Despite outing my anti-football stance in this rant, careful readers will have noted I’m pretty much okay with gambling. And since nothing brings out that instinct (it does seem like an instinct, doesn’t it?) more vigorously than the Super Bowl, here we are again.

Last year we wandered from Pittsburgh to Green Bay by way of the White House (and the homebrewing activities going on there, all mentioned here).

But for Super Bowl XLVI we’re sticking to the east coast, and hitching our star to a wager already in the works, between Brooklyn Brewery and Harpoon Brewery. Seems that the old pros at the helm of each brewery are chums and couldn’t pass up the chance to tweak the other should their home team win.

The deal is that should the Patriots win, Steve Hindy will dispense a keg of Harpoon IPA at the Brooklyn brewery. Likewise, should the Giants win, Harpoon’s Rich Doyle and Dan Kenary will dispense a keg of Brooklyn Lager in the Boston tasting room.

Gauging by the amount of coverage the wager has already received, the publicity will presumably help salve the wounds of the defeated, and I’m willing enough to lard on some more.

For the two breweries, this is actually Super Bowl Wager II, since the same terms were put forth for Super Bowl XLII in 2008, and even non-fans like me know the Giants dusted off the previously undefeated Patriots 17-14, a stunning upset. As this video shows, the bet was paid off, and Hindy made a prescient comment about the two teams meeting again in the playoffs:

Hindy, who obviously has a gambling problem, threw down a similar wager with Anchor Brewing in San Francisco before the Giants-49ers tilt for the NFC title. Anchor president John Dannerbeck not only agreed to pour Brooklyn’s Sorachi Ace beer from this Monday to tomorrow, but outfit tour guides in Giants jerseys:

At the Anchor Brewing tasting room, pouring Brooklyn's Sorachi Ale while wearing a Giants' jersey

I’m going to throw in my two cents here. I’ll select one of the specialty beers of whichever brewery wins on Sunday–so to speak–and make it my next TAP Beer of the Week. To the victor goes the laurel. To me goes the beer.

As far as this week’s two beers go, as a lager and an ale they aren’t really competitive; it’s apples and oranges. But there are some similarities in that both beers are the best-selling flagship brew in each company’s portfolio. Both are now being canned as well as bottled (both canned at the F.X. Matt Brewery in Utica, New York).

And both companies have now been around for a long time, by craft brewery standards. (See “Related Posts” below for a little more on each brewery’s history and beers.) Harpoon released its first beer, Harpoon Ale, in 1987. Brooklyn Lager was that brewery’s first offering in 1988. From small and none-too-certain beginnings, both companies have come a very long way: Harpoon was ranked ninth in U.S. craft brewery sales in 2010 (16^th in overall brewery sales), while Brooklyn was 16^th (25^th overall).

The two beers in question were mildly radical for the time and place of their introduction. As they enter adulthood they’ve more or less settled down into mainstream respectability, considering the wild experimentation going on around them. Neither will knock your socks off; nor will they let you down.

Brooklyn Lager harkens back to pre-Prohibition brewing days in the borough, when almost 50 breweries plied their trade, with a Vienna Lager-style recipe formulated by William Moeller, a fourth-generation brewer who went back into the notebooks. The Milton Glaser-designed logo harkens back to the Brooklyn Dodgers. (Talk about festering wounds!)

It’s a lightly amber beer with a nice sudsy head, an appealingly grainy nose with a touch of lemon zest probably from the (somewhat unusual) dry-hopping during lagering. (Hallertauer Mittelfrueh, Vanguard and Cascade in the hop mix.) The bottles I had from a recent variety pack were just past their freshness date with no apparent harm done. The palate is lightly malty, suitably crisp, with a bittersweet finish.

I hadn’t had a Brooklyn Lager for awhile. When I cracked one open a few days ago I had a bit of a flashback, on first sip, of the old New Amsterdam Amber, which both Brooklyn Lager and Sam Adams Boston Lager are the immediate descendants of from back in the mid-80’s. But that’s a bit of history for another time.

Interestingly, though, Brooklyn Lager is brewed at the Matt Brewing Company, as was New Amsterdam, Sam Adams and Harpoon for a time. However, the expansion of the company’s Williamsburg brewery is expected to double capacity in 2012 and again in 2013, so that may change.

The Harpoon IPA was introduced in 1993 as a summer seasonal beer, but sales went off the charts and the company quickly made it a year-round offering. Now it’s the number one house brand.

I suspect its very ubiquity makes beer geeks take it for granted. But I know I’m happy to call on it as a go-to beer when choices are otherwise suspect or limited. It’s not a west coast in-your-face IPA, but a solid Cascade hop-accented IPA with a fruity nose, a toasty malt character and a good bit of hop zing in the finish. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am, I’ll have another.

There, now wasn’t that more fun than talking about football?

Name: Brooklyn Lager
Brewer: Brooklyn Brewery, New York
Style: American Amber
ABV: 5.2%
Availability: Year-round, 25 states and D.C.
For More Information: www.brooklynbrewery.com

Name: Harpoon IPA
Brewer: Harpoon Brewery, Boston, Massachusetts and Windsor, Vermont
Style: IPA
ABV: 5.9%
Availability: Year-round, 26 states
For More Information: www.harpoonbrewery.com

Related Posts:
TAP Beer(s) of the Week: Harpoon 100-Barrel Island Creek Oyster Stout and Single Hop ESB
TAP Beer of the Week: Brooklyn Local 2
TAP Beer(s) of the Week: Summertime Brews
Super Bowl XLV

Jim McLean

Here at The A Position we’re given a topic to address (or not) each month for The A List feature, in a neat 150 words or so. The January challenge was pretty much the same as last year’s–to make fearless predictions about the golf year ahead. Click here to see just how far off the tracks The A Position writers careened then.

This year we enlisted the prognosticating skills of Jimmy Roberts of NBC Sports to lend the expertise gleaned from his many interviews with the game’s top players, surely adding more gravitas to our wild imaginings keen and insightful looks ahead. For the full collection of 2012 crystal ball gazings, click here.

I went for cheap laughs in 2011, but played it straight this time. I recently interviewed Jim McLean for a piece that will appear next month in the spring issue of Celebrated Living, on some of the top instructors in golf. He qualifies six ways to Sunday, and with a couple of his star pupils lately prominent in the news, I felt emboldened in putting the following prophecy on the record.

***

This should be a pretty good year for Jim McLean, not that 2011 was too shabby, marking the 20^th year of the first Jim McLean Golf School at the Doral Golf Resort in Miami, and the opening of the newest in November at SunRidge Canyon outside Scottsdale.

His eleventh book (with Tom McCarthy) appears next month, The Complete Hogan: A Shot-by-Shot Analysis of Golf’s Greatest Swing.

But the man who estimates he’s given 12,000 private lessons in his time now has two pupils succeeding at the highest levels of the game. The talents of Keegan Bradley and Alexis Thompson burst like bombshells at the end of last season and inject needed vitality into the 2012 PGA Tour and LPGA schedules.

Look for more excitement to come. McLean says, “Alexis is such a sweetheart, but she has no fear. As for Keegan, I’m going to go play Augusta National with him in March.”

Lexi Thompson

Keegan Bradley with the PGA Championship Wanamaker Trophy

My wife gave me the t-shirt for Christmas (and took the picture). I think she might be on to me. But Happy New Year all, and here’s to a fun road ahead for 2012.

Scott Willis demonstrating the power of yoga (courtesy of Timothy Thrasher, Thrasher Graphics)

In the year of his grieving, 2001, Scott Willis would hop in his car and just drive south from Brattleboro, Vermont, on Route 5, the back road through Guilford, into Bernardston, Massachusetts, Greenfield, Deerfield, as far as he needed to go until his equilibrium returned. Then he’d turn around and head home. His father, Ed, had died that June, and then the shock of 9/11 just compounded the dislocation.

Golf had been a big part of Scott’s childhood in Walpole and Keene, New Hampshire. He would caddy for his dad and mom, he and his dad would play together occasionally, and the pair would frequently watch golf on television together. For a time hardly a spring or summer day went by when Scott and his friends weren’t playing or caddying out at the nine-hole Hooper Golf Course in Walpole. But he essentially quit the game after ninth grade, to concentrate on baseball, music, girls.

By 2001, he had barely played a half dozen times in 35 years. Then one day, motoring between Bernardston and Greenfield, he decided to stop at Sammy K’s driving range and hit out a few balls. Another day he veered over to the Northfield Golf Club, went to the practice green in a medium to pouring rain and just stayed out there, putting. “It felt good,” he recalled recently. “I liked it.”

He played a few times at Northfield in 2002, then joined in August. The next year he signed up at the Brattleboro Country Club, where he is still a member. “Not long after I resumed playing I realized it wasn’t a big step from there to putting my two loves together.”

The other love is yoga. After a varied career path as a musician and academic counselor, Willis took his first yoga class in 1987, when he was 35, “And it all immediately felt so good, physically and emotionally.”

It still does. The way Willis puts it to his students–he has now taught yoga since moving to Brattleboro in 1992–is that, “Yoga is like a well I can always go to to get water. And for me, golf is yoga outside.”

Be the Ball

From the Sanskrit root, yuj–to bind, or unite–yoga is the ancient means to unite mind, body and spirit. How this is done can be interpreted in a bewildering number of ways, not a few of which Willis has studied. “Yoga is about postures, breath work, meditation and philosophy. I think of it as a practice of three things: gratitude, loving kindness and forgiveness, mindfulness in daily life. There is a spiritual component to it; I encourage people to connect to whatever that means to their deeper selves. “

Be the Ball

But his classes–particularly his Golf Yoga classes–are laid-back and easy-going, conducted with a sense of humor, urging students to go at their own paces, to the comfortable edge of a stretch or yoga pose.

“I tell students yoga is an oasis of time where they’re not responsible to or for anyone else, with no need to impress anyone in class or the instructor. Pretty much like a round of golf.” Willis finds golf such an opportunity to really focus that he has occasionally put together “Meditation in motion” foursomes that play for nine holes in relative silence.

He doesn’t teach golf technique. The Golf Yoga classes he conducted over the last four years consist of six dynamic stretches and nine static stretches–some classic yoga postures like Warrior, Dance, Willow with golf club in hand–all at a relaxed pace. In place of meditations that might begin and end typical yoga classes, Willis plays taped excerpts from the likes of golf psychologist Dr. Bob Rotella, and might wrap up a session with a Jim McLean video.

Scott holding the coveted Be the Ball Scramble trophy

Ten weekly sessions culminate just about the time the golf season opens in Vermont–and then it’s time for the Be the Ball Scramble for all current and former students.

Does it help? “Using myself as an example,” he said, “I was a 24 handicap when I started playing again. I’m a nine now.”

But he’s not stopping there. He suspended the class in 2010 in favor of giving private lessons, going a little deeper into the sports psychology angle, but he’s taking them up again early in 2012.

“The idea is to maximize the enjoyment of the game. It’s like Bagger Vance says (in Steven Pressfield’s novel)–through focusing one can experience levels of awareness deeper than usual.” If we play to the level that our subconscious lets us play, then we need to convince the subconscious to let us play better. And to that end Willis has created methods for players to become more factually aware of their games, and affirmations that help them visualize playing better.

In his own case, he’s created a precise scenario that has him shooting a 68 on October 15, 2013, thereby lowering his handicap to four. He won’t promise this will happen, but for now he’ll admit no doubt about it, either, merely commenting: “Check back with me then.”

———————–

More information on Scott Willis and his Golf Yoga classes can be found at www.Solarhillyoga.com; he can be reached at Scott-willis@comcast.net, or (802) 257-1926.

The Yoga Center at Solar Hill studio, Brattleboro, Vermont

How golf and yoga went down in the desert during the Golf Road Warriors Scottsdale trip, “The Golf Yoga Connection” here.

So it’s no great surprise that a compact Marc Sleen Museum stands alone in Brussels across the street from the more expansive museum holdings of the Belgian Comic Strip Center, one of the major tourist stops in the city.

Belgians love their comics, and their Art Nouveau, which makes the Center a perfect fit, housed in a 1906 Art Nouveau masterpiece designed by Victor Horta.

The animating spirit of Belgian comic art, Tintin, is now animated (well, in 3-D motion-capture animation at any rate) in the Peter Jackson-produced and Steven Spielberg-directed “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.” Spielberg was on hand for the premiere in Brussels on October 22, preceding the widespread U.S. debut now on hand:

Tintin and his creator, the late Hergé, are Belgian icons. Hergé was born Georges Remi in 1907 in Brussels, but signed his drawings Hergé for his initials in reverse (RG). Tintin came along in 1929, Hergé did 23 books of his adventures up to his death in 1983, and then there were no more–as he had directed in his will.

About the time of Hergé’s death the Horta building was looking for a stay of execution. The former textile warehouse, empty for twenty years except for squatters was in ruins, on the verge of destruction, about to become a parking lot.

Some 200,000 visitors now stream through the site annually to see the happier ending that ensued.

Nero striding at entrance to the Marc Sleen Museum

Sleen, meanwhile, is still very much alive as he approaches his 90^th birthday on December 30. He’s reportedly delighted with the museum in his name, and with the beer named after his best-loved character.

In the very first Nero strip Sleen drew in 1947, a criminal is uncovered using beer to brainwash Belgians into doing his bidding; in a subsequent adventure Nero discovers a beer tree in Rwanda which makes him rich.

There’s no beer tree at the Marc Sleen Museum, but there is the beer, available only there or in the café at the Comic Strip Center. It was brewed as a one-off by the De Proef Brouwerij in Locristi, but proved popular enough that larger production is being considered. I was lucky enough to sample some there in early May and bring a bottle safely home as well.

Willem De Graeve, director of the Belgian Comic Strip Center, pours a glass of Nero Bier

It’s a cloudy amber ale that is quite hoppy by Belgian standards, verging on an IPA, with a deep hop nose. It’s floral and fruity, the Nelson Sauvin hop throwing off notes of pineapple and mango. There’s a hearty malt character, but not overly sweet, with a brisk finish.

I just finished off the bottle fairly briskly as well in the spirit of it all–not only movie premieres, but the fact that the country finally has a new government.

We talk about gridlock in this country, but we have nothing on Belgium which, like Sleen, also set a record–the longest period in peacetime without an official government. Since the last general elections in June, 2010, the regions of the country–Flemish-speaking Flanders to the north, French-speaking Wallonia to the south (with a sliver of Germanic influence to the east)–were unable to agree on a ruling coalition.

Think René Magritte, and Belgium’s surrealistic side may suggest the political imbroglio, only just settled after 541 days. Having historically been invaded by everyone from the Vikings and Romans to the Spanish, Dutch, French and Germans, the Belgians can perhaps be forgiven a slightly oblique world view.

When the record was broken last February many Belgians, typically enough, partied. In Ghent in the north citizens stripped in public. In Louvain-la-Neuve in the south, free beer was given away. Not Nero, though it surely would have worked as well.

Name: Nero Bier
Brewer: De Proef Brouwerij, Lochristi, Belgium
Style: Belgian ale
ABV: 6.5%
Availability: Only in Brussels at the Marc Sleen Museum and the Belgian Comic Strip Center
For More Information: About Marc Sleen: www.marc-sleen.be
About De Proef: www.sbs-imports.com/deproef.php

But I behaved myself this trip, since I was really out Christmas shopping, and had actually stopped in hope of finding some gift beers.

The Wassail was a gift to myself. I hadn’t had any Full Sail beers since I got on the bus in Portland, Oregon, as part of the 2011 Beer Bloggers Conference in mid-August. We were heading for the Goschie Farms hop fields right in the middle of harvest season. The trip from Portland to Silverton in the Willamette Valley should have taken about an hour, but late on a Friday afternoon in good weather, we wound up trapped on the bus for well over two hours.

Trapped, in this case, wasn’t so terrible, since representatives from the Full Sail, Widmers, Rogue and Ninkasi breweries were on hand to introduce and pour their beers. A picnic and the smell of fresh hops was awaiting us at the end of the journey and there was a working bathroom on board, so all was well.

Full Sail will soon hit its quarter-century mark, a ripe old age for a microbrewery. It began in an old fruit-pressing factory overlooking the Columbia River Gorge and in 1989 became the first craft brewery in Oregon to bottle its beer, the Full Sail Amber. What’s lost now is that an amber beer was rather startling at the time, and so was the name. The Amber is still the company’s flagship beer, but it puts out a full range of year-round, seasonal and specialty brews.

At its twelve-year mark in 1999 the brewery became employee-owned, and it still bandies the number of the owner/employee workforce on each bottle (47 currently).

Executive brewmaster James Emmerson of Full Sail Brewing, on the bus

Full Sail's brewing supervisor Barney Brennan

Two of them were on the bus, brewing supervisor Barney Brennan and executive brewmaster James Emmerson. They poured three beers for us, marching upwards in ABV.

The first came from the throwback session lager series–Session–meant as a tribute to the way beers used to be pre-Prohibition, including the squat 11-ounce bottles. We had the Session Black, indeed as black as night, but a 5.4% ABV lager that was crisp and appealing, with a bare hint of roast.

We followed that up with one of the lagers in the rotating LTD series, meaning limited edition, although Emmerson said it also meant “Living the Dream,” which apparently all of the Full Sail employee owners are doing.

The LTD 03 lager, also on the bus

We had the LTD 03, a Pilsner-style lager at 5.6% ABV, that had a spot of wheat in the grain bill, and all Sterling hops. It was also a crisp, bright beer with a nice hop bite at the finish.

From the year-round beers we had the IPA, which for a northwest beer was not overwhelmingly hoppy, brewed more to the English-style, but still with a sturdy 6% ABV.

Like the Celebration Ale from Sierra Nevada I drank last week, and despite its name, there are no spices or additives other than malt, water, hops and yeast in the Wassail; its inveigling character derives solely from the four ingredients.

And not that the Celebration needs any kind of corrective, but non-hop heads might find it with the Wassail, and the two beers make for an interesting contrast.

Freshly harvested hops at the Goschie Farms in Silverton, Oregon

Brewed since 1988, the Wassail is a deep mahogany brew that, though it still has a considerable hop character, is skewed toward malt. The nose is sweet, fruity, with a touch of dark cherry. The palate is spicy, woody and toffee sweet, and the finish is subtly bracing rather than aggressive. It’s a mouthful, all in all.

Full Sail actually puts out three holiday or winter beers. The Wassail is the most potent, followed by Wreck the Halls from the Brewmaster Reserve Series (6.5%). A newer entry is the Fest Lager in the Session series (6.2%).

It would have been nice to try all three, but maybe that’s something for next year’s Christmas list.

Name: Full Sail Wassail
Brewer: Full Sail Brewing, Hood River, Oregon
Style: Winter Warmer
ABV: 7%
Availability: September-December, 29 states
For More Information: www.fullsailbrewing.com

Rarely has a beer been so aptly named as this holiday offering from Sierra Nevada. Mental fireworks blossom each November when I run across it on market shelves.

Although following the lead of Anchor Brewing, which first produced its annual holiday ale in 1975, Sierra Nevada was pioneering as well in annually producing a special winter beer since 1981, long before it became a brewing commonplace–and virtually a requirement for a brewery these days.

Unlike the product shot on the right, each bottle of the Celebration ale is dated with its vintage year. But this doesn’t mean that each year is different and that collectors should be laying down bottles for vertical tastings.

I once labored under just that impression, with the further thought that Celebration was a platform for trying out new hop varieties from year to year.

Apparently I was misinformed. Last year Dan Becker of The Full Pint website approached the always approachable Bill Manley of Sierra Nevada to ask him about certain myths that have grown up around Celebration Ale. The post is still up here but the gist of Bill’s remarks was that the recipe for Celebration has been unchanged since 1983. The only difference between batches would be due to the usual vagaries in hop crops.

The ale is bittered with Chinook, finished and dry-hopped with Cascade and Centennial hops, and despite any tasting impressions, has no added spices or flavorings.

But there are plenty of impressions to be found in a bottle. One is just how moreish Celebration is; it’s so delicious that the temptation is to drink it by the gallon. This would not be a great idea, since at 6.8% ABV it’s no shrinking violet of a beer.

Ken Grossman ponders the bottling machine in Sierra Nevada's early days

A bright amber in the glass, it is wildly floral, however, as well as fruity in the nose–citrus to be sure, some spiciness, a hop lover’s dream bouquet.

For those whose memories aren’t quite as long as mine, I have to report what a revelation this beer was when it first starting showing up on the east coast back in the day. There was simply nothing else like it around, or nothing that could be easily found in any case. Well, Sierra Nevada itself wasn’t that easily found back in the early ‘80s.

“Balance” is a term bandied about as a desirable goal in brewing, meaning the malt sweetness and hop bitterness have reached some grail of equilibrium. I’ll buy it in this case (and by the case). Celebration Ale is the epitome of poise, with its rousing malt opening followed by a quenching hop bitterness.

It’s a beer to be reckoned with, and I reckon I’ll have another one.

Name: Celebration Ale
Brewer: Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, Chico, California
Style: American IPA
ABV: 6.8%
Availability: Nationwide, winter seasonal
More Information: www.sierranevada.com

Related Posts:

TAP Beer(s) of the Week 49: Oh, Bring Us Some Clootie Dumpling…

TAP Beer of the Week 46: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

TAP Beer(s) of the Week 37: Fall Classics

TAP Beer of the Week 7: Sierra Nevada Glissade

TAP Beer of the Week 2: Life and Limb

2 – Big rocks

Out on the Troon North Monument Course

3 – Bigger rocks

Fifth hole, Boulders South Course

4 – Tough lies

5 – Tougher lies

6 – Cacti

7 – Cacti with embedded golf balls

McDowell Mountain Ranch Golf Club

8 – Distant mountains

Greyhawk Raptor Course

9 – Famous holes

TPC Scottsdale Stadium Course, sixteenth hole

TPC Scottsdale Sixteenth Hole

I had a great day playing the TPC Scottsdale Stadium Course this morning. Not because I was playing well, because I wasn’t. I chalk it up entirely to a lack of sleep and my aching back, with nothing left over for an inherent lack of skill.

But it was a lovely morning that dodged the bullet of predicted rain. We saw a bobcat on the first tee, eagles in a tree on the second, and a few birdies from Scottsdale CVB National Sales Manager Stuart Evans. We being the rest of the threesome, myself and The A Position CEO Bob Senoff, playing his second round of the year. That he beat me by a stroke should shame me, Bob said, but that’s not easily done. It’s golf, after all.

We also enjoyed the company of forecaddie Bryan Fischer, who’s a plus-four handicap, and who will be taking a run at qualifying for the Waste Management Phoenix Open, which begins here on February 2. Construction is already well underway on the stands that surround the famous, or infamous sixteenth hole, here introduced by Stuart:

If proof is needed that the west can still be pretty wild, the tournament supplies plenty each year. More fans attend this early event in the PGA Tour season than any other golf tournament, and by late Sunday afternoon, about the time the networks tune in, there’s a good chance many will be wired. The raucous cheering that attends shots at the sixteenth is as rowdy as any NFL game, and reached its extended epitome in 1997 when Tiger Woods aced the hole. To say the crowd went wild is to use a vastly understated cliché.

The Stadium Course comes by its name honestly; aside from temporary bleacher seating, there are raised mounds around many of the greens where fans can pack in to watch the action, and there’s usually plenty, particularly on the closing holes.

I not only played the course on my first golf visit to Scottsdale almost exactly ten years ago, taking part in an International Media Golf Shoot Out, it was my introduction to desert golf. Although, as my partner that day, John Davis of the Arizona Republic, said, “This isn’t true desert golf. The desert areas here are more cosmetic than treacherous. Wait until you play Troon North.”

I parred the sixteenth that day, and so I was hoping not to mess up my career stats when I stepped to the tee today:

I promptly put it on the putting surface with a nine iron, rammed my first putt about eight feet past the hole, and sunk the comebacker. I’m even through two rounds on sixteen, ten years apart.

My first look at the TPC Course startled me with what looked like tiny stripes of vivid green fairways, with bleached out wilderness areas beckoning from just beyond the rough.  Certainly, it’s a sound idea to keep the ball in the fairway at this Tom Weiskopf-Jay Morrish design, built in 1986.  But it isn’t that tough to find the ball in the arid waste areas, just tough on the irons when playing out.

The breadth of the mountain vistas (the McDowell range) in the Sonoran Desert setting makes the visual aspect of play more deceiving than firing through the wooded corridors I’m used to in the northeast. But once off the tee, it’s easy to see that the fairways are actually fairly generous.

The seventeenth hole has had its share of excitement as well. But let’s let Bryan explain:

The other player Bryan mentioned was Tom Byrum. Magee teed off while the previous foursome was still putting.  His ball rolled onto the green, bounced off Tom Byrum’s putter, and into the hole for a double-eagle one on the scorecard.

His shot of the year was matched by the quote of the year from Byrum’s caddie, Robert Uresti, who quipped, “It was the first putt Tom made all day.”

Invoke Cave Creek in these parts and people seem to roll their eyes a bit, as if you’ve mentioned an eccentric uncle who is a lot of fun, even if he asks you to pull his finger from time to time.

Cave Creek’s bent rears toward a wild west heritage, with a heavy streak of pigskin fanaticism woven in. Though Buffalo Chip began life in 1951 as a feed and bait shop, it has evolved into an ample western dance hall and saloon, complete with bull-riding.

Not mechanical bull-riding, the real thing. And on Wednesday nights, which this was, it’s amateur night. Anyone with sufficient balls and lack of sense enough to sign a waiver can mount up and try to hang on to a 1,800-pound manically lurching bull for eight seconds. The evidence (and amateurs) on the ground suggested this was nearly impossible, and no one in our group was about to chance it.

I felt at sufficient risk asking the bartender if she had any good craft beer available. Her disdain was like a pointed cowgirl boot to my crotch. But actually they did have Widmer Hefeweizen on tap, which went pretty well with the pulled pork, grilled sausage, biscuit, beans and coleslaw I larded onto my plate.

The Buffalo Chip is also known as a Green Bay Packers bar. Walk a little ways across a large parking lot, which a few of us did, and you come to Harold’s Corral, which I was told is the largest Pittsburgh Steelers bar in the U.S. (And therefore, presumably, in the world.)

I neglected to ask how that was measured, precisely, or where Cardinal fans go. But in 2009 over 4,200 fans jammed into huge tents set up on the property to watch the Steelers beat Arizona in Super Bowl XLIII, 27 to 23, and then doubtless went crazy on beer.

I wasn’t crazy about the selection at Harold’s, but across the street we struck paydirt. The Cave Creek Tap Haus is a new kid on the block, opened only a few weeks, but for good beer fans it’s the mother lode, offering over 50 craft beers on tap, and claiming to have the largest local selection in the state.

By this time our entourage had been whittled down to me and Jerry Rose of Communication Links. As this post suggests, Jerry and I have been spending most of our time together of late atop barstools. We can deal with it.

We took our time deciding on our pints because bartender Pam Porter (perfect name for a beer bar), kept giving us samples so we could make up our minds.

Fifty taps at the Cave Creek Tap Haus can make selection a little tricky

I wanted to keep it local, and so settled happily on an Old World Brewery Eclipse Black IPA, a not overly hoppy but fairly rich and slightly roasty dark ale that seemed more like a porter than anything. Fine by me.

I can’t say I know much about the Phoenix-based brewery beyond what’s on its website and Facebook page, noting that the lineup of regularly distributed beers include an Old World Wit, a Nitro Blonde, a 4Leaf Irish Red Ale, a Dark Knight Porter and seasonals like the Eclipse, which is probably eclipsed by now. The brewery and a taproom is located at the old Capital Station Post Office at 334 North 25^th Avenue in Phoenix.

I sort of lost track of the beer because we were soon chatting and taking pictures with Pam and assistant bar manager Carrol Douglass, before one of them pointed out that Robbie Knievel was sitting at the bar right alongside us.

Knievel, who turns 50 in May, was eight when he first performed on a motorcycle with his legendary dad, Evel Knievel. Robbie carries on the family stuntman daredevil ways as Kaptain Robbie Knievel, having made over 250 jumps himself, sometimes replicating the feats of his late father, often surpassing them.

Robbie has jumped over a 228-foot span of the Grand Canyon, broken all sorts of records for leaping over cars and buses, and hopes someday to cap his career with a jump of the Snake River Canyon in Idaho–the feat he father attempted in vain in 1974.

Golf Road Warrior Tom Bedell and Road Warrior Robbie Knievel (right)

Robbie has had his own share of wipeouts, surely enough to sympathize with the amateur bull riders over at Buffalo Chip. But this night, he had the old man on his mind. Evel Knievel was 69 when he died on the way to a hospital on November 30, 2007.

“I haven’t had a drop of hard liquor in quite some time,” said Robbie. “But it’s exactly four years ago today that my dad passed away. So I’ve been thinking about him. I thought I’d have a drink in his memory.”

That sounded like a good idea to us. So we clinked glasses, and joined in on the memories.

Name: Eclipse Black IPA
Brewer: Old World Brewing Company, Phoenix, Arizona
Style: Black IPA
ABV: 7.3%
Availability: Seasonally, Arizona
For More Information: www.oldworldbrewery.com

The beer list at Talavera and the resort’s Onyx Bar Lounge is limited, but it does have some of the stars of the craft brewing show–Anchor Steam, Fat Tire, Dogfish 60 Minute IPA, and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

Even better, they have a local list that includes Four Peaks 8^th Street Pale Ale and Kilt Lifter, Oak Creek Amber and Nut Brown, a canned Lumberyard Red Ale, and Nimbus A-1 Pilsner and Pale Ale.

I made it a Nimbus night, trying both beers from the Tucson brewery (there’s also a bistro outlet in East Tucson). I don’t know a lot about the brewery other than that it began in 1996 and was originally owned by Nimbus Cousin. Cousin–for some reason unknown to the Nimbus bartender I spoke to on the phone–opted for a simian theme for the brewery.

When James Counts took over the brewery in 2000, he decided to keep the monkey around–now part of the brewery logo, with the key phrase, “It’s a natural selection.” A monkey is also on most of the labels, often placed in quasi-religious artwork context.

An exception is the one lager made by the company, the Nimbus A-1. It is a re-creation of an old Phoenix beer from the Arizona Brewing Company, with an attendant old timey label. I liked the label more than the beer.

But the Nimbus Pale Ale turned out to be a keeper. It’s amber, a bit cloudy, with a decent but hardly overpowering hop aroma, more evident as the beer warms a bit. (Unfortunately, they seem to be big on frozen glassware in Arizona.) The flavor is tilted toward sweet rather than hoppy, with not a lot of middle to the profile. But with four additions of Cascade, Chinook and Columbus hops, the finish is bracingly bitter.

Name: Nimbus Pale Ale
Brewer: Nimbus Brewing Company, Tucson, Arizona
Style: Pale Ale
ABV: 5.5%
Availability: Arizona
For More Information: www.nimbusbeer.com

But considering the trepidation I had this morning about my back, I was all in for the post-round Golf Yoga session at the Movement Studio in the Spa at Four Seasons Resort Scottsdale at Troon North. Though five of us were signed up to attend, only Jeff Wallach and I summoned the courage to go to the mats.

Well, our videographer colleague Jamie McWilliams was there, but he was merely skulking about trying to take shots of Jeff and me in distress, as at right. (Guess I was taking a break, though, since I took the photo.)

But we were in good hands. Dodie Mazzuca is not only a certified yoga instructor, but a former LPGA Tour player. Clearly in great shape herself, she works out of the Four Seasons and her own GolfPROformance enterprise to take players through a threefold approach–body awareness, technical skills, and a mental state of peak performance.

This being the Four Seasons, yoga is but one item on a vast menu of fitness options for visitors–golfers, tennis players, joggers or otherwise, including mat Pilates, spinning or zumba classes.

In our abbreviated session we stuck with classic yoga poses as Dodie explained how they could apply to our games, while making sure I avoided those that might strain my back.

We weren’t unfamiliar–both Jeff and I have done yoga before, in my case in specific yoga for golfers classes that culminate in an annual Be the Ball tournament back at the Brattleboro Country Club in Vermont.

It eventually occurred to me–after a check of the records–that Dodie and I had probably crossed paths once before, clearly unknowingly, back in Vermont in 1999. Dodie was in her third year of the FUTURES tour then, and she played at the SmartSpikes FUTURES Classic at the Green Mountain National Golf Course in Killington.

I played in the pro-am event for the tournament. No time machine available, alas, to see if I spilled a beer on her at lunch, whether we spoke or even came within fifty yards of one another. But I do know she finished in a four-way tie for 15th that year, taking away a whopping $798 for the accomplishment.

She was back in 2000, her best on the FUTURES tour, winning the Capital Region FUTURES Classic in Guilderland, New York, making 18 out of 18 cuts, reaching third on the money list and gaining exempt status for the LPGA, where she played in 2001 and 2002.

She eventually headed west and did well on mini tours before turning more toward yoga and teaching.

After putting Jeff and I through our paces, we decided she would be the ideal player to fill in some of the empty tee slots we had for later in the week. Her dance card had some openings, so it’s probably a date.

More on the day’s round in the preceding post, “Meet and Beat” here.

More on yoga and golf as practiced in Vermont, “The Yoga Oasis” here.

Peter Kessler lining up his tee shot on the first hole at the Troon North Monument Course

Though I’d been on Peter Kessler’s “Making the Turn” radio show once, the Golf Road Warrior Scottsdale trip was my first chance to meet him, get to know him and play golf with the Voice of Golf, so called thanks to his stentorian tone, his many years with The Golf Channel and his regular stint now on the PGA Tour Network (SiriusXM).

Kessler had chided me about my back complaints in an email before we even departed for the GRW trip:

Enough with the back shit. I have had two back surgeries, minimally invasive and one on my neck. I have trigger finger in my right hand, all finger tips are numb, I dislocated a hip and tore my hip abductor and ripped a major tendon playing golf in northwest Ireland with friggin’ Wallach in July. I have painful sciatica from my back to both of my numb AND pins-and-needles-ridden feet, and some body parts wake up 20 minutes later than others. And I have two stents. I am however an amazingly flexible and gifted lovemaker….

Turned out he’s a damn good golfer, too. And as the self-appointed Rules Chairman, he laid out the GRW Scottsdale ground rules:

1. The highest score you can take is a triple.
2. All putts for double bogey or better must be holed.
3. If you lose a ball or can’t play it, you throw one down at the nearest point of relief where it entered the trouble and add a stroke, so that everything is played as a red-staked hazard. Saves lots of time and aggravation.
4. We try to play the courses at between 6,400 and 6,600 yards for maximum enjoyment.
5. Summer rules, strict rules of golf, no improving lies anywhere on the course.
6. Play ready golf.
7. The two best net balls per group, an individual net score and a foursome net best ball are the competitions when we have two groups of players.

Please advise any tweaks you think appropriate. Be advised, as your chairman, that any tweaks suggested better make sense or they will be dismissed promptly.

Grow the Game Golf works with smartphones and the web.

As it turned out, proviso No. 7 had to go, as the games and teams had already been set up by Grow the Game Golf, a new cross-platform web and smartphone app we were being introduced to in a trial by fire. With all the data for the matches entered beforehand (more easily done at the GTG Golf website, gtggolg.com), on the day of the round players can enter scores on their smartphone for an ongoing live update of individual and team progress throughout the round, no matter how many foursomes are involved. (And that’s up to 1,000 players!)

What this meant today was that, along with individual gross and net honors, our foursome was a four-man team using one best ball net against the foursome in front of us, all easily checked as the round unfolded.

I guess I have a dumb phone, since all it does it make and take calls, so my cart mate, the Voice of Golf, had to enter the scores on his phone. Kessler found this unclear and irritating at first–or pretended to, salting the air with some creative obscenities.

Our actual opening nine scores on the GTG Golf app. A rocky start for me, but note the eighth hole birdie, first of three.

But once he found out he could also check on Jeff Wallach’s score, he was sold: Kessler and Wallach have had an ongoing personal match since a past trip to Scotland, resumed in Ireland in the baptismal Golf Road Warrior trip, and carried over in Scottsdale.

It’s a friendly match, of sorts. To hear either crow about winning the day’s round, or moaning about losing it, you might think it falls just shy of a grudge match. But I had plenty of vicarious laughs listening to Peter cackle when he saw on the GTG Golf leaderboard that Jeff had double-bogied a hole ahead.

It worked the other way, too. Our fourth Golf Road Warrior, Terry Moore, is a stick, and he drove the par-4 fifteenth green, playing 283 yards from the gold tees, then sunk a long putt for the eagle. Hole safely won, he thought. But he was soon astonished to note on the GTG Golf leaderboard that Dave Akin, in our group, also eagled the hole.

Akin’s was more impressive, actually. Dave had been struggling all day, and his pop-up drive on fifteen wasn’t a thing of beauty, but it did land in the fairway. Then he hit what he thought was a pretty good second shot, though it was blind.

When we walked up to the green together he was puzzled, because he couldn’t see his ball anywhere. Until he found it in the hole. Ah, golf!

Dave Akin tees off toward the real Four Peaks, not the Four Peaks Brewery I’d visited the evening before.

More on this round in the preceding post, “My Aching Back vs. The Monument Course.”

Turned out to be a herniated disk pressing on my spinal cord (spinal stenosis), big enough to warrant an operation.

As it was the week before Thanksgiving, I proceeded to tell the doctor the story of the upcoming Golf Road Warriors trip complete with 27 8×10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.

I couldn’t back out: by this time the Scottsdale CVB had already reserved my flights, I’d been fitted for new Callaway clubs, new luggage from Travelpro was on the way and cigars from Certifresh were waiting to be smoked. I had sponsor commitments!

The doctor said, “Well, then you might want to consider a cortisone shot.”

Done. And when it was done, that doctor suggested it might take two weeks to kick in, which would coincide precisely with our first tee time at the Troon North Monument course.  So for two weeks, anxiety ensued as I obsessed over whether I’d be able to hit a golf ball.

Did I sleep well the night before the round, in the cushy surrounds of the Four Seasons Resort Scottsdale at Troon North? I did not. Luckily, we didn’t rush out to the course on our first full day; instead we eased into The Spa.

Golfer's Massage at The Spa at the Four Season Resort (Photo courtesy of Scottsdale Convention & Visitors Bureau)

It was time for a Golfer’s Massage, which incorporates stretching into the routine, as well as the use of heated golf balls instead of stones. (That’s not me in the photo above, but trust me, she’s better-looking. And I didn’t get worked over by Titleists either; I checked: Top Flites.)

This bit of pampering set a nice tone for our Golf Road Warriors tour of duty. But pretty soon I had to face the music on the practice tee, where I would swing a club for the first time in weeks–and my new Callaway clubs for the first time ever.

To end the suspense quickly, I seemed to be rejuvenated. Not free from pain, but able enough to swing a club, sometimes well. I marched off the eighteenth green with an 87, pretty decent for me from the Monument Gold tees, 6,716 yards, 137 slope. I fired three birdies, so the Callaways seemed to be doing the job, too.

Well, who wouldn’t be pumped up, as the Golf Road Warriors adventure was finally unrolling on the fairways, and at a superb golf course?

The Golf Road Warriors! From left: Peter Kessler Jeff Wallach, Tom Bedell, Terry Moore

The third hole at the Monument course is unsurprisingly called The Monument

On my first visit here about ten years ago I was actually rained out of a round at the True North Monument course (a Tom Weiskopf-Jay Morrish design that opened in 1990). But I did play the Pinnacle course (a solo Weiskopf effort opened in 1995). By the time I returned in 2009, a two-year project to renovate and reroute the two courses had been completed under Weiskopf’s direction.

The Monument course now comprises the two original front nines of Monument and Pinnacle, but as always, the setting in the high Sonoran desert couldn’t be more dramatic, and the giant granite boulders strewn about the landscape give the course its apt name.

I played with Peter Kessler, Dave Akin of the Four Seasons and Mike Friend, Troon North’s director of golf events. The original Monument course was the first course in the Troon Golf stable, now coming close to 200 courses worldwide, so clearly they chose wisely.

On TV, desert golf looks a little artificial, oxymoronically like a colossal miniature golf course, with giant pieces of felt slapped over the desert wastes. On the ground, it all looks pretty lush, though from the tee it sometimes seemed like it would take a miracle to keep the ball in the fairways. But they were pretty broad.

Cholla cactus with golf ball

Go awry, and the rock, saguaro cactus and scrub areas can be pretty punitive, which is why the desert is often played as a lateral hazard to speed up play, go a little easy on scores, and keep players away from rattlesnakes in the warmer months or the cholla cactus anytime. The cholla is sometimes called jumping cactus for its seeming penchant of leaping onto and impaling itself into unsuspecting golfers.

The flora is only a part of the intriguing desert wildlife.  The fauna includes deer, cottontails and jackrabbits, prairie dogs (affectionately called desert rats), not to mention all sorts of talented birds, including grackles that think nothing of stealing wrapped granola bars right out of golf carts.

More on this round in the next post, “Meet and Beat.”

Jerry Rose, a vice president at the Communication Links public relations firm, picked us up. The last time I saw Jerry was atop a barstool at a Yard House near Miami, so this wasn’t hard service for him.

He took us to the Four Peaks Brewery in Tempe, which I had heard was a favorite hangout for Arizona State University students, but the immediate world actually seemed to be here; it was a Monday night, and the place was packed inside and out. (And since Four Peaks can serve roughly 350 at capacity, my guess is that about 349 people were there.)

The brewery has been in existence since 1996, housed in a brick building dating from 1892, home of the Pacific Creamery, the first functioning dairy on the west coast, according to manager Matt McCormack. There’s a second location in North Scottsdale. McCormack also quickly delivered the bad news: the brewpub had plowed through 51 kegs of its popular Pumpkin Porter seasonal by Thanksgiving, and there was no more to be had, nowhere, no how.

Well, revise, adapt and improvise. We made do with a sampler tray, and we pretty much went through this entire list:

Matt McCormack

The Kilt Lifter is the flagship beer, a Scottish-style ale, though thanks to reverse osmosis tanks and clever water chemistry, Four Peaks mimics foreign styles pretty well. They also cultivate their own yeast cultures, and the big news, according to McCormack, was that a lease had been recently signed for a 16,000 square foot new production facility in Tempe.

Doing three brews daily six days a week in its 40-barrel brewhouse (all boldly on display in the brewpub), isn’t quite enough for Four Peaks to expand distribution beyond its 300 accounts in Arizona. But the new 60-barrel brewhouse will enable it to brew, bottle and can even more fine suds (over the current 10,000 barrels annually).

Kilt Lifter was suitably malty, with a bare hint of smokiness, and perhaps even less hop character as befits the style, coming in at 6.0% ABV. It’s a solid beer, and the wink and a nod name undoubtedly adds to its popularity. “My marketing guy tells me it’s the number one selling craft beer in Arizona,” said McCormack.

When we finally arrived at the Four Seasons Resorts Scottsdale I had another bottle to wrap up the night. But I can’t say it was my favorite beer of the evening. I was taken by the bold attempt to brew two different IPAs, the Raj and the Hop Knot.

The Raj is an attempt at an English-style IPA, though at a hefty 6.9% ABV, with Magnum, Fuggles and Golding hops, while the Hop Knot is the New World version, an American-style IPA at 6.7% with Cascade, Glacier, Magnum, Liberty and Simcoe hops. The latter is a hop bomb, and it suited me quite well.

Name: Kilt Lifter
Brewer: Four Peaks Grill and Tap, Tempe, Arizona
Style: Scottish Ale
ABV: 6.0%
Availability: Year round in Arizona
For More Information: www.fourpeaks.com

Kolbee Feese at the taps at Four Peaks

I’m like the absent-minded professor who buttered his dog and patted his pancakes. I’m sure I’ve lost days of my life in search for lost keys, missing wallets, vanished cell phones–all of which usually turn up, if in some unlikely outreach of the house: atop a bookshelf, out on a deck railing, in an upstairs bathroom, under a pile of newspapers.

Since nothing concentrates the mind like a trip to the gallows, deadlines are useful in keeping me on target. Fear in general works well.

So does order, which is why my wife long ago tacked up a key rack, so I’ll always know where my keys are. (If I remember to hang them there, that is.)

It’s also the reason Lynn rightly says, “You don’t like change.” It’s not true about everything; there are plenty of things I’d like to see changed in the running of the country. I always say I’m liberal in politics, conservative in baseball.

But when it comes to routines–how I do things or where things are, it’s true, because order helps. Hence I’ve become rather fastidious about packing and moving through airports. I’ve had some close calls–almost forgetting to pick up my car keys after going through screening, or the time I had to dash back from a gate to a distant bathroom, where I was lucky to find my datebook and passport folder still resting atop a toilet paper holder.

All by way of saying when two new suitcases arrived from Travelpro, I could see the applecart was about to go flying.

When last packing, in my first Long Haul post, I speculated that the sturdy Travelpro T-Pro Bold 30” Drop Bottom Rolling Duffel was perhaps a bit too large for my typical golf travel situations, if dandy for transporting beer.

Travelpro came to the rescue with a 26” Expandable Rollaboard Suiter, and a Walkabout Lite4 20” Expandable Business Plus Rollaboard, both in black.

I won’t need a suit on the Golf Road Warriors trip–all resort casual–but one could be neatly folded between pressboards in the larger suitcase, which in all other respects seems ideal for my checked luggage piece. I easily packed all my necessary gear for this week’s trip, which will include warm days and cold nights.

The knotty problem came with the carry-on bag. My usual routine is to take along a L.L. Bean knapsack (monogrammed, by the by) that has a padded sleeve for my laptop, and ample zippered pockets to fling all kinds of stuff into. Which is naturally what I did.

But the Business Plus Rollaboard eliminated the need for the knapsack. It also has a neat laptop pocket, one that would clearly make removing the laptop easier at airport security. It also had the boon of getting a heavy knapsack off my back, and the goods onto the ground on wheels.

I don’t like change; nonetheless, I began emptying the knapsack and finding equivalent or better locations for the stuff in the Travelpro bag. About halfway through I realized I’d probably actually need the knapsack on the ground, heading from golf course to golf course. Problem solved: I packed the knapsack in the Travelpro.

I’m writing this in the air, enroute to my Dallas connection to Scottsdale, and all is going well. I may not quite be over the mental hurdle, as I had some uneasy moments this morning driving to the airport. I knew my passport and boarding printouts weren’t in the knapsack, and I had a spasm of panic because I couldn’t visualize where they were.

And my mental rehearsal of going to the ticket counter, taking the knapsack off my back to pull out all the necessary documents and debit card wasn’t going to happen either, I realized; actually, it should be easier.

And, gentle reader, it was.

Fellow Golf Road Warrior Jeff Wallach can attest to a third category I shine in (making me a Triple Crown winner?), Things I’ve Lost or Forgotten on Golf Trips. At the drop of a hat, or pants, he’ll happily tell the story of a time I actually forgot my pants (the official version of which I hope to post soon).

But we’ll tally it all up at the end of the week and see if Travelpro helps dreamers as well as Road Warriors.

The MSRP for the Walkabout Lite4 20” Expandable Business Plus Rollaboard is $300, and the 26” Expandable Rollaboard Suiter, $400. Both retail for about half of that.

I’m hoping to pull off a TAP Beer of the Day throughout the week, because there will be beer. But no promises, because the days will be long and hard and loaded with (mostly golf) activity. I foresee much nodding off at night, while looming over the laptop.

After landing tomorrow I’m heading straight to the Four Peaks Brewing Company in Tempe (there’s a second location in North Scottsdale). Whether they’ll have any of their touted Pumpkin Porter left on tap will be promptly answered, preferably in the affirmative.

I’ll take what comes the rest of the way; a mini-pub crawl is in the works for Wednesday night in Cave Creek and who knows what by Saturday night. Stay tuned.

All right, profound apologies to Herman Melville, but it was a damp, drizzly November day in Vermont, and I was grim enough about the mouth, when I noticed that UPS had left a few telltale packages at the door.

As I tore into the boxes, unwrapped the clubs and started to put them into the bag, my wife snapped off this picture, which looks anything but grim. Appears more like a genuine S-E grin starting there.

Well, I knew the clubs were coming, since I’d been fitted for them two weeks before. But the Callaway Hyper-Lite stand bag was a happy surprise, since my old PING Hoofer has reached a shaky antique status after long and noble service. It has earned a period of honored rest in the garage before I find someone to give it away to.

Cigar cutter, check; deck of cards, check....

It was easy enough to empty the PING and quickly render the Callaway Hyper-Lite less hyper by checking off the essential items: folding reading glasses (also a Callaway product I noted), regular gloves, cool weather gloves, rain pants, long-sleeve wind shirt, short-sleeve wind shirt, towel, spare towel, sunblock, sunglasses, balls, ball markers, ball marking pen, tees, divot repair tool, cigar cutter and a deck of cards.

The old bag was bedizened with tags from courses I’d visited. I transferred but one for ID purposes, and I was ready to go.

Making the switch to a complete set of new clubs is likely to be something more of a shock. The old set was a bastard child collection no doubt, clubs from TaylorMade, Tour Edge, Mizuno, Bobby Jones and a mid-weight Heavy Putter.

New bag, new clubs, new game?

The new club selection is the same: driver, three wood, five wood (RAZR); three and four hybrids and five through sand wedge irons (RAZR XF). But except for the putter, I’m all Callaway now.

A combination of the lousy weather and a back problem will keep me from swinging the new sticks, alas, until the Golf Road Warriors tee it up Tuesday morning at Troon North in Scottsdale.

I’m not quite sure how things are going to work out with another sponsor, Grow the Game Golf, which works with smart phones and a web program to provide instant scoring and live leaderboards. I have a sinking suspicion that my scores may be broadcast throughout cyberspace right after each triple bogey. This may not make me or Callaway very happy.

But a Golf Road Warrior knows no fear and perhaps less sense, so what the hell. I wish I could say all bets were off, but I think my fellow Warriors have something else in mind, so let the voyage begin.

A Callaway Performance Center

As the plans unfolded for the second Golf Road Warriors trip mounted by The A Position–this one to Scottsdale, Arizona–the good folks at Callaway came on board as a sponsor and offered to custom fit the foursome. Only problem for me in Vermont–no fitting center anywhere nearby.

That seemed like a shame, so in full GRW spirit, I went on the road to get the job done.

Okay, I was heading off on an assignment anyway, to the Lansdowne Resort outside of Washington, D.C. But this was temptingly close to the jumbo Golfdom store in McLean, Virginia, which does over a thousand swing analyses a year at its Callaway Performance Center within.

After a few email exchanges I was set up to meet with the store manager, Matt Trenton, in early November. Matt had me take a few swings with my six iron to warm-up and see what my current numbers were. Then he basically just asked me about my game and what I was looking to get out of a new club.

Testing, testing...

"I don't normally hit it that badly, of course."

The numbers in question are about club head speed, ball speed, launch angle, side angle, back spin, side spin, swing path and the angle of attack. All the fittings at CPCs are done on CPASs–the Callaway Performance Analysis System, and analyze these numbers it does, thanks to a dual camera-based 3D launch monitor system, the same as that used for fitting Callaway’s players on the PGA Tour and LPGA Tour.

“Every player is different, of course, and the motivation may be completely different, too,” said Trenton. “Someone may have been using the same clubs for six years and is basically happy with them but feels it’s time for an overhaul. Or someone may have been using a new set for six weeks and doesn’t like them. Some are just testing the waters.

“We’ll go through that thought process, plus what your current handicap is, how often you play, and are you really looking to get better?

“We then have you hit a club in the Callaway line closest to what you have, and see where those numbers fall in comparison to your clubs. After that we start zeroing in on specific models, with different shafts and so on.”

Matt Trenton crunches the numbers

The numbers are well-crunched after each set of swings. The entire process takes about an hour to an hour and a half, costs $100 a session, with $50 back with a purchase of clubs. The sessions have become a popular gift item, said Trenton, particularly around Christmas time and Father’s Day.

I was pretty much swinging like a rusty gate, but Matt told me what the numbers meant and all did not seem hopeless. With a fairly low back spin rpm, however, I needed something to give me a little boost there.

If heavy on the science of the swing, there’s still an art to a fitting. “We’re not out to sell clubs that wind up sitting in your bag all day long,” said Trenton. “So a player has to be satisfied in two other key ways–does the club feel and sound good, and does it look good?”

There was no question that the clubs that wound up on my specifications form looked very good indeed–the RAZR Hawk Driver, three wood and five wood, and the RAZR XF three and four hybrids and five through sand wedge irons.

The RAZR XF line was introduced only in mid-September, aimed squarely at a mid-handicapper like me.

RAZR XF iron

Heading back north from the Virginia adventure the only remaining problem seemed to be waiting patiently for UPS to deliver the goods. But some early snow in Vermont produced more waiting–to escape the creeping chill.

My first time hitting the clubs outside of Golfdom is going to be on the ground in Scottsdale, at the Monument Course at Troon North on Tuesday. This is a tough assignment for a new set of clubs. But these are, after all, Golf Road Warrior clubs, with the additional TNP specification–take no prisoners.

Golf Road Warrior Tom Bedell with Golfdom manager Matt Trenton, right. (Testing photos by Eric Singer)

A similar tip of the golf cap goes out to sportswriters Neil Hayes and Brian Murphy, who collaborated on The Last Putt: Two Teams, One Dream, and a Freshman Named Tiger (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010, $26), about the 1995 NCAA Men’s Golf Championship.

There may be a Sooner who doesn’t know that Oklahoma State won the title that year, besting Stanford in the first playoff in the tournament’s then 98-year history. Although I doubt it. (Oklahoma State prevailed again in the only other playoff, in 2000, over Georgia Tech.)

The authors set up the narrative with the final showdown in sight, and then take a leap back for the long buildup over the season to the final payoff. One would think any sense of momentum would be derailed by constant backing up for more back story–profiles of coaches, the players, even the players’ parents and grandparents. Yet all those back stories are so thoroughly researched, fleshed out with detail and compellingly alive, that one just keeps marching through the pages.

One does tend to glaze over the endless list of tournaments and individual scores that fly by, but secure in the knowledge that Hayes and Murphy will soon be serving up more intriguing anecdotes.

And what a cast of characters and contrasts!–the intense, critical yet always supportive coach Mike Holder of Oklahoma State (shepherding such players as Alan Bratton, Chris Tidland, Trip Kuehne and Kris Cox), versus the laid-back and easy-going Wally Goodwin of Stanford, defending its 1994 title.

Stanford’s formidable 1995 squad included seniors Notah Begay and Casey Martin, as well as that already famous freshman named Tiger Woods. Considering all that has befallen Woods since, for good and ill, the book certainly looks back to a more innocent time in his life, although he was one of the few participants who did not cooperate in the authors’ exhaustive research.

No matter, the authors nonetheless make a strong and riveting case for what they call “the greatest NCAA Championship in the history of the sport,” one that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.

***

I’ve drawn up a rap sheet against Zachary Michael Jack’s Let There Be Pebble: A Middle-Handicapper’s Year in America’s Garden of Golf (University of Nebraska Press, 2011, $24.95), beginning with the fact that he spent a year living near Pebble Beach and I didn’t.

It was an inspired idea, no question, Jack’s year in Carmel-by-the-Sea, covering a variety of tournaments leading up to the 2010 U.S. Open, turning into an investigation of what makes playing Pebble Beach the nearly mystical experience that many believe it to be.

When not on deep research sabbaticals Jack teaches literary sports writing and seminars in sports sciences at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, but I would have handed this one back to him heavily marked. His attempt to commit art here is frequently strained, repetitive and too long, although he unaccountably refers to only one round of his own play at Pebble.

The publisher’s proofreaders and fact checkers were complicitous, too; there are a raft of typos and careless errors–Stuart Cink instead of Stewart, Pat Moriatory instead of Morita, Jean Harlot instead of Harlow, although perhaps this one is more understandable.

Still, these are mostly misdemeanors, irritants, in what is otherwise a fairly rollicking account of Jack’s time in the sun, which brings him cheek-by-jowl with a parade of pros enraptured by the course (including Tom Watson, Johnny Miller and Notah Begay), with actor Bill Murray, with Golf in the Kingdom author Michael Murphy, with billionaire Charles Schwab and former Carmel mayor Clint Eastwood.

Jack’s woeful love life is an appealing background running joke, while his relationship (golfing and otherwise) with his ailing father injects a poignant note into this mid-life crisis odyssey to what Robert Louis Stevenson termed, “the most felicitous meeting of land and sea in creation.”

***

The University of Nebraska Press proofreaders were apparently more alert in going over Bill Kilpatrick’s Brassies, Mashies, & Bootleg Scotch (2011, $16.95), perhaps because the manuscript was smaller, its 164 pages feeling lightweight next to Pebble’s 331.

Yet compared to Jack’s fervid prose, the pace is languid in this genial memoir by a former general features writer, columnist and golf writer for the Fort Myers News-Press in Florida.

Kilpatrick’s father, Bill Sr., was a native Scotsman reared in St. Andrews who turned to greenkeeping and made his way to the United States in 1908 to practice the trade at private New York clubs.

So the young Kilpatrick passed his youth at the Sunningdale Country Club in Scarsdale, the Maidstone Club in East Hampton, and particularly at the National Golf Links of America in Southampton up to World War II, hence the book’s subtitle, “Growing Up on America’s First Heroic Golf Course.”

The book should certainly appeal to fans of Charles Blair Macdonald’s 1911 masterwork, and I count myself among them. I’ve played National but once, yet it remains firmly ensconced in my top five all-time favorites. (Naturally, I was playing well that day.)

There’s not really a firm narrative drive at work here as much as an amiably anecdotal approach in describing the members Kilpatrick sometimes caddied for, workers he occasionally assisted, pros and chums that passed through his boyhood days.

I grew up right next to a golf course, and was more than once chased off the grounds by the superintendent and his dog who, unfounded rumor had it (probably started by the super), liked to bite children.

But I also saw some of the vanishing old methods, lovingly documented here, once used to care for golf course turf. This included the lugging of fire engine-sized hoses to power the fairway sprinklers, an endeavor that turns Kilpatrick into the lyric bard of greenkeeping:

“The sprinklers covered a circle as much as a hundred yards in diameter. Their spray majestic, launched into the air at a high angle and spewing out in a graceful arc, they were all power, and under a bright full moon the spray seemed almost ethereal.”

Speak, memory!

This piece first appeared, in slightly different form, in the October-November 2011 issue of Golf Oklahoma.

Now virtually every brewery in the land, and worldwide for that matter, puts out some kind of holiday ale or winter warmer, usually a strong or spiced or in some way out of the ordinary brew. I went on about this in a piece last year, noting a few others as well as Anchor’s.

But back in 1975 when Anchor brewed its first Our Special Ale, there was virtually nothing similar on the landscape. Fritz Maytag and his crew look positively visionary in retrospect.

Anchor continued the custom annually, supposedly varying the recipe each year, though keeping the brewing details close to the vest. One early version became part of the regular portfolio, however, as Liberty Ale (day-to-day one of my favorite beers).

The company definitely varied the label from year to year with some kind of tree–either stylized or actual. For the arborists in the audience, this year’s specimen is the Bristlecone Pine, and that’s Pinus longaeva for the sophomores in the crowd.

The company produced a nice little video about the whole magilla this year, so why not trot it right out?:

The beer is in its 37th iteration, and I can’t say that I’ve had them all. I barely knew Anchor existed in 1975. But I’ve had most at least since 1988, the first Our Special Ale bottle in my collection.

The beer is always a welcome sight when it appears in stores each November, and not buying at least a six-pack is virtually unthinkable.

Though the brewers won’t say what’s in it, I’ve suspected some kind of spruce adjunct for quite awhile now, or maybe even spruce tips. In any case, the ale is a spicy concoction with clove and nutmeg notes, and its piney aroma in a complex weave of hops, spice and malt all streaming out of the glass.

The beer is nearly opaque, with mahogany hues when held to the light. The flavor delivers all that the bouquet promises–sweet, tangy, full, well-bittered.

The spruce character seems somewhat less aggressive to me than in years’ past, which I think is a good thing. The beer has tended to taste as though it’s straight from the forest, maybe a stand of Bristlecone Pine. It still tends to summon the image of a Christmas tree. And, since ‘tis the season, all is well.

Name: Our Special Ale 2011
Brewer: Anchor Brewing Co., San Francisco
Style: Spice/Herb/Specialty Beer
ABV: 5.5%
Availability: Nov-Feb, nationwide
For More Information: www.anchorbrewing.com

Kangaroo Island

Congratulations to the U.S. team for its Presidents Cups win in Melbourne earlier today. Watching some of the play on the Royal Melbourne course put me in mind of the time I was fortunate enough to play there. So I thought I’d pull this one out of the vaults as a nod to the land down under, part of a trip I took eight years ago, and which remains one of the high points of my globetrotting.

I’ve left the piece as it was in early 2003. By way of minor update, the Jacob’s Creek Open Championship ended its sponsorship with the Nationwide Tour after the 2007 tournament. Tommy Tolles kept his hand in on some mini-tours, winning a 2007 tournament on the Tarheel Tour, now the eGolf Professional Tour.

It was after emerging from the sheep-shearing shed on Kangaroo Island that it began to sink in, looking up into a night sky I had never seen before, and finally finding the Southern Cross: I was below the equator for the first time, in a new country, on a new continent.

I wasn’t there to shear sheep. The shed had been transformed into a dining room for a few golf writers, golf tour officials, and employees of our host, Jacob’s Creek. The Australian wine company was the primary sponsor of the Jacob’s Creek Open Championship, the first Nationwide Tour event of the year and the first of two tournaments co-sanctioned with the PGA Tour Australasia.

It was the first of a packed two weeks in Australia for me, the first in and around Adelaide, the second in Melbourne and environs, roaming over some of the country’s finest golf courses, sampling plenty of its fine food, and wine, and beer, and enjoying the hospitable and energetic Aussies. Australia may be far away, but it’s nice to know we still have friends somewhere in the world.

True, some may interpret Scott Kelf’s suggestion that I try some Vegemite for breakfast as a hostile act. Scott, from Melbourne, was my seatmate on the Qantas flight, which lasted about fourteen hours. (Luckily, I was in business class, with a six-hour flight to L.A. behind me, and another hour’s flight from Melbourne to Adelaide ahead of me).

Scott filled me on the Aussies’ sports mania, particular for Aussie Rules Football, a roughhouse blend of rugby, our soccer (their football) and our football (gridiron), though with little protective equipment.

And then there’s cricket. Since the Cricket World Cup was underway in South Africa, attended to by much of the rest of the world if ignored in ours, I made dogged and repeated attempts to interpret the rules. I made feeble progress, though I’m on top of it enough to know that Australia is currently in the lead, and the final match is Sunday.

Vegemite jars are stamped with a “Best Before…” date, and the phrase seems a bit euphemistic. Even the flight attendant suggested I might not be ready for such a taste adventure. But the stuff is made primarily from spent yeast and malt extracts used in brewing, and a lot of salt, so how bad could it be? Australians are raised on Vegemite, and love it. (However, no one in Australia drinks Foster’s Lager.)

Scott said to spread a lot of butter on my toast, and then cover it with a thin veneer of Vegemite. It wasn’t actually that bad. Sort of like a spreadable bouillon.

It was a benign omen that things are a little different down under. I sure felt different, and never quite shook the sensation that I was living in a parallel universe from home, where it was a day earlier, freezing, looking distantly toward spring. In Australia, it was sunny, toasty warm, heading toward fall.

Good golfing weather, to be sure. After landing in Adelaide, South Australia’s capital and the country’s fifth-largest city, I was whisked an hour north to the prime wine-making region, the Barossa Valley. Next to the Jacob’s Creek Heritage Site, where Bavarian immigrant Johann Gramp planted the first vines in 1847, we fired some short irons at a temporary flag.

Jeff Wallach displaying some beach cricket form

Tom Mackin works on his sand play on Kangaroo Island

This included fellow golf writers Jeff Wallach, Tom Harack, and Golf Magazine associate editor Tom Mackin, all of who had arrived a few days earlier. We made great hay throughout the trip that three of us were named Tom, and with the Aussie penchant for nicknames, we were soon known as Beds, Harry, and Macca.

Les Perchevski, originally from Newcastle, Australia, now lives near San Francisco and runs a market in Corte Madera that sells enough Jacob’s Creek wine that he garnered an invitation, too. Greg Stirling, a senior brand manager, was our Jacob’s Creek impresario for the week.

If I was spacey from travel, my cohorts were logy from just having sampled the entire Jacob’s Creek portfolio (about 18 varieties) with one of the winemakers, Bernie Hickin. They tasted a few again in a lavish lunch at the site, which introduced us to the local King George Whiting fish.

The lunch almost made dinner that evening redundant, but we strolled down the boardwalk from our seaside Stamford Grand Hotel in suburban Glenelg, where I tried the tasty barramundi lungfish at the trendy Salt restaurant.

All in all, we were in fine shape for the pro-am the next day at the Kooyonga Golf Club, where the tournament proper was to be held. I was teamed with Greg, Harry, and Peter O’Malley, the Aussie who beat Tiger Woods 2 and 1 in the opening round of last year’s WGC-World Match Play Championship.

(Left to right) Pro-am partners Tom Harack, Peter O'Malley, Greg Stirling, Tom Bedell

O’Malley splits his year between Australia and England, where he plays the European Tour. Now 93 in the world rankings, the 37-year-old displayed some marvelous driving accuracy and near-wizardry with his short irons. “I figure I get about 80 percent of my shots from 160 yards and in, to within eight to ten feet of the cup,” he said, and he went on to prove it.

On the fourth hole, I actually out drove O’Malley, and we were playing from the same tees. (He was using a three wood to my driver, but still.) My bragging rights lasted only until he walked away from the hole with a birdie to my bogey, and I was reduced to saying, “That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”

The Tommy Tolles incident occurred near the end of the gala dinner that evening at the Stamford. Tolles, 36, from Flat Rock, North Carolina, was riding high on the PGA Tour in 1996 and 1997, winning over $800,000 each year, ranking 16 and 27 respectively. He never won on the big tour, though he came tantalizingly close in some big tournaments—third in the 1996 PGA, second in the 1996 Players Championship, third in the 1997 Masters. But after 1997, things started to head south. I’d always wondered why, and his caddy, Mark Pace, said, “Ask him.”

Five Toms: Pros Tolles and Biershenk (left and center) and writers Bedell, Mackin and Harack

So when Tolles wandered within earshot, I did. But all my traveling mates heard was the blunt, “So what the hell happened?” and for the rest of the trip suggested that my zinger would destroy any hopes Tolles had of playing well, now or ever, and that he would probably be seeking me out before the end of the trip to throttle me.

I protested that they hadn’t heard my sensitive lead-up to the question, in which I praised Tolles for single-handedly helping me win my golf rotisserie league in 1997, and that ever since I had looked for his name in tournament results.

“You’d have to look pretty low, lately,” he admitted.

With that out of the bag, I decided it was okay to ask, “So what the hell happened?”

Tolles pointed to his head, and said, “It’s all between the ears.”

I began to wonder. The next day we took our side trip to sample the natural wonders of Kangaroo Island, and where we heard from the mainland that Tolles had opened the tournament with five consecutive bogeys, and wasn’t likely to make the cut. “You’re a dead man walking,” said my mates.

Our meal in the former sheep-shearing shed had been another eye-opening production—spit-roasted grain-fed beef topped with Kangaroo Island lobster and béarnaise sauce with vegetables. There were four Jacob’s Creek wine selections, and a sticky date pudding with butterscotch sauce dessert that was worth flying all day for alone.

Outside, looking skyward, contentedly filled, I contemplated that whatever universe I was in, it was a good one. All I had to worry about was being clubbed to death by Tommy Tolles.

Johnny Bench

Here at The A Position we’re given a topic to address (or not) each month for The A List feature, in a neat 150 words or so. The November challenge was to offer our assistance to Presidents Cup captains Fred Couples and Greg Norman in naming celebrity co-captains that might really get the boys going this week in Melbourne. We even enlisted the guest services of baseball Hall-of-Famer Johnny Bench in taking a swing at the question.

Click here to see whom Johnny and my colleagues put forward–not all of them actually living, mind you. My contribution follows, and naturally I’d be willing to tee it up with my picks anytime, anywhere.

***

I’d go with Cate Blanchett for the Internationals and Cameron Diaz for the U.S. squad. And it’s even possible (if not entirely probable) to look beyond the usual sexist reasons, though there’s no denying that both are babes.

Blanchett is an Aussie, which will lend her beaming smile home-court wattage in Melbourne. And it’s not like she’s never had a club in her hand: In her role as Katherine Hepburn in “The Aviator,” Blanchett did her actorly training for a golf scene with Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, not that we ever quite detect her swinging the club:

As for Diaz, she’s been quoted as saying that golf is more addictive than crack cocaine. True, not a slogan Fred will want to sew onto the team blazers, yet indicative of her magnetic zeal. But should boyfriend A-Rod (shown with her, left) join her down under, Fred should keep him away from the practice range: Last big swing A-Rod took was a whiff.

Cameron Diaz and A-Rod at home on the range

Bonus question (for which I have no answer): Anyone recognize the course/resort the beautiful couple is practicing at?

Nice of Stone to release their Veterans’ Day Vertical Epic Ale 11.11.11 a few days earlier than the label date. That meant I actually found a few bottles on the Brattleboro Food Co-op shelves today. And since I’m a vet, my path seemed clear.

It also seemed apt that the chilies in the beer–yes, chiles–came from the Hatch Valley in New Mexico, since I was mainly stationed in New Mexico back in my army days. (I was an MP, but you’ll have to get me pretty liquored up before I start dishing army stories.)

Dr. Fabian Garcia

Let’s talk about Dr. Fabian Garcia instead. A member of the first graduating class in 1894 of the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts (later to become NMSU), Garcia eventually returned to serve as a professor of horticulture for more than 40 years.

And it was his work in breeding cultivars that led to the New Mexico No. 9 chile in 1913–also known as the Anaheim or long green–and the main deal in Hatch, where the annual Hatch Valley Chile Festival is held in early September.

As I said in my review of the 09.09.09 beer on 10.10.10, the brewery’s Vertical Epic series began on 02.02.02, continuing on 03.03.03, 04.04.04 and so on, the next brew always appearing a year, a month and a day after its predecessor. Though all are strong beers made with Belgian ale yeasts, each recipe is different (in more ways than one), and so the notion of an actual vertical tasting of the eleven ultimate releases is a bit of a misnomer.

No matter–should be a lot of fun on 12.12.12 anyway, when those who have managed to annually horde bottles begin sharing their stashes.

For the record, I have a bottle each of the 09-11 releases. So far. I was quite fond of the 09.09.09 Imperial Belgian Porter, less enamored of the 10.10.10, which added wine grapes and chamomile to the mix.

I’d say Stone has nailed it again. The 11.11.11 is a reddish amber ale with all sorts of intriguing and appealing aromatics swirling together–banana esters from the Flanders Golden ale yeast, touches of clove, cedar, cinnamon, and a suggestion of chile peeking through.

This is all apparent in the flavor as well, though the chile rises immediately to the foreground. Not in flamethrower fashion–the chiles used are mild green Anaheim chilies, and they add more zest than real heat, although it’s there, and lingers through the finish. The light addition of cinnamon is at play as well.

At a hefty 9.4% ABV, the beer has plenty of sweet malt character at work as well, and the interplay of all the varied elements add up to a complex, compelling, and quite delicious beer.

I’m thinking I may have to go buy a few more, so I was happy to see the bomber bottle coming in at well under $10. (All the $15 to $25 bottles of beer I’ve been running across lately are becoming vexing.)

Bring me the chiles of Fabian Garcia!

Name: 11.11.11 Vertical Epic Ale
Brewer: Stone Brewing Co., San Diego, California
Style: Belgian spiced ale
ABV: 9.4%
Availability: Nationwide, but usually doesn’t last long.
For More Information: stonebrew.com

All this because ‘tis the season for pumpkin ales, which I suspect are now outselling Oktoberfest beers as far as fall seasonals go. I was going to bypass them this year but as I was just on a whirlwind trip to Cape Breton, where the fall colors were still vibrant, it’s only a week from Halloween and a Propeller Pumpkin Ale came to hand–so be it.

This isn’t my first acquaintance with the Propeller Brewing Company, as my book group buddy, Mary Lou Treat, brought me a six-pack of the Propeller IPA after her last visit to her Nova Scotia summer home.

And it was a treat. The less assertive hop character might have put this more in line with an English IPA than a west coast U.S. IPA, but it does come on strong at 6.5% ABV. And in any case, there are plenty of hops to keep all but the most rabid satisfied.

Our ride to Cape Breton

So I thought I was lucky then. But then the offer came to visit Nova Scotia, specifically Cape Breton, and visit it in style, aboard a privately chartered eight-seater Citation Sovereign jet. The point of the trip wasn’t to drink Propeller Pumpkin Ale–except as a further incidental exhibit of Nova Scotian talents. The point was to visit and play at the new Cabot Links golf course in Inverness, as well as a classic Cape Breton course, Highland Links.

And this we did–we being a group of eight golf travel writers, editors and publishers–taking off from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey and landing in Port Hawkesbury, where we boarded a comfortable bus well-equipped with beers from Nova Scotian micros (Propeller and Garrison) as well home-baked cookies and scones courtesy of Katherine MacDonald’s mom. (Katherine is the director of marketing for Golf Cape Breton.)

The golf I’ll go into in greater detail in another venue. But briefly, there’s going to be plenty to celebrate in terms of golf up this way, both in the full scale opening of Cabot Links in early July, and in the continuing work at Highland Links, not to mention the other four courses that make up the Golf Cape Breton association.

Highland Links

Highland Links was our first stop, a more than 70-year-old Stanley Thompson design that makes full use of the bold contours and backdrops of its locale within the Cape Breton Highlands National Park. The course has been tinkered with over the years but is in the throes of a restoration.

David Baum, publisher of Golf Odyssey and Golf Vacation Insider, in the throes of the lobster feed

Playing partner Vic Williams and I tried an Alexander Keith’s IPA out on the course. It had no bold contours; it was like any pale lagerish Canadian ale, with no hop character to speak of at all.

We had better luck that evening at the Castle Rock Inn in Ingonish Ferry where we stayed, and where we had a traditional Cape Breton lobster feed, which involves tossing lobsters onto a table covered in newspapers, the heck with the plates, and then digging in atavistically.

We had a choice to wash down the lobster (and a killer chowder) with Keith’s Red Amber Ale, a Clancy’s Amber Ale (from Moosehead), and a Rickard’s Dark (made by Molson). As a passable porter the Rickard’s was actually the most interesting of the bunch, save for the Propeller.

Okay, so, John Patch did not invent the Archimedes Screw. (Nor did Mrs. Archimedes.) The term is a colloquialism for a marine screw propeller, as Archimedes used a rotating screw as a mention of lifting water for irrigation. The principle was turned toward shipping in the early 1800’s, and one of the first demonstrations came in 1833 with an invention by Patch, a Yarmouth sea captain.

John Patch

But the SS Archimedes launched as the first steam-driven screw propeller vessel (with a design by Francis Pettit Smith) in England in 1835, and any credit Patch was due was already evaporating. He was never able to patent his design, and he eventually died in poverty in Yarmouth.

John Allen ran across the Patch history when seeking a name for the microbrewery he was starting. Since Allen was a props man himself in the TV and film industry, it all seemed to fit, and the Propeller Brewing Company took off in Halifax in 1997.

PBC has a few seasonals and seven year-round beers. “We’re big on keeping it classic and represent the beers to style the best way we can,” said sales and marketing director Andrew Cooper.

The Pumpkin Ale first appeared 2004. “It was a logical fall seasonal,” said Cooper. “It’s become legendary in Halifax. We do send some across Canada, but it flies off the shelves as fast as it can be stocked. It’s a good representation of the style, but quite accessible, not too over the top.”

It’s an apt assessment–though there are the usual pumpkin pie spices at play, the beer is skewed more toward ale than dessert, with a nice hop finish.

Maybe the pumpkins have something to do with it. The brewery uses the world’s largest pumpkin variety, Dill’s Atlantic Giant.

Seems the late Howard Dill, a farmer from Windsor, Nova Scotia, was obsessed with growing giant pumpkins, to the point of endless experimentation with genetic crossbreeding. He was successful beyond words, and was able to trademark his seed varieties–which have spawned giant pumpkin competitions worldwide ever since.

For the record, the current record is a 1818.5 pound behemoth grown by Jim and Kelsey Bryson of Ormstown, Quebec. Or rather, was, since the pumpkin was then shipped off to the New York Botanical Gardens where master pumpkin carver Ray Villafane turned it into a aptly gruesome part of this year’s Haunted Pumpkin Garden. Here’s a video of Ray at work on the Bryson’s great pumpkin:

The Dill farm and Howard Dill Enterprises, now run by his son and daughter, is a major tourist stop in Nova Scotia. The Propeller Brewing Company is good for tours, too, and heading there is not a bad idea, since the beers are not available in the U.S. unless a friend transports some south.

Once in Halifax, it’s only about a three and a half hour drive to Cape Breton. And now that Cabot Links is built and set to officially open July 1, people will come.

They’re coming already, of course–Cape Breton was named the Best Island Destination in the continental U.S. and Canada in a 2011 Travel & Leisure poll, and it wasn’t hard to see why as we roamed over the Cabot Trail on our way to the golf course. The 298 kilometer (185 mile) roadway loops over the northern tip of the island, and the consistently scenic splendor backs up the current marketing slogans, “There’s no wrong turn,” or “Where the mountains meet the sea.”

Cabot Links is in Inverness, and the course wends from the town to the sea in classic links golf style. Ten holes opened for play this July, and we were privileged to be the first journalists to sample the full 18, if with still fairly shaggy greens on the newer holes. So tireless tweeter Stephanie Wei was fully justified in claiming the women’s course record when she shot a 79 on our second day of play on this coastal joy.

The course is designed by Ron Whitman, surely his masterwork to date. Whitman was involved pretty much from the beginning with managing partner Ben Cowan-Dewar–who eventually enticed Mike Keiser into becoming involved. When Keiser brought his Bandon Dunes playbook along, success was virtually assured, although it’s been a long road since Cowan-Dewer and Whitman first walked the land in 2005 and began acquiring 13 separate land parcels.

Cabot Links ninth hole

Like the courses at Bandon, Cabot Links will be walking only, but a mesmerizing stroll it is. It broke my heart to drop out of the second round due a back condition which has been bedeviling me for a few months, but it was pleasure enough just to be on the grounds, so attractive is the pull of sea and links land here. And heading back to the airport for our flight home a reprise of the Propeller Pumpkin Ale was succor at least.

Meat darts? About what it sounds like, according to Katherine. For a $5 or $10 entry fee at the legion hall or local bar on meat dart nights, players can compete for prizes that range from lowly bologna to more desirable moose steaks or loin of veal.

You can’t do everything in 48 hours, so no one took home any meaty prizes. But having seen Cabot Links once, there’s little choice in wanting to return as soon as possible. Next time, meat darts and more Propeller beer for sure.

Name: Propeller Pumpkin Ale
Brewer: Propeller Brewing Co. (John Allen Brewing Company Ltd.)
Style: Pumpkin Ale
ABV: 5%
Availability: You might find some through October, mainly in Nova Scotia.
For More Information: www.drinkpropeller.ca

Cabot Links

Tom Doak

Here at The A Position we’re given a topic to address (or not) each month for The A List feature, in a neat 150 words or so. The October challenge was inspired by Halloween, and we were asked to come up with treats or tricks–things we’re enamored with in our relationship with the game, or the mean-spirited opposite. We asked golf architect Tom Doak to chime in, and he offered a little of each.

Click here to see what Tom Doak and my colleagues put into the sack–or if they pulled out the can of shaving cream and let fly.

My contribution follows, if more about golf travel than the play itself.

***

What’s better than a massage? I’m like the Will Rogers of massages: Having been through a worldwide menu of spa treatments, I’ve never met one I didn’t like.

A treatment room at the Sense Spa at CordeValle

I should start ranking them like golf courses. For me the Pine Valley of massages was one I had a few years back at the CordeValle Resort in California—before it starting raining hot dogs on Tiger Woods out on the Robert Trent Jones Jr. golf course. It’s still on the Sense Spa menu, the two-hour Rain Room Rejuvenation.

What was essentially a steam bath followed by a horizontal shower—as close as one can come to being in a human car wash—was followed by an exfoliating scrub and deep-tissue massage. I’m not sure if it was more rejuvenating or stupefying, but I’m still looking for the treatment to top it.

[See a longer post about the CordeValle Resort here.]

What’s this heresy? I could go on and on why I think football is less of a healthy pastime in this country and more of a disease, but why bother? I know I’m in the minority, so I’ll just try to keep my head when all about me are losing theirs, painting them two colors, or stuffing them in over-sized foam hats.

But basically, I can’t see what all the excitement is about, unless it’s the betting. (That I can understand.) The games themselves are dreadful time-sucking bores on television. They speak to American excess however, in that the games are overly wrapped in wasteful packaging, with precious little meat on the bone.

To speak of the games being boring may sound strange from someone who would far rather watch baseball or golf. Football adrenaline junkies no doubt find these sports somnambulistic.

But baseball and golf are more individualized thinking man’s (or woman’s) games. Yes, baseball is a team sport, but when a batter is at the plate it’s one against nine. To win a golf tournament a player has to overcome a virtual horde.

Football, despite all the playbooks and specialists and endless X and O diagrams, is still basically about getting clobbered. It’s a militaristic advance and retreat that can’t help but appeal to the aggressive natures in players and spectators.  Good old George Carlin always had it right, when he said football was about “advancing deep into enemy territory,” while baseball is about, “going home.”

But then I said I wasn’t going to say anything. So I should move onto the beer. But even that bothers me in a football context, since many viewing party-goers or tailgaters drink too much beer, and too much lousy beer, and none of it works out well in the end.

If it weren’t for the boorish behavior, I could get behind tailgating, though, since it has potential for good communal fun, with grilled meats.

The San Diego-based TailGate Beer company launched its Blacktop Blonde in January, and followed up with its Hefeweizen about the time the football season kicked off. The name bespeaks the market the company has in mind, with a goal to bridge the gap between canned craft beers and canned mainstream beers.

Other than the obvious difference that both TailGate beers are ales, and not mass market bellywash lagers, neither is pushing any brewing envelope. That may be astute marketing, since pounding mainstream drinkers with a heavily hopped beer might not work out well. (The tide does seem to be turning in the direction of more flavorful beers even among the masses, but it’s still a big ocean.)

The Blacktop Blonde, said to be named with the help of Jay DiEugenio (otherwise known as Jay the Tailgate Guy), does have some Magnum and Cascade hops in the mix to lend a lightly spicy character. But this is an easy-drinking light ale. It’s a bit hazy in the glass–and yes, drinkers are encouraged to pour canned as well as bottled beers into a glass. There’s a distinct aroma of pineapple and a bit of pineapple tang in the flavor as well.

The Hefeweizen, too, has a bit of a canned pineapple juice aroma, along with a touch of sulphur, perhaps the barest hint of a clove character. But this slightly hazy golden brew seems to be in a limbo unlikely to appeal to too many tailgaters or craft brew fans. It reminds me of the old Rodney Dangerfield (not Carlin) joke: “I said to my wife, ‘Honey, was that good for you?’ and she said, ‘I don’t think that was good for anyone.’”

The TailGate beers, like the canned beers from San Francisco’s 21st Amendment Brewery, are contract-brewed in Minnesota at the Cold Spring Brewery. As mentioned in this post, Cold Spring is perhaps best known for having produced the infamous Billy Beer, back in the day.

If he were still alive and drinking it might be interesting to know what Billy Carter would favor these days. He might venture a spin on the blacktop, or even be downing some Georgia micros. The odds are he’d still be out in the mainstream mid-ocean, but at least unlikely to paint his face blue and gold.

Name: Blacktop Blonde and Hefeweizen
Brewer: TailGate Beer, San Diego, California
Style: Blonde ale and Hefeweizen
ABV: 5.0% and 4.9%
Availability: Year-round, four states: CA, MN, ND, PA.
For More Information: www. tailgatebeer.com

My last visit, chronicled here, turned into a quest to find Ambar Cerveza Oscura, the darker-hued sibling to the ubiquitous Presidente, the flagship beer of the sole brewery in the DR, the Cervecería Nacional Dominicana. With no more nights to spare on that trip, I was finally successful.

So this time I thought I’d get my order in early, so to speak, shortly after arriving at the Casa de Campo resort. At a cocktail party for our arriving group of golf writers, I already had a Presidente in hand when I met the resort’s general manager, Daniel Hernández Quiñones, and expressed the hope that he might be able to track down an Ambar for me.

As it turned out, he was not able, but he didn’t let me down, either.

Nor did anything else about the resort. I’ve been writing about Pete Dye’s Teeth of the Dog course for years–without ever seeing it–because one can’t write about golf in the Caribbean without mentioning it.

The Dye Fore Chavón nine

Ever since it opened in 1971, preceding the opening of Casa de Campo in 1975, Dye’s course has routinely been considered one of the best in the world. (Number 47 in GOLF Magazine’s current Top 100 Courses in the World list.) Its seven holes right on the water (four on the front side, three incoming) have become something of a Caribbean template.

The first seaside hole, number five, is an iconic eye-opening par-3 that starts putting the teeth into the course, which is showing no signs of wear. Dye has returned twice to polish the Teeth, which he still calls one of his favorites.

Others enjoy the Links course (undergoing work during our visit), and some have gone so far as to call the Dye Fore course their favorite. It was mainly to see nine new Dye holes that our group was invited, a nine that will become part of a 27-hole Dye Fore layout.

With the former front nine of Dye Fore (the Marina nine) also undergoing work, we began on the former back nine, now called the Chavón nine since it plays high above the Chavón River in spectacular fashion. In hopes of doing something completely different for the new nine, Dye went to small and sometimes tabletop greens in a links-style nine.

Eric Lillibridge, director of instruction at the resort’s Jim McLean Golf School gives a brief intro here:

Just as we were finishing up our round at Dye Fore some nasty looking clouds rolled impressively in, and the ensuing storm was a dozy.

Mostly the weather was drippingly hot, and under the circumstances Presidente sure began to seem like the beer of choice.There are others–Cervecería Nacional Dominicana also makes a Presidente Light and another cerveza tipo Pilsner, Bohemia and Bohemia Light. But the call of “beer” in these parts provokes the smiling response of “Presidente” to any local I spoke to, almost a point of national pride.

Presidente is a totally unremarkable pale lager, made with sugar and corn grits adjuncts, the kind of beer I pretty much stopped drinking years ago. So I was a little surprised by how much I was looking forward to one, or several, after coming off the golf course.

Golf writer Art Stricklin lines up a shot

Or after a round of shooting clays, one of the many non-golf activities available at the 7,000-acre resort. The shooting center is spread out on 245 acres, with 300 different stations available. Our group headed over, put on a protective vest, were handed a box of 25 shells and earplugs, and were soon merrily blasting away.

I expected to hit absolutely nothing. True, I was a sharpshooter with an M-16 back in my army days, but I think I’ve fired a rifle exactly once since the early 70’s. More surprise, when I had 17 hits, tops in our crew. But it was hot and sweaty work–time for another Presidente.

The weather wasn’t all that was hot. The Zimmerman Agency had arranged the trip and the two capable reps they had on the Casa case, Kerry Anne Watson and Jennifer Gillespie, also happen to be stunners. And one of the invitees, Renee Knorr, is the fashion and beauty director for The 19th Hole Magazine.

Left to right, Jennifer Gillespie, Renee Knorr, Kerry Anne Watson

Golf press trips rarely have a pulchritude level this high. Renee has, unsurprisingly, modeled and done film work, and she wore one killer outfit after another on and off the golf course, though if that dress above looks good from the front, its absence in the back was also tough to beat (eyes right).

The emphasis on fashion is something of a tradition here, if one recalls that the 1971 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue used Teeth of the Dog as a backdrop.

The resort was owned in the early days by Gulf+Western, which owned Paramount Pictures, and a few movies were filmed on location here as well. (Dip back into “Apocalypse Now” and check out the river scenes, filmed on the Chavón River, pre-Dye Fore days.)

A Paramount set designer created Altos de Chavón, an artist gallery and shopping area near the Dye Fore course, made to look like a Mediterranean village. I took a stroll through one morning and it seemed like a fashion shoot was going on around every bend.

The cameras were firing the last night of our visit as well, as we’d all been asked to dress in white for a dinner at the Beach Club by Le Cirque.

White Night at the Beach Club by Le Cirque--Canadian golf writer Brian Kendall didn't get the memo.

Daniel Hernández Quiñones was at the dinner and he turned a little white himself when I mentioned that the Ambar beer had never shown up. As I soon discovered, he then set the wheels to turning, turning to executive chef Luca Banfi, something of a beer nut himself after over a decade of work in craft beer-crazy San Diego.

I’d spoken to Luca earlier in the trip and found out he’d been at beer-food pairing at a San Diego Beer Weekend event in June, 2010 that I had attended. Sure enough, when I returned home I spotted him in a photo I’d taken then–small world, getting smaller all the time.

Before long a Erdinger Dunkelweiss was sitting on the table and a Köstritzer Schwarzbier in the ice chest. I was a happy man, but still, I wondered aloud, no Ambar? Daniel pulled out his phone, and an acquaintance told him he didn’t believe it was being made anymore.

This I later confirmed–Cervecería Nacional Dominicana ceased production of Ambar in February. Descansa en paz.

I was a happy man as well when I asked Jennifer Gillespie to strike a pose and my misbehaving camera caught her at just the right moment. I think we have a chance to turn Jennifer into the Farrah Fawcett poster girl of the 21st century–if anyone reading is old enough to know what I mean by that.

Name: Presidente
Brewer: Cervecería Nacional Dominicana
Style: Pale lager
ABV: 5%
Availability: Ubiquitous in the Dominican Republic; 15 states east of the Mississippi and Washington, D.C.
For More Information: www.cnd.com.do

Click here to see what golf shibboleths Duffy and my colleagues decided needed toppling. My contribution follows, with the only further thought that I wouldn’t mind teeing it up with Duffy, either.

***

“Hi, Tom, it’s Mark Steinberg. I have a slot open for you to play a round with Tiger Woods and wonder if you can make it?”

Okay, Tiger’s agent isn’t going to be calling me any time soon, but you know what, Steiny? The answer is no thanks, anyway, because I’m certain there’d be precious little in the way of authentic invitation behind such an offer, yet a storehouse of calculation.

I’ve played with Ernie Els, David Duval, Loren Roberts, Matt Gogel, 2005 U.S. Women’s Open champion Birdie Kim and other pros. And, in what remains my greatest thrill in golf, I lucked into a full 18 at Bay Hill with Arnold Palmer, and tipped beers with him in the locker room, too. So I’ve had my share of rubbing shoulders.

But do I want to play with the greatest golfer of them all? Sure, if Nicklaus calls, I’m ready.

[Click here to see a review of "The Swinger" and here for a piece about Tiger during the scandal.]

Well, they’re juicy, for one thing. But in the hands of Sports Illustrated writers Michael Bamberger and Alan Shipnuck, they become suspenseful, comic and poignant by turns.

The Swinger (Simon & Schuster, 2011, $25) it should be noted, is neither an instructional book nor one you’ll want to let the kids get their hands on. The co-authors have not left the X-rated stuff out of this roman á clef, and readers will be forgiven for trying to figure out how many of the shenanigans depicted actually occurred. Isn’t that the appeal of the genre?

[Click here for a piece about Tiger during the scandal and here for a piece about playing with Tiger.]

The French literary term roman á clef literally means novel with a key. Though actual names and events are altered, if you figure out the key, you presumably unlock the passageway between fiction and truth.

With The Swinger a reader doesn’t really need the key; the door pretty much swings wide open: Tree Tremont is Tiger Woods, Will Martinsen is Phil Mickelson, Belinda DeCarlo is Elin Nordegren, Andrew Finkelman of the IGM agency is Mark Steinberg, formerly of the IMG agency–and so on and so on.

Sure, Belinda is Italian, not Swedish. The yacht is called Off Course instead of Privacy. Tree’s mother is from Chicago, not Thailand. But when Tree utters such press conferences Tigerisms as, “Family is everything to me,” or, “Welcome to my world,” we know what world we’re in.

I confess that I wasn’t really expecting much from The Swinger. Most books in the roman á clef genre tend to be fairly trashy, with Harold Robbins’ The Carpetbaggers (said to be based on Howard Hughes and Jean Harlow) as one dubiously classic example. Alternately, one could point to Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men as an example that ascends to literature (his Willie Stark modeled after Huey Long).

Shipnuck and Bamberger aren’t aiming that high, and there’s plenty of trashy behavior in the book, but they have good story-telling instincts, and they’ve invested the character of Tree with enough complexity and the events with enough public complicity that the story rises above mere ripped-from-the-headlines retelling.

Warren used Jack Burden, a political reporter hired by Willie Stark and working through his own troubles, as the insider narrator. The Swinger supplies Josh Dutra, a sports reporter with an ex-wife and mounting debts, newly hired by the Tree Corp to help contain certain cracks beginning to appear in Tree’s carefully constructed public persona.

The story is basically told in three acts–before the fall, after the sexual allegations hit the proverbial fan (all told with mounting anticness), and then Tree’s month-long stint in a recovery facility–before gliding to a close.

Dutra, who had written about Tremont early in his career, characterizes him thusly:

[His] parents…hadn’t worked in years. Tree was their job. He was an only child, homeschooled by his mother and coached exclusively and secretly by his father until Tree entered, at age nineteen, the first tournament of his life, a U.S. Open where he finished ninth. Since then he had become not just the most dominant golfer of all time but also the richest, most powerful, and most popular athlete in the world. He was modest and handsome with perfect Hollywood teeth and the family to go with them: the beautiful wife, the adorable twins. Everybody wanted a piece of the action, and before long Tree Tremont became the first celebrity ever to have endorsement deals with Coke and Pepsi.

Dutra knows that Tree is a consummate actor, and that his squeaky clean image is just that, that the façade conceals a highly profane individual, prone to cheapness, probably drug dependent, and increasingly inattentive to details that suggest he is indeed “stepping out.”

But even as Dutra slides deeper into covering up Tremont’s, well, mounting indiscretions, he can’t rid himself of his ambivalence because of the man’s undeniable charm, his unworldly skills on a golf course, and his depth of knowledge about the game’s history–golf being, besides his children, Tremont’s purest abiding love.

Once the sexual revelations begin to hit the internet, the tabloids, the talk shows–and once Belinda hits Tree with a fireplace poker (instead of a five iron), leaving him with the face that launches a thousand quips–the story loses a little narrative steam in having to cover the sexting transcriptions, legal wranglings, allegations of homosexuality and steroid use.

Alan Shipnuck (Photo by Meredith Evans)

Michael Bamberger (Photo by Erick W. Rasco)

But the third act takes place at the Walden Pond Wellness Center in Mississippi, and includes perhaps the funniest set piece in the whole book, as Tree literally counts up and describes for Belinda each of his sexual encounters. Not to give too much away, but there are quite a few.

And it’s here where the authors, after serving up two hundred pages of reprehensible behavior on Tremont’s part, somehow manage to make him seem sympathetic, in many ways a victim himself, of his own and others’ unrealistic expectations for him, and possibly, possibly, now trying to make things right.

The Tiger Woods story is still unfolding in unpredictable ways–his firing of his long-time caddy Steve Williams, his lingering injury that has scuttled this season for him while making his pursuit of the Jack Nicklaus majors record increasingly uncertain.

But it’s still not giving too much away to say that The Swinger ends on a sweet and upbeat note, with most of the characters pairing off as neatly as in a Shakespeare comedy, and a new major title in the bag for Tree Tremont.

Tiger Woods should be so lucky.

***

This piece first appeared, in slightly different form, in the August-September 2011 issue of Golf Oklahoma.

I could probably have the bag fixed. But it was a gift from the Doonbeg Golf Club in 2004, and I’ve done a considerable amount of traveling since. So the bag has had a pretty good run. More importantly, I’m not getting any younger, and the bag doesn’t have wheels.

The T-Pro Bold 30” Drop Bottom Rolling Duffel

So, like Tiger and Stevie, it was time for a change. Providentially, I heard from the folks who represent Travelpro, long a favored brand of flight crews and frequent travelers, who were introducing a new line. I said I’d be happy to test out their T-Pro Bold 30” Drop Bottom Rolling Duffel if they cared to send one along, and they did. Unfortunately, it arrived the day after I left on a week-long trip.

Then it was months before I went anywhere for long enough to justify packing anything beyond carry-on luggage. So it took awhile to test it out. When I finally did it wasn’t in my golf-writing persona, but my beer-writing guise. Meaning I wasn’t worried about packing extra golf balls. But I was facing the always-delicate task of packing a six-pack of beer and a bottle of wine to take along with me, hoping they wouldn’t break and saturate my clothes.

(Just to be clear, I’m only talking luggage here, not golf club travel bags, which are another animal and rightfully deserve their own posting altogether.)

To cut to the chase, all the bottles arrived safely–both those I took with me, and those I brought home.

But all was not immediately rosy. As soon as I received it I said, “That’s one big bag,” and began to think I should have asked for T-Pro Bold 26” version. When I’m packing I’m like nature, and abhor a vacuum, usually throwing in more than I wind up needing. I knew it would be pretty easy to stuff the 30-incher until it was well over the current 50-pound limit for most flights.

I packed with the bathroom scale nearby and, sure enough, blew right past 50 pounds in my first go-round, though feeling I hadn’t come come to pushing the bag’s limits. (Granted, I don’t normally travel with a six-pack and a bottle of wine, either.)

So I moved what I could to the carry on, whittled the weight down to 50.5 pounds and figured that was close enough, I could whip out a jacket and put it on if the airline got persnickety. (It didn’t.)

Second problem was that the bag is, in Travelpro’s word, “versatile,” meaning attention must be paid to how one actually packs the thing. It can be used as just one large cavity, or a zippered panel can create upper and lower compartments.

The latter seems perfect for shoes and other bulky gear, so that’s what I used it for. But I hadn’t quite studied the zipper system with enough rigor, so when I picked the bag up the lower compartment was partially open, threatening to spill the goods into the Seattle airport baggage area. My bad.

There are a variety of compartments to use as well, one of which is a lined and cushioned pocket for food or, in my case, beer bottles.

The lined and cushioned food (or beer bottle) pocket passes the test

So far, so good. The company claims the bag was inspired by adventure travelers and should roll as easily over rough terrain as city streets. I certainly found it a real relief to roll rather than lug, though the numerous handles made the bag easy to lift when lifting was necessary.

The company also claims the bag is as durable as they come, but time will tell there. Check back in seven years.

***

The MSRP for the T-Pro 30” Drop Bottom Rolling Duffel is $400, but it can retail for half that.
Dimensions:  L30″ x W15″ x H15.5″; 76cm x 38cm x 40cm
Weight: 11 lbs. / 5kg.

G. A. Smith

You never know, but this isn’t my old man, who enjoyed a glass of beer now and again, but was more of a vodka man. This is Tom Green, a comedian in Brighton, England, who appeared in several silent films by G.A. Smith, this one dating from 1897–the earliest days of British cinema.

Indeed, according to an article by Frank Gray on the Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema website, George Albert Smith was lauded late in his life (1864-1959) as “the father of the British Film Industry,” and was made a Fellow of the British Film Academy in 1955.

Such early films were usually limited to about 75 feet of film running through the camera, and hence were rarely titled. This one was alternately called “Comic Face” or “Man Drinking.”  It may be YouTube that also decided Tom Green looked old and slapped that title on it.  Certainly, Tom is no poster child for Drinking Responsibly, getting pretty silly in the space of four sips and forty seconds.

The clip comes from the British Film Institute archives, which can be  accessed at its own YouTube channel.

The big question remains–what beer is Tom Green drinking? I can’t make out the label, but it’s a pretty dark beer that would have been available in a bottle in Brighton in 1897. Let the nominations begin.

Jefferson Davis in Scotland, 1869

In the summer of 1869, Jefferson Davis, former President of the Confederate States of America, went to St. Andrews in Scotland. He did not have a tee time.

Davis was not in the best frame of mind when he went to Scotland. He was not long removed from a two-year imprisonment following his capture at the close of the Civil War. And while he was relieved to hear of the Christmas Day pardon from President Andrew Johnson in 1868, clearing him of the charge of treason, he was still puzzling how to provide for his family and make his way in the world after the war.

As he put it in an 1875 speech, “My first visit to Scotland was when the clouds of adversity had gathered over me, of the darkest hue, and when my heart constantly and sorrowfully turned back to my own distressed country.”

Davis never really referred to the war as the Civil War, of course, since he held that the war was between two sovereign nations, and therefore couldn’t be called a civil war. He always called it The War Between the States, and certainly characterized it as the War of Northern Aggression.

But the visit to Scotland, if it didn’t measurably improve his fortunes, at least gladdened his heart. He was charmed by the countryside, the weather, the people.

St. Andrews Cross (Flag of Scotland)

Confederate flag

A harebell, or Scottish Bluebell

Several times he wrote to his wife, Varina, then in London, enclosing local flowers. One was a harebell from St. Andrews. The flower, he said in his letter, was plucked from the “ground dedicated to the ‘Royal Game of Golf.’”

Davis used the same phraseology in the address he delivered in Memphis six years later–ten years after the close of the war–on St. Andrew’s Day and to the local St. Andrews Society.

In what was a general encomium to the country, he singled out the home of golf: “In this town of St. Andrews, though the ruins of the ancient Abbey alone remain, one of the ancient sports is still preserved–the royal game of golf. That is the place where golf is played above all others. There they not only play golf in fair weather, but they play it when the mist is falling, so that it is said it won’t wet a Scotsman, but it will wet an Englishman to the bone. (Laughter.) And when the weather is so very bad that they cannot go afield, the ardent lovers of the game study topographical maps in their houses, on which is delineated the bunkers, the gorse, and all the accidents of the ground which may affect the success of the player. The characteristic, it may be said, of the Scotch people is activity and earnestness. When they go to sport they go at it with zest, when they go upon an excursion they leave all business behind, and themselves to enjoyment; but when they come back to work their labour is as intense as their sport had been joyous….”

The Old and New courses, St. Andrews

Davis went on long enough that the talk was printed up in a small booklet by the Glasgow publisher Anderson & Mackay in 1876. A local reporter presumably put in the editorial asides, including the reaction to the stem-winding finish: “The speaker took his seat amid thunders of applause, [which] continued for several minutes.”

Davis died in 1889 at the age of 81. He never lost his blind spot regarding the status of blacks in society, nor his conviction that the South had a right to secede in 1861. But he did come to some sense of peace.

As William J. Cooper, Jr. notes in his thorough and readable (if occasionally overzealously detailed) biography, Jefferson Davis, American (Vintage Civil War Library, 2000, $19.95), the former CSA President gave his last public address in 1888 to a gathering of young men in Mississippi City, and he exhorted them to look to the future:

“Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feelings, and to make your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation devoutly to be wished–a reunited country.”

Varina Davis ultimately moved north, to New York City, where she wrote for the New York World newspaper. Entirely coincidentally, while on a vacation to Cranston’s Hotel on the Hudson River in 1893, she met Julia Dent Grant, the widow of the Union general and U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant.

The two women liked each other. They began a noted friendship, and one that lasted, as they continued to correspond with each other, right into the twentieth century.

A post card of the now defunct Cranton's Hotel (on right) on the Hudson River

Steve assisted Kris Tschetter with her book,  Mr. Hogan, The Man I Knew, which I recently reviewed here. I noted that Hogan may have been one of the first to talk about the notion of a repeatable swing, and there are certainly plenty of repetitions on display here.

I’m not sure what Hogan, Stevie Ray Vaughn or Jimi Hendrix would think of the clip (Vaughn is covering Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child”). I’m not sure what they’d make of YouTube, either. But it is fun to see Hogan actually at work according to his famous phrase, “in the dirt.”

It’s also curious to note that in a few of the frames here of Hogan on the range, he’s puffing on a cigarette, plumes of smoke appearing a few times along with that famous follow-through.  Maybe it was a drill–to see if he actually breathed-in on his takeaway?

I included the Pike XXXXX stout, so I had every intention of downing one (at least) at the brewery. But with a late arrival from the east I remained in the outlier district near Sea-Tac airport my first night in town, venturing no further than Sharp’s RoastHouse, a busy BBQ joint within walking distance.

Sharp’s sported a respectable 26 taps of mostly northwest brews, 23 more than I could handle in one sensible night.

While passing the time with other transients bellied up to the bar I soon acquainted myself agreeably with Fremont Interurban IPA (6.2% ABV, and belonging to that slim genre of beers named after outdoor sculptures), Maritime Pacific’s Nightwatch Dark Ale (listed as 7% ABV on the Sharp’s menu, but 5.5% on the brewery website) and a Flyers Pacemaker Porter (5.5%).

Fremont's Waiting for the Interurban

The latter brewery hews to an aviation theme in naming its beers, which seemed apt as I was talking to two commercial pilots at the time. Phil Spencer of Delta, who lives in Honolulu, was in town for an annual golf jaunt with friends, this year to the Sunriver Resort in Oregon.

I didn’t even bring my sticks on this trip, even though SIP’s editorial director, George Fuller, and I go way back more in terms of golf than spirits. But we restricted our exercise on this trip to elbow-bending, meeting up yesterday to grab lunch at Pike.

We had hoped to run into Charles and/or Rose Ann Finkel, but as they were busily getting ready for an imminent trip to Africa, we had to content ourselves with Naughty Nellie, a 4.7% blonde ale that seemed well-enough behaved to us.

George and I took a lengthy break to tour the Pike Place Market and along with the rest of the tourists watch a fish or two go flying. But in a few hours we were back in the same booth at Pike’s Brewing with SIP writer Jacqueline Pruner and designer Randi Karabin, swapping mostly Pike beers from different samplers. This included the XXXXX Extra Stout, a regular in the portfolio after an on-again off-again history, not unlike that of the Finkels.

Step one, grab fish. Step two, toss.

It’s tough to overestimate the impact of the couple on the contemporary beer scene; they had a major hand in getting it all rolling in the first place, that place being the late 1970’s, through their seminal beer importing company Merchant du Vin, begun in 1978.

I have a bit of that history here. Not only were the Finkels helping to revive nearly lost styles, they were doing much to educate U.S. palates. Eventually, they decided to do it themselves–enter the brewing company in 1989.

Broadly curious and eager to try their hands at new endeavors, the couple sold both companies in 1997. But after wandering in the wilderness for a few years, the old yearning returned, and they reacquired Pike Brewing in 2006. It looks like they’re now here for the duration, as is the XXXXX Extra Stout, which floats above the brewery/restaurant action in a giant inflatable bottle.

The XXXXX is a no-frills stout’s stout, black as night, suffused with roasted malt aromas, chocolate, licorice and coffee flavors. It’s all balanced well with Chinook, Willamette and Goldings hops, for a smooth, chewy and filling pint. Well, it was after I drained the insufficient sample glass and ordered a pint to dive into, as the beer deserves.

Lining 'em up at the SIP Northwest launch (Photo by Nityia Design)

The launch party was held at the Wine World Warehouse, and the emphasis was indeed on wine, varietals served up from Barnard Griffin, Cooper Wine, Swiftwater Cellars, Terra Blanca, Gordon Brothers, sparkling wine from Treveri, cocktails from two different Maker’s Mark blends, chocolate from Forté and other goodies.

Daniel Lee of the Odin Brewing Company

But Daniel Lee of Seattle’s Odin Brewing Company was there as well, saving the day for beer nuts with a Kölsch-style Freya’s Gold (4.5%) and the juniper berry laced Odin’s Gift, a 5.4% ruby ale.

It was a grand event, but we weren’t finished yet, as most of the SIP folks present went off for a late bite to eat at Murphy’s, said to be the first Irish pub in Seattle. Naturally, there was Murphy’s and Guinness on tap. But I went with the cask-conditioned Diamond Knot IPA (6.2%), since I’d already had my stout for the day.

Name: XXXXX Stout
Brewer: Pike Brewing Company, Seattle, Washington
Style: Stout
ABV: 7%
Availability: Year-round in WA, OR, ID and MT, sometimes AK, and in select Total Wines stores on the East Coast.
For More Information: www.pikebrewing.com

The chalk board at Murphy's

That was the tasting of the 2009 bottling, with a little history on Samuel Smith and its stone Yorkshire squares, beer writer Michael Jackson and his influence on the early days of beer’s rebirth in the U.S., all thrown into the brewkettle.

This is only the third release of the beer in the U.S., as usual on August 1, Yorkshire Day in England. Well, here too, if one so celebrates. And taking note of the celebration with a Yorkshire Stingo would only be appropriate, not to mention satisfying.

This year’s version, brewed in 2010, comes in at 8% ABV, a tad lower than last year. It has prune-like aromas swimming in a sea of oak. The taste is sweet, smooth, rich, oaky, almost like a port, slightly less tannic than last year. Though news releases from the U.S. importer Merchant du Vin suggest a soft oak note, it seems pronounced to me, but blending nicely in the overall complexity of the brew.

I’m not going to make last year’s mistake, when a mere bottle crossed my lips, and leaving me with nothing to vividly compare to this year’s vintage. I’ll pick up a few more this year to cellar, and a few more just to savor now. That is, if I can find it. Fewer than 24,000 bottles were produced, so don’t dawdle should you find one on the shelves.

The White Rose, symbol of Yorkshire

As last year, Stingo remains a beer you can linger with over an hour or two, if one has such patience. It was easily done this year as I had opened the bottle before sudden dinner plans materialized, so I enjoyed as a pre- and post-prandial treat, right up to the time I began dozing on the couch. Naturally, praising Yorkshire all the while.

Name: Yorkshire Stingo
Brewer: Samuel Smith, Tadcaster, England
Style: English Strong Ale
ABV: 8%
Availability: Nationwide as long as the supply lasts
For More Information: merchantduvin.com

Hogan standing next to what remains of his car after the February 1949 accident.

No extended piece about Ben Hogan can go on for long without mentioning the car wreck in February of 1949 that nearly ended his life, but surely elevated the rest of his career into the stuff of legend.

Not that the Dublin, Texas native hadn’t already begun burnishing the Hogan Mystique with his play before the accident. (And has the word “mystique” ever been applied to any other golfer with such accurate regularity?)

As author David Barrett makes clear in Miracle at Merion: The Inspiring Story of Ben Hogan’s Amazing Comeback and Victory at the 1950 U.S. Open (Skyhorse Publishing, 2010, $24.95), once past his early troubles with a persistent duck hook, Hogan served notice on the tour with his first individual victory in 1940. (He had won a two-man event in 1938 with Vic Ghezzi.) He then went on to win the next two tournaments and finished the year as the leading money winner.

He took time off from the Tour in Tulsa in 1943 and 1944 as a member of the Army Air Guard, eased back into playing in 1945, and then began an astounding run of success. As Barrett puts it:

From 1946 through 1948, Hogan won 30 tournaments. If you throw in the five events he won after getting out of the Army in 1945, it adds up to a remarkable 35 wins in three-and-a-half years. Some perspective: Tom Watson and Gene Sarazen, two of the greats of the game, each won 39 events in their entire careers on the tour.

The compact golfer who became known as Bantam Ben had one of the most repeatable swings in the game’s history–and may have been, Barrett suggests, the first to talk about the notion of a repeatable swing. But part of his legend is how hard he worked at it.

“There’s no such thing as a natural golf swing,” Hogan was quoted in a Time magazine article cover story from January, 1949, an article that portrayed him as a fierce competitor with unmatched focus and desire to win, and one who unnerved his fellow players so that they were thrown off their games. (Sound like any recent model we can think of?)

The article appeared 23 days before the accident on Highway 80 in Texas, when it became apparent that a bus attempting to pass a truck in foggy weather was going to crash into their car, and Hogan threw himself across to the passenger side to protect his wife, Valerie.

It probably saved both their lives, but Hogan’s lower body was injured. But as Barrett makes clear, it was subsequent blood clots and the resultant vascular surgery that led to Hogan’s later physical ailments, rather than the broken bones themselves.

It all made Hogan’s march to victory at the 1950 Open the stuff of Hollywood, and indeed Hollywood obliged, with Glenn Ford playing him in “Follow the Sun,” what some say is one of the worst golf movies ever made (but which I have yet to see, so judgment reserved).

Barrett, at any rate, goes on to accomplish no mean feat–creating some suspense leading up the climax of an event we know the details of. But he finds more details to savor, including a brief portrait of Hy Peskin.

Who’s Hy Peskin? He was the photographer who took what may be one of the most famous sports photos of all time, but surely the most famous golf photo, of Hogan’s one-iron to the green on the 72^nd hole at Merion in 1950, appropriately on the cover of the book.

***

There’s also a rather remarkable photo in Mr. Hogan, The Man I Knew (Gotham Books, 2010, $22.50) by Kris Tschetter with Steve Eubanks. Tschetter is an LPGA player who came to know Hogan long after his career was over but hers was just forming.

She was attending Texas Christian University and as a talented amateur became a member at Hogan’s club, Shady Oaks in Fort Worth. One day she broke the club’s standing rule–don’t bother Mr. Hogan–and said hello as he walked by. He returned the greeting, moved on, but when he returned later and saw that Tschetter was still practicing said, “You’re still here? Keep working at it.”

For a man who practiced more than anyone before or since (until Vijay Singh came along), Hogan had an eye for stick-to-itiveness, and he became a friend and mentor to Tschetter, who went on to a fine career (one win on the LPGA Tour, and 72^nd place on the all-time money list).

Her portrait is the anodyne to stories about the caustic Hogan, the Hogan with the basilisk stare, and the palpable if silent disapproval. Oh, she has some funny anecdotes about how Hogan could make anyone squirm–like pro Tom Byrum who was tardy to the range one day and had to undergo a placidly lethal interrogation from Hogan.

But mainly this is a paean to a Hogan with a quick wit, a softy at heart, and a gentleman at all times. Set in his ways, perhaps, but ways that were far more benign than those usually consigned to the legendary Wee Ice Mon.

The photo comes from a video Hogan allowed Tschetter to take of his swing in 1989, which she speculates is the last time it was so captured. The final frame of the sequence is of Hogan’s follow-through, and what’s remarkable is how similar it looks held next to the Peskin photo.

Sure, he’s not as high on his right toe, he’s not as wiry as in 1950, there’s not quite the same arch in the back. But taken about 40 years apart, the two photographs are living testimony to the repeatable swing!

***

Hogan made himself into a good putter, although that skill faded as his career went on. He often differentiated golf and putting as two different games, yet it needed to be practiced as well.

One of Hogan’s oft-repeated observations was that, “There isn’t enough daylight in any day to practice all the shots you need to.” Another: “Every day you miss practicing, it takes one day longer to be good.” What’s an amateur to make of such daunting comments?

Hogan reportedly told one enquirer that the secret to golf could only be found “in the dirt,” meaning through endless practice. In his 2009 tome, Ben Hogan’s Magical Device: The Real Secret to Hogan’s Swing Finally Revealed, Ted Hunt attempted to describe what that secret really was, and he’s back with a sequel of sorts: Ben Hogan’s Short Game Simplified: The Secret to Hogan’s Game From 120 Yards and In (Skyhorse Publishing, 2010, $16.95).

Hunt is an amateur, and he goes to some lengths to defend an amateur’s writing of a golf instruction book, but he doth protest too much. For those who respond well to instruction books (I confess that I usually don’t), this covers all the bases–actually starting from the putting surface and moving to 120 yards out–with specialty shots, problem shots and plenty of Hogan anecdotes and photos to sweeten the pot.

This piece first appeared, in slightly different form, in the June-July 2011 issue of Golf Oklahoma.

So it goes in Belgium, where beer and food trump golf. I never did see a course on a recent trip to Flanders, but toured five breweries and ate numerous meals cooked with beer or paired with beers.

Belgium is an inspirational mecca for brewers and beer lovers and there’s nothing like a visit there to try specialty house beers in restaurants and bars. (www.visitflanders.us) But many of the best are readily available at better beer outlets in the U.S.:

Poperings Hommel Ale (Brewery Van Eecke, Watou, 7.5% ABV) www.brouwerijvaneecke.be

Unlike the U.S., in Belgium highly hopped beers are the exception rather than the rule. This is a distinctive exception, brewed near the hop fields of Poperinge, where a festival in praise of hops is held every three years. (And this is the year.) The beer is a golden ale with a suitably sharp finish.

Kwak (Brewery Bosteels, Buggenhout, 8.1% ABV) www.bestbelgianspecialbeers.be

All Belgian beers have their own special glass, but the round-bottomed Kwak glass requires a wooden holder to keep it upright. If you want to remain upright, drink this amber ale carefully, since its fruity, spicy, malty mix goes down easy.

Westmalle Tripel (Westmalle Trappist Brewery, 9.5% ABV) www.trappistwestmalle.be

There are six monastic breweries in Belgium (and one in the Netherlands) under the direct control of Trappist monks. Westmalle more or less invented the Tripel style of strong golden ales, and the beer remains a complex wonder, a reverent pour.

Duvel (Brewery Moortgat, Puurs, 8.5% ABV) www.duvel.be

On the other shoulder, the devil (duvel) is in the details of this most beguiling golden ale, which looks as innocuous as a light lager, but which packs a punch in strength and in its fruity, pear-like flavors.

Rodenbach (Rodenbach Brewery, Roeselare, 6% ABV) www.palm.be/en/rodenbach.php

The late beer writer Michael Jackson once called Rodenbach, “The most refreshing beer in the world,” and it’s tart, cherry-like character is certainly a palate cleanser. There’s no fruit in the brown ale; it’s character comes solely from the special yeast, fermentation techniques, aging in oak casks (for up to two years) and blending of different vintages. An acquired taste, but worth acquiring.

In somewhat different form, this piece was originally featured in the July-August 2011 Fairways + Greens Magazine, courtesy Madavor Media. To read the latest digital edition, click here.

The Pete Dye Course at the French Lick Resort

The plane was rerouted to Nashville, which meant I had about a four hour bus ride ahead of me to the Louisville airport, and then an hour’s-plus drive to the resort.

I missed a day of golf, but all was well in the end, and I think it’s now safe to step forward and take credit for Barack Obama’s 2008 victory. As the following piece shows (it originally appeared in the Brattleboro Reformer in Vermont before the election), my trip to Indiana clearly tipped the scales, and threw the formerly red state into the blue column for Obama. I don’t know whether Dave was the deciding vote or not, but I’d like to think our little chat had something to do with it. As for 2012, my strategy is still in the planning stages.

***

I packed the sticks and pinned on my “Vote Obama” button last month, traveling to the heartland to discover that Indiana is a swing state.

I was heading for the French Lick Resort, where the midwest meets the south, 70 miles northwest of Louisville, Kentucky, and where the Ryder Cup was set to unfold the following week.

I was set to preview the new Pete Dye course that will open in the spring, as well as play the restored Donald Ross course at this equally—actually, stunningly–restored casino resort town.

The hick from French Lick

Unfortunately, there is no lascivious origin for the town’s name. Its bubbling minerals springs left salty deposits on rocks that the wildlife would lick, the early settlers were French, and there you have it.

By the mid-19^th century a Dr. William Bowles was bottling the local specialty, selling it as Pluto Water and putting up guests who had come for the cure in the French Lick Springs Hotel, where chef Louis Perrin created tomato juice in 1917.

In 1850, a mile away in Mile Lick, the similarly conceived Mile Lick Inn went up and the area was truly launched as a resort destination. The Mile Lick owner, Dr. John Lane, later changed the name of his hotel and the town to West Baden Springs, where Mr. and Mrs. Joe Bird created their son, Larry, in 1956.

FDR in 1931

Bird also lived across the town border, hence the nickname “the hick from French Lick.” The boom years were over by time Larry started dribbling. Both hotels had flourished for decades, largely because illegal gambling thrived until 1949, which it managed to do because the West Baden hotel became a headquarters for the state Republican party, while the French Lick hotel became a Democratic fixture.

Indeed, it was at a conference at the hotel for Democratic governors in 1931 that Franklin Roosevelt solidified support for his presidential run.

With the current presidential run on my mind, it was instructive to find out that not everyone in the country is a rabid Obama fan, and that a mere campaign button could provoke stares and comments and turn me into a proselytizer. I was ready to flap my gums at any opportunity.

Not for naught: the day after I returned, Obama had gone up two percentage points in Indiana polls and the state is now officially considered a tossup, if still leaning McCain’s way. And my handicap went down two points, so all in all it was a successful trip.

And after a half-century of bust days, French Lick looks to be revving up for success as well. What began as a philanthropic gesture in 1996 by the Cook Group Inc. to save and partially restore the West Baden Hotel took on a life of its own, ultimately a half-billion dollar effort that has included an historic restoration of both hotels, a new (legal) casino, two spas and the various golf courses.

The expenditure, if startling, is understandable just by walking into the atrium of the West Baden Hotel. Prior to the construction of the Houston Astrodome, the hotel held the record for the world’s largest free-span dome, stretching 200 feet and once called the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Shining once again with an old world elegance, the atrium is a visual and acoustic marvel.

With 45 holes of golf on hand, I never even made it to the casino, another marvel. There’s history in the golfing grounds, too. The nine-hole Valley Links adjacent to the French Lick hotel was built as an 18-hole layout in 1907 by Tom Bendelow. Lee Schmidt did the reworking in 2006.

Schmidt also took on the 2006 restoration to its original design of the Ross course, built in 1917 and the site of the 1924 PGA Championship won by Walter Hagen, and the 1959 and 1960 LPGA Championships (Betsy Rawls and Mickey Wright, respectively).

The Donald Ross Course

At a cost of $6 million, the restoration included reshaping and expanding many of the greens to their antique square or rectangular configurations. It’s a splendid job, at a course traditionalists should flock to.

One curiosity is that the 1957 Midwest Amateur Tournament was held at the course, won by Pete Dye. Dye knew Ross, and Lee Schmidt once worked for Dye; there are fewer than six degrees of separation in the golf design world.

Dye was on hand for the preview rounds at his course, and responded to a fawning introduction with refreshing self-deprecation: “I may not be the leading architect of the day, but I am the oldest.”

Pete Dye, his handiwork in the background

His newest creation is a study in grandeur perched on one of the highest hilltops in Indiana, with 30-mile vistas in all directions, but plenty of work on the ground for the golfer to attend to in a brawny design likely to be compared to Dye’s work at Whistling Straits.

It was a lot to take in in a two day campaign, but there’s no question that French Lick is a fresh golf destination to reckon with.

On my last morning in Indiana I was ushered into the dining room for breakfast, the hostess seated me, wandered away, and then returned to say, sotto voce, “It’s nice to see someone wearing an Obama button here.”

“Not too many in these parts?”

She laughed, and said, “Pretty much none.”

My driver back to the airport, let’s call him Dave, wasn’t wearing one. Dave agreed that the Dye layout was a beautiful site, though he didn’t really play golf much.

In truth, Dave was something of a walking stereotype—a former truck drivin’ kind of guy, a pot-bellied, hog ridin’, beer swillin’, gap-toothed grinnin’, deer huntin’, chaw chewin’ McCain supporter.

But Dave had a brain in good working order, and we were able to bounce things back and forth genially enough for awhile before he sensibly concluded that we could agree to disagree.

So then we spent the rest of the ride talking about marriage, wives, kids, grandkids—the important stuff. Plus a lot about beer swillin’.

Golf course architects may bemoan the sunny 1990’s, when new layouts debuted virtually daily, peaking at 398 in 2000. Such days are unlikely to return: there were fewer than 50 new course openings in 2010. But it does makes it easier to spot the winners.

Castle Stuart Golf Links, Inverness, Scotland

The par-3 eleventh hole at Castle Stuart

The accolades are stacking up like revetted bunkers for this Highland course overlooking the Moray Firth, which opened July 2009. On a Golf Tourism Scotland short list with The Old Course at St. Andrews and Kingsbarns, Castle Stuart was named the 2010 Golf Course of the Year, and will host the 2011 Scottish Open on July 7-10.

The trick with a 21st Century links course is to make it seem like it’s been around since the 19^th, or earlier. Architect Gil Hanse and Mark Parsinen, managing partner and co-designer, have nailed it. They’ve blended the land forms in harmony with the stunning visual surroundings, while creating thoughtful strategic patterns that suggest The Old Course or Royal Portrush.

The 425-acre site will ultimately include a boutique hotel and spa, 148 lodges and apartments and another 18 holes, but the current course is a brilliant first step. Thoughtful visitors will also book rounds at the nearby classic links of Nairn, Royal Dornoch and Brora.

Verdura Golf & Spa Resort, Sciacca, Sicily

Verdura ninth hole and clubhouse

Kyle Phillips, who designed Kingsbarns and Dundonald in Scotland, has worked his magic on the southwest Sicilian coast on 36 holes (plus a nine-hole par-3 track). Many wend right to the Mediterranean Sea, which is never out of sight during play. If the clubhouse is an appropriately bleached Italianate stucco, the windswept course suggests Scottish links play, with the anomalous sightline of distant olive and orange groves.

The West Course has slightly edged the East in some recent rankings; others say a composite routing of all the seaside holes is best. We say play ‘em all, and then indulge in the Verdura Spa, which includes four Thalasso pools, in graduated temperatures, varied densities of salt and minerals and a plethora of jets and waterfalls.

The 570-acre resort opened last March, part of the Rocco Forte Collection but the first built by the luxury hotel company, all on a splendidly private 1.2 miles of coastline.

Corales Golf Course, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic

Corales eighth hole

P.B. Dye’s La Cana Golf Course has some serious sibling rivalry since the April 2010 opening of Tom Fazio’s Corales Golf Course. The pair may well have helped PUNTACANA take the 2010 Golf Resort of the Year award from the International Association of Golf Tour Operators (in the ‘Rest of the World’ category–outside Europe and North America).

The course is pretty much out of this world. On land once bush, cactus and seagrapes, Fazio has fashioned a fecund beauty with six holes skirting the Caribbean Sea, the home hole requiring a carry over the rocky limestone coral of the Bay of Corales.

Fashion is the right word; Oscar de la Renta is an investor in Corales, as is singer Julio Iglesias, and both live in the developing Corales neighborhood that gives access to the course. But guests at the de la Renta-designed Tortuga Bay villas and the PUNTACANA hotel can also corral some tee times.

Baker’s Bay Golf & Ocean Club, Abaco Islands, The Bahamas

The fifteenth at Bakers Bay (Henebry Photography)

Can Tom Fazio top himself in the Caribbean? His layout for the Discovery Land Company opened in December for those eager to settle the question. The developing 585-acre private club and community with a deep water marina is on the northern end of Great Guana Cay. While the course is reserved for residential members and guests, two daily tee times are set aside for guests at the newly opened Marina Inn.

Players will find wide open links-style fairways ranging from the Atlantic Ocean shoreline at the start of play, over to the close of the front nine with a daunting 215-yard par-3 carry over the Sea of Abaco. From the panoramic thirteenth hole high point, Fazio pretty much puts the hammer down the rest of the way. The course measures over 7,327 yards from the tips; this is not recommended unless you have a PGA Tour card.

Old Macdonald Golf Links, Bandon Dunes, Oregon

Fifteenth hole at Old Macdonald, Bandon Dunes (Photo by Brian Oar)

Charles Blair Macdonald

Not named after the farmer, definitely not a cow pasture course, this fourth track at the Bandon Dunes Resort opened last June and almost immediately joined its three brethren in the top 15 of GOLF Magazine‘s “Top 100 Courses You Can Play” list (and where the Pacific Dunes course overtook Pebble Beach as No. 1).

Charles Blair Macdonald was the founder of the U.S. Golf Association and the country’s first great golf course architect. Tom Doak and associate Jim Urbina have created their big-shouldered versions of classic Macdonald holes (themselves reproductions of European models)–the Eden hole, Hogback, Biarritz, Cape, Redan, Punchbowl–with an uncanny blend of vigor and simplicity. Wide open fairways, fierce bunkering, immense greens, all typically whipped by wind, add up to an intensely satisfying strategic challenge.

Wrap it all up at McKee’s Pub with Grandma’s Meatloaf and a Deschutes Black Butte Porter and life will indeed be good.

* * *

Time for nine more? Here they are:

Seneca Hickory Stick, Lewiston, NY (senecahickorystick.com): Pure golf, lots of water at Robert Trent Jones II design near Niagara Falls.

Fourteenth at Seneca Hickory Stick (photo courtesy KemperLesnik)

The Scandinavian, Farum, Denmark (thescandinavian.dk): Bruce Charlton was RTJ II’s man on the tundra for two new courses officially opening this spring.

Apes Hill Club, St. James, Barbados (apeshillclub.com): Private to property owners, stunning Landmark Land Co. design might prompt opening checkbooks.

Apes Hill Club thirteenth

Macrihanish Dunes, Scotland (machrihanishdunes.com): Next door to a classic Old Tom Morris routing is David McLay Kidd’s modern take. Double pleasures.

Shining Rock Golf Club, Northbridge, MA (shiningrock.com): Rugged New Englander by design newcomer Patrick Sullivan.

Meadow Brook, Richmond, RI (meadowbrookgolfri.com): Expansive Roger Rulewich and Dave Fleury track is longest public course in the state.

Eighteenth green looking toward ten at Meadow Brook

The Prairie Club, Valentine, NE (theprairieclub.com): Two 18’s and a par-3 nine–potential Bandon Dunes aborning in the grasslands?

TPC San Antonio, TX (tpcsanantonio.com): Two private tracks by Greg Norman and Pete Dye, open to guests at JW Marriott Resort.

The Patriot, Owasso, OK (patriotgolfclub.com): Limited public tee times at this RTJ II routing, with percentage of fees going to Folds of Honor scholarship fund.

This piece originally appeared in the Spring, 2011 issue of American Airlines’ Celebrated Living magazine, in somewhat different form.

Baker’s Bay photo courtesy of Henebry Photography.

Old Macdonald photo courtesy of Fairways & Greens Magazine.

Whatever you call it or no matter how you calculate it, the Golf Boys video has already been sincerely flattered by imitation. Four players from the Ladies European Tour–Sophie Giquel, Sophie Sandolo, Jade Schaeffer and Cassandra Kirkland–have basically copied “Oh Oh Oh”–albeit with a Continental accent:

It seems somewhat regrettable that there’s no chest-baring in this version.  Though the video was shot about 15 miles west of Paris, this is apparently not the place in France where the naked ladies dance.  It was shot at the Golf de Saint-Nom-la-Bretéche club, an exclusive 36 holes melded into a composite course for competitions.

It will be the site of the 2011 Vivendi Trophy match in mid-September this year, the second running of the tournament between (male) players of Continental Europe against Great Britain and Ireland, in alternate years from the Ryder Cup. In May, the cup was renamed, and players will now vie for the Vivendi Seve Trophy.

Getting back to the girls, Sophie Giguel, Jade Schaeffer and Cassandra Kirkland are French; Sophie Sandolo is Italian, although French-born. She went to UCLA and played on the golf team there; Kirkland was a standout at the University of Arizona.

All are exempt players on the tour, all have websites, but only Schaeffer and Giguel have the ever-elusive victories, one each. Giguel is tenth on this year’s money-list to date.

Personally, I think it’s pretty hilarious, and as good a way as any for today’s touring pros to puncture their uptight image.

For anyone who suggests that the new breed of player is colorless compared to the linksman of yore, well, try to image Arnie, Jack or Gary romping around like this. Better yet–Ben Hogan!

(Well, there is the famous shot of Arnie dancing with a bewigged Nicklaus in Palm Springs during some Bob Hope Classic. Palmer, who is leading, looks like he’s having a great time while Jack appears to be nuzzling him in the ear.)

The video debuted on The Golf Channel on June 14, and I’m sure there will be those who say if Ben Crane, Hunter Mahan, Rickie Fowler and Bubba Watson weren’t jumping around like lunatics in a music video they might have mounted more of a challenge to Rory McIlroy in the U.S. Open.

But we’ll consign those to the screw-you-if-can’t-take-a-joke category.

Crane is the driving (so to speak) force behind the Golf Boys video and other comedy bits that have been making their way around the web. He drummed up backing money from one of his sponsors, Farmers Insurance, and the company is donating $1,000 to charity for every 100,000 views. Good enough reason to click on the Golf Boys again. And again….

This, I thought, is the death knell of Megasuds Bellywash. With superior choices now available in non-breakable cans, golfers need to assert themselves and demand that the cart girl pack in better brews! Slake a thirst and strike a blow for quality!

So we’ve gone all cool aluminum with these suggestions for the warmer months–and mostly wheat beers at that, just because they’re so darn refreshing.

Mama’s Little Yellow Pils (Oskar Blues Brewery, Longmont, Colorado, 5.3% ABV; www.oskarblues.com): But let’s first give a nod to Oskar Blues, the brewery that put its Dale’s Pale Ale in a can in 2002, revving up the craft brew in a can movement. This one is an all-malt Czech-style pilsner, mildly hopped, and if it works for Mama it sure works for us.  (Click here for an entry on Gubna from Oskar Blues.)

Sunshine Wheat (New Belgium Brewing, Fort Collins, Colorado, 4.8% ABV; www.newbelgium.com): Another Colorado offering by way of a Belgium wit beer style–malty, spicy and fruity, with orange peel and coriander leading to a citric tartness that will scour away any thirst.

Royal Weisse (Sly Fox Brewing Co., Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, 5.6% ABV; www.slyfoxbeer.com): East of the Mississippi, this regional favorite is an unfiltered Bavarian-style wheat beer, the special yeast strain lending a bready malt and clove character. The aptly named Scott Summers, general manager of the brewery brewpub, said, “It’s a good morning beer.” We’ll consider that.

Nude Beach Summer Wheat (Stevens Point Brewery, Wisconsin, 5.17% ABV; www.pointbeer.com): Forget a collared golf shirt, this is a clothing-optional unfiltered brew with what the brewery claims are all “au natural” ingredients, including raw and red wheat. Light, crisp, nothing hidden. Remember the sun block.

Hell or High Watermelon Wheat (21^st Amendment Brewery, San Francisco, California, 4.9% ABV; www.21st-amendment.com): I would have picked this just for the name, but make no mistake, it tastes like watermelon. Melonheads will want to try it at least once, or have some on hand to whip out at a barbecue for the novelty value, which includes the instructions on the can to agitate before opening. Another plus–it’s seedless. (Click here for more on the 21^st Amendment Brewery.)

Sorta fits the theme, right?

Paulaner Hefe-Weizen (Paulaner Brauerei, Germany, 5.5% ABV; www.paulaner.de): A classic Bavarian style unfiltered wheat beer (“hefe” means yeast) with banana esters and a strong clove character. The canned version of the Munich brewery’s best-selling beer will debut in the U.S. at the end of May. Prosit!

In somewhat different form, this piece was originally featured in the May-June 2011 Fairways + Greens Magazine, courtesy Madavor Media. To read the latest digital edition, click here.

All right, I’ve used some indelicate language here, but I didn’t know the exciting conclusion to this international round was going to go international on YouTube. For that I have to thank Joe Whitley, a strapping young Yorkshire lad who is a staff writer for the National Club Golfer and Lady Golfer magazines across the pond. (Some of his Flickr photos can be seen here.)

Joe and I played several rounds together in late January in Abu Dhabi, and considering that he took the game up only in recent years, he has come a very long way–the same distance he hits the ball. Joe writes mainly about equipment, and he was testing the then brand-spanking new TaylorMade R11 driver with its then incongruous white head. (The R11 has quickly become ubiquitous, and now after hitting it at a demo day and making a few of the many adjustments that can be made with the club, I’m lusting after one myself.)

But Joe put on quite a demo himself when we were playing the tenth hole at the Saadiyat Beach Golf Club in Abu Dhabi. Albeit it a short par-4 at 296 yards from the tees we were playing, Joe decided to go for it with his driver and not only landed the ball on the green but almost aced the hole.

Joe Whitley and designer Gary Player at Saadiyat Beach Golf Club

Martin Kaymer at press conference following his win in Abu Dhabi

A day or two later we played the Abu Dhabi Golf Club, this right after the early season European Tour event, the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship. It was here that Martin Kaymer blew the field away, vaulted past Tiger Woods to the number two spot in the world rankings, on his way to the number one spot for a time. (As of today, Kaymer is third behind Luke Donald and Lee Westwood; Woods has slipped to #15.)

All I can say is that these guys must really be good, because once I strayed off the fairways at the Abu Dhabi course I was cooked. While actually hitting the ball fairly well, I was just enough off line to wind up in snarly long grass hole after hole. Yet the pros were going low as usual.  Kaymer finished at 24-under! Also using the R11 I might add.

I was probably about 24-over for the one round, so by the time we came to the par-5 eighteenth I wasn’t much concerned with the score.  (Looking at the card now, I see I stopped writing anything after another X on the thirteenth.) I hit a blistering drive on the 515-yard hole, but there was still only one way to make it home.  Joe, who hadn’t lost his glow from an earlier eagle from the fairway, urged me to give it a go with the driver (a TaylorMade R7 in this case) and pulled out his camera to record the attempt.

A good attempt it was, too; a few shouts of amazement can be heard at the end of the video, but young Joe did let up on his filming trigger finger a bit too soon, and the soaring beauty of the shot is lost.

For the swelling multitudes who have asked–I had the distance. But the shot didn’t cut enough to avoid a left greenside bunker. And then I made a complete hash of it from there.

The Fuller’s London Pride in the clubhouse removed the sting. And just to play fair, here’s one of Joe at Saadiyat, with an arguably more universal beverage:

One thing Vermont has over Oklahoma is a long off season, which gives me more couch time with golf books in my hands. But if I had one hundred years in front of me with nothing to do but read I’d still never reach the other shore on the ocean of golf books.

Naturally, there’s some garbage floating around. But greatness, too. When I began thinking about what ten titles would constitute a solid desert island golf library, about five came immediately to mind. Then I put it out on the social media to friends and colleagues–if limited to one golf book to take to the proverbial desert island, what would it be?

The results mostly proved that great minds think alike, since we agreed on many titles. But extra points for thinking ahead to golf blogger David Rowell, who said he would take Dream On by John Richardson, along with his sand wedge.

Still, presuming there wouldn’t be much chance to play on a desert island, it would be cruel to list any instructional books. So I haven’t, concentrating on stocking the raft with good reads to see us all through, until rescued by the beginning of the season.

The Golf Omnibus by P.G. Wodehouse (Gramercy, 1996): I suspect even non-golfers would be seduced by this collection of 31 stories by the creator of Wooster and Jeeves. The rest of us will be helpless. Even the preface is hilarious, but the master unfurls a parade of hapless lovers, obsessed duffers, dastards due a comeuppance, most in tales narrated by that clubhouse fixture, the Oldest Member. Love, and golf, usually triumph.

Golf Dreams by John Updike (Knopf, 1996): The late Updike, renaissance literary man, was also a devoted mid-handicapper. He was besotted by the game and wrote about it often with his usual élan, on sustaining display here in stories, essays, and novel excerpts. (Yes, Rabbit Angstrom plays through.) My father and I once spent the better part of a dinner laughing over the title essay, about those impossible golf shots we face in our dreams. Worth the price of admission, and that’s just the first hole.

My Usual Game by David Owen (Main Street Books, 1996): Like Updike a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Owen was a mid-life golf recidivist. Having once forsworn the game, he fell hard upon his return, and in one comically entertaining essay after another about golf schools, Myrtle Beach, playing in Scotland and Ireland and inventing excuses to play golf that wives will buy, he speaks directly to the addict in us all.

Following Through: Herbert Warren Wind on Golf (Ticknor & Fields, 1985): You’ll probably have to search the net or used book stores for this superb collection of pieces by the stylist the U.S.G.A annual book award is named after. Wind preceded both Updike and Owen at The New Yorker and it always amazed me how his pieces on major tournaments long over could be spellbinding cliffhangers. His paean to the Highlands, “North to the Links of Dornoch,” will unleash a yearning that can be satisfied in only one way.

The Golf Courses of the British Isles by Bernard Darwin (Nabu Press, 2010): The grandson of Charles Darwin published his first and some say greatest work in 1910, surveying the great courses of the Realm, and in the process setting the bar awfully high for his successors. This reproduction volume includes the equally alluring illustrations by Harry Rowntree.

Blasted Heaths and Blessed Greens by James Finegan (Simon & Schuster, 1996): He’s nowhere near the stylist of the other writers on this list, but Finegan’s enthusiasm and love for Scottish links courses, and an amiable anecdotal approach make this an essential carry-on for any traveling golfer, and the same can be said for his companion volumes Emerald Fairways and Foam-Flecked Seas (Ireland) and All Courses Great and Small (England and Wales).

Doctor Golf by Richard Price Fox (Crane Hill Publishers, 2001): Next to the Wodehouse trove, this 1963 work remains one of the funniest golf books ever written, a wholly imagined epistolary collection. Head of the Eagle-Ho Sanctuary in Arkansas, where caddie flogging is still in vogue, Doctor Golf answers Dear Abby-like queries from the golf perplexed–players who slice even when off the course, a wife who thinks there’s something wrong when her husband sleeps with his clubs (Doctor Golf fails to see this as a problem), all the while flacking dubious gadgets, such as the Doctor Golf Eagle-Ho Swing-Speed Whistle Control or the Eagle-Ho water-filled-head putter.

Golf in the Year 2000 by J. McCullough (Rutledge Hill Press, 1998), Golf in the Year 2100 by Bob Labbance (TowleHouse Publishing, 2003): Okay, cheated a little here, but this is an ideal pairing of novels, the first written in 1892, and yet prescient in visualizing such wonders to come as television, digital watches, bullet trains, remote-controlled golf carts and Ryder Cup-like matches. In Labbance’s sequel of sorts, golf nut Martin Grant awakens from a century-long cryogenic snooze, and is soon teeing it up at the seventh Bandon Dunes course–at 9,384 yards long “short by modern standards.” At long last, we learn, golf balls send out locating signals, scorecards speak, there are aerial hazards, magnetized bunker sand, and something called Altered Element Golf. Luckily, as Grant puts it, “beer was still beer.”

The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield (Avon Books, 1996): From the Mystic Golf School of writing, with talk of The Field and The Authentic Swing, not to mention a time shifting battle sequence that sure wasn’t in the movie. Heavy, man, but leavened by the great 1931 fictional match between protagonist Rannulph Junah, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen.

Missing Links by Rick Reilly (Broadway Books, 1997): Sportswriter Reilly presumably needs no introduction, but for those who know him mostly for his often comic nonfiction, welcome to the world of the Ponkoquogue Municipal Golf Links and Deli, presumably the world’s worst municipal links, and right next door to the posh and ultra-private Mayflower Club. This is essentially a When-Worlds-Collide farce, the flawed heroes and craven villains clear, but the soundtrack filled with laughs and plenty of flavorful golf. What the heck, slip the sequel in, too–Shanks for Nothing.

This piece first appeared, in slightly different form, in the inaugural April-May 2011 issue of Golf Oklahoma.

Though it’s in rural Connecticut, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, the truth must told–when approaching Foxwoods Resort by car it arises suddenly out of the countryside like the Emerald City in “The Wizard of Oz,” a suggestion that past television ads for the resort have played upon.

The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation has indeed created a wonder in the North Stonington woods. Foxwoods began life in 1986 as a single high-stakes bingo hall, but the action grew into the largest resort casino complex in the world, with a towering hotel, theaters, nightclubs, a full house of high-end dining spots, a bushel of casual restaurants, and a jackpot of snack bars, not to mention the ever sweet siren song of the many gaming tables.

Even better, the Nation set Rees Jones loose on 900 acres across the street from the resort, and the May 2005 debut result was Lake of Isles–36 holes of splendid and challenging golf (though only the North Course is open to the public; the South Course is members only.) The complex is now enhanced by a Hank Haney Golf Academy, indoor and outdoor practice facilities, and a gracious 50,000 square foot clubhouse and grill (Matches Tavern), with an award-winning golf shop.

North Course, hole 17

The North Course is clearly a winner–copping the Golfweek Best in State award for four consecutive years. But it’s easy to toss strokes away here as breezily as dollar chips at the roulette table. The course demands attention, with a 135 slope rating–and that’s from the mid-tees (6,304 yards).

The tips extend beyond 7,300 yards, but mortals will not want to go there, unless to check out some of the dramatic and daunting views from the tee boxes, and there are many, as the course is big-shouldered, with lots of elevation and seven holes that skirt a picturesque 90-acre lake.

The secret at the North–or one of them–is getting safely away off the tee; fairways are ample, but straying from them hazardous, with a fair share of forced carries and dense Northeast woodlands to contend with–mighty pretty in the green of summer and glorious in the flaming colors of fall, but not too kind to hookers and slicers.

North Course, hole 3

The greens are huge, but well-protected throughout. And the par-3s, which include some of the prettiest elevated tee shots of the routing, can put a real spike in a scorecard.

As popular as the course has proven, the eighteenth hole had many a player fuming, with a forced carry over the lake to a slender landing area, beyond which was a gobbling bunker and then a sharp left dogleg besides, over another hazard.

The good news at the start of the 2010 season was that Jones had taken pity, and tinkered with the hole so that players falling short of perfection still had a prayer. The fairway was extended, the landing areas widened, and additional grassed areas planted on the landing side of the lake to shorten the carry. In an additional stroke of generosity, the fairway bunker was eliminated.

South Course, hole 11

The experience is similar on the South Course, though members and high rollers who manage a round there will certainly find fewer divots due to smaller number of rounds.

The conditioning is superb at LOI, and the service attentive, as one should rightly expect at a course with upscale rates in high season (off peak rates begin dropping in October). But there are great stay and play packages, and none of this is a concern anyway, if one’s luck is holding across the street.

This piece originally appeared in somewhat different form in the September/October 2010 issue of Troon Golf & Travel. The current issue can be viewed here.

My greatest wish, I thought, was that someday I might get a chance to play golf with President Barack Obama, the golf nut. Now I realize that what I’d really like to do is have a beer with President Barack Obama, the beer geek.

Okay, technically, I suppose what I’d really like to do is play golf with the President and then have a beer with the guy. But if only one of these dreams could come true, I’d happily settle for lifting a pint with the man who has to be one of our greatest beer-drinking Presidents.

I’m not talking quantity here. I’m talking panache, a man who likes a good beer and isn’t ashamed to show it. I’ve written about this before (most recently here), but the President reaffirmed the fact today with a triumphal visit to Ireland. He included a stop at Moneygall, home of his great great great grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, and where he lifted a pint of Guinness with (among many others) Henry Healy, his eighth cousin.

Now, I recommended that the President do this as long ago as February 2010 (see My Breakfast With the President), and it pleases me to see that he’s taking close note of my counsel.

I guess he couldn’t work out a golf game in Ireland, or even spend a night there; he had scheduled a stay in Dublin, but Iceland’s spewing volcano scuttled that plan. Barack did run into Padraig Harrington however, waiting backstage after the President’s speech to a crowd of about 25,000 in Dublin.

During the speech, the President said, “I’m Barack Obama, from the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.”

President O’Bama met with Irish President Mary McAleese in Dublin, and like President John F. Kennedy before him, planted a tree in a garden at the rear of the presidential home.

More impressively, back in the Ollie Hayes pub in Moneygall, Obama had downed his pint of Guinness in four gulps. (Take that, Tim Pawlenty!) An AP report quoted government clerical worker Christy O’Sullivan as marveling at the feat: “”The president actually killed his pint! He gets my vote. He’s the first president I’ve actually seen drink the black stuff like he’s not ashamed of something.”

Indeed, the President waited for the pour to settle, as did the First Lady, who downed a half-pint, and later moved behind the bar to try her hand at pulling a few pints. No word on whether she added the shamrock flourish or not. (If it came to it, I’d happily settle for having a beer with Michelle. Just for the record.)

There are only about 300 souls populating Moneygall, but there’s a good chance Obama shook hands or hugged every one of them. Only about 35 to 40 made it into the pub, but spirits were clearly high as the lifting of the pint moment arrived.

According to the always entertaining Obama Foodorama, the Beer Drinker-in-Chief also laid some money on the bar and said, “I just want you to know the President pays his bar tab.”

Another good reason for drinking with him!

Rolling one amidst the rolling hills - Brattleboro Country Club seventh hole

The golf season may be off to a soggy start in southern Vermont, but at least the figurative sun shines brightly on those doing good work while swinging the sticks. If we’ve counted correctly, there are ten charity tournaments unfolding at the Brattleboro Country Club this season. If anyone plays in them all we’d like to hear about it for sainthood nomination (or golf addiction treatment). But even teeing it up in one gives you solid karmic credentials, so all the opportunities are listed, with some contact information.

We won’t repeat the details of each tournament, since most follow a familiar format–shotgun starts, best ball scrambles, hole-in-one prizes, team prizes, closest to the pin and long drives prizes, with extra putting games, other challenges to ante up for, mulligans to buy, as well as a variety of door and raffle prizes and/or auction items announced during the post-round banquet.

Calendars out? It all starts Friday, May 20. The Twelfth Annual The Gathering Place Golf Tournament is a personal favorite, since I’m the chair. That my wife is the executive director of The Gathering Place has nothing to do with that, of course.

We veer from the routine in playing a Texas scramble with Stableford scoring, making the play a little closer to real golf than a straight scramble, but still friendly enough for the occasional golfer. Walkups are welcomed. Registration begins at 11 a.m. ($100 per player), the shotgun start is at noon and, as usual, all proceeds directly benefit The Gathering Place adult day program in Brattleboro.

After the TGP tilt a full slate of worthy tournaments follows at the BCC. Here’s the pertinent information:

On Wednesday, June 1, the First Annual Relay for Life Golf Tournament will begin registration at 11 a.m., the shotgun start at noon. The fee is $99 per player, all proceeds going to the Windham County Relay for Life. A putting contest is dangling two roundtrip tickets anywhere in the U.S. on Jet Blue. Register online at www.relayforlife.org/windhamvt, or contact Dana Zelenakas, 257-4469.

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The Bob Royce Open Golf Tournament is sponsored by the Bellows Falls Polish American Club, with proceeds to benefit the Bellows Falls Union High School and the Fall Mountain Regional High School. Tee off time is 8:30 a.m. on Saturday, June 4, with a donation of $75 per player.

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The 36^thAnnual Brattleboro Rotary Charity Golf Tournament is Thursday, June 10, registration at 11 a.m., shotgun start at noon, proceeds going toward the West River Park project on Route 30. The fee is $125, $460 for a foursome. More information online at BrattleboroRotaryClub.org, or call Cathy Coonan at 251-3782.

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The Corbeil Classic, to benefit the Jimmy Fund, is Wednesday, June 22, but by invitation only. It’s already sold out, although hole sponsors are always welcomed, and dinner attendees (for $25) can join in on what Kellie Corbeil calls, “A tremendously large raffle.” Contact her for more information at 380-6137.

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They’ll start serving the coffee and donuts at 7 a.m. this year for The Chesterfield Lions Club Annual Tournament on Tuesday, July 12. The $100 per player fee remains the same ($500 for those who sponsor a team and a hole), the funds going toward the Lions scholarships, the Chesterfield School Foundation and other community uses. The shotgun start is 8:30 a.m. Call John Schlichting (603-363-4759) or Maryann Lauterbach (603-363-8872) to sign up.

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Last year was the silver anniversary of The Youth Services Annual Golf Tournament, and they’re rolling right along again on Wednesday, July 27, with lunch at noon and the shotgun start at 1 p.m. Fees are again $120 per player or $480 per foursome. You can register online at youthservicesinc.org or call 257-0361.

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The club’s Ladies Invitational is on July 30, an 8:30 a.m. shotgun start with proceeds going toward the Comprehensive Breast Care Program at BMH, and the Forest Moon support group. Contact Jill Zachary for more information, 722-9622.

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Registration begins at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, August 3 for the Sixth Annual Retreat Golf Tournament to Benefit Children’s Therapeutic Services. The shotgun start is at noon. The fee is $130 per golfer. For more information or to register call 258-4313, or email: golf@brattlebororetreat.org.

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The Second Annual Boy Scout Golf Tournament will begin registrations at 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, September 7 with the shotgun start at 10:30 a.m. The fee is $125 per player with proceeds to benefit the Green Mountain Council BSA. For information or to register call Deirdre Baker (579-5922) or Art Magnaghi (380-3338).

While maybe not quite as gruesome as the company’s 55% ABV The End of History, surely the first confluence of beer and taxidermy, Royal Virility Performance is surely the first professional blending of beer and Viagra. (Amateurs have been doing it ad hoc for quite some time now.)

The news began gushing forth yesterday from the BrewDog blog, announcing a limited edition of 1,000 bottles of the beer to be made available only on the company website, going for £10 per bottle, on April 28, the day before the much-ballyhooed wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

One complimentary bottle was sent off to Prince William; according to BrewDog partner James Watt, “We put a bottle in a jiffy bag marked ‘Prince Willy, Buckingham Palace.’ We sent it by Royal Mail as we presume they are most likely to know where he lives. As the bottle says, this is about consummation, not commemoration, so we hope he gets it.”

Whether Watt really meant the bottle or the joke is, well, hard to say. The label says the 7.5% ABV India Pale Ale is brewed with such well-known aphrodisiacs as Viagra, chocolate, Horny Goat Weed and ‘a healthy dose of sarcasm.’ The suspicion is that the dose of sarcasm has been substituted for the Viagra (which is not, strictly speaking, an aphrodisiac), and that the blogsite photo of the little blue pill being added to a brewing vessel is more artifice than evidence. No confirmation along these lines has yet been, uh, nailed.

Maybe it’s really in there, a tankard of tumescence. We can think of about 1,000 lawsuits that would come raining down on the brewery from every direction if such a brewing attempt were made in the U.S.A. Squadrons of lawyers streaming forth from the Feds and Pfizer would be just the beginning. Once consumers got their fists around a few of these 330ml bottles one can only imagine the creative clamor for damages that would, um, arise.

The brewers may have covered their tracks somewhat by offering 20% of all profits to Centrepoint, a U.K. charity for homeless youth that the late Diana, Princess of Wales served as patron; her son, Prince William, became the patron in 2005.

The dose of sarcasm also extends to the many commemorative brews that are being produced in the onrush of the wedding, brews variously named I Will, Windsor Knot, Something Blue, Kiss Me Kate, Better Half. So why not Arise Prince Willy, as the RVP is nicknamed?

In go the little blue pills....

According to the blogsite: “With this beer we want to take the wheels off the royal wedding bandwagon being jumped on by dozens of breweries; The Royal Virility Performance is the perfect antidote to all the hype. A beer should be brewed with a purpose, not just because some toffs are getting married, so we created something at our brewery that will undermine those special edition beers and other assorted seaside tat, whilst at the same time actually give the happy couple something extra on their big day.”

Beer has itself sometimes been called an aphrodisiac, although Shakespeare wisely noted in “Macbeth” that drink “provokes the desire but it takes away the performance.” These cheeky brewers may have put a spike in the old saying, while provoking a different kind of Scottish play altogether.

Since business appeared to be trending away from dueling in 1928, the master samurai sword craftsmen of Himeji, Japan, began making the country’s first golf irons. One craftsman in particular, Katsuhiro Miura, went on quietly producing expert clubs for 48 years, often for pros winning major worldwide tournaments.

Katsuhiro Miura

But there was a certain code of silence in effect about the Miura clubs, since the sticks in the hands of the pros bore other name brands, under a variety of confidentiality agreements and endorsement conflicts.

But the word began going out about five years, and Miura Golf now has an elegant line of quite public equipment, ready for custom-fitting. Among the offerings are the CB-301 forged irons, a progressive cavity back set offering a controlled, soft feel. These are precision instruments, made for the committed, which is one reason they carry a hefty price tag. Nine irons, 3-PW and P/S run about $225 per iron, with the Dynamic Gold or KBS Steel shaft options.

Using the same forging process and craftsmanship that makes the iron sets works of art as well as play, Miura also addresses the question of what happens once a player reaches the target.

Two toe-weighed offset putters, the Series 1957, have milled faces and oiled chrome finishes. The MP 005 model is a classic that might look as good mounted on a wall as it does emerging from one’s golf bag. It comes in two weights, 350 or 370 grams, running about $390.