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HGP II: Following the Crumb Trail of a Golfing Life
Harold Gardner Phillips, Jr., 1936-2011

HGP II: Following the Crumb Trail of a Golfing Life

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Harold Gardner Phillips, Jr., 1936-2011

So my dad, who died almost exactly one year ago, was a pretty serious pack rat. He didn’t really save things with any kind of direction. It was more or less an involuntary urge he had (and one I happen to share). Some of us simply cannot countenance the idea of parting with something that, at one time, meant something to him or provided her lasting joy, or insight. At some point my mother threw away a pair of sweatpants my dad had worn in college. This was the source of playful recriminations for years to come. Books were something never to be discarded and while he quite avidly lent them out, he wanted them back. The man passed from this Earth with at least 40 programs on his TiVo, all of which he’d seen but for some reason felt the need to archive.

I suppose that assembling these things, even as a sort of random catalogue (and holding them over time), does indicate direction. He would run across them randomly, on his own, and enjoy the memories. His wife and children might run across them, too, and their reports or remarks would bring it all rushing back to him yet another time.

My father was the first of our immediate family core to go, and so this is the first time our little unit has dealt with one of the five being permanently absent. Accordingly, there has been an active gathering and parsing of these trinkets, these literal souvenirs he left behind. We’ve paid special attention to these things, interpreting them in the context of this fellow we all knew so intimately.

Dad was a big golfer. The U.S. Amateur concluded last week and it was just the sort of televised sporting event he would have adored (see my account here). I’ve written about the golfing life my dad enjoyed, the subtext being that I wouldn’t have much of a golfing life without exposure and direction from his.

But it was ultimately his golfing life, not mine, just as the tiny, sleek, leather-detailed lighter — the one that sat unused in his top-left bureau drawer for decades — was his memento, reminiscent of a time he apparently wished to bank and recall. And maybe the lighter and all this other stuff had been meant for me or my brother, sister or mother to remember him by. During his last year, he passed to me the Johnny Hopp model baseball bat and first-baseman’s mitt he’d owned since he was a kid. Why else would he do something like that?

Among other things, there were several shoeboxes of stuff left behind when my dad, a firm atheist, left this mortal coil. There were big, substantial things, too, things the family reverently went through, remembering him and feeling sad about it, then dividing up so we might all have a healthy supply of these bits going forward.

But the smaller stuff fit into a few shoeboxes, and one was full of scorecards and other golf paraphernalia. Some of these items I had seen but very few of the scorecards were familiar. Here and in a few posts to come is a select accounting, because in the thousands of rounds he logged over seven decades, he only saw fit it to save these dozen or so. They must have meant something to him, and it seems fitting to pore over them and try to discern that something — along with other historical tidbits from his golfing life — on the first anniversary of his death.

This shot of my dad as a young high schooler was taken some time contemporaneous with the round at Jumping Brook.

• Jumping Brook CC, Neptune, N.J., circa 1953: No date on this one. My dad seemed to date only the scores worth dating, and he shot another 84 here with a fellow named Jack Sax (which could be a shortened version of the guy’s full name; my dad refers to himself as Hal Phill; it’s definitely his writing). In 1953 my dad would have been 17 and you gotta figure he played this match as a member of the Red Bank High School golf team in the spring of 1953, before he went off to Lehigh as a freshman. I can pinpoint the date because Johnny Alberti is listed as the pro and he’s also mentioned in passing as being the pro at Jumping Brook in an October 1953 issue of Golfdom, the forebear of all golf trade journals. I edited one of its progeny, Golf Course News, in the ‘90s, and it was fascinating to read this compilation of golf news from all over the country, published as one continuous column for 20 pages! Every new pro and retired superintendent and new course rumor is granted a paragraph. At GCN, we’d have broken all this into 40 stories with their own headlines to make a new section, which probably would have gone on for 20 pages (!). The more things change… My dad was a Jersey guy. Raised on the shore in Little Silver, Long Branch and Red Bank; he and his family would ultimately make house in Montclair and Haddonfield, before moving more or less permanently to Massachusetts. My paternal grandparents were both keen golfers, members of the post-war, hyper assimilated Jewish middle class. When you’re aping WASPs, you play golf and they did honestly love it. They were members of Old Orchard Country Club, where my dad grew up playing and caddying, but they ventured out to places like Jumping Brook, Fort Monmouth and Canoe Brook. My grandfather, Poppy, was a member of Hollywood GC in nearby Deal sometime in the 1930s. He was a lefty and was, at times, a single-digit player himself, according to my dad. My Gram was a good athlete, a tennis player really but picked up golf to be more like Clare Booth Luce or maybe Martha Gellhorn. They arranged lesson for my dad with George Sullivan, the pro at Old Orchard, and off he went. He and another good player, Ronnie Choquette, actually formed the golf team at Red Bank High, if I’m not mistaken. I’m sorta hoping this was merely a casual round because poor Jack Sax shot 102. But the first three holes would seem to indicate a match underway, as there’s a +1, a +2, and +3 listed two rows below the scores. Upon examination, the card shows my dad winning the first 12 holes before halving the 13th, but it would appear he didn’t see the point in writing any of that down. I’ll do it, dad: You beat him 10 & 8.

• TPC Sawgrass, Ponte Vedra, Fla., circa 1983: I have no idea who these guys were my dad played with that day in north Florida: Emil, Pete (a 7 handicap apparently) and Dave. But I was certainly made aware of this round. “Hal” shot 82 from the blues and claimed 12 skins, though he and Dave lost the team match. My dad was playing off 12, or so says the card (this was probably some tournament connected to a convention held nearby; the scorecard is kept quite formally, in a way maybe an event administrator had requested; my dad certainly never scored in this sort of detail). This is a typical round from my dad when he was playing some pretty good, middle-aged golf. He sandbagged this a bit because he carried for years a steady 7-10 handicap at his home course, Nehoiden GC, across the street from our house in Wellesley, Mass., which was and remains a low-slope job, antique and tight, but a place you should score. But then my dad was, in a way, a true 12. He went to the TPC, site unseen, and shot 82. He could shoot 83-84 pretty much anywhere, which is a fairly rare gift… Like a lot of golfers in 1983, he was pretty gob-smacked by the golf course, Pete Dye’s breakthrough design in the flamboyant, post-modern, stadium-mounded links category. My dad was never a course-design freak, though he got into it more as I got into it more. [I presented him at one point, years later, a signed first edition of Tom Doak’s “Confidential Guide”, wherein the architect — long before he became the It Boy of Minimalist Design — lavishes praise and shits upon, by turn, a laudably wide-ranging assemblage of the courses he’s played. It’s some of the best bathroom reading ever devised, and I mean that as an unalloyed compliment. These editions are rare and sought after these days, though my dad never really grasped the import of having one. Now I’ve got his copy back. Then both burned in a 2016 barn/office fire.] The TPC Sawgrass clearly made an impression on him, and I think that (and the course’s subsequent notoriety) moved him to keep this scorecard. When my dad played a golf course that, for good or ill, either confused or radically challenged his expectations, he wasn’t always eloquent in explaining his views. He would assess it as “sorta kooky” or “a little weird”, then close the thought with a mildly exasperated cackle.

Fox Claims US Am to Remember, but Was It Ever Live?

Fox Claims US Am to Remember, but Was It Ever Live?

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Anyone who missed Steven Fox’s unlikely victory in Sunday’s 36-hole final of the U.S. Amateur Championship is the lesser for it. You won’t witness a better argument for the dramatic glories of match play and its magnificent leveling qualities. Fox should never have beaten Michael Weaver, as he ultimately did on the 37th hole at Denver’s Cherry Hills Country Club. Indeed, if it weren’t for the vagaries of tape-delayed telecasts and modern media alliances, I’d have missed it myself.

Here’s what happened: I was called away Sunday afternoon by a gaggle of visiting relatives, so I recorded (with my DVR) what I presumed to be NBC’s edited/taped presentation of the final that aired from 4-6 p.m. EST. Saturday’s NBC telecast was tape delayed and generally I’ve got real problems with networks presenting golf events on tape, as the viewer knows in advance the action has been edited to fit a specific programming period, which can in turn lead to the outcome being revealed ahead of time. For example, if it’s 5:50 p.m. EST and some dude is two up with two to play, clearly the other dude isn’t going to stage a monumental comeback, nor is the match going to extra holes — because the local news is coming on at 6 p.m., come hell or high water.

Still, I wanted to see this final. I wanted to see Cherry Hills, which I played a few years back, and I wanted to see which unheralded participant would win this match-up of 60th and 63rd seeds (!). So, late Sunday night, I settled in to watch what I presumed to be NBC’s taped coverage, which I in turn had taped.

On the 17th hole with Weaver dormie, the tape ran out. Apparently, the telecast ran over its allotted 2-hour time slot. For all the world, NBC’s coverage resembled the pre-packaged, edited version they always present on the Amateur’s final day — salted strategically, of course, with myriad feel-good features on the competitors, their families, the vaunted trophy room at Cherry Hills (site of 9 USGA championships), and Arnie’s driving the 1st green en route to a closing 65 to win the 1960 Open.

But maybe NBC had run the event live. Why else would the 4-6 p.m. time slot have been breached? … Or maybe my DVR clock was off kilter… Or maybe they switched the live telecast at 6 p.m. over to their partners at The Golf Channel? … Maybe the match had indeed ended just seconds after the tape ran out — Weaver was just a putt from claiming a 2 & 1 victory…

Mystified and slightly irked, I flipped over to The Golf Channel, where, 5 hours after the fact, surely the event was still being parsed 16 different ways. But lo and behold, what was on TGC but an encore presentation of Sunday’s NBC telecast! And here’s the really weird part: I switched it on almost precisely where my DVR’d version had cut out — on the 17th green, both guys with birdie putts, Fox’s to stay alive and Weaver’s to close out the match.

It was sort of eerie. I mean, The Golf Channel programmers surely had no idea that I had taped the NBC telecast. Even if they did, surely they wouldn’t have any idea WHEN I would watch the recording. Or would they…

In any case, a hearty round of applause for NBC’s partnership with The Golf Channel, without which I would have missed one of the most compelling finishes to an Amateur since Steve Scott took Tiger Woods to extra holes before losing in 1996.

Fox drained his birdie at 17, while Weaver missed, leading to a crazy 36th hole where Fox looked dead to rites (in the thick right rough) but somehow found the elevated green from a steep, side-hill lie. His two putts left Weaver with a 4-footer to win it all, but the Cal student authored one of the most cruel and violent lip-outs I’ve ever seen, on TV or in person.

Turns out all the syrupy flashbacks and references to Palmer driving the 1st green in 1960 had resonance, because Weaver’s decision to drive the 346-yard, 37th hole cost him the Amateur. He pulled it left, beyond the green and the 2nd tee. He fluffed his chip, then chunked another. Fox hit 6-iron off the tee, dropped his approach 15 feet above the pin, and coaxed into the cup his birdie attempt when two putts would have sufficed.

Fox had no business winning that match. His unorthodox swing, his lack of length and collegiate pedigree should have left him happy to have merely qualified for match play, much less the final. But he was dogged and nervelessly drained every putt he looked at, all day. Still, if Weaver had made that 4-footer on the 36th hole, it would not have been enough.

But it was enough. It was heartbreaking. It was thrilling. It was all highly unlikely, and eventually I got to see the best bits, plus the extraordinary denouement, via recordings of a recording, on two different TV outlets, late at night, on the couch by myself.

Mr. Cornish Covered Lots of Ground in 97 Years

Mr. Cornish Covered Lots of Ground in 97 Years

by Hal Phillips 3 Comments

We were again reminded, by the recent passing of esteemed golf course architect Geoffrey Cornish, of just how integral the act of walking is to the practice and perception of golf course design.

Mr. Cornish died at his home in Amherst, Mass. on Feb. 10, at the ripe old age of 97. Much has already been written about him, in golf circles, though maybe not so much about his work. Every day, right up until the very end of his long life, Mr. Cornish walked/hiked the nearby Lawrence Swamp. Many a tale was related this week about younger men struggling to keep up. For a guy who designed more than 200 golf courses over the course of a 70-year career, for an eminence who was known and loved by nearly everyone, it seemed an odd thing to fixate upon.

I grew up in New England and have lived here pretty much my entire adult life, so I’ve probably played close to 75 of the 200-plus courses credited to Geoffrey Cornish. Still, his design work is difficult to assess. In detailing why that is, we get a fuller picture of the man — and why he was such a beloved and unique figure.

For starters, Mr. Cornish, though Canadian born, was a frugal Yankee on a par with all too many of his clients. He was the anti-signature architect, if you will, often taking jobs with small budgets, on land of questionable golfing value, and making from this the best course he could — one that might be efficiently maintained. (He was trained as an agronomist, after all.) It should come as no surprise that few men designed more municipal tracks than Mr. Cornish (the solid Chicopee Muni in Western Mass., pictured above, is but one example).

Consider the vast number of 9-hole courses where he added new nines, or the rudimentary courses he renovated and/or formalized. I can think of several examples of real dog tracks that Mr. Cornish made whole, and wholly improved, with his renovations and 9-hole expansions. They are today understood to be “Cornish designs”. But it must be said that an architect more concerned with his signature, his reputation, might not have even taken these jobs. But Mr. Cornish could turn down no one.

By the same token, this mixing and matching of his work with that of others tends to muddy evidence of his design skill. In the late 1950s at Wahconah CC in Dalton, Mass., Mr. Cornish added nine to a spectacular original loop laid out in the 1930s by Wayne Stiles. The newer work is good but frankly pales in comparison. At Brunswick (Maine) GC, Mr. Cornish did essentially the same thing and his nine — some of his very best work — is certainly equal to that of the Stiles nine, maybe better. In neither case does there seem to have been an attempt on Mr. Cornish’s part to build upon or advance or mimic Stiles’ style from the original holes. I’m not sure what that means… Just figured I’d throw it out there.

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Pay College Golfers? Maybe on a Per-Antic Basis…
The majority of Wesleyan students during the 1980s were indifferent to sports and would've been hostile to the golf team, had they known it existed.

Pay College Golfers? Maybe on a Per-Antic Basis…

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Most Wesleyan students during the 1980s were ambivalent toward organized sports and would’ve reserved an outright hostility for the golf team, had they known it existed.

The June 2021 Supreme Court decision allowing for the paying of collegiate athletes nevertheless provided little guidance as to how those athletes should be paid. What revenue might college golfers, for example, possibly generate and ultimately demand? Future touring professionals might reasonably command/accept endorsement money from Titleist or the like, but most collegiate golf programs themselves generate no revenue at all. They are essentially loss leaders at most colleges and universities. Back in 2017, Sports Illustrated reported that the University of Oregon annually budgets around $650,000 for its men’s golf team. This might still represent some time of standard for Division I college programs, but that sum is probably jolting to anyone who participated in small-college programs, which accommodate the vast majority collegiate golfers.

It’s positively mind-blowing to those of us who competed for Division III Wesleyan University during the 1980s. This was competitive golf, but it was the stuff of van-enabled matches, mismatched shirts, and the odd overnight invitational. We got paid a couple times: per diems of $5 for lunch at the Big Boy just off I-91 in Agawam, Mass.

Still, while I would never hold up my college golf experience as an argument for or against strict amateurism, neither would I trade the experience. WesGolf was an absolute blast. What stands out today, 35 years on, aren’t the personal victories (which were sadly few) but the ridiculous personalities the game attracts and the sometimes-absurd situations tournament golf continually drops in our laps. You can’t put a price tag on this stuff. At hippy Wes, where the vast majority of students essentially scorned athletics, golf kept a very low-profile. Indeed, our fellow WesKids would have surely been appalled had they known the varsity golf team existed.

•••

Two of my teammates and I recently harkened back to those days via an email roundtable. Rich “Danny” Gibbons and John Brais each shared three Wesleyan golf seasons with me. Despite what the rest of campus didn’t know or ignored, much hilarity ensued.

John Brais: So I’m in Professor Greene’s class, which is set up to produce your Senior paper, to complete your History major. We’re at his house for dinner, about 10 of us, and we’re sitting around the table, setting up the schedule to present our papers. Two separate dates: First day, five people present and the other five choose a paper to critique. The following week, same thing but reversed. Problem for me was the second week was the first day of New England Intercollegiates at New Seabury and I present this dilemma to the professor while going over the schedule, in front of everyone. I suggest that I present and critique on the same day, first week. Professor Greene’s response: “You do know, John, that I was on a committee to cancel the golf program outright as certain students have protested that to support golf, which is obviously an elitist sport, is against the moral and ethical principals that Wesleyan represents.” I replied, If these people knew the members of the golf team, I am sure they would reconsider this opinion. Professor Greene went on to say, “It is your decision to make, if others in the group agree… By the way, congratulations for the great year on the hockey team. My son and I are huge fans.” The other students were stunned.

Rich Gibbons: Talk about worlds colliding. Golf team and the People’s Republic of Wes ethos…

JB: I seem to remember we consumed several cases of beer and an assortment of doobies that trip to New Seabury.

Hal Phillips: I seem to remember that was the case any time we traveled with the golf team. There was one epic quarters game and general piss-up inside some condo where we stayed at New Seabury. Much silliness. That was the year Teddy Galo shot 75 or something on the easy course, when all the good teams were playing the gnarly Ocean Course. So he was, like, top 5 overall after Day I. He pointedly maintained a level of sobriety that night but went out and shot something in the high 90s next day. Classic.

JB: It was 102 actually.

HP: Epic. That may be the biggest spread in the history of New England Intercollegiates.

JB: Wes golf was an absolute forum for top-notch comedy. You remember that 1st hole at New Seabury, the Ocean Course, like 590 yards dead into the wind to a green about an acre in size? Dude from Middlebury (you know that guy… blonde, blue eyes, 6’4” basketball player with no personality) is on the back of the green putting downhill, downwind to the front, about 120 feet of putt. The three of us are near the pin as he crouches down to read the putt. Now picture his golf getup. He’s got tan Haggar slacks (the kind Jack Nicklaus made popular in the ‘70s) with not a millimeter of room to spare around his waist… He crouches down and we hear this amazingly long and loud tear. He has split his paints, front near the belt buckle to back near his belt. He looks like he’s wearing one of those huggy blankets, only this one is for his legs not his arms. He plays nine holes like this and actually turns out to be a great dude.

RG: I recall the guy shredding his pants. What a cruel game. What a wealth of material. New Seabury brings to mind another, but it may have been my senior year after you graduated… I’m rolling a few on the green in preparation for the tumult that is a New Seabury round in wind/rain/cold. Pat Dudley comes out of the clubhouse, walks onto the green looking vexed. Then he’s shaking his head and muttering to himself. “Pat, what’s wrong?” He says, There’s some poor guy in the bathroom just pissing out his ass with diarrhea. I don’t know how he’s going to go 18… College golf. Nothing better. Life lessons of endurance and fortitude abound.

HP: And empathy. Pat could have been that guy. Remember when we did an overnight for the NESCAC Championships, spring of my senior year, up at Middlebury? As captain, I had located for us a killer party on campus. On the way back to the hotel, Pat projectile vomited out the passenger-side window of the Wesleyan Athletics van, into the cold Vermont night. We got him home and, next morning, revived him in time to stumble onto the 1st tee, successfully drive the ball in play, and walk down the 1st fairway — into a gathering snow squall! This was, like, March or early April, in Vermont. Poor Pat. He turned back to those of us assembled on the tee behind him with profound resignation. He and his ghost-like pallor disappeared into that freak storm like an old time baseball player into a field of corn.

JB: Incident B — some horrible condo course outside Hartford…

HP: I think that place was called Farmington Woods. Tightest course in captivity.

JB: Yes. It’s Wes, Trinity and Coast Guard and the course is short and tight with condos on BOTH sides of almost every fairway. White stakes everywhere. The guy from Coast Guard is tall, thin and rigid in both swing and personality. I’m telling you, he had one way to play every hole: aim dead left off the tee and hope the first half of the trajectory cleared the trees. If this occurred the ball would slice back into play and land on the right side of the fairway. He was not a good player — but he was even par going into the 9th!! I swear it was a miracle round and he was actually loosening up and we were having a good time. Now, why am I telling you this: Well, we all know the golf gods are sometimes with us and sometimes against us, usually within reasonable degrees. The golf gods were not going to be reasonable for this poor sucker, not this day. The way they set this poor bastard up for the fall made me rethink my own faith. Like I said, he’s going into nine even par… the round of his life… and that 80-yard slice is working like a charm. So he gets to the 9th tee, aims dead left, straight at one of those condos — and hits the condo. No slice. Out of bounds, so he re-tees. No slice. Hits the roof. He re-tees, no slice — puts it in the backyard. He re-tees, no slice, hits the house again. Finally he takes out a 5 iron, finishes the hole and cards a 15. Poor bastard.

HP: What about the Isao Aoki incident?

RG: Lyman Meadows GC, circa 1985. My putting is a disaster at the time. Eager to try ANYTHING to shake me out of my rut, I adopt an unconventional address/stroke that seemed to be getting some traction on the practice green. Brais and I are playing an afternoon practice round with, I think, Teddy [Galo]. My Aoki set up with the hands-low, putter-heel-down has been working well for six or seven holes, allowing me to sink several over 20 feet. Finally, Brais can’t take it anymore. I roll in a 17-footer and you’re standing on the apron shaking your head, incredulous, yet also disgusted: “Look at him. He looks ridiculous… but he’s FUCKIN’ DRAININ’ THEM!!!” Delivered in your Chowderhead accent of course, which made it.

JB: Gotta shed light on the Little Three foursome.

HP: This is the year we did three-way match play against Williams and Amherst?

JB: Yeah. Me and Matty Shatz, alternate shot. We have no business being in this match but I swear every time I hit a putt, the ball drops in. The other guys are pissed, as we are one up with two to play (9-hole format) after I hit a seeing-eye 30-footer on 7. It was ridiculous. Matty steps up on the 8th tee, 160-yard par 3. He makes his swing but unfortunately that swing just did not hold up. His left side collapsed like an overcooked noodle and he shanked it dead right, 50 feet into the woods. The ball MAY have gotten two feet off the ground. I remember just trying to comprehend the simple physics of that shot. I think I came to the conclusion that only Matty and a jai alai player could produce that one.

So I get into the woods and find the ball. I’d say 110 yards through bushes, trees, you know, the works. I figure we got nothing to lose and just whack a half 5-iron. It clears everything: hits a mound, launches over a bunker and miraculously bends up 40 feet from the pin, on the apron. Marty stands over the putt and rolls it down the hill — and it lips out. He almost made the putt! I tap in which means we go to the last hole all square. Poor Matt is shaking like a leaf. He steps over the ball in the fairway and all five of us literally cover our eyes and, unfortunately, that swing just doesn’t hold up…

HP: Danny, perhaps now’s the time for you to share with us the “Brutalization of Matty Shatz” story.

RG: Circa 1986, Herb was coming down the passenger side of that huge white van. It was parked close to another vehicle, creating a tight alley. He was trying to get by Matty. In what was likely just Herb clowning around, but taken by Marty as an act of overt derision by the coach, Herb shoved him against the sheet metal of the van and walked past while muttering something. Marty was stammering and stupefied, repeating to anyone who would listen in high falsetto, “Did you see that???!?!! He just shoved me. HERB SHOVED ME INTO THE VAN!!” If you’d told me that day Marty was Woody Allen’s nephew, I would have bought it. Piss-your-pants funny.

HP: We haven’t talked much about Herb Kenny, our coach. He was the basketball coach at Wes, too, and a good one. Was an assistant on the 1972 Olympic team, or something like that. Golf was just a lark for him, another way to snag a stipend. I wouldn’t call him fun-loving. But he wasn’t a grouch either. Danny, tell the good people how Herb screened incoming freshmen to determine whether they had the right stuff to play golf for Wesleyan.

RG: “You got shoes? You got clubs? Alright then…”

JB: That’s pretty much all it took.

HP: I will say this about Herb — in my last match as a collegiate, he trotted me out at no. 1 against some dude from Williams, who was New England Champion, all divisions, and some other stud from Amherst. It was three-way match play and I had been playing no. 3 or 4 that year. He tried to pass it off as an honor to play no. 1, as it was my last match as a collegiate, my last match as captain, etc. I was like, “Fuck that, Herb. You’re sacrificing me.” He just smiled and sent me off. The miracle was, I halved the guy from Williams. When I reported in after the round, he seemed genuinely happy and impressed. “Let me buy you a beer,” and he did.

RG: I recall one spring afternoon, Herb engaging in some “coaching”… We were mustered on the practice green and he called us over, intoning:

“If you’re having trouble with your 7-iron, get out there on the range and practice your 7-iron.”

“If you’re having trouble with your 6-iron, get out there on the range and practice your 6-iron.”

“If you’re having trouble with your 5-iron, get out there on the range and practice your 5-iron.”

“If you’re having trouble with your 4-iron, get out there on the range and practice your 4-iron…”

I looked around desperately to lock eyes with someone. Anyone. I was stunned.

I was this close to asking, “Herb, are you going to go through the whole bag?!”

Golf still shoulders ambivalence toward all things bourgeois

Golf still shoulders ambivalence toward all things bourgeois

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Golf simply cannot shake its reputation as a sport for rich, white guys in bad pants, not even where the game has spread its seeds, i.e. halfway around the world from the preppy, bourgeois, American suburbs where those pants were worn and that reputation was formed.

In Vietnam, one government bigwig, citing the growing number of his minions who’ve taken up the game, has forbade all those in his ministry from taking part. According to the Saigon Times, “Minister of Transport Dinh La Thang has banned senior leaders, chairmen and directors of companies under his ministry from playing, organizing or attending any golf event… According to Minister Thang, some leaders working in organizations under his ministry were not focused on their work and duties which was affecting the progress of several projects. One of the reasons for this heedless neglect of their duties was that officials had adopted the time consuming sport of golf.”

Naturally this tidbit was lapped up by news outlets far and wide, once again proving golf to be a convenient whipping boy — for environmentalists, media, even one-time communists — mainly because its devotees are presumed to be plutocrats with nothing better to do. It’s always been an easy target. I’m surprised Augusta National has not yet been occupied.

The minister is correct that 18 holes can easily occupy 5 hours of your day, and zealots have been known to think of little else. But does anyone think SCUBA diving and skiing require any less money or time? I don’t see them being singled out in this way. Is it the fault of golfers that one cannot conduct business 15 meters below the ocean surface, or in the 10 minutes you might be sharing a chair lift?

The big difference between golf and other cost-exclusive, time-sucking recreational pursuits actually dovetails with a striking irony. Governments like those in China and Vietnam, which spent decades railing against the evils of bourgeois capitalism, still aren’t comfortable with golf and its trappings.  However, golf development is growing all across Asia, in China and Vietnam especially, and where courses are built, jobs and tourists and native golfers follow.

In China, there is an official moratorium on course development, though hundreds of courses continue to be built on the sly, with local government support (because local pols are the guys who provide developers the land, for a price).

Time Out magazine recently detailed the politics of golf development in Vietnam, quoting yours truly in the process. The government in Hanoi has never banned course development, but neither had it ever publicly backed it — not until 2010, when Decision 1946 issued guidelines on how and where all VN courses were to be built going forward. The Decision also capped at 89 the number of courses to be completed by 2020. The government has since increased that number.

But the VN government can and should do more — to promote Vietnam as the burgeoning golf destination it is. Golf attracts tourist revenue, and the Vietnamese clearly love the game, especially those in the Ministry of Transport. This show ban will surely be lifted or simply peter out. Thereafter, let’s keep it to the weekend hours, shall we boys? We don’t want to go spoiling it for everyone else.

Cartoonish Hues, Vertiginous Views on The Plateau
The crazy-high black tee at Redlands Mesa's 17th hole. Note bunker at right:

Cartoonish Hues, Vertiginous Views on The Plateau

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

The nose bleed-inducing black tee on the par-3 17th hole at Redlands Mesa in Grand Junction, Colorado.

About 10 miles outside Delta, Colorado, the road heading southwest turns a rough grade of gravel and, about the same time, the scenery on either side goes Technicolor. In the fall, cottonwood trees here in the rugged Umcompaghre Reserve turn an unreal, Tweetie Bird yellow. Come spring, wild flowers blanket the mile-high cow pastures in every other conceivable hue. There’s plenty of time drink in this wondrous detail as no sane person would drive more than 45 mph on gravel this serious, on a byway this narrow and cambered, this secluded — though the odds are good there’s no one else on the road to Nucla but you and a few adventurous steer.

It’s a good three hours from Devil’s Thumb GC in Delta, through the Umcompaghre, to The Hideout GC in Monticello, Utah. It’s another two from the swanky Tamarron Resort above Durango, Colorado, to the superb Pinon Hills GC in Farmington, New Mexico. But if indeed golf is a journey (as the New Agers keep telling us) then this is just the place to get your bliss on. For here is a starkly beautiful, mesa-strewn wonderland where the sky is big, where the next turnoff is liable to mean another national park, where the rides between courses are as inviting as the golfing outposts themselves.

This is the Colorado Plateau, a hunk of arid landscape stretching southwest from The Rockies’ Western Slope to the highlands northwest of Phoenix. One reaches this golf-rich region through Salt Lake City or Denver, connecting to places like Durango or Grand Junction, Colorado, where the mountains end and the desert sage takes over.

Grand Junction is a logical place to start (or finish) as it’s home to what is arguably region’s best course, The Golf Club at Redlands Mesa. This Jim Engh design has earned a raft of national plaudits and it’s not difficult to understand why: The setting here is at once startling and exhilarating, a dither of canyons, random rock formations and high-desert heaths. At the par-3 17th, the black tee is nestled on a peak so tall and acute, you half expect the Grinch to show up with his sleigh-full of stolen toys. I’m not joking; it’s looks and feels like the freakin’ Matterhorn. Watching your ball fall the 100-odd feet to earth is like watching Wile E. Coyote resignedly plunge off a cliff to the canyon floor below (there’s even a bail-out bunker right of the green to serve up an appropriate “poof” at impact).

Forgive all the animated allusions, but the scenery out here honestly does border on the cartoonish. It’s bloody spectacular and the rides between venues — i.e., the ascetically magnificent terrain one must pass through — make golfers appreciate each layout’s physical attributes all the more. Devils’ Thumb, an hour south of Grand Junction in Delta, Colorado, is clearly a product of its inimitable landscape. Imagine a honest-to-goodness links laid out in the Sea of Contentment, and one begins to envision what architect Rick Phelps has created here. Opened in 2001, Devil’s Thumb careens around a veritable moonscape with alarming originality. Like Redlands Mesa, this course is difficult if not impossible to negotiate on foot. So take a cart. And some Dramamine.

•••

The locals in Delta may warn city slickers away from the vaunted road to Nucla, but do ignore them. A ride through the Umcompaghre Reserve is not to be missed. At one stage the motorist is convinced he’s barreling into oblivion, as a pair of cavernous canyons slowly encroach on either side of the gravel ribbon. Rest assured you will find your way down, to safety. Just make sure you’ve set aside plenty of time, check that your rental has a viable spare tire, and bring your camera.

Having negotiated the Umcompaghre, the road to Nucla will deposit you on Highway 191 which runs north-south along the eastern edge of Utah. Turn right (north) and it’s 40 minutes into Moab, home to Arches National Park with its breathtaking rock formations, myriad southwestern eateries of high quality (check out the Desert Bistro and its goat cheese-stuffed, corn tortilla-crusted chicken breast), and a lovely little golf course by the name of Moab GC. Designed and built by the owners, it’s 6,400 from the middle tees, beautifully kept and wiggles cleverly into the foothills outside of town.

Turn left (south) on 191 and it’s 20 minutes into Monticello, home to the region’s newest “destination course” — with drives like this, they all fit this description. The Hideout GC (no. 15 pictured above) was built across the street from any old uranium mill using federal dollars left over from the inevitable Superfund clean-up. Designed by Phoenix-based architect Forrest Richardson, The Hideout rises well above the novelty of its odd development history. The gorgeous 4th and 16th holes run side by side (in opposite directions) atop a ridge that marks the land for what it is: glorious, high chaparral. Holes rise and fall, dart in and out of miniature canyons, and slice their way through thick stands of cottonwood and choke cherry — all in the shadow of the mighty Abajos, a free-standing mountain range that tops out at some 11,500 feet. Overlooking the entire scene is the Horse of Abajo, an outline of trees on the eastern face which, as locals point out, really does resemble the head of a noble, all-seeing stallion.

Just over the Abajos from Monticello lies Canyonlands National Park. It’s a 20-mile drive into the wilderness before one even reaches the park entrance. Blowing down this remarkable access road at dusk — or in either direction on Highway 191 — can be a disorienting sensory experience. In the distance, long strings of deep purple clouds appear to settle atop and extend beyond the surrounding buttes, creating an irregular and ever-shifting horizon of soil, rock and, on occasion, impending weather. Radio reception out here isn’t so great; in the resulting silence of a rental car, or standing in the red dust at a roadside look-out, one revels in the seclusion and shudders slightly at the many peoples who over the centuries have arrived, thrived and been extinguished here in this unforgiving landscape.

Indeed, an hour east of Monticello is Mesa Verde National Park, where tribes of ancestral Pueblos carved a life for themselves in a series of remote canyons some 800 years ago. The cliff dwellings here are as eerie as they are awesome. Somehow it comes as no surprise to learn the thriving culture that built these cities in relief disappeared as abruptly as they appeared — the victims of severe drought, unrelenting enemies, or perhaps cannibalism. Theories abound on their plight but, in truth, no one knows for sure. The Four Corners region, where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona come together, has for millennia been home to tribes of indigenous peoples. The Spanish arrived circa 1500 and modern American “civilization” turned up only 150 years ago. It is the confluence of these cultures — some extant, some recently supplanted, some long gone — that makes the place, the cuisine, the general ambience so distinctive.

Does golf work alongside buffalo meat and abandoned cliff dwellings? Well, that’s like asking whether it goes with haggis and derelict castles. Just remember this particular tableau is a mile high — so drop a club to account for the elevation.

Hal Phillips, A Fine Golfing Ambassador: 1936-2011
Big Hal and Little Hal, crossing the Shannon on the way to Ballybunion in 2008.

Hal Phillips, A Fine Golfing Ambassador: 1936-2011

by Hal Phillips 17 Comments

Big Hal and Little Hal, crossing the Shannon on the way to Ballybunion in 2008.

My father and namesake, Harold G. Phillips Jr., passed away Saturday, Aug. 27, after a 15-month battle with lymphoma, and so I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about him this past week. Most of this bittersweet rumination has nothing to do with golf but some of it surely does. He’s the guy who introduced me to the game, taught me the game, claimed to do most of his “fathering” on the golf course, and took great satisfaction in the fact that I once played the game well and have ended up making my living, to a certain extent, writing about it.

Golf differs from most sporting and recreational pursuits for its heavy reliance on venue. Unlike those playing grounds accommodating tennis, baseball, soccer, football or whatnot, golf courses are all unique and, like a fragrance stuck in the deep recesses of the mind, they summon things that other stimuli cannot. I can’t possibly remember each round I played with my dad, but if I think about where we played, the memories — some fully formed, some mere bits and pieces — come flooding back. Indeed, I can begin to appreciate and readily recall, in quite extraordinary detail, the long coincidental relationship he and I had on courses stretching from the sands and forests of New England and the Northeast, to islands in the Caribbean, to the Mull of Kintyre and Ring of Kerry. Here are a few that come to mind:

As he looked when we started our golfing adventures, in the mid-1970s.

• Powderhorn GC, Lexington, Mass.: This joint is where I started out in the game, at my father’s side. I was 8 or 9, and we had just moved to nearby Wellesley from northern New Jersey. Powderhorn was a par-3 course but that unfairly belittles it. There were 18 holes and while some were no more than 100 yards, others measured well over 200 and none were flat, rinky-dink or boring. I remember my dad and his game seemed sort of god-like back then, in that I played a lot of these holes like par-4s and -5s and there wasn’t a single hole he couldn’t “reach”. Powder Horn stood us in good stead for at least two years, and I remember playing there with my grandmother, a steadfast player in her own right (for some seven decades). I recall that I once pitched a mighty fit here after butchering the uphill 11th hole. There were tears. I recall her being sort of perturbed at my behavior but my dad, as per usual, never was… We picked up games with all sorts of people at Powderhorn — another lesson learned early: that one always invites people to join him, even when one might rather not. Made my first-ever birdie on the 17th hole there, a 130-yarder over water. We were playing with a fellow named Mr. Jolly; when that ball dove into the cup, he was nearly as excited as we were. Powderhorn is gone now, converted to a condo development in the early 1980s, which is a shame because I’ve often wanted to go back — and play it like a god.

Claiming some tournament hardware from Ken “the Hawk” Harrelson, second low gross, if memory serves (Why does it serve? because I was third!).

• Stow Acres CC, Stow, Mass.: We were public golf vagabonds, my dad and I, never belonging to a private club, at least in these early days. We played all over Eastern Massachusetts at places like Juniper Hill, Sandy Burr, South Natick CC and Saddle Hill. South Natick was just nine and survives today as a mere driving range surrounded by housing; Saddle Hill has since gone private and goes by the name of Hopkinton CC. But when we wanted to play somewhere truly fine, we ventured 45 minutes north to Stow Acres, home to a pair of really fun Geoffrey Cornish/Bill Robinson designs. They didn’t take tee times and I recall hanging around that clubhouse, sometimes for an hour or more, before finally going off. From the time I started playing until the time he turned 55, some 20 years, my dad played off anything from 7 to 10. A good player and very steady; did nothing super well but nothing at all poorly. One day at Stow North, when I was 14 or so, he went out in 33. I self-destructed at some point on the back nine, went into a funk, but managed to pull myself out of The Dark Place about the 17th hole, at which point I consulted the scorecard. “Hey dad: Par 18 and you shoot 72!”

“I know!” he shot back, clearly wishing I had continued to pout and leave him alone with his demons. He made that par and I’m pretty sure it was his best round ever, though I know he shot 73 in competition a couple times during high school matches at Fort Monmouth CC (I’ve seen the newspaper clippings). He had a great story about the one year he played collegiately, at Lehigh University. He scrabbled his way onto the varsity as the 8th and last man for a match at Penn State, apparently, and managed to put together a 79. The guy dropped 71 on him. “The 8th guy! And it could have been 69!” he would later explain, still amazed that there were seven Nittany Lions better than that. Thereafter my dad resolved to concentrate on his studies.

Rocking the Merion 1981 U.S. Open hat, as he would for many years.

• Pleasant Valley CC, Sutton, Mass.: My dad and his business partner, Harvey Howell, owned a polystyrene manufacturing operation south of Worcester, Mass., and they commuted an hour each way from Wellesley and neighboring Dover, every day, my whole growing up. There wasn’t much great golf to be played out that way, not back then. But there was Pleasant Valley, which for years hosted one of only two PGA Tour stops in New England (the other was The Greater Hartford Open, now The Travelers; PV hosted its final Tour event in 1998). So, while it was no design masterpiece, Pleasant Valley was sort of a big deal club among golfing Massholes. Because my dad was a local business guy of some standing, he could arrange games for us there. He arranged a lesson for me at PVCC, too, the only formal one I ever had as a kid; the teacher was Rick Karbowski, quite a good player out on satellite tours back in the early ‘80s… I played a match there once in college, vs. Assumption College. I was playing no. 1 for Wesleyan that day and drew a guy named Frank Vana, who would go on to win a bunch of Mass. Amateurs. We were dead even on the 12th or 13th hole when I spied my dad walking along the fairway; he had snuck away from the office, just a few miles down the road. I remember being pleased he was there, though I promptly doubled the next hole and bogeyed two more. My dad had played enough golf with me to know what sort of volcanic response was coming. He got out of there pretty fast.

I had all sorts of blow-ups like this as a kid, as a young adult… okay, as a full-on grown-up, too. My dad’s temperament, on and off the golf course, is really nothing like mine. A very mellow dude, he was. The worst he would ever say after botching some shot was, “Oh, Hal…” He was surely embarrassed sometimes by my behavior but he never really called me on it, beyond a quiet-but-stern, “That’s enough now.” When I heard that, it was time to pull myself together.

• Pine Valley GC, Clementon, N.J.: When one serves on any sort of course-rating panel, the inevitable question is whether one has played Pine Valley. Thanks to my dad, I’ve played it twice, both during my college days. He had business contacts at Dupont, and whoever it was (Hugh something?) invited us down during the fall of my freshman and sophomore years. They have a bet there, at the other PVCC (!), as you readers may know, that guests can’t shoot within 10 shots of their handicaps. I never came close to cashing in. My dad won that bet twice. In his day, he could shoot 84-85 pretty much anywhere. This was pre-cell phone, of course, and it would’ve been quite bourgeois to bring a camera, so no pictures exist to mark

At The Equinox in Manchester, Vt. After he had arranged so many games for me, at places like Pine Valley and Merion, it was nice to arrange them for him.

our visits. But I do have the paper placemat (a nice map of the layout and scorecard) from our luncheon, which I framed and have hanging in my office. One of the years we played Pine Valley, it must have been the first, we followed up the round with another just a few miles west, in the Philly suburbs, at Merion. This was only a year or so after David Graham’s win there at the 1981 U.S. Open. My dad closed me out on the 16th hole, the famous Quarry hole, where I four-putted, snapped my putter in two and left it in the little waste-basket below the ball-washer on 17 tee. I parred in, putting out with my 2-iron. We were not invited back… However, the Merion legacy proved long-lasting: My dad picked up a commemorative U.S. Open bucket hat there, and he would wear it for years on golf courses and soccer sidelines far and wide (see image of that above: white with a blue band). The entire time I knew him, my dad had a head of hair not unlike Albert Einstein’s. And so he always wore a hat on the golf course or anywhere the wind might make for unreasonable coiffure-maintenance. He rarely wore baseball caps, always some sort of bucket hat with the brim turned down on all sides. Before he procured the Merion model, he had a green one that he wore for years (see that model further up in this story). I dabbled with it for a time. Wish I knew where that thing was… In later years he went to the wide-brimmed straw model — see the lead image for an example of this mode — which my mother never liked. Half in jest, she claimed made him look like a fruit vendor.

• Old Orchard CC, Red Bank, N.J.: This was the course my dad grew up on, where he learned the game at the knee of the pro there, George Sullivan. My grandparents would play with my dad, along with me, and they’d often marvel that he still had “that same, smooth George Sullivan swing.” It was indeed smooth, quite effortless. He never, ever overswung (unlike some of us). Of course, my dad also learned the game from his own father, my grandfather, Harold Phillips Sr., in his prime a high single-digit player in his own right,

That smooth George Sullivan swing, circa 1952

a lefty who had a penchant for aces. Poppy would post 5 or 6 over the course of his many golfing days, at least two while he lived at Shadow Lake Village, a N.J. retirement community with a par-3 course. I remember going to visit there as a lad, by which time Pop had become a bit dotty. He was bragging to me on a hole-in-one he’d just made and I looked over at Gram with circumspection — “No, it’s true,” she exclaimed. “He had another one!”… In any case, one time during the late 1980s, my dad and I went back over to Old Orchard; it had been decades and he really got a kick out of going round there again. He had caddied there, too. Apparently there were several gangland figures whose bags he toted in the 1940s and 50s. Good stories were related that day. Plus I shot 76 and totally torched the Old Man on his own turf… I would love to have gotten him back down to the Jersey Shore in later years to play Hollywood GC in Deal, which is supposed to be a great old Dick Wilson design, recently restored, and where Pop had been a member in the 1930s. Thereafter we’d have scooted west across the Pennsylvania border, on Route 22, to play Saucon Valley, Lehigh’s home club, where my dad hadn’t played since college. But we never did find the time. File that one under “Regrets”.

• Nehoiden GC, Wellesley, Mass.: This is the 9-hole, private club across the street from which my family lived for 20-odd years. It’s owned by Wellesley College and while it’s nothing stupendous from a design standpoint, it was notorious in the 1970s and ‘80s for having a 10- or 15-year waiting list. Why? Membership was open to college faculty and staff, to folks who worked for the Town of Wellesley, and it was cheap compared to the swanky clubs all around us (Wellesley CC, Woodland GC, Weston GC, Dedham Golf & Polo, Brae Burn CC). The first 10 years we lived in the chocolate brown Victorian across the street, my dad didn’t gain membership at Nehoiden. He didn’t really play the course at all. However, I played the course ALL THE TIME: My friends and I would sneak onto Nehoiden constantly, in addition to playing in the sprinklers there on hot summer nights, looking for golf balls, sledding, playing hockey on the 7th fairway, and generally treating the place like our own personal playground, which, from sundown to sun-up half the year, and 24/7 the rest of the year, it was.

Oddly, when my dad did become a member, in 1983 or so, he

My ace, recorded at Nehoiden 7.16.90 … The poor man was witness to several but never had one himself.

started playing a golf course that he hardly knew — but his sons knew intimately.

My dad was sort of shy socially and by that I mean he didn’t seek out social situations. Once in them, however, he was famously genial, almost courtly (a quality his NOLA-bred father exhibited in spades). So it’s no surprise that he became an active and, I think, extremely well liked figure across the street. He served on committees and enjoyed regular games with different sets of guys; he was a sought-after partner in the various scotch foursome events — because he was courtly, because he would never make a woman or any lesser player feel badly about being lesser, and because he played off 7. Though I had a big head start on him, the universe of our shared experiences at Nehoiden would prove vast. We were together there the first time I broke 80; the time he pegged that car crossing the 9th fairway; the time I aced the 4th hole (my only hole-in-one; the poor man never did post one); the many times one of us would hit what appeared to be a perfect, blind approach on 6 only to see the ball bound back into view after hitting the unforgiving pavement on Route 16; and the time he came closest to winning the club championship — finishing second, with me on the bag for the final round… He let his membership lapse over this past winter, as he didn’t think he’d be well enough to play. My brother and I called the Nehoiden powers-that-be in June, seeing if we could arrange what had become our regular Father’s Day game. They bent over backwards to make that happen, even hooked him up with a riding cart (which are banned at Nehoiden), something for which we remain eternally grateful. It was the last time he set foot on the property… Until we sprinkled his ashes in the bunkers surrounded the 8th green.

• Western Gailes, Ayrshire, Scotland: For all his travels, my dad was 60 or so before he ever played golf in the U.K. My brother Matthew and I sorted that, in 1998, when we arranged a mini-tour of Scotland’s west country: Gleneagles, Turnberry and Machrihanish. However, our very first game took place at Western Gailes, and it stands out for me because 1) it really was an eye-opener for the man, walking and playing amidst the dunes as opposed to watching them on TV during the British Open; and 2) my dad, for all his wonderful traits, was one of the slowest men on earth. I’m not talking a slow golfer,

Stalking a putt at Machrihanish in the late 1990s.

which, to be fair, he surely was. Physically, he did everything slowly and deliberately. This just naturally spilled over into his golf game: always the last one to his ball; never altering his pre-swing routine or undertaking it before it was his turn to play (partly because he was so frequently the last one to his ball); always coming over to look for your ball, but often disappearing into the woods/rough and having to be coaxed out. Surrounded by Scots, his game proved positively glacial. We had prepped him on this, telling him we had to keep the pace good, that there would be precious few if any yardage markers, and, of course, no riding carts. I remember walking up the first fairway at Western Gailes and there was my dad, behind me, standing over the ball, looking around: “What do you think I’ve got from here?” Dad, there are no markers! Eye it and hit it. Of course, he continued to ask this same question over and over, throughout the trip, never registering the new reality. During some later round, when I was just finished admonishing him yet again to move his ass — and to stop asking me where the the non-existen 150 marker was — I turned to my brother and said, “You know what? I sound just like mom.”

• Lahinch GC, County Clare, Ireland: In retrospect, the timing on this trip couldn’t have been much better. In 2008 my dad was 71 and, so far as we knew, in pretty good nick. But even in fair health he’d arrived at the stage of life where walking four rounds in 4 days was too much. And little did we know that in less than three years, he’d be gone. So, this trip to Ireland was a godsend and we made the most of it (see video capsule from that trip below). The round at Lahinch was our first, the one we played fresh off the plane, in brilliant sunshine and 70-degree weather, with one set of rented clubs (my brother’s had been misplaced by the airline), around one of the peerless links on God’s green earth. It’s not fair to single out Lahinch at the expense of our rounds at Doonbeg, Ballybunion and Tralee; they were lovely all four and we even wangled a buggy for dad at the latter. Indeed, the day before he had been able to walk only 14 holes of Round III, at Ballybunion. We met him that day back at the clubhouse where he was chatting up a group of fellow Americans in the bar, pint in hand, grinning ear to ear. “This Guinness is really pretty good,” he said. My God, Dad: How old are you? You’re just figuring this out? … Not much of a drinker, my dad.

I remember asking him once — when I was quite grown-up, working in the golf business, and ever more curious about courses, design and travel — exactly where he had played his golf when we’d all lived in northern New Jersey. This would have been the early 1970s, before we moved to Greater Boston, when he was still in his golfing prime (30-35 years old) but when I, his eldest son, was too young to play with him.

“Oh, I didn’t play much of anywhere really.”

What do you mean?

“Well, I had a wife and kids and a job. I didn’t play much at all until you were old enough to play with me.”

 
Irene, Gloria and the Wesleyan Sports Hall of Fame

Irene, Gloria and the Wesleyan Sports Hall of Fame

by Hal Phillips 2 Comments

Events conspired these past few weeks to recall one of the great moments in my sporting life and, in my humble view, one of the singular sporting episodes in the long, largely inconsequential sporting history of Wesleyan University.

The first prompt was Hurricane Irene. What stood out for me, as Irene blew through our small Maine town in late August, was the difference 25 odd years can make. When the lights went out here, I responded by reading and taking multiple naps. When Hurricane Gloria swept north in the fall of 1985, the eye of the storm tracking along the Connecticut River Valley, the reaction was quite different. News of the approaching storm and blanket class-cancellations catapulted the student body into immediate and decisive action: En masse we hit the liquor store and lined up the necessary narcotics, were they not already on hand. The storm would prove an irresistible opportunity to do crazy-ass things, like eat mushrooms and play pick-up football in spectacular winds.

The other recollective catalyst was the letter I received this week from my alma mater inviting me to a dinner honoring 2011 inductees into the Wesleyan Sports Hall of Fame. This invitation comes annually, along with calls for nominations. I notice that, among others, the entire 1980 Cardinal Field Hockey Team will take its place among the hallowed in Middletown on Nov. 5.

Perhaps you see where I’m going with this… In posting this blog item, I’d like to formally nominate for induction, in 2012, the 1985 Pick-up Football Team representing 8 Warren Street.

Thanks to the World Wide Web, there have been several tongue-in-cheek HOF nomination ideas floated by various WesKids over the years — like the time I sailed yet another free kick over the crossbar my sophomore year against Babson, and team captain John Nathan (who wanted the free kick for himself) sarcastically upbraided me as we ran back on defense: “Too many bong hits, Bluto?” Or the time the varsity golf team participated in the NESCAC Championships at Middlebury and, following a killer party I had located for us on campus, Pat Dudley projectile vomited out the passenger-side window of the Wesleyan Athletics van into the cold, unsparing Vermont night, whereupon he passed out, only to be revived the next morning in time to stumble onto the first tee, successfully drive the ball in play, and walk down the 1st fairway into a blizzard. Poor Pat. At one stage he turned back forlornly to those of us assembled on the tee behind him — he and his ghost-like pallor disappearing into that freak storm like an old time baseball player into a field of corn stalks.

These are indeed hall-of-fame-worthy accomplishments, but they are mere moments. Running the wishbone while shrooming on a muddy track in hurricane-force winds AND leading a ragtag group of soon-to-graduate liberal arts misfits to victory is another matter entirely. In the interest of supporting the nomination more credibly, allow me to paint the scene more fully:

Wesleyan is, to be clear, situated just 25 miles north of Long Island Sound, so the storm was quite strong when it arrived and, indeed, the glory of Gloria kicked in about the time the winds picked up. With Patty Smith’s “Horses” blaring from some student house nearby, I remember standing on the soccer practice fields looking back down Warren Street, where dozens of students milled about with/in their cups. Others spread their arms wide so as to better catch the hurricane-force winds, while still more took advantage of an organically muddy slip ‘n slide that had been fashioned on a long, sloping embankment across the street from the old hockey ring parking lot.

We had arrived at the practice fields, just beyond said hockey rink (now a monolithic, state-of-the-art sports complex), to throw the football around. We ended up playing a game of 5 v. 5 football (tackle, naturally) against the guys from across the street. Who were they? Chi Psi brothers, mainly. Basketball and hockey players who liked to stroll around shirtless in their yard smoking cigars and playing bocce. In other words, a high jock quotient and formidable opponents.

We played all offensive possessions in the same direction, downwind, enabling each QB to throw the most splendid 60 yard bombs with mere flicks of the wrist. It was a spirited, fun affair — as only a game of tackle football in a hurricane under the influence of psychotropic drugs can be. But the game got appreciably more interesting when the boys from 8 Warren St. decided to run…  the wishbone.

Yes, the triple-option wishbone, with yours truly doing his very best Jamiel Holloway imitation. And you know what? Barry Switzer would have been damned proud. We thumped them from there on out. If you don’t put the ball on the ground, the wishbone is basically indefensible — even with a soccer player at QB, under stormy skies whose cloud formations appeared to breathe (and bore an uncanny resemblance to the cover art from the R.E.M. album, Murmur).

Gloria at Wesleyan has since been officially memorialized among students of my vintage, on account of our shared experiences that day, but also on account of a singular image — of a student car utterly crushed by a tree felled during the storm. This photograph was played big in The Argus, where I was an editor, and subsequently in our yearbook. But I say it’s time to broaden the Wes legend that was Gloria 1985, and what better way than inducting me and my housemates into the Wesleyan Athletics Hall of Fame? All together now, with feeling:

G… L… O… R… Aye-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay — G-L-O-R-I-A.

GLO-RHEA!

 

The Curmudgeon tackles Asia, GPS, Celts v. Picts

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Great to be with Peter Kessler, again, on his radio show, “Making the Turn,” a staple of the PGA Tour Network. It’s on XM, and this aired a week back but I reckoned I’d share it with you here, under Curmudgeon guise, as a podcast. Ireland vs. Scotland is the burning question. We answer that and touch on course development in Asia, GPS in rental cars, what makes a course worth playing over and over, and more Eire antics. Got to know Peter better during our recent Irish golf trip. The guy is a serious Beatles fan, which explains his show’s segue music. Enjoy.

The 1931 U.S. Open: Golf’s Bataan Death March
George von Elm (left) and Billy Burke, combatants in the longest U.S. Open every contested..

The 1931 U.S. Open: Golf’s Bataan Death March

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

 

George von Elm (left) and Billy Burke, combatants in the longest U.S. Open every contested..

The next time you play a round of golf in some modicum of heat and humidity, the next time you walk 18 and feel the lactic acid building up in your thighs and calves, spare a thought for Billy Burke and George Von Elm. These were the stalwart principals in golf’s most extraordinary physical test: the 1931 U.S. Open, held way back when at The Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio.  As the central characters in what Grantland Rice called “the most sensational open ever played in the 500-year history of golf,” Burke and Von Elm required 144 holes of medal play to produce a winner: Burke, by a single stroke.

Take a moment to think about the parameters here: 72 holes contested over the first three days, followed by 36 playoff holes on Monday and 36 more on Tuesday. It was and remains, needless to say, the longest playoff in U.S Open history. Supreme Court cases have taken less time to adjudicate.

Waged in the midst of a stifling, July heat wave — in an era devoid of fitness trailers, cushioned in-soles, and air-conditioned clubhouses — this match was golf’s precursor to the Bataan Death March.

Or so it appeared during the morning round on Tuesday, July 6, 1931, as Burke and Von Elm — with 126 holes behind them and 18 still to negotiate — staggered off the 18th green toward the clubhouse for lunch. Even the most callow observer could see the quality of play eroding, quite understandably, under the enormous dual burdens of fatigue and Open-playoff pressure.

Yet Burke rallied to play his finest golf of the tournament over the final 18 holes. Von Elm, too, rose to the occasion and finished a single shot in arrears.

“I looked for a rather ghastly finish to a grand struggle,” wrote O.B. Keeler in The American Golfer. “Instead it was, and ever shall remain in my mind, the most remarkable exhibition of recovered stamina and poise and of sheer staying power and determination I have ever witnessed.”

Legend says that Von Elm, a lithe figure with little to lose, shed nine pounds during the championship, while the stocky Burke managed to gain two. “A circumstance,” Keeler mused, “which, if accurate, gives rise to wonder as to his diet.”

Read on to sort through, with me, the fascinating details of this extraordinary championship, staged 80-plus years ago this summer by two fascinating figures whose stories have been obscured by time, during a period when golf was wildly popular but still adjusting to the loss of its dominating figure.

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The U.S. Open of 1931 was the first “Jonesless” Open since 1920. The Emperor had retired from competitive golf following his epic Grand Slam the year before, and while he was on hand at Inverness, the golfing public was anxious to see just who would fill the considerable void. Golf’s professional class was especially keen; Bobby Cruickshank admitted he and colleagues were delighted to see Jones in the gallery, as opposed to the field.

Nineteen thirty-one was also the year the so-called “balloon ball” was required for Open play. This larger and lighter spheroid didn’t prove popular at Inverness, as competitors complained loudly that mis-hits were exacerbated by the new-fangled ball, which neither carried nor rolled as far. After just one year, the USGA would junk it — returning to the previous, heavier guideline of at least 1.62 ounces, but keeping the balloon’s larger size (1.68 inches in diameter).

Yet all the talk of balls and would-be kings was quickly subsumed by the event’s overarching conversation piece: the weather. The heat was oppressive by any discernible measure. Contemporary accounts of the championship are littered with modifiers like “blistering “, “blazing” and “sweltering”. Golf Illustrated‘s “special correspondent” noted that “The field was all on hand early for practice several days ahead of time, but so intense was the heat that on these practice days no one with any chances to jeopardize played more than nine holes of golf.”

It was 105 degrees on Friday, July 2, the first day of competition. It was no cooler on Saturday, when Von Elm served notice to the field with a 69, the tournament’s low round. His 36-hole total of 144 led 63 players who made the cut; Burke stood one stroke back.

It would be another 34 years before the USGA extended the Open format to 18-holes on four consecutive days, so Von Elm’s 73 on Sunday morning left him two shots clear of Burke with the afternoon round still to play.

By lunch time, the mercury was hovering between 97 and 99 degrees, with humidity levels only a tad lower. Igniting one of his trademark cigars (he would go through 32 during the championship), Burke went off in the penultimate group with Johnny Farrell, while Von Elm and Al Espinosa formed the final pairing.

Espinosa and Farrell had fallen from contention with substandard third rounds; by Sunday’s final nine, it was essentially a two-man race, with Von Elm in the driver’s seat. Standing on the 12th tee, he led Burke by two strokes but Von Elm would stumble over the next six holes, playing them in four-over. Burke parred the 18th to post a 292, meaning Von Elm needed a birdie 3 to force a playoff. He did just that, calmly draining a 12-footer before the breathless, sweat-soaked multitudes gathered a green’s edge.

With its extraordinary fugue of physical demand and competitive drama, Sunday’s play (the presumptive 36-hole finale) might have gone down as one of the most thrilling days in Open history.

As it turned out, the tournament was only half over.