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.

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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.

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Golf club guru’s side job is a Cash business

March 1, 2013 By Leave a Comment

HE MAKES HIS LIVING in the golf business. He makes his living in the music business.

Lately, business is good.

Craig Foster is a golf club technician/guru, the pro’s pro, the man to see when it comes to fixing, building, adjusting and customizing your sticks. The transformation he worked on a 1950s-era spoon of mine is  documented here.

I was able to text him recently to say I was reading about him in GolfWorld magazine (Feb. 18). He was mentioned in a story about Steve Elkington and his golf-improvement Website, Secret in the Dirt. Foster’s invention, the DynAlign system for putting, is building a following.

Foster never strays too far from golf and his workshop in the Olympia area. He can’t – too many people rely on him. But the man loves his music. He’s guitarist and badleader for Dan Whyms & Rock Island Line, and he’s got a little road trip this month.

Yesterday, he sent an email:

Hello Music Lovers:

Taking my Telecaster to Nashville. Excited to tell you all that our Johnny Cash tribute band is going to play two shows at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville on March 22-23. It’s going to be a ball, especially since we get to play with our good friend and Johnny’s longtime piano player Earl Poole Ball. Quick, somebody pinch me.

Best,

Craig

Hell, never been to Nashville. What better reason? I bet they have golf courses there.

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In golf, one is the happiest number

February 5, 2013 By Leave a Comment

If you could take them individually, the voices inside your head when you stand over a golf ball might even be saying all the right things.

You might think they meant well, all of them, if they weren’t shouting over each other and jostling for attention and managing to agree, once your swing is over, only in unanimous insult:

You dumbass.

There’s a better way. There has to be.

1 Swing Thought (www.1swingthought.com) wants to point you down the path to spiritual enlightenment, one golf swing at a time. It’s Zen, but better than that it’s practical.

Eyes on the ball, dumbass

And quiet.

“I know that I have three swing keys,” says Bryon K. Smith, the entrepreneur behind 1 Swing Thought. “My mind can’t handle three. If I ingrain one, I can deal with it.”

1 Swing Thought, in product form, is a sticker that is applied to the top of the clubhead on a driver, fairway wood or hybrid with one of several sayings or visuals that help you think good thoughts on the course.

The stickers are waterproof, easy to apply and remove, and not easily dislodged by a headcover sliding on and off. They work on your choice of dark-colored clubheads or white.

In fact, for Smith, 53, a marketing consultant by trade, the new white driver heads hitting the market looked like nothing so much as miniature blank billboards … that golfers see as much as 14 times a round.

The first sticker Smith produced was “Swing Eaasssyy,” and it’s still the most popular. As momentum slowly builds for his concept, he says, other ideas for sticker phrases are flowing in.

My golf teacher says he could tinker with my swing mechanics forever and it wouldn’t mean anything until I learn to keep my head still over the ball, ‘til I stop swaying side to side, ‘til I maintain my spine angle through the swing.

For me to get there, then, the best sticker is the simplest. It might be the purest and most common sports mantra of all: Keep your eyes on the ball.

You, Zen Master, might be past all that. For you, if accuracy is the goal, 1 Swing Thought offers “Commit to the target” and “Turn and trust it.” For better tempo, one sticker reads “Tic Toc.”

For golfer brains that process pictures better than text, 1 Swing Thought offers stickers depicting proper swing path, or alignment to the target, or keeping the head trained on the ball through impact.

“It just makes so much sense,” Smith says. “You can immediately translate the thought into a benefit.”

I haven’t played much with the “Eyes on the ball” stickers on my driver and hybrids, but I like them already. I did keep my head on the ball more often through impact, and stood up out of my posture a few less times. Most of all, it helped me think less in general, which is never a bad thing.

Writings about the mental/mystical/spiritual side of golf all seem to focus on a mind uncluttered by too much synaptic activity. It maybe doesn’t even matter what’s in your brain, just that the number of conscious thoughts is a low number … like maybe one.

Just one.

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Anchor this: Inventor’s putting technique rises above debate

February 1, 2013 By Leave a Comment

It used to be just an old-guy technique, something you might grasp at when all else failed with your putting stroke. Now young guys are using it, and winning with it, and the subject is a matter of international debate, compelling sports fans to learn words like “bifurcation.”

Gee whiz, Craig Foster says. It didn’t have to come to this.

Craig Foster

The technique is “anchoring,” and though the word has other definitions in other life endeavors, in golf it means taking a longer-than-normal putter and jamming it firmly into your belly to negate the effects of nerves (shot) and grip (shaky) on the strike-through.

Bifurcation, in this discussion, refers to the real possibility that the USGA and the Royal and Ancient might, for the first time, establish different rules for amateurs and professionals. Pros, including 26-year-old Keegan Bradley, who won the 2011 PGA Championship, would be barred from anchoring if the golf governing bodies’ joint proposal is implemented.

Foster is an Olympia, Wash., golf club technician, musician and inventor.

He doesn’t like to be a grump, generally, but anchoring isn’t fair, he says, and furthermore, it’s unnecessary.

Try this, he says. Try DynAlign, a “dynamic alignment” technique that uses the natural angles of the skeleton to keep a putter firmed up and on target.

To help us get an idea about DynAlign, Foster made an edit for YouTube of a recent interview with Danielle Tucker on The Golf Club radio show from Hawaii. While you’re at YouTube, you’ll find several other short videos about DynAlign.

DynAlign’s main professional advocate is Steve Elkington, a newly minted 50-year-old, who has taken his refreshed putting stroke (thanks to DynAlign) to the Champions Tour.

Elkington is a founder of Secret in the Dirt, a Website where the game of golf, the long and short of it, is obsessed over, dissected, and bi- and trifurcated. All of Foster’s full-length videos are available at Secret in the Dirt.

It’s certainly possible to think too much about golf, and there is much of biomechanical science in the DynAlign technique. Foster has done all the thinking so you don’t have to.

“Anchoring,” as defined in the field of psychology, is a common cognitive bias whereby a person clings to an initial judgment or belief despite new information that contradicts it.

Craig Foster would say, “Get over it.”

His putting technique is simple – to learn and to use – and it will always be legal. The debate over anchoring will be somebody else’s problem.

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Melanoma finally stills Terry Lee

December 17, 2012 By 1 Comment

LACEY, Wash. – The wide world of friends and family of Terry Lee gathered Saturday at Saint Martin’s University, where he played basketball 30-odd years ago, to celebrate his life and mourn his death.

Lee, 56, died Nov. 14 of the cancer he had battled for years. That the deadly melanoma claimed his life was surprising only because Lee had gotten a clean bill of health in his most recent checkups.

Terry Lee, from the 1978-79 Saint Martin's basketball media guide.

“DAMN CANCER,” Lee’s mother, Theresa Lee Hood, wrote in an email to me a week or so after his death.

“ … He fought a great fight and we all thought he had won since his last two testings all came back clear and doc said come back in 6 months and not 3. Then it struck with a vengeance a couple of weeks ago and it was thought he had a stroke.  However, it was the melanoma  and went for the brain.”

The plain truth is, melanoma, which starts as a skin cancer, almost always gets you when it has you.

Lee knew the odds, and knew they weren’t stacked in his favor. In an interview for a 2010 column I wrote for The Olympian, Lee talked about a couple guys named Danny who died of melanoma before him.

One was Danny Federici, the longtime keyboardist for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, who died in 2008. The Danny Federici Melanoma Fund was launched after his death to help finance melanoma research and raise awareness of the disease.

Lee never knew Federici, but the other guy, Dan Lee, who died in 2002, was a close friend. Dan’s first symptom of melanoma was a mole that was itching, Terry Lee said.

“I thought I was golden,” Lee said in the 2010 interview. “Mine didn’t itch.”

“Mine” was a nasty-looking spot on the back of his thigh. The doctor who saw it first in 2005 sent him to a dermatologist immediately. The surgery that followed soon after carved a wide swath from his leg, the first of a long series of surgeries and treatments.

Terry Lee knew the odds. But he packed a lot of life and a lot of golf into his last seven years. He loved to sail, and was accomplished at it. He gathered strength from a workout and support program at the YMCA sponsored by the Livestrong Foundation.

I made Lee’s acquaintance first in the same basketball city league. Later, I got to know him better through the articles we did together.

Tough guy, nice guy, able to be realistic and ever ready to laugh about his life and what it had brought him.

I do regret that we never played a round of golf together.

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Liquidation of a golf-store dream

December 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

OLYMPIA – You’ll find him tucked back off an alley in a neighborhood of warehouses and empty buildings, and it’s by appointment: He’s the guy with the key.

His vocation is golf teaching pro. These days, he’s a liquidator. He’s making a little something off each sale he makes of the marked-down golf gear, so don’t feel too bad for Kris Swanson. But there is a sadness in the enterprise.

“That’s what Phil Mickelson plays,” the affable Swanson says to one customer, who is combing through a golf bag (it’s for sale, too) full of wedges of various degrees and brands.

In that same room, other clubs in other bags are on sale for the same 30 percent off, including the latest generation of woods and irons by the big boys, the Callaways, TaylorMades, Pings and Clevelands.

In the adjoining room, the walls are lined with golf bags. In the biggest room, just inside the door, you’ll find stacks of golf shoes, balls, gloves, various gadgets and gimmicks, and a couple racks of shirts, shorts, skirts and outerwear.

Get ‘em while you can … 50 percent off.

What’s left here is the bank-owned inventory of the Golf USA store in Lacey, Wash., whose owners closed up shop last month. The closure left part-time employee Swanson without a day job and Washington state’s capital region with only one remaining golf retailer (outside the golf course pro shops), and it’s more of a specialty store than full-service, big-brand seller.

It’s a buyer’s market today, in these rooms in an empty building several blocks from the retail hub of downtown Olympia.

There are deals to be had, but it’s hard not to feel like a buzzard, circling and circling and biding my time until the body is really near death … or when the markdowns reach 70 percent.

One man’s hero is another’s villain, and there are neither in this story. It’s no secret, if you play golf at all and live in the modern world, that the deals are better online – the auction sites, the discount sites, Craig’s List.

You don’t get any face-to-face customer service, but that’s a dying art anyway, right? Who really needs a conversation with a knowledgeable proprietor? Who has time to be fitted with clubs that suit you, that you get to try before you buy?

It’s a tough world for brick-and-mortar sellers, who deserve a fair price in return for the old-school services they offer. But it’s tough all over, and nobody is to blame for paying less if you have a chance.

Traditional retailers are doing what they can to coexist with the cyber-market. My home course pro shop, just for instance, offers a price-match of the online retailers. But I wouldn’t feel good about calling him on it.

It also doesn’t feel good picking over the remnants in a sale like Swanson is presiding over. Be assured: If you don’t find what you’re looking for at a price you can live with, there will be other sales … of other failed golf shops, in other towns, in other empty buildings on other back streets.

It’s nobody’s fault. Still, it’s sad.

Related post: What the hell is ‘azimuth’?

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It’s Pink Golf Glove Awareness Month

October 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If it seems like Breast Cancer Awareness Month has gone on for a lot longer than its 31 days, as of its official final day today, well, it has, since at least the April part of the month, when Bubba Watson packed the pink driver and won The Masters with it.

All this awareness is a good thing, in my eyes, because, for one thing, I rock the look. Pink is a good color on me, and oh yes I do too know how to accessorize around it.

You can call it pink

So I was particularly interested to find, through Twitter, a company that brings something new to that sliver of the golf equipment marketplace devoted to gloves.

However essential it might be as equipment, as fashion accessory the golf glove is an afterthought. Most male golfers wear white golf gloves. Black is second, brown a distant third. I have no stats to back me up, but I’m right, am I right?

Dudes … you, who agonize over the piping on your polo collar and whether it picks up your eyes or echoes the stitching on your hat brim; you, who yearn to stand out among your bland band of buddies … you’re the guy that needs to check in with GFore (@gfore).

Here, you can get your white, and accent it with a contrasting logo on the Velcro flap. And of course you can get your black. You can get your two-toned in the Limited Luxe line – I like the Lopez, with the red thumb on white and the green flap.

I like the solid charcoal, which fits the demographic …

But my first buy will be the Blush (you can call it pink, without fear of contradiction), because I think the 180 days of Breast Cancer Awareness Month should not end today but go on at least another 180.

It has something to do with the loved ones in my family (my sister and sister-in-law) who are breast cancer survivors. Awareness is a good thing, because I know for a fact that doctors and researchers are doing new things all the time.

I know, because they found my sister’s lump (tiny, at that point) through a new test she agreed to take after her regular mammogram found nothing.

My sister took the second test, as a favor, in a pilot project, as an afterthought.

My golf gloves will never be an afterthought again. Pink, I think, for now, because it goes with everything. And damn, I rock it.

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Livin’ life on the bottom shelf

October 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In those long ago days before June 1, the bottom shelf of the liquor store kept to itself and I to mine own self.

That day, everything changed.

That day, the state of Washington was officially shoved out of the liquor arena, and hard liquor sales were fully given over to the private sector.

75 South: Nectar of the dogs

There are weird anomalies in price around here, almost five months later. For instance: Evan Williams, my barometer whiskey, was around $12.50 before the change … I saw it yesterday at a downtown Olympia liquor store for $23.94.

So the bottom shelf was a natural response, for the likes of me.

And there’s a blog for that …

Enter the keywords “bottom shelf” and you’ll get to a Website called Serious Eats , whose proprietor, Will Gordon, “drinks his way through the bottom shelf of the liquor store…so you don’t have to.”

He’s funny, most of all, and he seems to know his territory, the relative location of which is all he apparently aspires to as far as any claim of expertise.

The stuff he calls “bottom shelf” tends to lie north of the products I apply the term to. He recently wrote about Overholt Rye and Jim Beam Rye, which shined a light on an underappreciated segment of the whiskey world. That’s good, but it doesn’t get close to the real bottom shelf, where live Monarch and Potter’s and where I recently entered into a nodding acquaintance with Prestige and 75 South.

Gordon in a recent post wrote about McAfee’s Benchmark No. 8, which costs $11.99 a fifth in Massachusetts (but not available in Washington, at least insofar as my shallow research has turned up).

He doesn’t get around to actually talking about Benchmark No. 8 till the last three paragraphs of a longish tour of the tire tracks of his mind and what has been squished beneath the treads, which is not to say it isn’t more or less relevant to the stated subject matter, nor that you will mind the digressions.

It’s Mr. Gordon’s theory that the readers of his site must be mostly worker/soldiers in the a-dult entertainment industry, and as you know by now my site is far too prudish (!) to look too deeply into the veracity of his hypothesis …

Reviewers of stuff like 75 South seem to share the thinking that it’s hard to rate because it’s hard to know what it ought to taste like.

Because it’s not like real whiskey at all, but some combination of moonshine, shit and shinola. The J. Harrison Company is proud to put its formula on the label of Prestige blended whiskey: “A unique blend of 20 percent straight whiskey and 80 percent grain neutral spirits.”

75 South and Prestige  are distilled in the same part of California’s San Bernardino Valley where lies Mira Loma and/or Loma Linda, each of which will always be confused with the other, but in any case this area is said by the Website thecasks.com (also worth visiting) to be  “the new epicenter in the nascent non-craft distilling movement.”

That same site gave 75 South a rating of 66.6 with an asterisk, which it explained like this: “ *Scores of 66.6 simply reflect the most hellish whiskies and despite their numerical appearance, do not sequentially fall between 66 and 67 in terms of ‘quality.’ They stand purely alone.”

I’ve always believed that good whiskey – sipping whiskey – should never be mixed, because all you’ll taste is the mixer (although the Scots insist the best single malts are enhanced by a splash of water). Once you’ve paid good money for decent booze, I believe, you should taste what you paid for.

When you dole out the relatively tiny price for 75 South, you get what you pay for, indeed. And you will never feel bad about mixing it … you’ll only feel OK about improving your cocktail experience.

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