Fore! Play

by Bill Giest

  We began beating the bushes with our clubs, but it was Chad who spotted our balls. We emerged from the thicket bowed and bleeding and pleading with the lovely couple to play on without us. But they stayed with us for several holes, probably by the same principle that you don’t just stay for five minutes when you do volunteer work at the old folks home. Finally they realized that we might not finish before dark and bid us adieu. The way they hit the ball they were out of sight, at warp speed, in seconds.

  At the next tee, a charming older woman came over and raved about the “Sunday Morning” television program that I’m part of, then she teed off while we waited for them to get safely ahead. It was a short, par-3 hole so we waited until she and her partner were all the way on the green, putting, before we hit our drives.

  Somehow—somehow—my ball took off for distance, and somehow—somehow—directly at the green. Perhaps the Visualization Department found my order.

  “Oh no!” I gasped. “What’s that word … ?”

  “Fore!” Willie yelled, as my ball zipped not three feet past her head. She turned around, this fan of mine, and gestured, possibly with her middle finger. She was pretty far away. But I could see her shaking her head as she walked off the green.

  How the hell was I supposed to know? How was I to know that I—I!—would hit a great drive? Sometimes good shots happen to bad golfers.

  Anyway I was in the zone, baby. I accidentally parred the next hole, a straight fairway with no hazards. I found the scorecard and penciled that one in. Willie congratulated me, somewhat insincerely. I felt guilty, like I was cruelly breaking a pact with my own son, a pact that we’d both be bad for so long as we both shall live. If anyone had the luck, I wanted it to be him. Well, not really …

  I didn’t have to ponder that ethical dilemma for long. I went into a bit of a slump for the next, say, hour and a half. That’s the thing about golf. You hit a decent shot, or maybe even three in a row for a par, and you think that maybe you’ve finally found the groove, once and for all.

  But of course you haven’t. It’s just luck. It’s like shooting craps in Vegas and winning a few rolls before going on a losing streak from 11:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. You’re making out like a bandit with the complimentary cocktails and the $5.99 all-you-can-eat buffet, but suddenly you’re out five grand.

  Willie was particularly frustrated. He’s a natural athlete accustomed to excelling at “real” sports. He had played twice before on this vacation, had improved the second time, and assumed he’d play even better this time. But, no. That’s not the way o’ the links.

  His problem may have had something to do with the fact that he is six foot four, and his rental clubs might have previously belonged to former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich—the one who you always thought hadn’t shown up for his press conference but was really there behind the podium.

  At last, we reached the final tee, he and I. With dusk falling, I hit a chopper down the third base line and decided to take another try. A mulligan, I believe. And another. A mcmulligan? An O’Shaughnessy? I’m not sure what they call that third try. And another. Erin go bragh! This was turning into a St. Patrick’s Day parade of drives.

  Then my son stepped up and hit a beauty—an awesomely powerful drive, perhaps 250 or even 300 yards, plus a great roll after it hit the highway. Then he hit another, and another, and another, until a groundskeeper came over the top of the hill on an all-terrain vehicle. He was probably a member of a search party dispatched to see if those two guys who rented the clubs hours and hours before were somehow still out there at sundown hacking away.

  He was shouting something. Was there an emergency of some kind? No …

  “Move it!” he was yelling. “This isn’t a driving range!”

  We moved along, Willie and I, the two of us taking turns advancing the one ball we had left. The final 9th hole yielded ground grudgingly, like the Japanese soldiers dug into those hilltop machine gun nests in The Thin Red Line.

  It grew late. It was starting to look like we might have to pitch camp and attack the green at dawn.

  “Dad,” Willie said in the gathering darkness.

  “Yes, son.”

  “I hate golf.”

  “So do I, son. I think we all do.”

  “It reeeally sucks.”

  “Yes, son. It really does.” Suck.

  20

  Big Bertha and Me

  I should probably be buying my own clubs by now, although rental clubs do have their advantages. They’re a great excuse for playing badly and you can abuse them like you do rental cars.

  They say the right clubs can be good for another 10 strokes off your game. (That’s 78!) And maybe I really would play a lot better with clubs custom-fit to my physique (maybe with shafts that curve out a little at the abdominal area) and to my personal inability level. I’ve seen advertisements touting certain clubs as “forgiving.” I like that. You used to have to go to church for that stuff.

  The term golf clubs bothers me. Shouldn’t they be called golf “instruments,” or “implements,” or golf “tackle,” or golfing “rods,” or “utensils,” or even “sticks” the way they’re called in hockey and lacrosse—something a little more delicate than clubs?

  Tiger doesn’t club his ball, he strokes it, fades it, draws it, feathers it, lofts it, spins it, taps it in. Although, in my case, clubs may be the more accurate term. Considering the level of refinement I bring to the game, I should probably purchase a single fat, gnarly club like those the cavemen ran around with beating on woolly mammoths.

  But, what to buy? There’s a single adjustable club that performs the functions of fourteen, from driving to putting. There are clubs that guarantee backspin, clubs that cost $600 apiece, and clubs made from armor-piercing steel that you can fire bullets at without hurting them. But why? I think it’s to show how strong they are, but who among us has not wanted at some point to gun down our golf clubs?

  Manufacturers spend tens of millions of dollars on golf club research every year to create clubs so advanced that they practically play the game for you. Someday you won’t even have to show up. As a matter of fact, the testing is done in laboratories using robots to hit the balls, and I would like to know if we can purchase the robots as well as the clubs.

  I want that kind of club, the kind that takes me out of the equation: big, fat-headed drivers that give you a slingshot effect. Woods and irons that promise not to slice or hook, and ones that loft the ball even when you top it. They’re out there. Of course those are the ones that cost the most. And there’s probably nothing worse than a guy like me with a $1,500 set of clubs chalking up a 125.

  They sell golf clubs everywhere these days. You can get ’em at BJ’s Price Club or Costco, right next to the forty-five-pound tins of pepper and the fifty-five-gallon drums of ketchup. Big clubs. Cheap. Just don’t ask for advice from the guy stocking the shelves with the forty-eight-packs of horseradish. And you may have to buy drivers in a twelve-pack.

  You can buy clubs on the Internet, of course, and you can find them in the classifieds, and at country club pro shops (with the customary 300 percent markup), and at one of those big Golf Galaxy Super Mega Outlet Warehouse stores that are springing up everywhere you look.

  I wandered through one of those Golf World–type stores, trying in vain to fend off helpful (aka on commission) salesclerks. One finally snagged me and opened up on me with a barrage of terms like “kick point” and “swing weight” and “stem torsion” and “dual weight ports.” It was that same feeling you get when you’re buying a new computer from a nineteen-year-old techno-geek. I felt myself reaching my own personal kick point and fled before I lashed out at him.

  It’s terribly confusing. Woods are not wood anymore, irons not iron. Everything is titanium these days. The big golf club manufacturing area in southern California is called the Titanium Coast. Even the golf gloves at BJ’s claim to be titanium. Considering my drives go about a hundred yards, I’m more in the market for plutoniu
m—turbo plutonium.

  It’s like the 10 billion bottles of water allegedly coming out of the little Evian spring in France. Can there possibly be this much titanium in the world? Aren’t our precious titanium reserves being dangerously depleted? Aren’t the United Titanium Mine Workers overworked and underpaid—if, as we suspect, it is in fact mined? And aren’t they suffering from Gray Lung Disease? What if titanium is leeching through the skin of golfers and causing inoperable palm disease? And what if our kids suck on our clubs and score poorly on their SATs? So many questions. How little we know of this ubiquitous and enigmatic element!

  There are scary new rogue forms of titanium, such as Black Titanium, “the next generation of titanium,” which actually guarantees no hooks or slices. But at what price? Science can grow four-hundred-pound tomatoes that glow and throb on the vine, too, but would you eat a BLT that moves?

  There are ominous signs that our reserves—hell, most of them are in Russia!—may already be running out. Cubic Balance is watering down its titanium clubs with zirconium and calling it “Tizirc.” Other club-makers are blending it with tungsten or forgoing titanium altogether and using beryllium copper.

  The newest clubs are being made of steel, which used to be considered horribly outdated, but now is not. It has been rediscovered so that everyone will replace their titanium clubs. Callaway has “Steelhead Plus,” Taylor Made touts its “Supersteel,” and Kasco “guarantees” you’ll never, ever slice a ball again thanks to “super hytech” steel.

  All of this space-age technology focused on my pitiful little golf game. Golf scientists from our best research universities—who really should be doing something more important, shouldn’t they?—recently announced an important breakthrough in the discovery of an alloy of titanium, zirconium, nickel, copper, and beryllium in which the particles aren’t arrayed in crystalline patterns that come together in pattern boundaries to form weak spots in typical metals. So, Mr. Lab Coat, why does my ball still sail into the damned bunkers?

  And all these numbers! The old 1–9 irons seem to be on the way out, being replaced by a whole new numbering system: loft degrees. Celsius? Fahrenheit? Who knows? You want the 8.5 degree wood? These trajectory comparison charts and center of gravity graphs should be of some help. How about a 21 degree rescue club? Does the 55 or the 56 degree wedge sound better to you? Wedges used to be sand or pitch but now come in at least 12 degree differentials, some touting “15 percent greater inertia.” You want that inertia out there working for you every day, brother. The drivers come in 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12 degree loft. What’s your pleasure? Hmmm?

  And the putters! Taylor Made alone has eleven models of the Nubbins putter featuring the “proprietary insert compound” that golfer Gary McCord says “reminds me of a gummy bear"—and we all know they’re good. Ping offers about forty styles of putters, such as the Isoforce 2 2000 with the pixilated copper insert, a significant improvement on the nickel-titanium insert. There is the Hog putter, featuring a fat grip, fat shaft, and fat head that was recently okayed by St. Andrews (the golfing club, not the saint himself). Callaway offers sixteen kinds with features such as the double radius shaft bend, low flex reverse taper shaft, and the offset hosel—just like President Clinton! If Monica is to be believed.

  At the golf merchandise show, I saw some really odd ones, like blown glass putters, a two-shafted putter, and the Sight Wing putter with a shiny parabolic-shaped reflector on the head like the Lunar Explorer vehicle so you can see the hole when looking at the ball—and probably bring in 500 TV channels at the same time. There’s the Fazer Putter with two red lights on top that come on when you’re perfectly lined up. But nothing quite so strange as Pure Bull Peter Putters. That’s right, the shafts are “made from the reproductive organ of American bulls.” Buy American. “Only quality, handpicked bull organs are used.” Employees must wash hands. “Finds the hole every time.” And what happens then?

  For our fifth golf class in the gym, Liz had invited a salesman from a golf store to talk to us about purchasing clubs and his first words were prescient: “Buying clubs is very confusing.” Not like renting, where they might ask you “lefty or righty?"—or they might not. “We have one hundred different sets in our store,” he says. “Prices range from $200 a set to $2,000. You can spend $1,300 just for a set of irons, $360 or more for a single driver.”

  Questions arise: “What’s in a set?” asks a student. He said a set normally includes the P, not the S, three woods, eight irons, and a putter. He said the driver is a wood. He said this because he knew we were idiots.

  “Titanium or steel?” The salesman recommends stainless steel clubs for beginners, predicting we’d be hitting a lot of rocks and dirt and asphalt—"and my husband,” added the student who said her husband tried to teach her something on every swing.

  “What’s with all the different shafts?” He explains that the new “bubble shafts” offer more speed and less deflection—deflection apparently being a bad thing.

  With irons, he says we definitely want to purchase hollow backs: “They have much larger sweet spots, which used to be the size of the tip of your pinkie, but are now the size of two golf balls. Clubs today are much more forgiving. Bigger clubs are more forgiving. They require less skill.” Forgiveness is divine, bigger is better, less skill is just the ticket.

  He says the Ping ISI, for example, is a huge driver, 323 cubic centimeters: “It has that trampoline effect and was almost outlawed by the USGA.” (Another driver, the new Callaway ERC, has been banned by the USGA for its spring effect.) I definitely want stuff that is almost or absolutely illegal. But if the Ping is $380, and if you do indeed … suck … as we do … it just means you’re going to be hitting the ball that much farther into surrounding communities.

  My head is spinning. His store has two hundred different putters ($15 to $300) to consider, not to mention shoes ($40 to $250) and bags ($60 to $300) and gloves and balls and umbrellas and scoops to get balls out of the water and all the other necessities. I think I prefer basketball, where you just buy a ball.

  Liz reminds us that no matter how much we spend, there are no guarantees, and that we can’t return the clubs simply because $800 or $2,000 later we continue to … suck.

  “You can have $2,000 clubs and a $2 game,” the salesman says. “You can’t buy a game.”

  “Well that’s discouraging!” blurts one student, who left and never came back.

  21

  It Takes Alotta Balls

  Are your balls reactive?” asks the hawker, as we pass by his booth at the PGA show.

  Excuse me? Is this the Ramrod Bar in New York or the PGA Golf Merchandise Show?

  “Your golf balls,” he adds, by way of clarification.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I reply, after some reflection. “Passive, I would say. Sometimes when I swing at them they go nowhere at all.”

  “Well,” he says, “our Ram Tour Reactive ball has the ‘magic metal’ neodymium core, the most explosive core in golf for maximum distance or your money back.”

  Neodymium? Sounds like the ring I bought Jody in the precious stones department at Kmart.

  “Or,” he says, “you could go with the Balata LB with the blend of titanium and lithium balata and the patented 442 dimple pattern. Or the XV2, a blend of titanium, magnesium, and neodymium with the patented neodymium and polybutadiene core for the softest feel and maximum spin?”

  Huh? Lithium balata? Sounds like a really slow Latin dance. Or the stuff they give hyperactive fourth-grade boys to turn them into desks.

  Polybutadiene I think I’ve heard of. Might be that orange dust on Cheez-Kurls.

  He also has the XOC, which comes in orange, yellow, or raspberry, but I tell him I think there’s probably enough snickering when I play already, thanks.

  The Volvik booth offers the four-piece metal model 432 octahedron with the bismuth mixed dual power core and the zirconium cover. Bismuth? That’s a “miracle substance” (as well as the fine capital of the M
innesota–North Dakota area).

  Or perhaps I’d prefer the Air Channel ball with “no-slice technology"—Ha!—and “explosive distance.” Ha-ha! You see, “the Air Channel connecting dimples reduce excessive air drag for more distance and reduce side spin for reduced slice and hook factors.” The Wright brothers had less research data for their flight than these balls do.

  Titleist has an enormous golf ball exhibit at the show, festooned with huge billboards of pros like David Duval hitting Titleist balls. The exhibit features about twenty computer terminals where you can enter your golf game attributes and problem areas (m-y-g-a-m-e-s-u-c-k-s), and the computer tells you what kind of (Titleist) golf balls to buy. In my case the computer urged me to buy floating golf balls, a lot of golf balls, and a tetherball so I could just move on to another sport altogether.

  The next booth has irradiated balls! They’re described as “the world’s longest legal balls.” I check the package to see if there’s a warning that their irradiated balls might affect mine—lowering sperm count, causing erectile dysfunction, that type of thing. Not that it would matter. Golfers would gladly risk a short putz for longer drives. As you’ll recall from history class, on June 30, 1999, in Tenerife on the Canary Islands, British golfer Karl Woodward drove the irradiated TNT ball (with the high-energy XD core and the Surlyn cover and exclusive cross-linked Dura-Shield coating) a historic and almost unbelievable four hundred eight yards and ten inches! Apparently, in one shot. Sort of like when they tested the irradiated hydrogen bomb on a remote island in the South Pacific. Four hundred and eight! But isn’t June hurricane season in the Canaries? Karl probably carried a good three hundred yards down the fairway himself.