of our home course (which closed for the winter on the Monday after Thanksgiving).

Woodbridge used to be a private club; the town bought it in the aftermath of the mortgage crisis, and Billy Casper Golf manages it. The course was designed in 1938 by Orrin E. Smith, who worked with Donald Ross on a couple of projects and designed or redesigned 20 courses in our state, including the course of our No. 2 Enemy Club, which we like a lot. The selectmen of the town of Woodbridge are thinking about turning part of the course into condominiums for oldish people, or something, but I hope they don’t, because we want to go back—maybe on New Year’s Day, when (the starter told us) they usually have a good crowd.

There was a frost delay, but that was OK because it gave us a chance to get caught up. Several of our guys were easy to spot in the crowd outside the golf shop, because after December 1 the Sunday Morning Group gives two extra handicap strokes to anyone who wears shorts. You would think that wearing shorts in sub-freezing weather would be unpleasant, but in fact your legs adapt fairly quickly, by becoming permanently numb:

The frost delay didn’t last all that long, and when it was over the starter shotgunned everyone. We had twelve guys, and all three of our groups started on the first hole. By then, the sun had made the day seem sort of hot. We played two best balls, All Balls Count on the money hole (No. 12), and skins.

On the third tee, we met a member of the town’s golf committee. He wasn’t playing, but had driven out to say hello. He told us that Woodbridge is unusual in that the property was once owned by Roger Sherman, the only person to sign all four of the principal founding documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Association, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Here’s a picture of Sherman dressed in an eighteenth-century golf outfit:

The layout is Woodbridge is a little tricky, but it’s easy to navigate if you remember (as the starter told us) that when you leave a green your next tee is almost never the one you come to first. Near one tee, we saw a golf-ball vending machine installed by an entrepreneurial neighbor:

Afterward, we drank beer and went over our scorecards in the golf shop. My team came in last, but I won two skins and split the money hole with Chic and Todd. That puts me closer to the top than to the bottom of the standings for the Jagermeister Kup, our all-winter competition.

We had a great day—as I had known we would because the night before I had a dream about golf. In the dream, I discovered that Nancy Reagan is much younger and more interested in me than people have generally thought. She also loves golf, although she told me that when her husband was in the White House she kept her interest to herself. She drives a Cadillac convertible—Seville-type, not Escalade—and in the parking lot of the golf club where I ran into her I saw that there were two golf bags in the backseat, hers and Hedy Lamarr’s. Both sets of clubs were in “mint vintage” condition, and the woods had simple muted-pastel headcovers. Nancy said she wanted to give me Hedy Lamarr’s clubs, and maybe her own as well, along with some sort of golf journal she had kept for years. The journal was written in dream writing, so I couldn’t quite make out what was in it, but I was pleased because I knew that I would eventually get at least a couple of Golf Digest columns out of it. Nancy is totally not the calculating, vindictive ice queen that people have always made her out to be. I don’t think our relationship was “going anywhere,” but I’ll never know because right about then I woke up to take a whiz. When I described all this to a friend later, he said that Hedy Lamarr’s days of appearing in people’s dreams were probably just about over. He’s definitely right about that; in fact, I think that even my dream was probably a bit of a stretch.

Our Awesome New Waterproof Scorecards Are Here!

Posted on December 6, 2015 by David Owen

In February 2007, Ray, Tony, and I played golf in the rain for five days at Bandon Dunes. We had the same caddies for all ten rounds, and during an especially troublesome downpour they switched us to waterproof scorecards, which another Bandon caddie, Todd Petrey, had invented. Here are Ray, Tony, two of our caddies, and some other guy during a relatively dry moment on that trip:

Petrey graduated from the University of Florida 1992 with a degree in sports therapy, and tried to play golf professionally for a while. He began caddying when he was short of cash, and one of the places he worked was East Lake, in Atlanta, where the weather is so disgustingly hot and humid that scorecards sometimes dissolve in perspiration. To deal with that problem, and also with rain, he invented Drycards. (“Like a normal scorecard, only better because you can use it as a coaster.”) Petrey’s company didn’t stay in business for long—apparently, the average golfer doesn’t play in bad weather as often as the Sunday Morning Group does—but he told me how to make the cards, and my friends and I now make our own. You can make them, too. Here’s how they work (my wife lent me a baking pan for this demonstration):

You can write on them with a regular pencil, even underwater, and you can erase what you’ve written with a regular eraser. The secret is synthetic paper, which Petrey first noticed in New Zealand, while caddying at Cape Kidnappers. New Zealand prints its banknotes on polypropylene, which has many advantages over paper made from cotton fibers: it lasts longer, stays cleaner, and is easier to make secure. It’s also waterproof and tear-proof. For our first batch, we used polypropylene card stock manufactured by a company called Yupo.

Those cards worked great, but they were expensive, so when we ran out we switched to thinner stock, manufactured by Xerox, and had the scorecard part printed on both sides, so that each card can be used twice. The relative thinness of the new stock isn’t a problem, because the stuff is indestructible:

As always, we had the printing done at PrintWorks, the official provider of graphic services to the Sunday Morning Group. The paper was still expensive — a buck a sheet — but because we got four usable sides out of each sheet our total unit cost was a little less than 30 cents.

Doug, who runs PrintWorks with his mother, is an old hand at this stuff now. He’ll print waterproof scorecards for you, too, if you ask him nicely. Here he is consulting with Hacker (real name):

Golf in the Shoulder Season

Posted on November 20, 2015 by David Owen

Quite a few members of my golf club think our course is closed for the season. That’s good, because it keeps most of the complainers at home, but even without them golf is becoming problematic. By the time the frost has melted, there’s not a lot of daylight left. On Sunday, we moved our starting time from 7:30 to 9:00, but when we arrived the frost still looked almost like snow, and we couldn’t tee off until 10:00. Here’s the ninth green at 9:30:

Tim D. took that photo, with his phone. Luckily, the other Tim, Tim C., had brought Bloody Marys and cinnamon rolls:

There was a plastic knife on one of the plates—not for cutting the rolls into smaller pieces, but for scraping up icing that had fallen or dripped off. The Bloody Marys were on the porch, where someone had stacked all the furniture from our patio, to protect it either from the elements or from us:

Our clubhouse isn’t heated, so every November the plumber has to drain the pipes and fill the toilets with antifreeze. One winter, someone (not a member of the Sunday Morning Group) used one of the toilets anyway, so now we try to make it clear that they’re out of commission:

This is the VIP Suite, also known as the women’s restroom. It’s nicer than the restroom in our locker room, but it’s usually available only in bad weather and during the men’s member-guest:

At last, someone decided that the remaining frost was probably just dew, and we teed off. In the trees beyond the fourth green I saw the largest flock of turkeys I’ve ever seen on the golf course, or anywhere. Here’s about half of it:

Tim C. brought lunch. A recent report by the World Health Organization says that hot dogs and bacon cheeseburgers aren’t as good for you as people have always thought. No mention of beer, fortunately. And the hamburger buns that Tim brought were “multi-grain,” so if this really turns out to be a problem we could cut back on those.

I couldn’t hang around for too long on Sunday, because I had to get home to meet the appliance-repair guy, who now does his appliance-repairing only on weekends. He had to take a regular job during the week (at an auto-parts store) because, he said, when appliances break nowadays people usually just dump them and buy something new rather than having them repaired. That is to say, they treat them like year-old golf clubs. His most recent example: a guy who bought a new dryer because he didn’t want to wait for a 25-dollar belt to arrive and be installed. An additional factor: the most vulnerable component of almost every modern appliance is the (basically unnecessary) computer board, which can’t be repaired and is so expensive to replace that buying a new appliance often actually makes sense. The Internet of Things!

Anyway, he said he always remembers where I live because he once came to our house to repair a broken dishwasher, and the source of the brokenness turned out to be some coyote teeth, which had gotten stuck in the thing that sprays the water. The teeth had fallen out of a coyote skull that I bought on eBay. I bought it because I wanted one, and although we have a lot of coyotes in our area I was tired of waiting for one to die in our yard. Anyway, putting the skull in the dishwasher turned out to be a big mistake, and not only because of the teeth. It made the whole house smell like a very wet, very dirty dog. So never again.

A Simple Trick to Speed up Play

Posted on November 12, 2015 by David Owen

Most golfers are wussies when it comes to bad weather, even if they own lots of expensive bad-weather gear. There was a huge storm overnight in my area not long ago, and even though the rain had stopped by noon the next day hardly anyone played, except for my friends and me. The reason was that there was still a little rain in the forecast, and that threat was apparently enough to make everyone else stay home and clean out their garage. As a result, we played all eighteen holes without human interference—and in perfect conditions:

Afterwards, I got to thinking: couldn’t this quirk of human nature be put to some practical use? What I decided to do is create a free service that will send a next-day weather forecast, every evening, to all the other members of my club. The forecast will be accurate, except for days when my friends and I are planning to play, when it will include at least one of these:

I might put a big red exclamation mark in there, too.

Shorts Rule, Leaf Rule Now in Effect

Posted on November 6, 2015 by David Owen

The Sunday Morning Group gives one extra handicap stroke to anyone who wears shorts after November 1, and two extra strokes after December 1. There are usually quite a few takers, even when the weather stinks.

Wednesday was unseasonably warm, though, so Addison suggested we give the extra stroke to guys in long pants instead. (He had been working in the golf shop all morning and was wearing corduroys.) This was an intelligent suggestion, but, like many intelligent suggestions, it had to be rejected out of hand, because rules are rules.

S.M.G. also abides by the International Leaf Rule, which states that, if everyone in your group agrees that your ball is lost in the leaves, you can take a free drop (in the leaves) in the likeliest spot. An especially sticky case came up recently during a field trip to Todd’s other club (photo above), which not only has more holes than our club does but also has more deciduous trees. Everyone agreed that Peter A.’s ball was at the bottom of the pile of leaves in the video below, but in order for him to take a drop in the proper spot he would have had to interfere with the maintenance guys:

Sorry, Pete. No relief. Rules are rules.

International Drain-the-Beer-Keg Day

Posted on November 4, 2015 by David Owen

Every fall, around the time the golf shop closes for the season, the Sunday Morning Group prepares for winter by spending a day finishing all the beer that’s left in the kegerator, so that the kegerator can “self-clean” over the winter. This year, finishing the beer was made extra challenging by the fact that all the beer in the kegerator had actually been finished the day before. The solution (devised by Chic and Mike A.) was to buy a new keg, and finish that:

First, though, there were Bloody Marys and Jagermeister on the first tee:

And, of course, we played our regular Sunday round, during which Tim D. secured his position as the year’s leading money winner:

Then Justin helped Fritz and Tim C. run a hundred-foot-long cable from the golf shop to the clubhouse, so that we could watch football if anyone could figure out how to make the TV work. (No one could):

Then, because there was still some beer left in the keg, we played a five-hole cross-country tournament, ten dollars a man:

The format was two-man scramble — but if you or your partner lost a ball you had to switch to alternate shot, and if you lost that ball, too, you had to switch to the beer cart:

We played from the first tee to the sixth green, then the fifth tee to the seventh green, then the eighth tee to the third green, and so on. Surprisingly many members of my club think our course closes when the golf shop does, if not on Labor Day, so hardly anybody got in our way. Plus, Corey, our pro, was playing with us. Here we are waiting on the second tee while two non-participants finish the first hole, which is about to be “in play”:

Sad to say, the new keg ran out before the afternoon was over. Our local liquor store had closed already, so Dr. Mike had to drive to the next town to buy more. But everything worked out in the end.

I Wish My Favorite Golf Shoes Didn’t Leak

Posted on October 29, 2015 by David Owen

I learned about True Linkswear golf shoes at the PGA Golf Merchandise Show in 2011. The pair I tried on at the show was too small—the company’s reps had sold out of my size—but they were still the most comfortable golf shoes I’d ever worn. I now have a dozen pairs, and I wear them even when I’m not playing golf, and many of my friends have switched to them, too. Tim even bought a True golf bag:

My only beef, until now, has been that the pairs I own that are supposed to be waterproof aren’t really—and other golfers who wear and love Trues have told me the same thing. My favorite model ever is one they don’t sell anymore, called “lyt/dry,” which I wear in preference to other shoes even when I’m not playing golf. They are definitely lyt but they’ve never been truly dry, even though the word “waterproof” is printed right on the side:

I’ve dealt with that issue by wearing wool socks when I play in the rain or when the grass is wet, and I’ve dried wet pairs between rounds by using the hairdryer in my hotel room, and I’ve persevered because even when my Trues were leaking they were way more comfortable than any other golf shoes I’ve ever worn. But during the Sunday Morning Group’s recent golf trip to Atlantic City my latest pair, called True motion, didn’t just leak — they basically came apart:

Now, True doesn’t claim that motions are waterproof, and this particular pair had been in my golf-shoe rotation for more than a year. Still, we were playing in dew, not rain, and I had subjected them, cumulatively, to less wear and tear than I have to my very first pair of Trues, which is four and a half years old and which I still walk the dog in. Yet they didn’t hold up:

I complained to the company, and a representative assured me that a new model coming in early 2016, called True elements, will really and truly be “breathable & waterproof.” And I hope he’s right, because even when they’re wet I really, really love these shoes.

A Perfect Autumn Buddies Trip

Posted on October 20, 2015 by David Owen

Every October, the Sunday Morning Group celebrates the approach of the winter golf season by taking a long-weekend golf-only buddies trip to Atlantic City, a little over four hours south of where we live.

This year was Trip No. 16. We had 20 golfers, two of whom must have been in the men’s room when the bag-drop guy took this photo:

As always on these trips, we did more waiting than we usually have to do at home. But the waiting was actually part of the fun—including waiting for the sun to come up at Seaview:

Waiting for J.P. to arrive at Twisted Dune:

Waiting for the frost to burn off at Renault Vineyards:

Waiting for Hacker (real name) and me to finish entering the day’s hole scores in the awesome do-everything spreadsheet that Tim created for the trip:

Waiting for the slowpokes in the group ahead of us to get the hell out of the way on the Bay Course at Seaview:

Waiting for the guys in our own last group to finish at Twisted Dune:

Waiting for our pizzas to be delivered to the lobby of the Sonesta in Somers Point:

Waiting for Tony to realize he was never going to catch the 50-dollar bill that Gary, our terrific superintendent, kept dropping between his open fingers:

Waiting for Reese, on the way home, to attempt a rare cross-lane lit-cigarette hand-off, to Paul, at speed on the Garden State Parkway:

Waiting to find out which of our favorite meals our wives had spent all weekend preparing to celebrate our return:

And, in effect, waiting for the thing that no one likes to think about, much less talk about. We all look a lot older than we did during our first A.C. trip, 16 years ago:

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

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