Two Easy Ways to Speed Up Golf

Posted on December 1, 2014 by David Owen

My golf course closed for the season on the Monday before Thanksgiving. The day before that, thirteen guys showed up for the final 2014 home-course meeting of the Sunday Morning Group. I wasn’t there, because I was on my way home from a non-golf reporting assignment in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California—poor life-management on my part. The following Sunday, though, Hacker (real name), Mike B., Gary, Ray, three of Ray’s friends from other clubs, and I played at Fairchild Wheeler Golf Course, a 36-hole facility owned by the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut:

The Wheel (as it’s known to friends) is the main winter golf hangout for a lot of guys in our region, because it’s so close to the coast that it doesn’t get much snow. It’s where S.M.G. played last year on New Year’s Day:

The Wheel is also the home of an extremely successful chapter of The First Tee, which served more than 600 kids last summer:

One of the volunteer coaches is Richard Hunt, an honorary S.M.G. member. That’s him at the far left in the photo below, which was taken at Twisted Dune during S.M.G.’s fifteenth annual golf trip to Atlantic City, in October:

Each summer for the past ten years, Richard has spent his Saturday afternoons at the Wheel introducing youngsters to golf. This year, his First Tee chapter named a trophy after him: the Coach Rick Award, which goes to the scoring champions in the Ace/Birdie division. (He’s also pretty good at teaching grownups; he’s a marketing consultant in Manhattan, and he oversees the Venture Creation Program at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, where he is a mentor-in-residence.)

A couple of weeks ago, Richard attended the U.S.G.A.’s Pace of Play Symposium, at which two dozen speakers spent two days talking about how to make golf go faster. “I thought the event was quite valuable,” Richard (who took the photo below) told me. “This is exactly the kind of thing they need to do ‘for the good of the game.'”

Richard’s report:

Turns out, there are way more problems than your buddy plumb-bobbing his third putt. A major culprit is tee-time spacing, which is way too short at most public courses, and even in professional events. The L.P.G.A. did a test this year, and was able to reduce playing times an average of fourteen minutes per round just by moving tee times slightly farther apart, from ten minutes to eleven, and asking players to keep up with the group in front of them. Easy stuff. In addition, course setup, design, and facility management policies are all either part of the problem or part of the solution.

When I was in Arizona, I had dinner with my old friend Shelby Futch, the world’s greatest golf teacher, whose company owns several courses in the Scottsdale area. At one of them, Shelby reduced playing times by offering forty dollars in grill-room credit to each day’s first group if they finished in less than four hours, and by asking the groups behind them to keep up. Easy stuff.

I asked Richard whether the kids he teaches play quickly—and, sad to say, he said they don’t:

Trust me—we don’t teach them to play slow. Yet on late summer Saturday afternoons, during our team matches, my young charges struggle to beat darkness every week. I myself blame CBS, NBC, and the Golf Channel. Maybe Fox will only show golfers in action next year, instead of repose.

Easy stuff.

This is the Best Sunscreen for Golfers, and I’m Not Kidding

Posted on November 15, 2014 by David Owen

As I drove home from my dermatologist’s office, I felt more than slightly annoyed. Slicing two bumps from the side of my nose had taken the doctor roughly eleven seconds, from Novocain to Band-Aid, yet had cost me more than a thousand dollars. With five minutes of instruction, I figured, I could have performed the operation myself, using tools I already own. But I calmed down a few weeks later, when I went back for a follow-up appointment. One of the bumps was just a harmless old-guy surface enigma, the doctor said. The other, though, was something I really did need a licensed physician to deal with: a basal cell carcinoma—skin cancer.

Golfers face an elevated risk of developing all sorts of skin trouble—especially golfers who, like me, grew up in the sunburn era, when kids were pretty much expected to broil away the top few layers of their epidermis every summer. Most of the sun-related products that people used in those days were intended not to prevent damage caused by solar radiation but to exacerbate it. My pals and I used to bet Cokes on who could peel off the largest intact sheet of stomach skin.

My bump removal took place a decade ago. A few days later, I showed up at the golf course with a pair of small bandages on my nose. The bandages attracted comment, and I was partly comforted and partly appalled to learn how many other members of my small club had suffered various skin cancers, most of them more troubling than mine. Friends showed me galaxies of scars on their arms, foreheads, faces, ears, and bald spots. Two current members and two former members have even been treated for melanoma, the hydrogen bomb of dermatological problems. One of the current members lost most of one calf in an operation to remove her tumor; one of the former members received 140 stitches in his stomach. Both are still alive, though—unlike a guy I knew in high school, who was too late in discovering the asymmetrical, irregularly bordered, unevenly colored, large-diameter mole lurking in the folds of his belly button.

Last month, one of the guys on the Sunday Morning Group’s annual buddies trip to Atlantic City told me about a sunscreen that, he said, was created specifically for golfers. It’s from New Zealand, and it’s used by large and growing number of tour pros and caddies. It’s called GolfersSkin, and it’s terrific: it’s sweat-proof, and it isn’t greasy, and it doesn’t stain golf shirts, and (according to my wife) it “smells like fine coconut cologne.”

It comes in three forms: lotion, “hands-free stick,” and lip balm. I bought ’em all, and I keep the stick and the lip balm in my golf bag, for touch-ups. And here’s the one-liter dispenser, for the clubhouse or, if you play enough golf, the trunk of your car:

Beer, Bushmills, Burgers, Brats, Bonus Days

Posted on November 10, 2014 by David Owen

Our regular golf season is winding down. Someone in a position of authority piled up all our patio furniture on the clubhouse porch:

As of late last week, though, we still had beer in the kegerator, plus part of one free-standing keg, so Chic (our club chairman) and Corey (our pro) decided that the Sunday Morning Group ought to hold a free-guest day, and that everybody ought to hang around until all the beer was gone. The morning was cold and overcast, but seventeen guys showed up:

Someone remembered to bring Irish antifreeze:

And, despite the weather, seven of us wore shorts, because after November 1 if you wear shorts you get an extra handicap stroke:

My team didn’t win, but I got a skin for a net eagle on No. 2, and I almost made a hole-in-one on No. 12, a 185-yard par 3. On 12, I hit my secret weapon, Baby Driver, which has 16 degrees of loft and goes anywhere from about 180 yards to maybe 210. (The shortest hole I’ve ever used it on was a 134-yarder in Northern Ireland a few years ago. The wind was blowing like crazy, and I was the only one who made the green.) Here’s how close I came on Sunday—and, yes, I missed the putt:

Howard brought lunch. He worried that he hadn’t bought enough food for seventeen guys, so after he finished playing he drove down to the grocery store and got more ground beef:

That was great, but he also got these. C’mon, Howard. No health food.

We don’t really clean our grill after we use it, because by the time lunch is over nobody is in the mood for housework. We do clean it before we use it again, however, by turning on the gas all the way and letting it run for a while. Here’s what we found when we lifted the lid on Sunday:

The grill cleaned itself in no time, and the flames from the burning grease looked like something from a Burger King commercial:

Our spatulas weren’t in the drawer in the big table in the kitchen, where they always are, so we figured they must have been stolen. (Our clubhouse is never locked, even after the course has closed for the winter, and stuff is always disappearing—including, once, a hundred cloth napkins with pictures of golf clubs and balls on them.) Then someone asked whether anyone had looked in the dishwasher—and that’s where they were. What kind of joker pulls a stunt like that?]

We’ve had a TV in our clubhouse for several years, but no one had ever used it because the only place we have cable is in the golf shop. But Corey bought a hundred feet of coax at Staples or someplace, and ran it all the way over so that we could watch the Jets beat the Steelers while we worked on the beer:

We lit a big fire in the fireplace, and the clubhouse stayed sort of warm as long as people kept the doors closed. Even so, it was probably colder inside than out, and everyone stayed bundled up.

A couple of years ago, my club decided to stop giving trophies to tournament winners, because the trophies were expensive and many of the winners didn’t bother to take them home. But as soon as we’d stopped giving them out people began to complain about not having them anymore, so this year they were back, but less fancy. Here’s Addison drinking beer out of the mug he got for winning the club championship. (Fritz, the tournament chairman, said it looked bigger in the catalog.)

Meanwhile, some of the guys were outside having a putting contest.

The weather is supposed to turn lousy pretty soon, but not quite yet. In fact, we probably ought buy at least one more keg.

Late-season Golf Breakthrough: Leaf Stymies

Posted on November 8, 2014 by David Owen

The golf world abandoned stymies in 1963, but the Sunday Morning Group keeps them alive, sort of, by using them in playoffs, which we conduct on our practice green. On New Year’s Day in 2013, we invented a new version, ball-marker stymies, in which the old stymie rule applies on every green, but to ball markers instead of balls:

On Wednesday, we invented yet another new version: leaf stymies. Gary, our terrific superintendent (shown stymied by my ball marker in the photo above, which was taken at Dyker Beach, in Brooklyn), keeps our course remarkably free of leaves, but when the wind blows hard he and his crew can’t possibly keep up, especially on greens with overhanging oak trees. Removing leaves from everyone’s line takes forever, and then the wind just blows them back, so we decided: screw it. From now on, the leaves stay where they are:

Remarkably, having even a lot of leaves in the way does very little to a putt. Here’s Rick trying for birdie on the fourth green:

International Shorts Rule Now in Effect

Posted on November 5, 2014 by David Owen

The Sunday Morning Group gives an extra handicap stroke to anyone who wears shorts after November 1 (and two strokes after December 1). It was so cold and windy on Sunday that Gary, our terrific superintendent, lit a fire in the clubhouse for us after he and his crew had finished mowing the greens. Only two guys wore shorts: Fritz and Mike A.—and Mike didn’t get anything for it because we played off zero that day and he already gets fourteen shots, the S.M.G. maximum. But he believes in not letting the weather boss you around.

The wind was blowing so hard that it kept tipping over the rocking chairs on the S.M.G. patio:

Still, eleven guys showed up, including Corey, our terrific pro:

Nobody had remembered the Jägermeister, the official cold-weather intoxicant of the Sunday Morning Group, but Corey found a bottle of something in the clubhouse, left over from the member-guest. There were fruit flies lying on the bottom, but not that many, and they weren’t moving.

The wind blew so hard while I was hitting a shot on the sixth hole that my pushcart took off like an iceboat, ran full speed down the steepest part of the fairway, and crashed nose-first into the creek. The front wheel buried up to its hub in the opposite bank, but the cart didn’t tip over, and nothing fell out:

Afterwards, we did skins in the clubhouse, which was still warm from Gary’s fire.

Then five of us went out to lunch.

Check Out Our Revolutionary New Rainproof and Sweat-proof Golf Scorecards

Posted on November 4, 2014 by David Owen

Hacker (real name) was questionable for our Friday-morning game, because he’d broken the middle finger on his left hand while using his wood-splitter:

Also, it was raining. But he played anyway, and so did Barney, Tim, and I. We had the course to ourselves:

Barney and Tim, in the rain, Friday, October 31, 2014.

Hacker discovered that his finger didn’t hurt nearly as much if he used a baseball grip. Here’s a perfectly square divot he took on the fourth hole (that’s his tee in the middle of it):

The rain wasn’t a problem, because we were using one of our new waterproof scorecards. (You can watch a video demonstration at the bottom of this post.) Our waterproof cards look exactly like our regular scorecards, but they don’t get soggy or fall apart, and you can write on them when they’re soaking wet, using a regular pencil—and then you can erase what you’ve written, using the same pencil. In fact, the wetter they are the better they work. Here’s the card we used on Friday, strapped to my pushcart:

Our field test went great, and I double-checked the result by driving home with the card stuck to my windshield:

Our waterproof scorecards were printed for us by PrintWorks, the official stationers of the Sunday Morning Group. We didn’t actually invent them; we stole the idea from Todd Petrey, a caddie at Bandon Dunes. 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 also invented Signsocks, temporary road-sign covers used in highway construction projects.

Ray, Tony, and I first saw Drycards while playing 10 rounds in the rain at Bandon in 2007. Last year, I tried to get in touch with Petrey, to order a batch for S.M.G., but as near as I can tell he’s no longer in business. (He doesn’t seem to be selling Signsocks anymore, either.) So I took an old Bandon Drycard down to my basement and reverse-engineered it —which is to say, I ordered a supply of synthetic paper (the secret ingredient) from Amazon, and Hacker and I took it to PrintWorks. Here’s how it works:

Reader’s Trip Report: Bandon Dunes in a Hurricane

Posted on November 1, 2014 by David Owen

Mike Goldman, a reader, recently spent several days at Bandon Dunes with seven friends. Here’s the local forecast from part of their trip:

They played every day, naturally, even though the Speed Golf World Championship, which was supposed to be held on Old MacDonald while they were there, was canceled because of the weather. Here’s what the wind did to the speed-golf scoreboards:

From Goldman’s report:

While the entire trip was a home run (mainly because my team won), the lasting memory will be our trudge through the hurricane on Saturday, on Bandon Dunes. What started as a light mist and a stiff breeze quickly regressed into a wind and rainstorm so dramatic that one member of our group said, on the second tee, “We’ve already passed the point of bringing all the animals inside and duct-taping the windows.”

I’m not an agronomist, but my understanding is that gorse is a hearty plant and that it’s unusual to see it rolling down fairways like tumbleweeds. At one point, on the sixth green, we suspended play and hunkered down in a catcher’s stance, and leaned into the wind to keep from blowing off the cliff. We were a little nervous, but, mainly, we were laughing hysterically at what we were going to have to do to complete the match. Here’s one of our caddies climbing uphill into the wind:

On the seventh green, as we were trying unsuccessfully to mark our balls, one of the caddies said, “Whatever you do, do not get within 10 feet of that cliff.” No. 9 at Bandon is a straightforward par 5. On a normal day, it’s two good shots and a little pitch, and then you’re putting for birdie. Playing dead into he storm, I hit driver (hard), 3-wood, 3-wood (again), and then a torched 8-iron to the front fringe, 50 feet from the hole. I’m more pleased with that result than hitting it in two on a normal day.

At the end of nine holes, much to the relief of our caddies, we suspended play for a burger and a beer, and strategized about how best to complete the matches. We settled on the Preserve, Bandon’s new 13-hole par-3 course. The longest hole is only about 160 yards, but many holes turned out to be unreachable. On others, you’d hit a simple pitch shot and watch the wind whisk your ball over the green and into the gorse. At the end of the day, we were tattered, wind-damaged, and in possession of a golf experience we’ll all remember for a lifetime.

Here’s the winning team. (Marty Hackel: note the wardrobe.) From left to right, they are Mike Kemmet, Trevor Dyer, Mike Goldman, and Steve Harry. Dyer (a.k.a. The Captain) organized the trip, and kept everyone up to date with a website he created for that purpose —an excellent idea.

Here’s Dyer during the hurricane. It looks like he’s swinging, but he’s actually just being bent into a pretzel by the wind:

And here’s a picture of Goldman during a round once the storm had passed:

And here’s a golf quiz: when you read Goldman’s account of their Saturday rounds, did you wish you’d been there, too? I did. (That means I passed the quiz.) I visited Bandon back in February 2007 with Tony and Ray. We played ten rounds in five days, all in the rain. During lunch between eighteens each day, we parked our rainsuits in some industrial-strength dryers in the clubhouse. Here are Ray and Tony with our caddies:

During that trip, a starter told me that, several winters before, on a day when the wind blew hard and Bandon received almost seven inches of rain, all eighty-five golfers on the tee sheet played—and so did two walk-ons, who were passing through and thought the day looked reasonable for golf. They were right!

The Frost is on the Jägermeister

Posted on October 20, 2014 by David Owen

Google Now is an app that automatically displays certain useful information when you launch Google on your phone or other mobile device. Exactly what it displays depends on a number of factors: your current location, data you’ve provided to other Google services, and subjects that you’ve asked the app to follow for you, such as professional golf. It knows where my house is, because I’ve entered my home address on Google Maps, and it knows I’m interested in the results of certain post-season baseball games, because I’ve looked them up, and when I’m traveling it suggests nearby activities. It still has a few bugs, though. For example, it thinks I “work” at my golf club—presumably because when I leave my house each day that’s the place I’m the most likely to go. Come on, Google! You sound like my wife!

Last Sunday, we had our first frost delay of the year. Reese, whose turn it was to bring lunch, also brought two bags of apple-cider donuts and a bottle of Jägermeister, the official cold-weather intoxicant of the Sunday Morning Group. The bottle made a handy weather gauge, because it was as frosty as the greens. While we waited for the bottle to clear, we putted on the floor of the golf shop, which, unlike the clubhouse, is sort of heated. Addison jammed a red plastic beer cup between two golf bags full of demos, and we aimed for that.

Our golf shop closes for the year at the end of the month, and if you have golf-shop credit you have to spend it before then. Now is a good time to do that, because everything is on sale.

Stanley wears size-thirteen-and-a-half shoes. The biggest ones Corey had in stock were thirteens, but Stanley almost bought them, because he figured he could stretch them. Then he came to his senses. Meanwhile, Gary, our terrific superintendent, was mowing the practice green, which had finally melted—almost time to tee off:

Better Golf, in Fizzies Form

Posted on September 20, 2014 by David Owen

I played football in junior high school and for a little while in high school, in the late 1960s and very early 1970s. We had two-a-day practices each August, before school began. This was in Kansas City, where summertime temperatures occasionally reached a hundred degrees, and the humidity was so high that the air felt like aswimmable liquid, and the droning of cicadas gave the heat anaural dimension. My school’s locker room had a salt-tablet dispenser. We were encouraged to help ourselves before practice but weren’t supposed to drink much water, which was said to cause cramps.

Taped to the wall was a large photograph, labeled “Johnny Condition,” of someone throwing up into a toilet—probably a water guzzler. There was a drinking fountain behind home plate on the baseball diamond; we were allowed to visit it once or twice each morning and afternoon during football practices, but we were encouraged not to swallow. Then, midway through a practice in 1970, our coaches gave us each a paper cup containing an orange liquid, which they had produced by stirring powder into a big plastic tub. The powder had been invented by scientists at the University of Florida, and the liquid was called Gatorade. It was the dawning of the Age of Hydration.

Nowadays, of course, there are people who won’t attend a thirty-minute office meeting without a big bottle of something to sip on. But overdoing it is undoubtedly healthier than underdoing it. And I’ve observed, over the course of many summers, that not drinking enough water on a hot day has a major impact, late in a round, on my ability to swing a golf club. Drinking water also gives me something soothingly self-distracting to do while my opponent dithers over a shot in a tense match.

The problem with Gatorade and other sports drinks is that they’re loaded with sugars or artificial sweeteners, and if you drink them like water they’re also expensive. Recently, I’ve discovered an excellent workaround: “Active Hydration” tablets made by a company called Nuun.

They contain the good stuff in sports drinks, including electrolytes (whatever those are) and various other things, and they don’t contain sugar. They come in plastic tubes, which you can safely keep in your golf bag, and when you drop one of the tablets into your water bottle it fizzes. Do you hear me? It fizzes.

Tree Trouble: Winter is Coming, and Howard Meets His Match

Posted on August 30, 2014 by David Owen

There’s a maple near the bend of the dogleg on the first hole, and each year it provides one of the first clear signs that the golf season is winding down. The tree may mark one of the famous portals to hell, because there’s another tree just behind it, planted in memory of a dead guy, and if your tee shot clears the first tree the second one will sometimes knock your ball into a lateral hazard—like a pair of volleyball players doing a bump-set-and-spike. The second tree was planted, many years ago, in loving memory of a dead guy, whom few current members knew but many current members curse, on account of his tree. The lesson is that you shouldn’t let your survivors plant anything in your memory two hundred yards from the regular men’s tee on the right side of any fairway.

On the eighth hole, Howard’s second shot (or possibly his third) ended up next to the base of a tree near the green. It was sitting down in a little depression, with roots on either side, but he made a manful effort to knock it back into play:

Two holes later, I hit my second shot too far, and it ended up about four inches from a stone boundary wall that runs along the edge of a grassy swale just over the green. My only possible shot was to bash the ball into the wall with my wedge, and hope it ricocheted back into play. I did, and the ball ended up gimme distance from the hole: par. I don’t have a video of that shot, because I couldn’t swing my wedge and operate my camera at the same time. I am one man!

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

Category Archives: Weather