The Ideal City for Golf?

Posted on October 19, 2015 by David Owen

If you’re thinking about moving to maximize your year-round access to golf, you could do worse than to study a map of the nation’s air bases. The reason isn’t that pilots play more golf than other people; the reason is that the Air Force tends to locate its facilities in places that are relatively free of the kinds of weather that keep flyers on the ground—which happen to be the kinds of weather that keep golfers indoors. By that metric, the most golf-friendly micro-climate in the United States may be in and around San Antonio, Texas, where thousands of new airmen and airwomen are trained each year. At least, that’s the theory of Scott Anderson, a fortyish information-technology consultant, whose wife is a major in the Air Force Reserve. She spent five months in Afghanistan, and, during her deployment, their Skype conversations were sometimes broken off by explosions. “I hate this role reversal,” he told me. “She’d be under attack somewhere, and I’d be home, hand-washing the dog bed.”

That’s Anderson in the middle in the photo above. He told me that he took up golf because he figured it would be a good way to meet people, especially while following his wife through her military career. I met him and two of his friends—Dustin New, on the left, and Evan Zickgraf, on the right—on the first tee at Brackenridge Park Golf Course, a few minutes from downtown San Antonio and roughly midway between Lackland and Randolph Air Force bases.

Old Brack—as regulars refer to it—opened in 1916 and was the first municipal course in Texas. It was designed by A. W. Tillinghast and built partly with convict labor, and for many years it was the home of the Texas Open. The clubhouse was built in 1923, after the original clubhouse burned down; it does extra duty as the Texas Golf Hall of Fame & Museum.On the thirteenth hole, Anderson, New, Zickgraf, and I were joined by Stephen Escobedo, an assistant pro, whom I’d met the day before.

His father, Marshall, caddied on what’s now the Champions Tour, and when Stephen was three or four Marshall took a photograph of him on the Old Brack practice green, pretending to smoke a corncob pipe. Stephen played baseball in college. He took up golf in a serious way during a five-year stint in the Marine Corps, and he liked the game so much that he decided to build his post-military existence around it. Today, in addition to giving lessons and working in the golf shop, he coaches the golf team at a local middle school.

Stephen and Marshall are both members of the Pan-American Golf Association, a predominantly Latino group that was founded in San Antonio in 1947 and now has 44 chapters in nine states. The organization’s national archives and hall of fame are next door to the golf course, in a building that also serves as both a clubhouse and a public bar.

Marshall and a large group of his golf buddies were there having a post-round beer when I stopped by, late on Saturday afternoon. They play most of their rounds at Old Brack, although they occasionally take field trips. “There’s a course they sometimes play that’s 30 miles away from here,” Stephen told me. “But even when they travel they always come back to their own clubhouse to do the scorecards.”

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Two Good Accessories for Wet-weather Golfers

Posted on October 14, 2015 by David Owen

The golf team of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro played in a big golf tournament last month (and came in third). Shortly afterward, I spoke with Bob Christina, an assistant coach. “Monday was a 36-hole day, and it rained,” he told me. “You’ve got your umbrella, you’ve got a heavy bag with all this stuff in it, you’ve got everything, and by the time you get through that second 18 you’re having trouble standing up. So we picked up three pushcarts, and the guys loved them.”

There’s still a prejudice against pushcarts in this country, especially among younger players, despite my ongoing campaign to shame all golfers into using them all the time. Still, as Christina says, pushcarts are awesome in the rain, even if you aren’t short enough to take advantage of the umbrella holder that comes with most of the modern ones.

Recently, I acquired two accessories that make wet-weather pushcart golf even easier. Both are made by Big Max Golf, an Austrian company, which made my current ride, a super-compact “push trolley” called a Big Max Blade +. The first accessory is called the I-Dry Rainsystem:

It covers the entire bag, and has a transparent hood that fits over the tops of your golf clubs. The hood opens and closes easily—sort of like, I guess, a breadbox. There are only two drawbacks: it’s expensive (eighty dollars or so, at various places online), and it’s made specifically for Big Max trolleys. In fact, even to use it on mine I had to replace the cart’s existing bag-holding “wings” with two included replacement pieces, which the hood snaps into.

A more economical choice—and one that works on anybody’s pushcart—is the Big Max Rain Safe. You strap it to your golf bag like a miniature parachute:

Then you forget about it until it starts to rain, when you unfurl it:

It’s not as substantial as the I-Dry, but it weighs next to nothing, and it doesn’t get in the way, and you can keep it strapped to your bag even when the sun is shining.

Why Don’t All Tour Pros Follow Mickelson’s Example?

Posted on October 13, 2015 by David Owen

When it started to rain during the Presidents Cup, Phil Mickelson did something he’s done in nasty weather for several years: he switched to rain gloves. In an interview once, he explained why: “they can get wet and my grips can get wet and I’m not constantly trying to stay dry.” Usually, he leaves them on even to putt:

My regular golf buddies and I all use rain gloves, too:

They work so well that I don’t understand why so few tour pros have followed Mickelson’s example. Of course, those guys have unlimited access to new gloves, and they have caddies to dry their grips and hold their umbrellas and protect their towels, and even in nice weather they don’t seem to mind fussing around for a couple of minutes before taking a shot. Still, leather turns slimy when it becomes even slightly wet, and a caddie who has to focus on keeping gloves and grips and towels dry doesn’t have time to think about more important matters. The great thing about rain gloves is that, once you’ve put them on, the weather ceases to be an issue, for exactly the reason Mickelson gave. You can just play.

The pros probably worry that wearing rain gloves would affect their “feel,” but, if a player as famously feel-oriented as Mickelson can handle them, so can anyone else. Besides, if you have to squeeze your clubs even slightly harder to compensate for the slickness of your grips, you’ve already abandoned feel. I would bet that most pros have never even tried them. During the Presidents Cup broadcast, Johnny Miller said that one reason Mickelson wears them is to keep his hands dry—but no one who had actually played in rain gloves could possibly think that, because they don’t:

Rain gloves don’t keep anything dry. What they do is enable you to hang on to your clubs when your hands and grips are soaking wet—even when the two-foot-wide stream at the bottom of the second fairway looks like this:

The Golfavore’s Dilemma

Posted on September 29, 2015 by David Owen

I’m not a survivalist, but I sometimes wonder whether I could get by as a golfavore: a person who eats only foods available on his golf course. There are fish in the pond and turkeys in the woods, and I’d always have plenty of venison. Berries near the fourth and fifth tees. Corn in the field you drive through to get to the driving range. And, if the alternative was starvation, tons of acorns.

Recently, I made Golf-Course Apple Crisp, using apples from a tree at the bottom of the second fairway and crab apples from a tree between the seventh green and the eighth tee. I gathered the raw ingredients in the optional “shelf” of my Big Max Blade + pushcart:

And I adapted the apple-crisp recipe from the first edition of my wife’s first cookbook, Beat This, which the novelist Elizabeth Berg once described on NPR as “the book I have probably recommended more than any other”:

I tested it on my wife and me first. It was really, really good: the crab apples, which in our area have been superabundant and enormous this year, added the perfect amount of tartness. Then I made it again, for the old ladies I play bridge with, at our regular Thursday-night potluck dinner and bridge game.

As the bridge ladies and I were getting stuff ready in the kitchen, one of them knocked my apple-crisp pan, which I hadn’t cooked yet, onto the floor, and it landed upside down. So we did exactly what my golf buddies and I would have done: we used spatulas to scrape up the sliced apples and the brown-sugar-and-oatmeal topping, along with unknown quantities of dirt, sand, rug fuzz, dog hair, spilled dishwasher detergent, and who knows what else, and dumped everything back in the pan. Then we baked it and ate it anyway, with Ben & Jerry’s vanilla ice cream, and it was really, really good.

My golf group and my bridge group aren’t all that different, even though in my golf group I’m kind of old and there are no women, while in my bridge group I’m the youngest and there are usually no other men. The language is essentially the same. Carol, who is my mother’s age, was a schoolteacher many years ago. One day, she went to work in a white blouse, red slacks, and blue-and-white spectator pumps. A little boy ran into her in the hall, looked up at her in awe, and said, “Miss, you look like a fuckin’ flag.”

Weird Blight Causes Leaves on Golf-course Trees to Change Color

Posted on September 13, 2015 by David Owen

Something creepy is happening to the trees on my golf course. Leaves that were completely green just a couple of weeks ago are different colors now, including bright red.
Other trees on the course have developed strange bulbous growths—none of which were there when the season began:

Even eerier, people kept referring to last Monday as “Labor Day”—which used to come at the end of the summer, not in the middle, like now. The Sunday Morning Group has been coping by supplementing our kegerators with an all-day Bloody Mary buffet, on the clubhouse porch:

The Bloody Marys haven’t made the leaves green again, but for some of the guys they seem to help. I’ll let you know if I figure out what’s going on.

Rain is the Avid Golfer’s Best Friend

Posted on June 28, 2015 by David Owen

Not because it makes grass grow, but because it makes non-avid golfers decide to spend the day cleaning out their basement. Two weeks ago, the Friday-afternoon meeting of the Sunday Morning Group had to begin an hour late because the 16 participants in the Ladies’ Nine-Hole Member-Guest Tournament, held that morning, took three hours and fifteen minutes to play nine holes on an otherwise empty course. One group was still finishing when we got to the second hole:

Then, because the course had been closed to non-participants all morning, we ran into traffic after we made the turn. Sunday was way better, because rain fell hard all night on Saturday and was still falling hard in the morning, and the forecast for the rest of the day was worse. Sixteen guys showed up anyway, and, because of the weather, we didn’t have to share the course with anyone:

One difficulty with rainy-day golf is that rainsuits are not designed for weather that isn’t cold and windy as well as wet, even if they supposedly “breathe.” Tim and my brother, John, who played with us, have short-sleeved rain jackets, which work pretty well:

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Rain pants are a problem, though, even if you don’t wear regular pants under them. One solution is to leave your rain pants in the car and wear a swimsuit (as Tony did) or nylon “hiking shorts” (as I did). Both probably violate our club’s dress code, but anyone who might have complained was at home, hiding indoors. I just ordered a pair of 100 percent synthetic Tony Hawk Plaid Performance Shorts, on sale at Kohl’s for $22—which will be my warm-season rain pants from now on. Shorts are much more “breathable” than Gore-Tex, because the leg openings act as vents, or chimneys, and who cares if they get wet?

Shoes are a problem, too, even if they’re supposedly waterproof, because if you’re wearing shorts water runs down your legs and into your socks. One solution: FootJoy golf sandals, like Barney’s (photo below). I just ordered a pair, also on sale, from GolfLocker.com.

Semi-miraculously, there was a break in the rain around the time we finished (as it happens, after three hours and fifteen minutes), meaning that we could eat lunch where we usually do, rather than on the porch.

Then more rain, just in time for a nap. Another perfect day.

Is This the World’s Greatest Golf Course?

Posted on June 1, 2015 by David Owen

On Memorial Day weekend, I played Friday afternoon (lost five dollars), Saturday morning (came in third in a two-man scramble, playing with Tim), Saturday afternoon (advanced to the final in the member-member, also playing with Tim), Sunday morning (won six dollars), Monday morning (won low gross in the nine-hole Memorial Day mixed shamble, playing with Madeline—my golf wife—and an actually married couple), and Monday afternoon (lost five dollars). Then I played again on Friday (lost five dollars) and Saturday morning (won the member-member, one-up, playing with Tim.) That was a pretty good eight-day run, so I wasn’t totally bummed when we had thunder, lightning, and heavy rain just before 7:00 the following morning.

I sent an email to the Sunday Morning Group saying I’d bring a couple of decks of playing cards, and Hacker (real name) suggested that we eat our cheeseburgers and hot dogs (supplied by Barney) for breakfast, instead of lunch. But the lightning had stopped by 7:30, so we played golf instead of setback. One very good thing about rain is that it scares away slackers: twenty regulars showed up, and we had the course to ourselves.

Getting soaked was better than inhaling pine pollen—something we’ve done a lot of this spring:

Because I was up early on both Saturday and Sunday, before I left for the club I watched some of the Irish Open — by which, of course, I mean the Dubai Duty Free Irish Open Hosted by the Rory Foundation. The D.D.F.I.O.H.R.F. was held this year on a course that many golfers would pick as the best in the world: Royal County Down, in Newcastle, Northern Ireland.

Among its many memorable features are its bunkers, which are maintained by vengeful demons:

During a round at Royal County Down in 2013, my playing partner and I waded into a jungle of whins and briers near the eleventh tee to look for a century-old relic that a caddie had told me about two years before: the remains of a small stone building, which the maintenance crew had uncovered during an aggressive gorse-removal project. We found it, at some risk to our clothing, although it was so overgrown that we couldn’t see much more than one corner.

Later that day, Harry McCaw—a past captain of both Royal County Down and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews—told me that he thought the structure might once have served as the literal “club house”: the place where early players stored their clubs.

I had driven to Newcastle from Dublin, a hundred miles to the south, and during part of the trip I followed Mourne Coastal Route, a scenic highway. Irish roads are narrow under any circumstances; they become narrower if your eyes are repeatedly drawn to the hills and out to sea—a danger that day, because the sky was so clear that I could see the Isle of Man, halfway to the English mainland.

My parents once visited Ireland with another couple, and on an especially harrowing stretch of road my mother, who was sitting in the back seat with the other wife, yelled at my father to stop steering so close to the edge. He innocently raised both hands, to remind her that, in Ireland and the U.K., the driver sits on the right, not the left. During my own trip, I knocked the cowling off the passenger-side mirror of my rental car. I told the clerk at Avis when I returned the car, but she said it happened all the time, and not to worry about it.

Will the Open Championship ever be held at Royal County Down? Fingers crossed.

The Best Sunscreen for Golfers is Now Available as a Spray

Posted on May 16, 2015 by David Owen

New Zealanders didn’t invent skin cancer, but they’ve come close to perfecting it: their country is stuck under one of the skimpier parts of the ozone layer. The only time the tops of my ears have ever peeled was during a golf trip Kauri Cliffs and Cape Kidnappers, in 2007 (photo above). So it isn’t surprising that New Zealanders have also created the best sunscreen for golfers: GolfersSkin, which is used by a large and growing number of tour pros and caddies. It’s sweat-proof, and it isn’t greasy, and it doesn’t stain golf shirts, and it comes in several forms—among them, now, a spray, which is especially easy to apply to bare arms and legs. My wife says the non-spray versions smell like “fine coconut cologne”; the spray is coconut-free, and if you use it in combination with insect repellent you can turn your legs into a La Brea-Tar-Pits-style mausoleum for flying and crawling bugs.

Cart-only Rules Should be Against the Rules

Posted on April 16, 2015 by David Owen

My home course isn’t open yet, but spring is finally truly here, and last weekend 16 of us played at Richter Park, one of the best munis in the United States: great course, stirring scenery, terrific pro, committed regulars, you name it. There’s just one problem: Richter doesn’t allow walking on weekend mornings, even if you pay the cart fee. The thinking, presumably, is that carts are good for pace of play. But, as anyone who walks regularly knows, four golfers on foot will almost always play faster than four golfers in two carts, because four golfers in two carts will almost always spend most of their time either doing nothing (because they’re waiting for someone else to do something) or aimlessly driving around. (The U.S.G.A., which is studying pace of play, should test this. And why not? They spend money on stuff that’s way dumber.)

We actually ended up walking almost as far as we would have if we’d walked, because on Sunday Richter was cart-paths-only. The starter had told us that weekend rounds usually take about five hours, and I expected the cart-path requirement to make things worse. But even the slowpokes ahead of us beat five hours, and by a wide margin. I’ve thought about that since then, and I believe the reason, paradoxically, is that having to keep carts on cart paths forces riders to think more like walkers. They plan ahead, to some extent, and that speeds them up. Still, I’ll be happy to be back on my home course, where even three and a half hours is considered dawdling—like these guys, who were sunning themselves in the lateral hazard to the left of the fairway on Richter’s sixteenth, a claustrophobia-inducing par 5:

Burgers, beer, and the Masters afterward, of course.

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.

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

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