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.

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.

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.

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?

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.]

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.

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?

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.

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….

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.

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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).

CHICAGO, IL, April 1–Hot on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s action in striking down the city’s ban on handguns, the Chicago Golf Club has announced that it will supply its course rangers with revolvers in an effort to speed up play. Established by legendary architect Charles Blair Macdonald as the nation’s oldest eighteen-hole course in 1893 (though redesigned by Macdonald disciple Seth Raynor in 1923), the Wheaton course has recently been plagued by long waits for those stuck behind some of the older members.

“We feel we’ve always been on the cutting edge,” said Frieda Stones, club manager. “After all, we admitted our first African-American member in 1993, and our first full female member in 2001, so we like to think we look forward as well as back.”

Charles Blair Macdonald

But referring to the club’s traditions, Mrs. Stones observed, “Charles Blair Macdonald was of an age when rounds were speedy affairs, and caddy flogging was still in vogue. We think he would have been appalled at the lethargic pace some of our members have adopted out on the course, and would applaud our proactive solution.”

While the exact firearms policy is still to be worked out, Stones assured members that rangers will not be encouraged to shoot to kill, at least at first. “We expect that firing a few divot-raising rounds at players’ feet should get the message across.”

# # #

GOLF JOURNALIST SHUNNED BY COLLEAGUES AFTER ACTUALLY PAYING FOR ROUND

WESTFIELD, MA, April 1–Daniel Carter, a freelance golf journalist who plunked down a mere $15 to play an early season round at the East Mountain Country Club in Massachusetts, is discovering just how costly that round has become.

“I’ve basically been shunned by all my golf writing ‘friends’ for going against the code and paying for a round of golf,” said Carter.

Syrus Cophant, membership director for the Golf Writers Association of America, said, “I just don’t know what Danny was thinking when he put his hand in his pocket. True, it may be an unspoken rule, but actually laying money on the counter for a round of golf is a pretty serious breech of protocol.”

Carter, a member of the GWAA, the Met Golf Writers Association and the International Network of Golf, says he’s playing solo these days: “Every time I call someone to try and arrange a round they all say the same thing: ‘Sorry, our threesome is full.’”

While no official records are kept, one ING official who asked to remain anonymous said he thought Carter’s transaction was the first time a golf journalist had paid for a round in 27 years.

# # #

Here at The A Position we’re given a topic to address (or not) each month for The A List feature, and last year around this time–same day, actually–some truth stretchers were called for. Click here to see what my colleagues came up with, or here to check this year’s version.

I didn’t do one for 2011, as I was in Washington consulting with President Obama, discussing possible ways to provoke legislation outlawing cart path only golf courses, while drinking all the homebrew he’s been making lately.

The Kauai Lagoons thirteenth, but soon to be the Kiele Moana fifth

And you’re asking why I promptly dump the shot into the Pacific? Could it be the thought of having to borrow underwear from my fellow travelers, since my luggage will only arrive at the airport the day I depart? Might as well ask why I want to go back and take that shot over!

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Here at The A Position we’re given a topic to address (or not) each month for “The A List” feature in about 150 words, and this month we were asked to write about “Our Worst Golf-Travel Experiences.”

The context was important to note–that as golf writers, we’re basically spoiled rotten, traveling to the world’s greatest golf destinations on someone else’s dime, suffering through great meals, spa treatments and golf on top of golf. Who are we to complain? As a species, golf writers are rarely showered with sympathy. But as my comrades point out here, sometimes it was the trips that were rotten, if not out and out dangerous.

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The Prince Course

In the face of machete-wielding thugs, my grievance was downright mild, and directed at no one but fate–and the airlines, of course. It wasn’t my first or last missed connection, nor the only time my luggage and clubs went astray. So far in my golf-traveling life, knock wood, both have always arrived–eventually.

A trip I once took to Mexico was more costly, since while I was eating dinner alfresco in Playa del Carmen my camera was stolen right off the chair I’d looped it over, and presumably by a cadre of seemingly charming youngsters who had stopped by to serenade us as we ate. Some serenaded us; others made off with the goods.

And luckily, I’ve never been sick abroad, although I once returned home from Scotland, of all places, with a nasty stomach virus. (Could it really have been the Lanark Blue Cheese?)

I still have a pair of loaner underpants from one of my generous golf-writing buddies on that Kauai trip, a sort of wry souvenir. He’s never asked me to return them for some reason.

I’ve been back to Hawaii since, and all went swimmingly. But I’ve never returned to Kauai. I’d like to, since other than my ongoing discomfort on the trip, it was splendid in every way, particularly the golf way. Among golf courses in hawaii, there can be no greater collection than on Kauai–Poipu Bay, Puakea, Makai at the St. Regis Princeville Resort, to name a few, and the Prince Course, a Robert Trent Jones II golfing profundity that is currently closed for renovations until October.

Poipu Bay

Kauai Lagoons has been getting a work-over too, from the Golden Bear himself. When Nicklaus completes phase one of the major course renovation now going on in May of this year, the iconic thirteenth hole mentioned above will become the fifth hole of the renamed Kiele Moana course.

What I could do there with my own clubs, in my own clean underwear!

I once played in a hickory club tournament, carting about seven clubs around in the bag. But those antique sticks were tough to hit, and I basically wound up playing the entire round with three clubs, ultimately faring not much worse than with my regular weapons of crass destruction.

Players are legitimately allowed to use 14 clubs per round these days, but I’ve often wondered whether we really need them all. It sounded like a project for the MOTO Research Team (the usual foursome, formed from the meat of the order of our softball team: David Cotton, Prentiss Smith, Jerry Carbone and me).

The MOTO Research Team, maintaining its anonymity as always. No idea who the fifth guy is.

We headed out to the Wintonbury Hills Golf Course in Bloomfield, Connecticut for 36 holes. The first 18 would be with all our sticks, the second 18 with but three clubs, those three left to the player’s discretion. We’d see what we would see.

The ninth hole green complex at Wintonbury Hills

We saw a lot of the fine Pete Dye design near Hartford, and that was a no-lose proposition. But it was a busy late fall day, and there was some question as to whether we’d make it through both rounds before darkness. We played as briskly as we could, and since we’re all in the range of the mid-handicapped, we all shot our more or less typical mid-handicapped scores.

What was different about the round was all the strategizing we did for the one to follow. Should one of the three clubs be a putter, or not? Forego a sand wedge, and then pray not to land in one of more than a hundred bunkers on the course?

What is the sound of the Zen putter putting?

I decided fairly early on to take my putter. I was the only one who did. Jerry was the only one to take his driver. Prentiss decided he would take his three wood and use it to putt, after he experimented with it in the opening round and actually pared the fourteenth hole with four strokes of the three wood–for all I know, some kind of world record.

After a speedy lunch break we stashed our unchosen clubs in the car trunk to avoid temptation and went back out to the first hole with this lineup: David (three wood, five and seven irons), Prentiss (three wood, seven and nine irons), Jerry (driver, seven and nine irons), me (five wood, eight iron, putter).

To cut to the chase, the results were mixed, and a bit hampered by the encroaching gloaming. By the eighteenth it was so dark we didn’t think we’d be able to find our tee shots. Indeed, we could barely see the ball on the tee. I hit a poor shot that scudded forward and hit the curb of the cart path and then clearly ricocheted–somewhere. There was no point in even looking for it.

We muttered about whether we should just drive on in or try to find the other tee shots. Jerry was still standing on the tee when my ball, which had apparently gone briefly into orbit and then into reentry, came down afire. The ball must have gone as high vertically as some of my drives achieved horizontally. So impressive was its hang time that Jerry wasn’t even sure what had almost brained him, until we confirmed it was indeed my ball, and then we all pretty much lost it.

Put us all down for a double on the last, and we get these results—Prentiss was six strokes higher with three clubs, I was five strokes higher, Jerry two strokes higher, and David–nine strokes lower!

The cold analysis actually suggested no significant data. David had had a particularly poor first eighteen, so kicking the ball around might have been an improvement. I was one stroke better with three clubs after nine, and Jerry two strokes; the last nine falloff could have been attributed to fatigue and the gathering dark.

Prentiss suggested not having a putter made the difference for him, but he did improve on his world record by using his three wood for five consecutive shots to par the eighth hole. Jerry was concurrently double-bogeying the eighth, using his driver for all seven shots!

It was such anomalies that kept us laughing and scratching. We were in carts, so when dropping partners off with all three clubs in their hands, it was hard to resist saying, “Got what you need?” Or when Jerry sunk a putt with the big dog: “Nice drive.”

Wintonbury Hills scorecard

We may have learned something about being more creative with shots, or that there’s not much point in slowing play down with agonizingly deliberate club selection when one will do about as well as another.

Or it may be that we just helped breathe life into golf clichés, as when I notched my first par on the sixth hole with a regulation five wood, eight iron, two putts, and someone said, “Play Wintonbury Hills: You’ll use every club in your bag.”

Conclusion: A definite need for further testing.

Dustin Johnson (Photo by Andy Lyon/Getty Images)

So now we know that Rickie Fowler will win a major this year, along with Dustin Johnson and Nick Watney. And in the non-golf world, one of our scribes went way out on a limb to predict that the Phillies will win the World Series.  Click here for the full list of fearless predictions.

I went with a fairly standard guess based on scientific research and anecdotal experience out on the course.

***

Though the number of golfers and golf rounds will remain static, or even slightly decline, the golf industry will remain the nation’s leader in measurable obscenity, again surpassing the perennial runner-up, the U.S. penal system.

The Institute of Lingua Franca, which created the rating in recognition of the worldwide use of dirty talk, gave a round of golf a soaring 92.5 MO rating in 2010, which easily surpassed the 82.7 MO of a normal day in the life of an incarcerated felon.

This was no surprise considering that some golfers score a perfect 100% rating–an obscenity uttered after every single shot in a five-hour round.  (There was no way to calibrate those who swear more than once–or more or less continuously–after a single shot.)

The Institute characterizes an obscenity as any word still frowned upon in normal human intercourse, recognizing that such words can now be counted on one #@!ing hand.

The kids run Burrita into the players’ golf balls, are heard to be laughing hysterically, until Player A says, “Very funny–I’ll show you how funny it is,” and takes a swing with his putter, smashing Burrita on the screws, so to speak, splintering it into pieces.  At this point one of the kids come running out in outrage while the other keeps filming the whole episode, which gets even funnier as Player B takes off after the perpetrators with putter a-swinging.

The commentary out on the Interwebs has been pretty hilarious, too, and lively with profanity–and be forewarned there’s some salty language on the video, too.

While some of the discussion ranges around the nature of the video itself–is it real? is it staged? (and for my money it looks pretty real)–the rest is devoted to the question of Justice: Did Burrita get what it deserved? Most viewers are hanging judges, and express the regret that Player B didn’t catch up to the kids and deposit his putter where the sun don’t shine. Whether this means most of the viewers are golfers or not is undetermined.

I also have no information about where or when this took place, what hole the players were on and whether they were lining up putts for birdie or triple bogey. I can say that Player A’s swing looks pretty smooth as he annihilates Burrita, while it is still moving.

More to the point, naturally, is what should the players do once they return to the green? Here we’re on pretty solid ground. Though one ball is moved by Burrita, and shoved into the other ball, also moving it, both Burrita and the first ball can be considered outside agencies.  According to current USGA Rules of Golf, Rule 18, Ball at Rest Moved, sums it up nicely:

18-1. By Outside Agency

If a ball at rest is moved by an outside agency, there is no penalty and the ball must be replaced.

So other than cleaning up various Burrita debris on the green, catching one’s breath from chasing down far younger miscreants, waiting until one’s blood pressure retreats from explosive levels, Player A and Player B are free to pick up their game right where they left it.

I wish I could see some video of the rest of that round, too.  How many holes, I wonder, did it take for our beleaguered players to stop muttering and cursing those young whippersnappers–if anyone actually uses the word “whippersnappers” anymore–and what shape was their story in by the time they reached the pro shop and grill room bar?

We’re certainly open for comment on this one.  If anyone knows any of the five W’s and an H  (who, what, where, when, why and how?), please let us know and we’ll pass it on.

Meanwhile, don’t mess with us players of a certain age.

To wit: The entry for July 19 asks the trivia question: Who is the only pitcher with 100 or more career shutouts? After guessing wrong with Cy Young, I went into the record books, to discover what is really an astonishing record, and one that will certainly never be broken until the day cyborgs begin pitching—the Big Train, Walter Johnson, threw 110 shutouts.

His nearest competitor, Grover Alexander, had 90. Only 20 pitchers all-time have 50 or more, the more recent being Nolan Ryan and Tom Seaver (61), and Don Sutton (58). The most recent active player, Randy Johnson, “only” had 37.

The leaders of current active players? Roy Halladay of the Phillies with 18 and Chris Carpenter of the Cardinals with 13.

The way the game is played today, pitchers will be lucky to have 110 complete games in their careers. Actually, Randy Johnson had exactly 100. (And for a likely Hall of Famer with 303 career wins, had only three 20-win seasons.) Halladay is the current leader with 56. Johnson had 531. Young, 749.

Which suggest a new trivia question to complement the one we often trotted out to writers at the beginning of golf fam trips, letting them stew it over for a few days before spilling the beans. That one was: What ten players with four or fewer letters as a last name, hit at least 40 homeruns in a season? Actually, there are now 14 such players.

Even more impossible is this one: There are seven pitchers with five or fewer letters in their last names with 50 or more career shutouts. Who are they? Well, you already have Ryan, and you could probably guess Cy Young (76) and Warren Spahn (63). But it could be tough coming up with the other four without resource to references. But go ahead, I’ll give you a few days.

Walter Johnson in 1924 (Library of Congress)

Meanwhile, I’ve just put up a whopper of a piece about Phil right here.  And for more great stories on Augusta and the Masters by TheAPosition.com writers, click here.

The shot heard round the world yesterday was Phil Mickelson’s second on the thirteen hole at Augusta National. Mickelson stuck his six iron to within eagle range, off the pine straw, through two pines trees, over Rae’s Creek and safely onto the green about 197 yards away. That he missed the putt didn’t tarnish the brilliance of the shot. He was clearly in the driver’s seat, driving in the zone, and at that point the outcome seemed inevitable, even though sterling play was creating roars all about him.

Winning the Masters yesterday puts Mickelson into some rarified company–now only Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Arnold Palmer have won more than Mickelson’s three green jackets. He has four major titles (including the 2005 PGA Championship), and his 39 PGA Tour wins put him 12^th on the all-time win list.

He’s enormously popular with many golf fans, who appreciate that he seems to appreciate them. But others not only can’t warm up to Phil, but seem to take an active dislike to him. I can’t quite understand this, though the suggestion is that there’s something phony about him, including his agreeableness. Others detractors say he’s just too full of himself, and he’s even taken some hits in the past from his fellow pros, albeit usually anonymously. (Although earlier this year, there was the grooves dustup with Scott McCarron.)

Others criticize his play, suggesting that his gambles don’t pay off enough, although the numbers would seem to belie that. Even Mickelson called himself an idiot when his double bogey at Winged Foot on the last hole of the 2006 U.S. Open cost him the tournament.

But don’t look for him to change his style of play any time soon. In his press conference after the Masters win yesterday Mickelson said, “A great shot is when you pull it off. A smart shot is when you don’t have the guts to try it.”

Phil at the Green Jacket ceremony (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)

I don’t claim to know Mickelson. My sole interaction with him was one interview of about two hours length early in 2004, when he still had yet to win a major, a burden he was dragging around like Marley’s chains, which may have suggested the ghostly figure I inserted into the piece. As far as the interview went, the lack of majors was more an elephant in the room, and a question I couldn’t avoid asking.

To his credit, Mickelson didn’t dodge it. And overall he struck me as frank, friendly, generous and genuine. If he was wearing a mask, I sure couldn’t detect it. I guess that’s when I became a Phil fan, confirmed yesterday as I was pulling for him.

So I decided to drag this piece out of the vaults just for a little perspective, and also because at the time it seemed prescient. Just after it appeared as the cover story of the Spring 2004 issue of American Airline’s Celebrated Living magazine, Mickelson won his first major title, the 2004 Masters. I present it here more or less in its original form:

O LUCKY MAN

Spring, 2004

The Lodge at Torrey Pines

The view from my room at the Lodge at Torrey Pines looks directly upon the finishing hole at the Torrey Pines South Course. The PGA Tour has shown up here annually since 1968, when the tournament was the Andy Williams San Diego Open Invitational. Now it’s the Buick Invitational, a tournament Phil Mickelson won in 1993, the year after he turned pro. He won it again in 2000, and again in 2001. In 2003 he finished fourth here, his second-best tournament of the year. Well, he’s a San Diego boy, born and bred, and after years in the Phoenix area he’s living near here again in Rancho Santa Fe.

I’d met with Mickelson the day before, and he told me, “Torrey South is, honestly, the hardest golf course, day in and day, out that I’ve played. First of all, it’s so long — 7,600 yards is a long course anywhere, but at sea level it’s extremely long. A 7,600-yard course is for Denver, some place with altitude! Down here, the par-5s aren’t reachable, you have to hit mid to long irons into the par-4s, the greens are tough, it’s a grueling test of golf. And if the USGA keeps the greens firm, I think it will be one of the highest winning scores in U.S. Open history.”

Mickelson was referring to the 2008 U.S. Open, scheduled to be played on the course he has had such success on.

Surely he will already have won a major by then? I do some quick calculations: With four majors a year, that’s 17 more chances before Mickelson, now 33, plays the Open at Torrey Pines, which will conclude the day before his 38th birthday. Still young!

Harry Cooper

This particular morning, the mist rolling in from the nearby Pacific Ocean is thick, the pond in front of the 18th green barely visible. In my mind’s eye, the ghost of Harry Cooper appears. Cooper, a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, was a dominant player on the PGA Tour, winning 30 times between 1925 and 1941, ranked the fourth-best player after Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, and Horton Smith. He had a splendid career in every way. The fly in the ointment was that while he came close on several occasions, he never won one of the four majors.

“The Best Player Never To Have Won a Major” is not a PGA Tour statistic, merely a label that’s passed around from player to player like a nasty game of Hot Potato. No one wants the handle, so along with the joy of victory in David Duval’s 2001 British Open Championship, or Jim Furyk’s 2003 U.S. Open title, comes the sigh of relief as the monkey hops off one’s back and the press looks around for the next victim. British great Colin Montgomerie has perhaps dragged the burden around the longest, and with his game appearing to fade somewhat, looks like a good candidate to join Harry Cooper.

Now the reluctant nominee is Mickelson, who is, without question, one of the dominant players on the PGA Tour. He is fourth on the all-time career money list with $23,773,106. He has won 21 times. Other than Tom Watson, among active players that number is surpassed only by a certain Mr. Woods. (As soon as the two mark 15 years of membership on the tour, the 20-victory plateau will earn them lifetime exemptions, the only current Tour regulars so honored.)

There are probably 21 or more theories about why Mickelson hasn’t won a major, some charitable, some less so. Fans love Lefty’s gambling style of go-for-it play that has accounted for 17 top-10 performances in majors, although critics will point to that same quality as the foolhardy reason for his bridesmaid performances: four third-place finishes in the Masters, two seconds in the U.S. Open, a second and a third in the PGA Championship. (Only in the British Open has Mickelson failed to crack the top 10.)

But it was Cooper who said about winning, “First you’ve got to be good. But then you’ve got to be lucky.”

Phil watches Ernie Els blast off at the 2009 U.S. Open

It’s virtually inconceivable that Phil Mickelson will not win one of golf’s major tournaments. He’s too good. He’s too talented, too exciting, too competitive, too likable, and, in every other area of his life, too lucky, not to succeed in that regard as well. It may happen this April at the Masters. Or, as Cooper’s spirit can hauntingly attest, it may never happen, because golf is golf, a game Mickelson was virtually born to play.

Lefty isn’t a lefty. He bats right, throws right, signs autographs with his right hand. The only reason Philip Alfred Mickelson plays golf left-handed is that he began mirroring his father’s golf swing at the age of 18 months, and the imprinting stuck.

The family story is that by age three young Phil tried to tag along to the local public course for his dad’s weekend outing. When Phil was deemed too young, he ran away from home, sawed-off golf clubs in hand. After the aborted escape attempt, Dad did soon bring Phil out for his first round, and that was that.

Somewhere in the family archives is Phil’s first full scorecard, from age three, when at the par-3 Presidio Hills course in San Diego he shot a 144. The course became his second home.

“My parents used to drop me off there every day around eight in the morning and pick me up around six or seven that night,” Mickelson says. “I loved it, I just loved it.” He won his first trophy, for a putting contest, at five. By age seven he’d more than halved his first score at Presidio Hills. In the 1980s he began piling up the hardware for wins on the San Diego Junior circuit through high school. At Arizona State University, he won three NCAA Championships, three Nicklaus Awards as national college player of the year, and the 1990 U.S. Amateur.

Perhaps his most remarkable victory came in 1991, when he won his first PGA Tournament while still an amateur. But he didn’t turn pro immediately. “My parents ingrained in me that an education was important. And I thought the money I might make in a year and a half would be nominal over the course of a 20- to 30-year career, so I stayed in school.”

But shortly after his 1992 graduation with a degree in psychology, he made it official. He made seven out of 10 cuts, won $171,714, and met the love of his life, Amy McBride.

“We lived in the same apartment complex, and we started dating in February 1993.” It was a good month, because Mickelson also won his first tournament as a professional — the Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines. He has won at least once every year on Tour since, except for 1999 and 2003. Yet 1999 was one of his most incredible years, what with the U.S. Open and the Ryder Cup victory at Brookline, Massachusetts.

Few fans can forget the ’99 Open. There was a question whether Mickelson was even going to finish the tournament, since Amy was about to give birth to the couple’s first child, and he planned to be there, U.S. Open or no. As it turned out, Payne Stewart won by a stroke over Mickelson. As the two walked off the green, Stewart clasped Mickelson’s face and spoke to him.

Statue of Payne Stewart's reaction to winning putt at Pinehurst

“At the time, I was obviously disappointed to have not won,” Mickelson says now. “But Amy went into labor the next day, and a couple of months later when Payne Stewart perished in the plane accident, I just kind of knew that it was the way it was supposed to be. Besides, if he had missed that final putt on 18 and we had gone into a playoff, I would have been called away anyway.”

Mickelson really wouldn’t have played in the playoff?

“I wouldn’t have played. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see my first child’s birth.”

And what did Stewart say to him?

“It wasn’t about golf at all,” Mickelson says. “You know, here he just wins the U.S. Open and he’s thinking about somebody else. He said, ‘Phil, you’re going to become a father, it’s the greatest thing in the world, I’m so happy for you and Amy.’ I just thought that was very impressive.”

Mickelson doesn’t drink or smoke. But everyone’s entitled to at least one vice. Mickelson’s is making the odd wager now and again. His biggest payoff was a pre-season football pool he went into with a group that included his mother-in-law, taking down some big bucks the year the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl. “My mother-in-law and I were on the phone with each other five, six, seven times every Sunday. But then, Amy’s parents are two of my favorite people in the world. It was just a lot of fun.”

Fun is important to Mickelson. Toward the end of the 2003 season, for example, Mickelson suited up with the minor league Toledo Mud Hens, took some batting practice, and waited to see if he might be offered a short-term contract to throw a few innings in a game. It didn’t happen, but some writers pounced on him about it.

“I don’t know why,” he says. “But if you live your life worried about what other people say, you won’t have any fun. And it was fun.”

It may have been more fun than he had on Tour in 2003. He finished 38th on the money list with $1,623,137, a position many pros would have been deliriously happy with. Mickelson wasn’t: “It was my worst [full] year on Tour; my previous worst was 28th on the money list in 1994.”

Mickelson’s problem was driving accuracy. He pounded the ball, averaging 306 yards off the tee with his driver, putting him in third in that statistic. But he landed the ball in the short grass only 49 percent of the time, ranking 189 out of 190. Even for an acknowledged short-game master like Mickelson, that makes the going tough.

“I hit it plenty far, but accuracy is the key,” he says. “I tried a little alteration in my swing in hopes of improving my accuracy, but it backfired; I actually went even more offline. But in the long run it helped me learn what works for me and what doesn’t, and it gets me looking forward to 2004.”

Another thing that usually doesn’t work for Mickelson is conservative play. If there’s a gamble to take, he probably will.

An intense Arnold Palmer at the 1960 Masters (Getty)

“There are plenty of times throughout a round that I don’t hit a driver or don’t shoot at a pin,” he says. “But for the most part I enjoy trying to make birdies, playing aggressively, the challenge of trying to hit good golf shots, and being creative with different shots — trying to hit a little fade to that pin tucked behind the bunker, or a high draw to get it stopped quickly on the green. I think that’s the challenge the game presents, and that’s what makes playing golf fun to me.”

Mickelson has some strong supporters in his camp regarding his style, like another hard-charging, gambling, risk-taking kind of guy named Arnold Palmer: “Arnold has come up to me a number of times and said, ‘Don’t change the way you play.’ He’s a great guy.”

Like Palmer, Mickelson is a pilot, having flown for nine years. His goal is to teach his children to fly. “When they get to be 10 or so, I’ll start taking them up with me, have them fly in the right seat, and teach them as we go.” Mickelson isn’t certified for the type of jets he takes to tournaments because his entourage is too big — the whole family travels together. “Sure, it gets a little hectic, flying twice a week 25 times a year. But the effort Amy and I put into keeping our family together is well worth it because we’re able to spend that time together.”

Phil and Amy

Mickelson and Amy, a few years his junior, married in 1996. With two daughters and a son (Amanda, Sophia, and Evan), planning is paramount. “We try to schedule about six months in advance, no easy trick trying to work a Tour schedule around doctors’ appointments for the kids and the like,” he says. “Amanda will be starting school pretty soon; I’m not quite sure what we’re going to do about that.”

Family strategy is one thing. Playing strategy is still aimed squarely at the majors. “I’ve found that I play the best in the majors when I play the week before, so I’ll do that to get in a good competitive frame of mind, using that week to practice and prepare,” he says. “If I’ve been at home for 10 or so days and tee off in a major, I’m a little stale, a little more nervous than normally.”

Mickelson, nervous?

“Bobby Jones used to say he couldn’t eat during competitions,” Mickelson says. “He’d be so nervous he would throw up before rounds, couldn’t sleep at night, he was just always unsettled. I’m not that bad. But those nerves are all right. When you lose that feeling, you lose your edge; you’re not mentally into it.”

Is Mickelson still into it?

“Absolutely,” he says. “I love it. I love the game even outside of the competition and the Tour. I’m going to play in a few days with my mom, sister, and dad in a little fundraiser for my brother’s golf program — Tim is the head golf coach at the University of San Diego. My sister, Tina, is a PGA class A pro, and she’ll be doing some commentary for The Golf Channel for their senior tour telecast this year. My favorite memories of playing golf as a kid are the times my dad would pick me up from school and we’d go play nine holes in the afternoon until dark.

“If I get a little tired of it, I just take some time off. And typically it only takes about seven to 10 days before I’m just itching to get out and play golf again.”

With just a little more luck, Mickelson will have one less itch to scratch. Which would have, of course, the added benefit of sending the ghost of Harry Cooper packing.

Phil lines up a putt at the 2009 U.S. Open

For more great stories on Augusta and the Masters by TheAPosition.com writers, click here.

This may have been on my mind when the invitation arrived to have breakfast with the President, not something that comes my way every day. So when the opportunity arose last May, I jumped at it.

It was also a chance to spend a night at the Fairmont Copley Plaza (right) in Boston. Stately since its opening in 1912, the Plaza still has an old-world elegance with contemporary panache.

The staff had thoughtfully anticipated my needs by stocking my room with a few Samuel Adams beers in a chilled bucket, but in any case I also wandered down to the plush Oak Bar (below left), where they still have the Engaging Martini on the menu for a mere $12,750. The drink–a mix of Finlandia vodka, dry Vermouth and ice in the form an engagement ring–is part of a romantic package that includes a stay at the hotel and an $11,000 credit at the onsite DePrisco Jewelers for a ring of one’s choice. I didn’t order one.

But I was pleased to find a small but reasonable selection of good craft beers from New England, IPAs from Smuttynose and Harpoon, and a Whale’s Tail Pale Ale from Cisco Brewers. Any one or all of these would have trumped the insipid choices recently hoisted at the White House, when President Barack Obama had his Beer Summit with Henry Louis Gates (center, below) and Sgt. James Crowley (left). (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

But I digress. I rose early the next morning and hastened down to the function room to mingle with the rest of the crowd before the President’s arrival. The hubbub soon died down as a security team led its way into the room, and Her Excellency Mary McAleese, the President of Ireland, was introduced. I’ve not been in the presence of a sitting President before, so this was fairly exciting.

The day was arranged by Tourism Ireland, in hopes that attending journalists would promote the cause, an effortless task in my case when suggesting that golf in Ireland is a desirable end. President McAleese spoke to the effort in any case, as is her task.

The office includes no executive or policy role, but the directly elected President does promise in the oath of office to, “…dedicate my abilities to the service and welfare of the people of Ireland.” That welfare took a hit in 2008, as North American tourism to Ireland, representing about a $1 billion market, declined 11 percent in the global economic downturn.

“It was a tough year, a very tough year,” said the 58-year-old McAleese at the breakfast, but then pointed out that for the second consecutive year Trip Advisor had selected Dublin as the friendliest city in the world, “and people tell us that there is a sense of an authentic welcome when visiting Ireland.”

McAleese is the eighth President of Ireland, then five years into her second and last seven-year term and, significantly, the first born in Belfast–Northern Ireland. Joe Byrne, the executive vice president for Tourism Ireland in North America, said, “We once welcomed people to south Ireland. Now it is to the entire island, an all-Ireland program. It’s been part of the peace process, and the President has played an enormous role in that regard.”

The President was in the U.S. for a variety of functions, including this year’s commencement address at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. In the past, at various golf course openings and dedications, she has cheerfully (seemingly) admitted to being a golf widow to her husband, a dentist by trade and also a Belfast native.

In June, a BBC News report suggested that Dr. Martin McAleese (at right in photo, behind his wife at a typical ribbon-cutting) has been quietly working for years behind the scenes to convince loyalists like Jackie McDonald of the UDA (Ulster Defence Association) to decommission its weapons.

Part of that work was said to have taken place during a round of golf at the K Club (site of the 2006 Ryder Cup matches), and going a long way to supporting my proposition.

On the fourth of July, the BBC also reported that the new U.S. Ambassador to Ireland, Daniel M. Rooney (left), had officially presented his “letters of credence” to President McAleese the day before, while commenting that U.S. President Obama wanted to visit Ireland, and that “he definitely would plan it” when “things settle down,” a sufficiently vague time (and perhaps an equally vague hope).

Rooney, whose family hails from Newry, County Down, is perhaps better known here as the chairman of the Pittsburgh Steelers, last year’s Super Bowl champs. But he was also one of the founders of the American-Ireland Funds.

As for Obama, he has multiple reasons to point Air Force One toward Ireland. Anyone who has heard the Corrigan Brothers song, “There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama” (or seen it performed on YouTube), knows the President’s great great great grandfather was born in the Irish village of Moneygall. So Obama would simply be coming home, where it shouldn’t be too hard to find a good ale to drink, and maybe arrange a game with Dr. McAleese–all with an eye toward peace, a desirable end.

(Courtesy of eyehook.com)

As the Tiagra Woods scandal continues to unfold, what were the odds that Valentine’s Day and the beginning of the Chinese New Year would coincide this year, unleashing the Chinese Year of the Tiger?

Well, they weren’t that good.  This is only the fourth time the two annual events have matched up on the calendar since 1900, and it’s not going to happen again for 38 years.  There are 12 creatures in the Chinese New Year rota: February 14, 1915 began the Year of the Rabbit; February 14, 1934 the Year of the Dog, and February 14, 1953 the Year of the Snake.  The Year of the Dragon begins February 14, 2048, or the Chinese year 4747.

There’s surely a way to calculate when the Year of the Tiger will again commence on February 14, but we’ll all be sleeping with kings and counselors by then, so I’m not going to try.  And I’m not going to try to make a further joke out of the situation, either, since the Tiger sex saga is already wearying.

Personally, I’ve gone from astonishment about the scope of it all, to laughing savagely at the jokes, to a cynicism about the inevitable script to unfold: the public contrition and claim of rehabilitation, the successful return to competition and the gradual refolding to the public breast.

Okay, poor word choice there, but it does point to the one unpredictable, and potentially hilarious element of The Next Phase–the gallery following Tiger around.  It surely won’t be any smaller than the former hordes he attracted, but the potential commentary is intriguing to ponder.  What happens after some joker lets loose the first bellow of the old, “Get in the hole!”?

Depends on reactions to the inevitable script, I imagine.  There will be guffaws and snickers and possible torment for Tiger as every move he makes is freighted with double entendre, or such vocal louts will be stoned to death for their insensitivity to golf’s risen Phoenix.

The inevitable script also suggests that the broadcast media will go ostrich, and treat any such razzing like a streaker at the World Series–that is, ignore it, and pretend distasteful things never happen.

I could be wrong about that one, but time, as usual, will tell.  Meanwhile, Happy Valentine’s Day, and Happy New Year for 4709, the Year of the Tiger.

[Click here to see a review of "The Swinger" and here for a piece about playing with Tiger.]