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

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 truly 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 (mass) skills for building and fixing things and his instinctive 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

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.

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.

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.

by Bart Potter
BREMERTON, Wash. – Let’s open the argument with a grand claim:

In the greater world of municipal golf courses in the Great Pacific Northwest, the greatest value of all lies in deeply wooded foothills in the southern reaches of the Olympic Mountains of Washington state.

A case could be made for the city courses in Portland, Ore., or the county- and city-run layouts in Spokane, Wash., or the breadth of public golf in Bellingham, Wash.

No. 16 at Gold Mountain Olympic

It’s an argument without a loser.

Each region is worthy of golf exploration in the cause of quantity, quality and affordability. But it’s in the Navy city of Bremerton that the art of Northwest muni golf assumes its highest form in the two courses of the Gold Mountain Golf Club.

The Olympic Course at Gold Mountain, home to two USGA national championships in the past seven years, would by itself be reason enough to pay Gold Mountain a visit.

Add in the Cascade Course, which suffers only by proximity to the Olympic, and you have a muni golf two-fer on this blessed site that holds its head up in awfully good company.

(Chambers Bay, site of the 2015 U.S. Open, is operated by Pierce County, Wash., and is thus a municipal course, but it can’t match Gold Mountain in value, i.e., affordability.)

Daryl Matheny, Gold Mountain’s general manager, said the world is in on the secret of the Olympic Course after the club hosted the U.S. Amateur Public Links in 2006 and the U.S. Junior Amateur in 2011.

“Around our area we knew how good the Olympic Course was,” Matheny said. “The Publinx was the first event that put us on the map, and not just the national map …the international map. We had kids playing from all over the world.”

Feedback from the USGA after the Publinx was phenomenal, Matheny said.

“When we had the Junior,” he said, “that just put an exclamation point on it.”

A player taking on the Olympic Course for the first time will encounter user-friendly fairways off the tee, offering ample landing areas with no sacrifice of challenge.

Elevation changes come into play on nearly every hole on the Olympic. The John Harbottle III layout is compact on its acreage in the sense that one green is close by the following teebox, but the dramatic ups and downs guarantee you’ll notice the workout when you’re finished with a walking round.

The rugged layout also ensures you’ll have genuine double-take moments when you arrive at a tee, any tee. Don’t forget to reward yourself with an occasional look backward from the green to the tee you just left … if you can see it. The Olympic is rich with blind tee shots – either because the flag is out of sight above you, or behind a broad hill you have to climb before descending, or some gnarly variation thereof.

The Olympic’s back nine boasts two holes that could be called its signature holes. The par-3 16th, 157 yards from the blue tees, requires a carry over water to a large-ish green and backdrop that loses nothing through the lens of a camera.

No. 18 is a memorable finishing hole. At 271 yards from the blue tees, 255 from the whites, it calls out to a big hitter to take dead aim at a green thoroughly blockaded by a half-dozen bunkers. More realistic players, or the faint of heart, depending on your mind-set, can play to a substantial bail-out area to the left and then hope to put some air under a wedge to land on the green.

Other holes, too, will stay in your mind. No. 6 is a birdie-able par-5, thanks to the potential for serious roll-out down the other side of the hill. No. 15, a 335-yard par-4, also calls for a tee ball to the crest of a hill, then a second shot to a pin below tucked behind and to the right of the pond that comes into play on 16.

Risk-reward finishing hole: No. 18 at the Olympic Course

No. 17, a 439-yard par-4, offers plenty of landing room to the right after a precipitous drop, but play too far that way and you limit your options into the elevated green. Trouble lurks tight left in a steep, heavily grassed hillside sloping inward just off the tee. The whole effect is stunning, better experienced than described.

The Cascade Course, opened in 1971, is a more traditional layout, with nothing like the hills and cliffs of its younger brother. Its fairways are even broader, and its greens are bigger; a ball hit into the mature trees can be found more easily here and punched back into play.

“Before the Olympic,” Matheny said of the Cascade, “it was one of the best public courses in the Northwest.”

Value, challenge, bountiful scenery: A visit to Bremerton is rewarding for any kind of golfer. For those tuned to the special vibrations of muni golf, Gold Mountain is the peak of the art.

(Photos by Rob Perry, courtesy of Gold Mountain Golf Club

]]> http://greygoateegolf.com/gold-mountain-a-high-value-on-quality/feed/ 1 http://greygoateegolf.com/masters-favorite-does-a-tiger-shit-in-the-woods/ http://greygoateegolf.com/masters-favorite-does-a-tiger-shit-in-the-woods/#comments Fri, 15 Mar 2013 07:39:05 +0000 Bart Potter http://greygoateegolf.com/?p=1142 UNTIL THE puff of smoke, I really thought I had a shot.

Three days later, I’m still sorting it out. I could do Pope. I really think I could.

I could hang out, dressed in my Sunday robes and beanie, like el rey del mundo, and make the occasional proclamation. I could handle the Basilica San Pietro being my local art gallery. I have to think the food’s probably pretty good.

I’m just as capable as the next guy of perpetuating 14^th-century attitudes toward women. I could express “concern” over sex-abusing priests.

I could say things like, “I condemn thee most strongly,” and be like really stern, and I could make sure the priests and the high priests who cover for ‘em never get too uncomfortable.

I could do Pope. Not a lot of deep thought involved.

The conclave called my current day job for references, and apparently my bosses gave me bad marks … I’m pretty sure it’s so I’d stick around and they wouldn’t lose me to the Vatican.

In the end, I understand, it came down to a little-known, rarely applied provision in the bylaws for picking a Pope. It seems the guy they select (there’s another of my qualifications – I’m a guy) must cause there to be an affirmative answer to a particular question.

I didn’t know it was a deal-breaker.

The only right answer is, “Like, duh.”

Which used to be the easy answer, right about this time of year, to the question, “Is Tiger Woods the favorite to win The Masters?”

Decent player. Had some success in the game. Two wins already this year. He’ll play next on tour at Bay Hill, where the old king Arnie hosts a tournament every year, and where Tiger has won seven times.

He was made to feel uncomfortable, and it showed in his game. Now, he’s acting like el rey del golfo mundo all over again.

He’s not a nice guy, and not overly worried about it. The killer instinct, it seems, is back.

So: Is Tiger the favorite to win the Master’s?

Is the Pope Catholic?

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.

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.

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.

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.