by Bill Giest
“Here,” he said, “there were assaults and robberies right on the courses. If you left your car in the lot while you played, it would probably be gone when you returned. Graffiti was all over everything. The well water at a course on Staten Island was so polluted that when you used it to water the course all the grass turned black. And people were using the courses as trash dumps.”
“Tell him about the bodies, Kimble,” said John DeMatteo, another American Golf supervisor. “We get a certain number of dead bodies deposited on the courses. I try not to be the first one out on the course in the morning.”
“At the Dyker Beach course in Brooklyn,” John said, “it was lovely in the morning, mowing the tall grass and watching the rats hop here and there like bunnies.” He said area residents complained about the golf course clean-ups because it destroyed the habitats of the rats, which then sought refuge in nearby homes.
Things began to improve, and more golfers were returning, but many problems peculiar to the city game persisted. Youths still ran out of the bushes and stole golf carts while the drivers were putting. The manager of the Clearview course spent a good deal of time roaming the streets of Queens retrieving his carts and driving them back to the course on expressways.
“Abandoned automobiles on the course are a perpetual problem,” Kimble acknowledged. “Auto thieves love to drive them onto the courses where they get stuck in the sand traps.”
At first he employed armed security guards at the courses. But as crime diminished and in the interest of providing a “country-club atmosphere,” he replaced the uniformed guards with a force of unarmed “marshals” made up largely of retired men who liked to play golf. They patrolled the course looking for people trying to sneak on without paying—an offense common to even the most exclusive suburban clubs—and the marshals reported felonies in progress to the NYPD. They also did away with high-security cashier cages, which were most un-country-club-like.
“New Yorkers love to beat the system,” he said. “We catch people sneaking on the course and they say ‘so try to stop me.’ ” We call the cops and they say ‘What!? Are you kidding? We’ve got three murders over here we’re working on.’ “
With so few open spaces in the city, the golf courses are used as soccer fields, picnic areas, dirt-bike courses, lovers lanes, and what have you. “They usually get out of the way,” said Jane Angelo, one of the many women golfers beginning to reappear on public courses after things became a bit safer. “They stopped what appeared to be a gang fight once to let us play through.”
“We try to live and let live now,” Kimble said, adding that a number of people had taken up residence in tents on golf course property and were allowed to stay so long as they were out of bounds.
He said that when American Golf took over it had to hire “ex-cops or large firemen” as starters—bouncers really—at the courses, because of the terrible arguments over whose turn it was to play.
“Before they took over,” said Lou Avon, who had played a Bronx course for twenty years, “we had to come here at 1:00 A.M. to get in line to play. That in itself makes people irritable. Now, they have a phone reservation system, and there aren’t as many fistfights. It is becoming a country club for the average man.”
Things have improved dramatically. Where once there were rats on the Pelham and Split Rock courses, now there are foxes, rabbits, and colorful birds, including pheasants, quail, and a mother duck hatching some eggs fifty yards from Pelham’s 7th hole.
And out in the nearly-filled-to-capacity parking lot that was once an abandoned weed field, one can observe expensive cars, including a Mercedes convertible with “MD” license plates.
* * *
You can play golf anywhere these days, even in Manhattan. The elevator is on the right. After pulling off the West Side Highway, the rumble and roar of its heavy traffic punctuated by jackhammers, one passes through the portal of a vast, old, enclosed pier to encounter what appears to be an urban mirage: the clapboard facade of … a country club? Yes, with a putting green right outside the front door, and valet parking if you like.
No sight is left unseen in New York. But here’s a new one for the books: two guys with full sets of golf clubs riding New York’s 23rd Street bus, in January.
They could be headed to a mental health facility, or they could be headed here, to the Chelsea Piers Golf Club, complete with the putting green, a golf academy, sixteen golf pros, a pro shop, a sand trap, and a driving range. It is a complete golf club right in Manhattan—except, of course, for the rather conspicuous absence of a golf course, an amenity people have come to expect when they join a golf club. But there is a vast bar, which of course runs a close second to golf in terms of importance. The club offers memberships, camps, even golf stretching clinics.
After 5:00 P.M. and all day on weekends the place is packed. Molly Lonigan, a twenty-eight-year-old Wall Streeter, says she is probably going to join the club, which will cost her $1,000, but will give her discounts, a locker, storage for her golf bag, and guaranteed tee times, among other things.
She likes golf and thinks taking it up will be good for business. “We’re invited to a lot of these corporate golf outings,” she says.
Her friend Deborah says she is trying to play golf, but isn’t really all that keen on the game.
“I just want to meet men,” Deborah admits. “Seriously. Rich men.”
“So do I,” says their friend Jim.
Okay, then.
The Golf Club is but a small part of this $100 million, 1.7 million square foot sports complex, fashioned from once grand piers that had of late been reduced to a site for garbage truck repairs, as well as the single most hostile spot in all of New York (and that’s saying something): the pound where spitting-mad motorists came to retrieve their towed vehicles, after discussing the matter with city employees hiding behind bulletproof glass and reinforced steel counters.
The indoor sports complex now comprises two ice rinks, two in-line skating rinks, basketball courts, soccer fields, batting cages, a gymnastics center, a health club, beach volleyball court, fifty-five-foot climbing wall, forty-lane bowling alley, boxing ring, spa, the world’s longest indoor running track, swimming pool, sporting goods stores, marina, restaurants, and a brew pub—as well as a fashion photo studio, and TV and movie studios.
But I find the driving range to be the wonder of it all: fifty-two heated, weather-protected stalls on four levels, from where dozens of balls are flying at any one time, out toward the Hudson River, and Hoboken beyond. Nets sixteen stories high and two hundred yards downrange at the end of the pier stop the balls before they land in the river or New Jersey. The nets also enclose the sides of the range, protecting big yachts docked here by the likes of Steve Forbes and Geraldo Rivera.
The range is completely automated. Completely. “You never touch your balls,” boasts the guy at the front desk. Which, come to think of it, might be something they’d want to enscript in Latin on the Chelsea Piers Golf Club crest, no?
It’s all very Japanese. You see gargantuan net structures like this every couple of minutes as you travel along the highways in Tokyo. The Japanese are even crazier about golf than we are, if that’s possible, and land is at a premium. You’ve probably heard tales of their multimillion-dollar golf club memberships, not to mention the golf religion with a driving range atop the temple. It was a Japanese team that installed these nets here at Chelsea Piers, as well as the completely automated ball system that vacuums up the balls on the course, shoots them through tubes upstairs, completely bypassing any need for buckets, and automatically places them on the tees, one after another, so that you never touch your balls.
Tu Numquam Tactus Tuum Globi.
My wife complained at another driving range about having to bend down to tee up a hundred balls, and how the next day her legs hurt. Well, here you don’t have to bend down. The range is equipped with Japanese auto-teeing devices, called CompuTees. You swipe your credit or debit card through the mach
ine at each tee, and you receive anywhere from 65 balls for $15 during peak hours, up to 625 balls for $100 off-peak, and unlimited balls from 5:00 A.M. to 8:00 A.M. for $20. CompuTee gives you your current RPB (Rate Per Ball) on digital readout. It also gives you your tee height in millimeters, and tee height adjustment capability. You can rent a club for $4.
Five A.M.? Golfers are addicts who will rise at any hour to feed their habit. And, New Yorkers tend to have type A personalities to boot. The range is open from 5:00 A.M. to midnight.
Six hundred twenty-five balls for a hundred bucks? Does anyone ever hit six hundred twenty-five balls?
“Oh yes,” says William, the manager, “one lady has come and hit a thousand.”
A thousand?
“Yes, more than once.”
Was she a good golfer?
“No.”
Did she appear angry?
“No.”
Disturbed? Possessed?
William says he’s no psychiatrist, but then: Who that plays golf is not possessed?
I come on my lunch hour. You take an elevator to play golf! A sign inside the elevator reminds me that no drivers or woods are allowed on the fourth floor of the driving range, because balls have been hit over the top of the net, striking vessels on the Hudson. This is the kind of childish thing I would do on purpose—if only I could hit it that far. As it is, I have to content myself with trying to hit the guy driving the golf ball sweeper.
I take the elevator to the fourth floor and love it up there. I notice my drives go farther when I hit them from forty feet in the air. Not straighter, just farther.
Also, there are guys up here Worse Than I Am. Honestly. I just wish I’d asked their names. They are Wall Street brokers who say “the market’s so damned bad we’re playing golf instead”—at one o’clock on a weekday afternoon. This frightens me. If their golf is better than the market this day, then the crash of ’29 was but a mild dip, a little correction, and thousands of people must be jumping out of skyscrapers right now. After seeing them hit the ball, I am surprised, frankly, that these men are not leaping from the tees here on the fourth floor out of total humiliation. Japanese men would. All you have to do is take three steps forward.
One of them looks absolutely marvelous. He’s dressed all in black, from his cashmere golf shirt, alligator belt, plush trousers, and socks, down to his black alligator golf shoes. An estimated $800 outfit I would say, even if he said he lived in New Jersey to avoid the 8 ½ percent sales tax (although that is not enough to make some people say they live in New Jersey). His driver is, of course, very large and mostly titanium.
He even looks good addressing the ball, and his swing doesn’t even look that bad to me, although with my knowledge of the game, Little Stevie Wonder could size up his swing just as well.
But his drives were just … awful. Horrible, 45 degree slices, and 45 degree hooks. It was downright Pythagorean.
But his partner is the one I really want to tell you about, a lanky guy with a new set of custom Callaway clubs that he’d just received yesterday at a cost of $3,000 (plus $500 for the shoes and bag).
On his first swing—ever—with his Great Big Bertha driver, he hit on his backswing one of the steel trusses that hold the place up. Thick, strong steel girders riveted in place in 1910. Strong enough that when the Queen Elizabeth docked here, the girders wouldn’t move. His swing was one of the worst moments here at Pier 59 since the Titanic failed to show up as scheduled in April of 1912.
You’ve heard of Ping clubs? Well this was a CLANG! Everyone stopped to look. He should have leaped off the fourth floor tee—hari-kari-style—but did not. Miraculously, the club and the pier appeared to be okay and he continued. Brad, who works here, says he has seen balls ricochet off the pier superstructure but this is the first time he’s ever seen a golfer hit the pier with a club. Brad suggests we preventatively move away to a safer distance.
On the pier-whacker’s second swing—ever—with his new driver, which he said cost more than $500, he did not hit the pier, which was good. He hit the Astroturf behind his ball with an emphatic THUD! before the club struck the ball.
Not a bad hit, though. Not bad at all. I see it sailing off toward the Garden State.
But wait! That’s not the ball in flight … it’s Great Big Bertha’s humongous head! The head was recovered by a rescue team more than a hundred yards downrange, which I thought was pretty darned good distance.
This made me feel good, sort of like when a soldier in combat sees someone else shot and is secretly glad inside it’s not him. I’m not proud of this.
But it was a reminder: No matter how bad you are, somebody’s always worse.
I went downstairs and wandered through the Greg Norman pro shop. I wasn’t ready for any of that stuff. Not ready for the expensive Taylor Innergel balls, and definitely not ready for the Greg Norman hat. I’d look like … me … wearing the World Wrestling Federation title belt.
When I returned my rented club with the head still on, I was feeling very good about my game.
I told the guy who’d lost his head that I was just taking up golf.
“I have a word of advice for you,” he replied. “Don’t.”
13
SwingCam: Golf in the 21st Century
Maybe advanced computer technology can help. I’d seen the SwingCam Advanced Visual Learning System at the PGA Golf Merchandise Show and here it was again at Chelsea Piers.
“This is the twenty-first century,” a sales rep at the Golf Show notified us. “Time to bring computer technology to your golf game. Could take off half a dozen strokes.” (That’s minus 68 now, and counting!)
He generously offered Jody and me complimentary computer golf swing analyses, using his SwingCam Advanced Visual Learning System with Doppler radar. Wow! Doppler radar, just like the weathergal uses on NewsChannel 4! I worry, however, that it might show the fog and scattered showers in my armpits. Playing golf in front of others, not to mention before a video camera, makes me sweat.
But in desperate need of help, I agreed to swing at a ball while a computer sat hunkered down across from me analyzing my every move. It did not laugh when I swung (as others do), or even say anything, it just professionally recorded my swing with a video camera and left the talking to a golf scientist person who interpreted the results using Advanced Planar Analysis.
“We can see on the digital readout that you drove the ball ninety yards,” the expert pointed out to me. Not good. He told me my clubhead speed was slow, as was my ball speed, and noted that my front foot moved a lot and my head went up way too soon. None of it good.
“Do people ever just slap you?” I asked.
“We try to be as positive as we can and still be helpful,” he replied.
The IRU (Instant Replay Unit) digitally captured my golf swing and had the temerity to show it to me in slomo and freeze frames. It wasn’t pretty.
The golf scientist said the Main Kiosk Unit was linked to the IRU and could provide my body sway measurements as well as my swing plane. But I figured I’d had enough bad news for one day and besides, I had no idea what he was even talking about. The unit could also provide a side-by-side (unfavorable) comparison of a golf pro’s swing with my own. No thanks.
He said my swing was now on their Internet Web site and could be downloaded at any time by a golf pro for further study. I told him that would be tantamount to calling in the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to analyze my kids’ finger painting.
He said I can “cyber-rent tools” to fix my golf swing, but I am afraid I would cyber-forget to return them and have to pay virtual late fees. He informed us that tips and suggested drills can also be provided “to develop and reinforce the latest in biomechanic training.”
At which point my wife informed him that she objected to the low camera angle employed by the SwingCam Advanced Visual Learning System with Doppler radar, which she felt made her ass look big.
I again encounter SwingCam out in the real world h
ere at Chelsea Piers, where one of the tees is SwingCam-equipped. It looks something like an ATM sitting there, except you pay it, not the other way around.
You put in your credit card, it charges you $9.95, and for the next ten minutes that same damned machine sitting on the other side of the tee records your swings and plays them back in slow motion for you on a monitor. Talk about bad TV! Although, really, how many sitcoms are this funny?
Two terrible golfers are using the tee equipped with SwingCam, even though they are not using the Swing-Cam itself, and even though furthermore it’s a rainy, cold weekday at two in the afternoon and most of the other fifty-two tees are wide open. What they are doing is hiding behind the SwingCam machine—an unintended, but fair, use. When your golf swing’s as grotesque as theirs, you should hide yourself from public view. They are the golfing equivalents of the Elephant Man.
When they finish, I step up to SwingCam and the first thing I notice is that there’s a large chunk out of the machine, either from an errant swing that would warrant the help offered by this advanced visual learning system, or from a golfer pissed off at the machine for what it’s telling the customer about his or her game.
I swipe my card and have to decide which of the three unlabeled buttons to press—kind of like a shell game. Unfortunately, I choose a button that turns the machine off. I swipe my card again, hit another unlabeled button and this time get lucky. I do a lot of swiping before it’s over and will not be surprised to find several $9.95s on my Amex bill totaling around $200.
This SwingCam also videotapes your swing, plays it back, and provides digital readout of the distance you hit the ball, club speed, and ball speed.
My first set of readings are absolutely phenomenal, representing my finest hour in golf!
Distance: 288 yards!
Club speed: 92 miles per hour!
Ball speed: 162 miles per hour!
I love this machine.
These are great stats! But they are not my stats. Maybe the last guy’s. SwingCam is on the fritz. It read 288 yards, yet I had actually seen my drive hit just beyond the second “green” on the range, which is eighty-seven yards away. So, there seemed to be this two-hundred-yard discrepancy. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten in my excitement to ask for a printout of those first stats to preserve in the family Bible.