You Need This Flashlight for Your Golf Bag (or Your Police Car)

Posted on March 14, 2015 by David Owen

My Golf Digest colleague Guy Yocom recently told me about a super-powerful flashlight he’d bought after learning about it about from a policeman he knows in Ohio:

When the cop used one on the job, virtually everyone in his department fell in love with it. Out of curiosity, I bought the outfit, too. He was right—the light is so bright that it illuminates my entire backyard. And when you shine it on a white ceiling inside you can easily read a book, vacuum, or make the bed. What you cannot do is stare at the bulb for longer than one second. It definitely would blind anyone not named Clark Kent.

The flashlight is called the Fenix PD35. It has four beam settings and a maximum output of 960 lumens—which is bright. Yocom continued:

Of course, I thought about whether it could be used for golf. The answer is yes, especially if all four guys in a group carried one. The Fenix is small and fits in a little hip holster. With two of these things popping at full brightness, you could easily illuminate a guy’s entire shot, from start to finish, and read a green as well at night as in daytime.

I bought one immediately. In tests of my own, I have also proven—and this could be important—that the beam is powerful enough to melt snow. The outfit Yocom recommends consists of the light, a pair of rechargeable batteries, and a charger. I also bought a detachable red filter, because red light doesn’t kill your eyes’ adaptation to dark. Or so I’ve read.

Yocom, incidentally, is Golf Digest’s master interviewer. He’s done some great ones over the years. Why don’t you cut the power in your house, shine your Fenix on the ceiling, and re-read a few of them—maybe starting with this one, with Payne Stewart in 1999.

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.

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:

Is This Idea So Crazy That It Just Might Work?

Posted on January 24, 2015 by David Owen

Not long ago, I received a promotional email from a golf course my friends and I have often played during the winter, called Lyman Orchards. That got my hopes up—but the email wasn’t an announcement that the course had re-opened; it was an invitation to celebrate “National Pie Day” with “a Free 6-inch Pie.” And the pie wasn’t really even free, since you had to buy twenty-five dollars’ worth of other crap in order to get it. And then the weather turned almost vengeful: driving rain and sub-freezing temperatures. And then we got snow.

I’ve been passing this golf-free period by working—or “working”—and, when I think of it, throwing birdseed onto the hill outside my back door. And one day I noticed something interesting: the birds, with all their frenzied wing-flapping and hopping-around as they pushed and shoved each other to get at the seed, had cleared almost all the snow from the area where I’d been feeding them:

That made me wonder: could bird power be harnessed to keep golf courses open during the winter? Spread birdseed with crop-dusting planes, which can’t have anything better to do until spring, and let birds take it from there? Fairways and greens only, to keep costs down? I don’t know; I’m not an ornithologist. But let’s try it.

When my wife was in third grade, her Brownie leader didn’t believe her when she said there was a bird with “tit” in its name, but my wife was right, and the photo above is proof. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, on a day when there was no functioning golf course within a hundred miles of where we live, the Sunday Morning Group went out to dinner, at a sports bar called 1st and 10.

Hacker (real name) ordered something that isn’t on the menu anymore but that the chef will make for you if you know to ask for it:

It’s two hot dogs split the long way and wrapped in a tortilla with chili, bacon, cheese, and some other stuff, then dipped in batter and deep-fried—and it comes with fries. I asked our waitress why it wasn’t still on the menu, and she said they took it off because no one but Hacker had ever ordered it.

Quite a few guys showed up that night. One who didn’t was Stanley. The day before, he had reported, by email: “Had a golfer’s knee installed on Monday. Now rehabbing. Legs the same length.” Hacker visited him a couple of days later:

Golfers who have knee replacements often figure they ought to get more handicap strokes. But shouldn’t they actually lose strokes, to make up for how much better they feel? When I suggested that to the group, Stanley disagreed. “I have no doubt that the U.S.G.A. will soon ban this device,” he wrote from the rehab center. “However, my knee was installed prior to the change and is therefore grandfathered.” We’ll see.

The other thing we’ve been doing this winter is working on our relationship with our first (and, so far, only) official sponsor: Jagermeister. Our sweatshirts are at the embroidery shop right now, because we’re having our names and some other stuff added to them. Even so, we’ve had a measurable impact on sales. A bridge partner of mine in Mississippi, who doesn’t play golf but does read my blog, wrote to say that he is seriously thinking about buying a bottle. And Other Gene’s wife, Diana, recently ordered some in a restaurant.

Just the beginning, my friend. Just the beginning.

Reader’s Trip Report: Ballybunion in Winter

Posted on January 7, 2015 by David Owen

Dan Tani, an American reader, joined Ballybunion as an overseas member in 1998, when the cost was next to nothing.

Two years later, he married a woman from Cork, and so now he’s obliged to visit twice a year. (He proposed to his wife at the stroke of the millennium, after playing Ballybunion in the afternoon and rehearsing his lines on the drive home.) Ever since, he’s made a point of playing at least one round on the Old Course very late in the year. In 2013, he played on New Year’s Eve Eve—December 30 —with three Irish guys whose fourth had exceeded the legal limit on showing up late. Last month, he played again. Excerpts from his report:

This year the weather was beautifully clear and calm, but a bit chillier than last year: the car reported a temperature of -2C when I pulled into the car park. In my attempt to maximize my golf, I had left Cork in pitch dark, at 7:00 a.m., and I pulled into Ballybunion at 9:30—perfect timing, I thought. There were very few cars in the lot, and just a few people milling around.

The empty parking lot turned out to be a bad sign: frost delay. Tani continues:

As we waited for the greens to thaw, I sat in the clubhouse and had coffee with several members, including the club co-captain. More than half the guys in the bar were named Costello, although they were not all related. We all became amateur meteorologists: looking out the windows, studying weather maps on our cell phones, estimating sun angles, analyzing temperature gradients.

The delay lasted two hours. When the superintendent gave the all-clear, the co-captain put Tani in the first group, with two older guys. Tani had forgotten his golf shoes, so he had to improvise:

Back to Tani:

The only real concession the club makes to winter is to take the fairways out of play. Last year, you had to lift any ball in a fairway (rare in my case) and drop in light rough. That let the fairways to rest over the winter, but I guess it ate up the light rough, so this year we had to use mats. A positive aspect that I did not initially appreciate is that, when mats are used, winter rounds are considered “official” for tournament purposes, and so count toward handicap.

Ballybunion’s Old Course has two alternate greens that are used in the winter, on holes 7 and 8. They’re just as challenging and beautiful as the regular greens, and if you didn’t know any better you would have no idea they were replacements. Here’s one of my playing companions teeing off on No. 8:

This winter, there was also a temporary green on the 18th. It made the hole disappointingly shorter and easier—although in my case I plugged my approach shot in the face of the huge “Sahara” bunker and had to play backward, into the same bunker, just to have a shot out.

One of the things that make Irish winter golf extra dramatic is the long shadows. Ballybunion is roughly 60 degrees north latitude, and when the sun at its southernmost position the highest it ever gets is about 7 degrees above the horizon.

That makes for extra-long shadows even at noon.

Failte Ireland, the Irish tourism authority, has created what it calls the Wild Atlantic Way, a 2,500-kilometer motor route along along some of the most beautiful coastline in the world. It passes through most of the country’s most famous western and southern coastal sites: the Burren, the Cliffs of Moher, Connemara, the Ring of Kerry, and many others. It also connects some great golf courses: Ballyliffin, Carne, Rosapenna, Donegal, Sligo, Lahinch, Doonbeg, Tralee, Waterville, Old Head—and of course Ballybunion. I’m sure it will bring many more tourists to this out-of-the-way part of Ireland, for good and bad.

As a matter of fact, my friends and I may be traveling part of that route a year from this coming spring—for good only, of course.

Beating the Snow, Plus Exclusive Footage of a Rare 86-stroke Penalty

Posted on January 4, 2015 by David Owen

The forecast for Sunday was terrible, but the one for Saturday was pretty good—“snow and ice, then rain; fog”—so we shifted our Sunday game to Saturday. There were several guys standing around outside the golf shop at Candlewood Valley when we arrived: never a good sign:

The problem was that the temperature was only a few degrees below freezing, and the superintendent was worried that the greens might not be frozen solid enough for him to ignore the frost. He went out to inspect the course, and we went out for breakfast, at a diner down the road. Then we came back and hung out in the golf shop, to await the superintendent’s verdict:

We also chatted up some of the other guys who were waiting. This guy, whose name is Greg, showed me a gadget called a PutterDart, which he sells and may have invented. It has lots of uses. There’s no PutterDart webpage, and Greg doesn’t seem to be on Facebook, but if you’re interested in learning more you can get in touch with him at PutterDart@aol.com.

We got the all-clear, finally, at 10:00. Ed Slattery, the head pro, said we could play as a fivesome. He also let us start on the tenth hole, so we had plenty of empty golf course ahead of us.

Addison was wearing shorts, so, in accordance with our winter rules, he got to be a 2 instead of a 0. But his socks were so tall that they functioned almost like pants, and to keep them from sliding down to his ankles he was holding them up with the rubber bands from two bunches of asparagus—which provided exactly the right amount of tension, he said. At some point, I guess, the Committee will have to rule on maximum sock height, as well as on artificial support.

The Housatonic River, which runs through the course, was flowing, but the puddles and ponds were all frozen:

On our ninth hole, Other Gene incurred a rare 86-stroke penalty, for repeatedly grounding his club after hitting his tee shot into a hazard:

We kept a weather eye on the weather with Raindar, my favorite Android precipitation monitor:

And, luckily, despite our one-hour frost delay, the snow didn’t reach us until we were making our way up the fairway on our seventeenth hole:

Even on our eighteenth, putting was still possible:

A final swig of Jagermeister, the official cold-weather intoxicant of the Sunday Morning Group, in the parking lot:

Then lunch at the Cookhouse —where, once again, we ran into the PutterDart guy. He was hard to recognize without that hat:

Can Ski Gloves Cure the Yips? How to Dress for Sub-freezing Golf

Posted on January 3, 2015 by David Owen

On New Year’s Day, fifteen of us played the Red Course at the Wheel. The temperature was 20 when I woke up and 25 when we teed off, and it never got to more than a degree or two above freezing. Our cars were virtually the only ones in the parking lot when we started, so the guy at the desk (who took the photo below) said we could play as five threesomes, three fivesomes, two seven-and-a-halfsomes, whatever. We played as three fivesomes.

The festive cardboard glasses that everyone’s wearing in the photo above were a seasonally appropriate gift from Chic, who is the chairman of our golf club:

The ground was so hard that getting tees into it was a problem. Shouldn’t there be a power tool for this?

We always award two extra handicap strokes to anyone who wears shorts after December 1. Only Fritz did on New Year’s—a seemingly reckless decision, but a profitable one, because his team won:

Fritz said later that only has face had been cold. If I’d worn shorts, I’d have gotten a handicap stroke on the Money Hole, so dressing rationally cost me ten bucks. I don’t regret that, though, because I was comfortable for the entire round. After many years of playing golf in bad weather, I’ve figured out what I need to wear to stay warm. As always, I dressed in layers, so that I could take stuff off if I got hot and put it back on if I got cold again—although on New Year’s I didn’t take anything off until we were finished.

I wore three long-sleeve shirts, the first of which was very thin and two of which were turtlenecks. All three were made of synthetic stuff. Here’s the one I wore on top, by Under Armour:

On top of that, I wore my brand-new Sun Mountain Tour Series Rain Jacket, which I love. There was no rain in the forecast, but rainsuits are good for wind, too, and we had plenty of that: 20 miles per hour all day:

My Sun Mountain rain jacket reminds me of my Galvin Green rain jacket, which I also love, but the Sun Mountain jacket sells for less than half as much. One of its best features is that it’s extra long, so that it can’t ride up, We’ve had a fair amount of rain so far this winter, in addition to the other stuff, and I’ve happily worn the jacket many times. I like everything about it:

On top of the rain jacket, I wore a Uniqlo Ultra Light down vest. Wearing a down vest over three shirts and a jacket made me look like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, but the vest really is ultra light, and because it doesn’t have sleeves it doesn’t get in the way of a golf swing. I keep it in a Ziploc bag in my golf bag all winter, for emergencies. It squishes down to such a tiny package that last year I forgot to take it out when the weather got warm again:

I own long johns in three different “weights.” On New Year’s Day, I wore the mediums. They aren’t really long johns; they’re actually running pants, or something, for men who don’t mind being seen in public in tights. They work like long johns, though:

On top of those, I wore rain pants. One of the keys to successful rain-pants-wearing, I think, is to wear them as pants—over bare legs if it’s warm, over long johns if it’s not. Another key: suspenders. Wearing suspenders with rain pants keeps the pants from sliding down when you stuff a gloved hand into your pocket to retrieve a tee or a ball marker. In fact, rain pants should have built-in straps. My suspenders have plastic grippers, which I think are gentler on expensive waterproof fabric than metal grippers are. They also supposedly won’t set off airport security equipment, should you choose to adopt a totally suspenders-based lifestyle:

On my neck and part of my head, I wore a Gore-Tex Buff, which may be my single favorite cold-weather accessory. A Buff is a tube of fabric. You can wear it in a million different ways, and if you get really cold you can pull it up (or down) over your face. The guy who invented it got the idea after wearing a pair of underpants on his head to keep his ears from freezing while he rode his motorcycle:

On top of my head I wore a regular golf cap, and on top of that I wore a bright orange knit cap from Cabela’s, which sells stuff to hunters:

On my feet, I wore two pairs of wool socks, one of which was pretty thick. The kind I like best are made by SmartWool. The great thing about wool, whether it’s smart or not, is that it keeps you warm even if it gets wet:

I had room for both pairs of socks because I was also wearing my super-comfortable True Linkswear Chukka golf shoes — a style the company seems to have dropped, I’m sorry to say. (True Gent Chukkas, which the company does sell, are not the same.) I now own eight or ten pairs of True golf shoes. I love them all, and the Chukkas are among my favorites, except when I’m wearing shorts:

On my hands I wore two pairs of golf gloves: a pair of FootJoy Rain Grips, which are thin, and, on top of those, my favorite winter golf gloves ever, HJ Winter Xtremes.

You might think that wearing two pairs of gloves would reduce your so-called “touch,” especially on the greens, but if it does anything it probably has the opposite effect. Debbie Crews, who is the sports-psychology consultant for the women’s golf team at Arizona State University and the chair of the World Scientific Conference of Golf, sometimes tells golfers with the yips to try putting (in her lab) with ski gloves on. They usually putt so much better that it’s amazing,” she told me, “because they can’t manipulate.” I wrote about Crews and her research last year, in an article about the yips for The New Yorker. You can read it here.

Afterwards, lunch, of course.

Late-December Bonus Days

Posted on January 1, 2015 by David Owen

On the Saturday after Christmas, the weather was so mild that a couple of courses in our area reopened. Joe, Mike B., Todd, and I played at Candlewood Valley Country Club, about twenty minutes from where we live. The greens were fast and the fairways were fairly dry, and the course was so crowded that we had to stand in line at the first tee, even though we had a tee time:

As you can see in the photo below, three of the four of us own Clicgear pushcarts — in different color schemes, so that we can tell them apart. Now that the Sunday Morning Group is shamelessly pursuing corporate sponsors, I can say that we would be happy to field-test any Clicgear prototypes or accessories or anything else that anyone at Clicgear or anywhere else might be interested in shipping to us. Is anyone listening?

Mike had to go to a party with his wife that evening. To maximize his golf time, he had persuaded her to pick him up at the course on the way to wherever they were going. (He planned to leave his own car in the parking lot, and retrieve it on the way home.) That was smart, but he still didn’t get to play all eighteen. Here he is, in the lower right-hand corner, trudging back to the clubhouse to meet his wife, with three holes still to play:

It rained during the night and the following morning, and that tiny bit of mildly unpleasant weather was enough to make almost everyone except us decide to say home on Sunday morning. There were nine of us, and when we teed off, beginning at 9:03, we had the course essentially to ourselves. At the turn, we ran into these guys, who showed no sign of being bothered by the weather:

We saw them again later, too:

They were too young, too well-dressed, and too well-behaved to be mistaken for members of our group, and they appeared to have had better luck than we have had at working a sponsorship deal with Titleist, but I admired their obvious disdain for weather forecasts. Or maybe they were orphans, and had nowhere else to go. Anyway, we finished in no time, then went to lunch at the Cookhouse:

The Cookhouse is where we used to eat back during our winter bowling years, before we discovered that a few golf courses in our part of the country stay open right until spring, as long as they aren’t covered with snow. In fact, our primary adaptation to climate change, so far, has been eliminating bowling—a plus.

Unbroken (by the Stupid Weather)

Posted on December 23, 2014 by David Owen

My home course has been closed since shortly before Thanksgiving, so we’ve been playing around. I was traveling (without golf clubs) two Sundays ago, but everyone else played at Tunxis Plantation, which is about an hour from where we live, and last Sunday we went back. I rode with Other Gene. Snow was falling when we left home, and it continued to fall as we drove, and when we were maybe fifteen minutes from Tunxis I realized that it was probably going to keep falling and not melt by the time we got there. And that’s what happened. So we held a conference in the parking lot:

We called every golf course we could think of and discovered that Fairchild Wheeler, in Fairfield, was not only open but “with greens.” The Wheel is just an hour from Tunxis, so that’s where we went. Tim showed up as we were pulling out, but he decided to be a good husband by returning home and giving his wife holiday-related opportunities to be angry at him in person. When the rest of us arrived at the Wheel, a maintenance guy with a leaf blower was removing snow from a putting surface:

We played the Black. The young woman at the desk in the golf shop let us go out as a fivesome after Hacker (real name) assured her that we would play faster than any threesome on the course. And he was telling the truth, because there was a threesome directly ahead of us and we waited on pretty much every shot, including this one, on a long par 3:

Hacker and I took on Gene, Gary, and Kevin (who was visiting from law school). We beat them by three shots, but rather than pocketing our winnings we used them to pay for most of everybody’s lunch.

During the cheeseburger course, Gene suggested that we adopt some kind of ongoing off-season competition, analogous to the FedEx Cup, and we all agreed that that was a good idea. Recently, I wrote about some guys in Massachusetts who call themselves the Winter Tour because they play all winter. Borrowing that name seemed easier than making up a new one, so that’s what we decided to do. Hacker, as always, will devise the format and the scoring system; my assignment is to talk to the people who make Jagermeister—the official cold-weather intoxicant of the Sunday Morning Group—and persuade them to become the Winter Tour’s lead sponsor.

If they give us just hats, say, we’ll agree to call ourselves something like “the Winter Tour of the Sunday Morning Group (in association with Jagermeister).”

But if they give us shirts in addition to hats, plus maybe some actual Jagermeister, we’d be willing to go as far as “the Jagermeister Tour (in association with the Sunday Morning Group).” Their choice. And if they’re really accommodating we’ll add their logo to all our other branded merchandise, including our regular hats and our bumper stickers.

The company’s headquarters are closed till after the New Year (when the Winter Tour will be playing at Shennecossett, in Groton ) so the actual negotiations won’t begin until then. I’m assuming there won’t be a problem. I’ll post an update as soon as I have the details.

Reader’s Trip Report: Bethpage Black and Yale

Posted on December 5, 2014 by David Owen

Alex Nosevich, a reader, is a member of a club-with-a-club at Shining Rock Golf Club, in Northbridge, Massachusetts. “Our group calls itself the Winter Tour,” he told me recently, “because we play through the winter. However, as soon as our home course closes for the year we call ourselves the Arctic Tour. Probably more complicated than it needs to be.” Here’s what Shining Rock’s fifth hole—a long par 3, called Quarry—looks like when it isn’t covered with snow:

It’s called Quarry because that granite outcropping near the green really is the remains of a quarry. According to the club’s website, “The abundance of granite in these hillsides made ready access to materials needed to construct the nearby Blackstone Canal or for foundations for the massive mills which blossomed along the river in the 1800′s.”

Back in October, at around the time the Sunday Morning Group was celebrating the Crystal Anniversary of our annual autumn golf trip to Atlantic City, the Winter Tour took a similar trip to Bethpage Black, Bethpage Green, and Yale. Excerpts from Nosevich’s report:

Twelve guys, two days, seventy-two holes. Beer, whiskey, bourbon, cigars. We arrived at the Bethpage parking lot in a fleet of cars around 10:30 Monday night, and secured the first spots in the lot—critical in getting the opening three tee times on the Black. Bethpage Lesson No. 1: Domino’s delivers to the Bethpage parking lot.

Paul, our President of Domestic Events [far left in the photo above], told us ghost stories all night about how difficult the Black would play. Bethpage Lesson No. 2: If you’re over six feet tall, do not volunteer to sleep across the back bench of a minivan. And remember to bring a pillow.

Bethpage Black is long, but I found it to be very playable. Three guys broke 80, and I was very happy with my 82. Of course, we played from the whites, the rough wasn’t that deep, and conditions were ideal. I played in shorts and short sleeves. Awesome. [That’s Nosevich in the yellow shirt in the back row in the photo at the top of this post.]

After a quick lunch, we played the Green. We finished in darkness, headed for a local place to eat, then drove to a hotel in Connecticut. I have never, ever been happier to see a full-length mattress. The next day, we played thirty-six holes at Yale. I think the consensus favorite hole was the ninth, the famous par 3 whose green is bisected by a tributary of the Grand Canyon. Here’s Darren on that green. He’s the one who got us on the course:

The hole we liked the least was the eighteenth, a par 5 that forced many of us to lay up off the tee with a 3-wood, then hit a blind second shot seemingly straight up in the air. But that’s a minor complaint. We got to play two of the best courses in the country, and my team won the first day’s matches.

This week, the Arctic Tour is headed to Rhode Island. Report to follow if they survive.

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

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