I seem to remember we once had a cabin

October 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment

It’s a relief now to see it for what it is.

Really, it’s just an old ramshackle cottage, stuck way out in a rural county whose administrators never failed to screw up our utility bills but always remembered to nitpick over our septic tank.

Oh my god, it’s old … the water pump is loud and mean; the plumbing is good enough to keep the water flowing, weakly, and, see, I don’t have to cringe now when it drops below freezing in the winter … the burst pipes are someone else’s problem.

The wiring is a fire waiting to happen, and it would have been a favor to the neighborhood if it had come to that.

Say what you will about the view, but it’s no better than five or six other places in the world, and those ruins or mountains or canyon walls aren’t marred by a profusion of mussels, like our seawall and the others that curve around the shoreline; their front yards aren’t crunchy with barnacled rocks to cut your feet, or thickly littered with oysters to pass on nasty microbes.

To the northwest there is, and will always be, Mt. Washington, a minor western U.S. mountain which we called George because the people we bought the cabin from told us we should. By a leap of imagination, it can look like the Father of Our Country in repose, his chin facing west and his nose and broad forehead pointing to the sky. Thus, it’s George, as in, “George is out,” or “Not much snow on George this year” or “George is especially handsome today.” How easily we are amused.

The old man’s dead, for quite a while now. He was a seat-of-the-pants carpenter, which was our nice way of saying it, and it’s not a grand picture: his pants were paint-spattered suntans riding low under his gut; his glasses slid down his nose and stayed there, because his hands were too busy with whatever to push them back up.

The first replacement  seawall we built together (he was the brains) only lasted 15 years; the south deck a few years less. It’s funny that the pros we hired in later years, after he was gone, couldn’t do as well, which shows that ignorance, blind persistence and dull pencil lead on paper scraps can sometimes beat skill and actual know-how.

The mother figure in the family doesn’t remember we ever had a cabin. It could be said it’s her dementia, but maybe it’s just not that memorable.

It’s already fading from my brain, barely more than two weeks after I slammed the door locked behind me for the last time. Forty-five years in the family, and it’s going, nearly gone, just an old broken-down cabin, soon to be forgotten completely.

 

Filed Under: Off Course, Uncategorized

Have tool, will smoke: The one golf gadget you deserve

August 15, 2013 By 1 Comment

IT WOULD BE EASY to think of The Cigardian as a solution without a problem.

You, because you smoke, already have a clip of some kind, or a notch cut in the leather of your bag, or something to hold your burning cigar … while you go putt, just long enough for the flame to go out.

You, because you play, already  have a greens repair tool … but it doesn’t keep your grip dry when you set your putter down to chip … and it doesn’t have a slot to slip your cigar into so it stays burning and nearby.

Cigardian at work at Alpine Meadows

The Cigardian at work at Alpine Meadows

Maybe you don’t need The Cigardian. But what does need have to do with it? You, a personage of golf in our time, deserve this tool of substance and style and utility.

Neil Goldoffas, 62, of Cleveland, once upon a golf round, decided there was a better way than laying his ‘gar in the grass.

“I had the cigar in my hand. I didn’t want to put it on the putting green.”

It got him to thinking: “If you cantilever something, that could work.” Nobody but Neil knows what that means.

For his prototype, Goldoffas cut up a scorecard. Now, his Cigardian is machined from solid brass. The hole in the middle accommodates up to a 52-ring-gauge cigar. The u-notch on top keeps your grip off the slop.

“From the practicality side,” he says, “it’s one of the best divot-repair tools I’ve ever used. It does a nice job for what it was designed for.”

Personal testimonial: The Cigardian is sturdy, feels good in your hand, and the three prongs of the repair-tool end make quick work of any ball mark on the green. The monogram on the model he sent me is a nice touch.

The Goldoffas tool was marketed first through Famous Smoke Shop; later, he had to buy the Cigardian trademark from a guy making humidors out of soaked cedar.

Nowadays, you can pick up a Cigardian at TheCigardian.com, where it is suggested that you, in fact, need one in your pocket.

Need’s got nothing to do with it. You deserve one.

Filed Under: Equipped, The Craft Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Beginning the long (too short) goodbye

July 3, 2013 By Leave a Comment

TAHUYA USA – It is, besides being the No. 1 place in the world to be when the sun goes down, the summer headquarters for the Howl at the Canal, a golf tournament of vast global significance and a party notorious throughout the greater Bald Point region.

So far, one deal has fallen through a day after being struck. Another apparently sincere suitor sent regrets.

Howlin'

Howlin’

I hope they all fall through. It’s the apparent will of my siblings, however, that we sell the place, this waterside cabin on Hood Canal, where at high tide the salt waves slosh near the top of our seawall. Even putting a dollar sign on the place is an insult to the 45 years it’s been in the family.

It’s out in the country, in deepest rural Mason County, where the closest store with beer is two miles away but the closest town with groceries, hardware, restaurants and gasoline is 18.151 miles east then north on the North Shore Road.

Lately, I’ve been at the cabin with tasks – stuff to fix, high grass to whack, photos to snap of the steps to the beach that lifted off their base on the day this winter when a violent storm met the highest tide of the year.

There are things to do, but what I want to do, damn near always, is sit on the deck with my feet on the railing, with a beverage in hand and something burning in the ashtray, with no need to eye my watch because I’m already done with the hardest work I’ll do that day, all 18 holes of it. The nearest golf courses – did I mention? – are close enough and just far enough away.

When I’m sitting there, I figure on looking up, maybe later, the exact distance between my shore and the other, which straight across sits halfway between Potlatch and Hoodsport. I still don’t know the answer, but I estimate that after dark the tendrils of flickering light on the water from the brightest-lit buildings on the other side stretch 78.7 percent of the way to me  … close enough to throw an oyster shell into, a swimmable distance if I wanted to freeze my balls off to frolic like a sleek-fat seal in the mirage of shimmering silver.

Any one of the five of us could veto a deal, but I’ve said I won’t be that guy. Probably.

Progress report
Meanwhile, there is a building emerging slowly from the lumber pile in the backyard of our Olympia home. There’s way less lumber now, and way more walls (four, in fact), plus two doors, a window and a roof, now with shingles.

It ain’t the cabin on Hood Canal, but it might someday be The Cabin, where the work that’s gone into it and the work product that comes out could help make sense of a post-Tahuya world.

Filed Under: Blogolfosphere, Off Course, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

‘There you go’ and other things golfers don’t want to hear

June 27, 2013 By Leave a Comment

by Wayne Allyn

Why is it? You’ve heard it all too many times.

You’re out with your buddies. You’re doing OK. You got a par on the last hole, or maybe even a birdie. Then there’s the blowup hole. You slice it into the woods. You take a drop, and then duff your next, or hit it across the fairway into the water. You’re lying 7 on a par-4. Then you hit your next shot somewhere on the green. Wait for it … Here it comes. One of your partners will say it:

“There you go.”

I’m sure they’re trying to be nice, but it doesn’t help. Really. It doesn’t. “There you go.” I hate those words.

Back in the day, I used to do the same thing. I’d try to make my fellow golfer feel better with kind words to help him shake off a bad shot or a bad hole. I thought I was being nice.

My best friend finally told me that people didn’t like to play golf with me because my attempts to make them feel better just made it worse.

“When someone hits a bad shot,” he said, “they already know they did it. They don’t want someone trying to make them feel better. It just frustrates them more.”

So, I did an experiment. The next time I played, I listened to what others said when someone hit a poor drive or whatever. I told myself I wouldn’t say anything unless someone else did.

Nobody did.

I made it a habit not to offer what I thought were encouraging words. In fact, I wouldn’t even make idle conversation, about anything, until they did. When a golfer starts talking again (not counting the expletives), then you can start talking again.

I noticed a difference in how people treated me. More people invited me to play with them.

One day I played with a guy I’d never played with before. He got a 10 on a par 4 – on the second hole. His play after that was terrible. Bogey, double bogey, missed putts, you name it, he did it. He didn’t talk until we were on the 14th hole. Neither did I.

I knew he was capable of shooting in the low 80′s. I’d seen him around the clubhouse. I’d seen his scores during tournaments. When he finally did talk, he had just hit within two feet of the cup on a par-3, and I didn’t say, “There you go.”

After that, he was fine. He played well the rest of the round. When we finished, he invited me to play again the next Saturday.

“You’re fun to play with,” he said.

“You’re a good golfer,” he said. I’m not. I shot an 88 that day. What he was really saying was that he was comfortable playing with me because I didn’t offer advice, or try to explain away his troubles. I let him figure it out.

When someone hits a bad shot, the best thing you can do is say nothing. When you make a comment like, “at least it’s in the fairway,” or “a chip and a putt is all you need,” it’s like rubbing salt in the wound. They are already teetering on the edge of slamming their club, or wrapping it around a tree. They don’t need to be reminded. Let them work out the angst on their own.

Another dreaded phrase comes out when you’re waiting on a group in front of you, and someone says, “I’m going to wait, but you can probably hit.”

Thanks. Like I need to know I don’t hit it as far as you. Feel free to rub it in.

And one of my personal favorites: You’re behind a tree, deciding whether to pitch outor go over. Then you hear, “Trees are 90 percent air.” Yeah, well, so are nets.

And then there is the classic on the putting green: “You’re still out.”

Dude! I just hit the putt. It came up way short. Do you think I don’t know? Sheesh.

When they talk about etiquette, and how golf is a gentleman’s game, and golf is life and all that, I believe it. Golf is life. There is always some jerk out there who means well, and wants to make you feel better, but just like in life, when you hit a bad shot, you’re not into someone reminding you that you did.

Wayne Allyn is a regular contributor to LocalGolfer.com. He’s been playing golf for more than 30 years and has yet to make a hole-in-one, let alone record a par round.

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This damn game: 3

June 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment

TUMWATER USA – It’s the course nearest to his heart, the course closest in space and time to Grey Goatee World Headquarters, a benign and scenic muni in this former brewery town which, as recently as this week, played host to the best single round of golf ever by the dude who posts these posts to a vast global audience.

This game is so goddamn easy.

He knew the golf course would turn wicked this weekend, but it was with confidence, for once, that he took on the extreme back tees and cruelly cut pins of the Tuck-It tournament. They never did fix the typo in the first letter, and the word after the hyphen should be “you.” Or  “me.”

How bad was it? Big number. Way big. Bigger on the second nine, even after the vow to think less and be better on the back. The usual shit.

Then come the “shots that bring you back,” the pure strikes and even two and three in a row. See? You can do this.

Tuck that … I’m quitting.

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This damn game: 2

June 18, 2013 By 1 Comment

LACEY USA – It was a scorecard the likes of which I’d never experienced … all sixes … until No. 9, when I missed a bogey putt for 7.

It meant two of the sixes were bogeys – okay. It meant two of the sixes were triples. It meant I played all the par-4s at double-bogey.

It wasn’t as bad as it might have been – no snowmen – but what happened on the par-3s? Forgot how to hit a golf ball, is what happened, which presupposes I ever knew.

It meant I had a few really good shots. It meant I couldn’t make a goddamn putt.

It was a leisurely nine holes at the Links Course at Hawks Prairie on a lush late-spring evening that never broke all the way out of cloudy … which meant the long sharp shadows never showed, which was okay ’cause the warm light washed us in something like silver.

It was golf, at my favorite time of day, with Mikey, who helped me keep it in perspective when I didn’t want to. It was fun, he said. Okay, okay, goddamn it, it was fun.

Filed Under: Blogolfosphere, Uncategorized Tagged With:

Working titles for the building I didn’t build

June 4, 2013 By Leave a Comment

This is a story about two buildings.

One is a place in my heart. I call it The Cabin. The other sits in my backyard, unfinished and so far unnamed.

I’m not ready to talk about the first place. It’s too soon and too sad.

The work in progress

The work in progress

So, today, it’s about the other, which is not even yet bidding for my affection, though it has a chance to earn it someday.

The bureaucrats would call it an outbuilding. The woman I live with, who is incredibly wife-like, even suggests I should call it, when it’s done, The Outhouse.

Just don’t call it a man cave. I won’t. I can’t. In fact, I won’t punctuate or put capital letters on this overworked phrase for fear it finds a foothold on my brain.

It’s not even a building yet. It’s three and a half walls, with roof yet unshingled, doors still unhung and  fissures still uncaulked.

So far, on this little construction project, I haven’t raised a hammer. It’s all Gabriel, because he deserves the money and he has a clue.

It’s amazing how good he is at all this – he, the son, the Gabester. He is blessed, genetically, by not having any of my blood in his veins. It frees him up to exercise his (mad) skills for building and fixing things and his sense for making it look nicer than it has any right to.

Gabriel says he doesn’t want my help. I slow him down.

It was his mother’s idea, in the first place, this 12-by-10 shed-like thing from a kit bought at a home-improvement megastore. If I had my own space, so her theory goes, I might write more. And writing is the only craft anybody’s ever paid me to practice.

Her real motive is clearer: Get my muddle out of her house, the shit and mess of not just the writing desk but every corner where I live and encroach on her life in the tight spaces of our very small house.

So I’m moving, in due time. Into The Den, The Lair, The Nest … The Spot, The Space, The Place … The Studio, The Shop, The Shack …

I doubt I’ll call it any of those things, and I’m sure not calling it a man cave, which is not to say I won’t do manly things in there.

I’m coming on to an idea. I’m thinking The Hole. It puts me in mind of “Fire in the hole,” or just “In the hole,” which finally hints at golf, in the next-to-last paragraph of this story.

It’s a working title, almost certainly temporary. Because I know, eventually, the raw wound will heal some, and I might be able to write about the first place, and the new place will get a name … maybe not, maybe so … but maybe The Cabin.

Next: Beginning the long (too short) goodbye

Filed Under: Blogolfosphere, Off Course, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

This damn game

May 3, 2013 By Leave a Comment

TUMWATER USA – Golf on a recent fading Thursday evening at the course closest to Grey Goatee World Headquarters, too dark, of course, to play on, but you’re so close and what the hell.

I jerked it hard into the trees on the left on 18, but I had a shot to the green. Struck it clean with a 7-iron, and didn’t think the snick on the skinny leafy branches would slow it down.  Never found it. Went back to the spot, hit it on the goddamn green, close, and made my bogey putt. I was glad it was 18, ‘cause it was goddamn dark.

There was a Stella in the bar and all I had to do was ask for her. I really wanted Manny, but Stel has never let me down and Manny lives in other taps. Baseball was on the screen, close by the NFL draft, and Dez went 22 to the Falcoons. But baseball, it was baseball, the Mariners up 2-0 and the rookie pitching a shutout … yanked in the seventh, but the home team got two in the bottom on consecutive well-hit singles. Goddamn.

In the bar, there were the guys that were playing in front of me, as snide as I on the subject of the M’s, but the talk never veered far from golf, the shots that you bollixed that ended up okay and the pure strikes that flew into bad places.

As always, the thing was whether it all evens out. The consensus was yeah, probably, but goddamn it not tonight.

Filed Under: Blogolfosphere, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

The Tiger ruling, by the Rules, under the circumstances

April 13, 2013 By 2 Comments

AFTER THIS, a lot of us will take a fresh look at the Rules of Golf, and that’s not a bad thing.

For me, if I was taking a drop like Tiger Woods, I would have, in all righteous ignorance, added “no closer to the hole” to my mental computation of where to correctly place the ball.

Of course, Rule 26-1a – which had me running to my golf bag where lives, generally unread, my copy of the Rules – says nothing about “no closer to the hole.” For Woods, he didn’t want to be closer, and his swing is calibrated so precisely that the couple yards he took behind his original spot gave him far more advantage than players like me would have gained by being that much closer.

Today, it got read.

Then again, Rule 26-1b says a player can place a ball behind the water hazard in line with where the ball last crossed the hazard line, “with no limit to how far behind the water hazard the ball may be dropped.” So, couldn’t Tiger have dropped anywhere on line with where the ball went into the drink? No, because it’s not the flight of the ball, in this case, it’s the point, after hitting dry land on the other side of the water, that the ball crosses the chalk-marked hazard line as it rolls back into the water.

Rule 26-1c (i), to further confuse the likes of me, does use the phrase “no nearer the hole,” but it’s about lateral hazards and doesn’t apply to the Tiger situation.

My assumption, then, is that by choosing to re-hit from close to his original strike (not close enough, apparently) he invoked 26-1a, rather than 26-1b.

As Fred Ridley, the chair of the Masters’ competition committees, pointed out, it only shows how good Tiger really is. Why would he give himself a couple yards back? I guess he thought if he swung again from the same spot he’d hit the pin all over again.

***

It’s pretty clear that Tiger Woods plays under a different set of circumstances than any other player. With a two-stroke penalty, rather than disqualification, did he get a ruling that might not have been given a lesser light?

The other side of the ball marker, as one good reporter pointed out, is that every shot by Tiger Woods is on TV, and thus DVR’d by millions. Other players could have made the same drop, knowingly or unknowingly, and not only would it not have been seen, there would be no video to send to Fred Ridley and his minions.

“I can’t really control what the perception might or might not be,” Ridley said this morning. “All I can say,  unequivocably, is that this  tournament is about integrity, our founder Bobby Jones was about integrity. And if this had been John Smith, of wherever, he would have gotten the same ruling, becaue it is the right ruling under the circumstances.”

Under the circumstances.

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A trophy worthy of the name

April 10, 2013 By 1 Comment

No matter whatever else anybody could say about the Grey Goatee Golf Association, it hasn’t been much about artistry in its seven years of life.

There are single-digit handicappers among us, and now and then somebody goes really low, by 3GA Tour standards. But most of us, most of the time, are as inartistic as the scraggly facial hair that men of a certain age grow because there’s not much else going on that attests to their masculinity.

The same could be said of the tokens of temporary ascendence to the top of the 3GA dogpile. While the vintage sweater that accrues to the winner of the 3GA season title, complete with monogram of all three Gs and the one A, is not  the Green Jacket, it is, by god, the Green Cardigan, and is much-coveted. But the Bent Shaft Classic trophy, which goes to the champeen of the 3GA season opener, is the definition of makeshift, a broken driver shaft stuck crookedly into the base of an old discarded lamp.

Nobody ever said they didn’t want it when they were handed it, but it was not out of line to call it just a little bit hokey. That was until the Mildenbergers, son and father, of Olympia, Wash. (capital city of Grey Goatee Nation), got their hands on it.

The trophy

 

A digression, here, for a little back story.

The base of the trophy is made of Oregon Myrtlewood, a hardy tree with aromatic leaves native to a small patch of coastal southwestern Oregon. It was once part of a matched set of lamps that sat in the living room of Mr. and Mrs. Commissar Sr. in Longview, Wash., the birthplace and hometown of The Commissar.

The other part of the trophy is of an era when eBay was young and ambitious but small enough that other auction sites still dreamed big. Once upon a couple decades ago, a driver came up for bid at a golf auction site (cleverly called GolfAuction.com) that caught a young Commissar’s eye. This was in that early post-Cold War time of loving cooperation between the Commies and the US of A. Believe it or don’t: The clubhead was said to be made from super-hard space-age metals from dismantled Soviet nukes. Thus the name: The Peace Missile.

The Commissar never got to launch this missile. A mishap with a trunk lid snapped the shaft in half … and within weeks he had moved on to new novelties. The super-hard space-age clubhead still lies in a drawer somewhere … but the shaft is super-glued into a piece of myrtlewood.

Let’s be true to the truth here: He’d never won shit. But the labyrinthine scoring sytem of the 3GA sometimes rewards pure, random, blind luck, and so it was for Steve Mildenberger, the son, in the 2012 season opener.

Other players, when they’d claimed the trophy for a year as the Bent Shaft champion, tried in various ways to spiff it up. Bill Caughlin, who (inexplicably) has his name on the Bent Shaft roll call three times, gathered the names of the other winners on a placard and attached it. It didn’t stick.

Mildenberger had bigger ideas. He sanded down the myrtlewood, put a coat of varnish on it, and then turned it over to his dad, John Mildenberger, to apply the art. John is a former illustrator for the Disney company, and is very much a working artist at 84. It’s John who created the golfball-headed fellow with the pointy goatee in the logo for this Website.

John brushed in the lettering in impeccable freehand. Then Steve put another coat of varnish on it, and as you can see in the photo, the Bent Shaft trophy now glows like gold …

It’s still just a busted clubshaft stuck all askew into a throwaway lamp, so it must have been the sun’s glare off the myrtlewood that caused The Commissar’s eyes to water when he got his first good look at it.

Bent Shaft Postscript
LACEY, Wash. – The eighth annual Bent Shaft Classic on March 24 officially launched the 2013 worldwide golf season, but just as significant was the awarding of the new visually enhanced trophy for the annual lid-lifter of the Grey Goatee Golf Association (3GA) Tour.

Jim Pirkl of Vancouver USA topped the field of 25 at Capitol City Golf Club to earn the right to place the Bent Shaft trophy on his mantel, or wherever his wife lets him put it if he even gets it in the door.

The next major event on the Global Golf Calendar, notwithstanding The Masters or whatever down in, like, Georgia or wherever, is 3GA Tour Stop No. 2 on April 21 at Meadow Park, a much-loved muni in Lakewood, Wash. Please direct requests for media credentials or interviews with Pirkl or other 3GA members to (360) 342-8687.

Filed Under: Blogolfosphere, The Craft, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
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