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I’ve been picking through a few scorecards left behind, in a shoebox, by my father, Harold Gardner Phillips, Jr., who passed away a year ago this week. They didn’t surface until a month or two after his death. It’s taken till now for me to really engage with them. Haven’t avoided it exactly. It’s been an eventful year, the proof being just how quickly it’s flown by. But I’m glad I waited. A little distance allowed me to revel again in my memories of him. I won’t bore you with a comprehensive accounting of all their lovely time-capsule qualities. See below a third and  final installment in The HGP Scorecard Series, as it’s time write and remember more about him than his golf game. See previous posting on this subject here and here.… A word on the photo above: That’s my dad on the 8th green at Nehoiden GC, in Wellesley, Mass., his home club the last 30 years of his golfing life. Across the street is the home we made those 30 years. It’s late November in this image; the greens have been staked for fencing come the first snow. We sprinkled his ashes here. His memorial bench sits just right of  frame, on the 9th tee. There is no headstone in any cemetery for the man, at his request. This was his chosen spot and will be for all eternity.

The Niagara Falls Country Club, Lewiston Heights, N.Y., circa 1950: My dad was probably 13 or 14 and playing with his dad when this round was recorded. Pop was a jewelry salesman and traveled all over the Northeast visiting clients and playing golf with them. I’d heard tell that he’d take my dad on some of these trips, and here’s the evidence (there’s another card from Hershey CC that details the same sort of round). My dad and I were so different temperamentally. If I played badly, it could get real ugly, especially when I was this age. Whereas Poppy and his son were both incredibly even tempered. I’m sure my dad never embarrassed Pop with any histrionics on this day, despite shooting 92. And who knows: Maybe this was 1948 and a 12-year-old Harold Gardner Phillips Jr. was well pleased with 92, which appeared to best the group. This round is also notable for the fact that there were three Harolds in the group. Filling out the troika was Harold Osw. [sic], probably short for Oswald or something. Some poor boring bastard named Bob was the fourth (!). The card is quite ornate and well designed in an old-fashioned way. There’s a special column for “Side matches”, a table detailing “85% Handicap allowances”, four perforated/detachable tags for the submission of tournament scoring, another long table (opposite the tags) showing what your handicap should be based on “Your Ten Best Scores Total”; and an admonition to “Please have caddies rake traps and replace divots.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen that written on a scorecard, in quite that way, ever in my life. They don’t make cards like they used to.

Fort Monmouth GC, Fort Monmouth, N.J., May 12, 1954: I’ve heard the brief tale and read the brief press clippings re. this game. This was the 73 he shot in some high school match against another dude named Bob, who shot 78 and got smoked. It remained his best round ever in competition, if I’m not mistaken. FMGC is now known as Sun Eagle’s Golf Course at Fort Monmouth. It’s reputed to be a Tillinghast design, built in 1940, or maybe A.W. merely stopped to walk the place and a tap out his pipe here one day — the next thing you know it’s “a Tillinghast”. Couldn’t tell you if it had the markings; never played it, and my dad never had much of anything to say about the course. It was 6,417 from the tips in 1954, so it wasn’t any Mickey Mouse layout for the persimmon era. Military officers formed a big part of the membership here and the high school team played there, which is indicative of 1) good communitarian spirit; and 2) Fort Monmouth probably not being the most prestigious club in the area. But 73 in competition is 73 in competition (he bogeyed the first and played the rest at par). His personal best for the next 25 years. No trouble understanding why he kept this card.

Saddle Hill Country Club, Hopkinton, Mass., circa 1981: It’s obvious why some of these cards were kept in the shoebox, while other keepers are more cryptic. I don’t really keep cards, but if I shot 73 in a high school match, I might have considered it! My best in competition was 75. Somewhere I may have stashed the card recording the day I finally beat my dad, a spring Saturday at Nehoiden that just happened to be same day I first broke 80. So I can’t blame him for keeping the Saddle Hill scorecard, which is from just this time period, when I had finally caught the guy. I could  beat him now, which I think that gave him a great deal of joy (I don’t think there’s another word for that broad emotion I attribute to him in this context: pride, empathy, large amounts of credit probably apply, too). By the same token, it now meant something — something more — to beat me, which he did this day at SHCC, 78-81. This was a big game in another way: We both played quite well, and it may have been the first time that really did happen. You can play years with a guy, and you know his game, you see him play well, he sees the same from you. But it’s actually quite rare for two longtime playing partners, amateurs, to both post really good rounds on the same day. So a round like this is something both parties remember… Saddle Hill was and remains an interesting place. We played many times at Juniper Hill CC just down the road in Northborough, but Saddle Hill always struck us as a fun and finer golf course. There’s a middle portion, holes 8-12 or something like that, where a bunch of par-4s all run back and forth, down into a valley and back up to a green; these were weaker juice, as they also suffered from their sameness. But the rest of the routing was solid and engaging. It was taken private a few years back, renamed Hopkinton Country Club, and redesigned by Canada-based Welshman Ian Andrew. I thought I had read that he’d reversed a bunch of holes — where a redesign literally turns greens into tees and vice versa — but more recently I read or got the impression he had just switched the nines. I’ve gotta get back there and play it because I’m  curious now, especially the idea of reversing some holes I know so intimately, or did. Won’t be nearly as fun going back there without my dad though.

Hollywood GC, Deal, N.J., circa 1951: This was a find. I don’t think my dad remembered, later in life, that he had played here. We talked about it and I didn’t get that impression. Indeed, I had talked about taking him to play there along with sorta-nearby Saucon Valley, where he played his collegiate golf. But we sadly never got around to it. I can say pretty safely there weren’t many of these trips never taken. We did the Scotland and Ireland things, together with my brother Matthew, and we hit a good many plums here in the States. But that Mid-Atlantic romp would have been a great stroll down memory lane for him, and both venues are reputed to be top notch … My dad played Hollywood  this day with his mother, father and some dude identified here as “The Sheep.” I’d like to know who that was, but I doubt that information is available anymore. Pop had been a member here a decade or so earlier, but they were definitely not members at this time. They belonged to Old Orchard CC in Long Branch. Hollywood is and was, to my understanding, the truly fashionable Jewish club on the Shore, with a Walter Travis design, updated by Dick Wilson (much later Rees Jones redid it again). I can’t be sure but I think this card was kept not for what my dad had done there but for what his mom, my Gram, had done. She shot 41 on the front and 45 on the back to shoot 86, tied with my dad. (Pop self-immolated, posting 97). I think shooting 86 and halving my dad, at medal, was probably a superb day for her — and she just happened to have made 9 on the par-5 10th and 7 on the par-4 11th before closing extremely well. I just reckoned the card at match play and she beat her 15-year-old son 2 & 1, straight up, with no handicaps taken into account. I only ever played with Gram as a much older woman, naturally, so I can’t say whether this was a typical round for her, but that’s pretty good golf for a 50-year-old tennis player. She was a handsome woman who, if pictures are any indication, was doing a creditable Joan Crawford thing during this time. I’d like to have seen it. I’d like to have played Hollywood, and maybe I will some day.

There was a Saucon Valley CC card in the shoebox. It’s clearly from the mid-50s, as my dad played collegiate golf there, as a freshman, and enjoyed other rounds at SVCC during his time at Lehigh (’53-58). My dad revered this place. I can date the card pretty well because it lists a third loop (the “New Nine”), built in 1953. This would become known as the Grace Course, designed by William Gordon. Herbert Strong had done the Old Course; Gordon did a lot of renovations there, too. In any case, this card must have been gathered during my dad’s college days, before the Grace was made whole, with the fourth nine, in 1958… As indicated above, we didn’t leave too many stones unturned. When I was young, he got me on all sorts of great courses. In my late 20s, when I started in the golf business, I returned the favor. But I greatly regret never taking him back to Saucon Valley. Arranging a game for us there would not have been too much trouble, but I never made it happen. Fittingly, the SVCC card he kept is empty. No scores. It’s a pure keepsake of the place, of the time. I’ll keep it myself, as a reminder to play it. Maybe with my son, Silas.

My dad passed away almost exactly one year ago this week, so I’m marking the anniversary with a sampling of the scorecards he saved over the years. They were handed down posthumously, in a shoebox, along with other golfing trinkets and memorabilia. The cards form a useful trail of crumbs, which, if followed and elaborated upon, inform us re. the man and his seven decades in the game. The first post can be found here.

• Pinehurst No. 2, Pinehurst, N.C., circa 1974: I’m dating this round by the vintage of Sansabelt slacks modeled on the front of this scorecard. This most decorated of the Pinehurst courses has just undergone a thorough retrofitting from Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore, who endeavored (as most course renovators do) to restore the “original vision” of Donald Ross (read: lots of exposed sand and scrub). This picture shows the 1970s incarnation and it couldn’t have been further from that purported vision: bright green, overseeded fairways flanked everywhere by wall-to-wall dormant Bermuda. Glad the Old Man got to play and brag about playing No. 2, even at its likely design nadir. News Flash: He shot 83, as he did by default nearly everywhere he played for the first time. A maddeningly steady player, he was… If the course had featured more sand when he played there, my dad would have made frequent use of The Meat Hook, the club he deployed for years as his sand wedge. There was nothing written on this unique club, no markings at all. It was notably heavy, antiquated and rust-colored (this was real oxidation mind you, as it was rendered long before coppery wedges became fashionable). There was something faintly menacing and mysterious about it — a Stealth Wedge, if you will. My dad exploded with a full swing nearly every sand shot around the greens, and he was pretty good at it. He never picked the ball with a smaller, steeper swing imparting serious spin, which is a limiting strategy, of course. He was apparently beguiled by the act of blasting balls from bunkers via the power of The Meat Hook, which he never played  from anywhere but a bunker, which, again, was limiting. He opened his pitching wedge when he wanted to flop something. It was old school, but there’s just no comparing what one can do with a proper sand wedge, with a heel, as I told him many times as a precocious teen and for decades afterward. My dad was nevertheless highly competent around the greens. His misses were never that bad, and he could routinely get up and down from green side with a bumped 5- or 6-iron. In a sense, his short game was what you’d expect from a 12-14 handicap, whereas he was a 7-8 tee to green. His putting followed this form: a decent lag putter but didn’t make a lot of putts, it seemed to me. He wore a glove and never removed it to putt, as many folks do. I think that removal routine seemed to him an affectation — like the kilties he routinely removed from his golf shoes, long before they went out of style completely. My dad was no fashion plate, far from it. But here we must give him credit for being ahead of the curve.

Old Orchard CC, Long Branch, N.J., circa 1950: I wish he’d have dated this one, because he shot 75 (bogeying the par-5s that opened and closed the round; the only sixes on the card) and this was his home course. Was it the first time he broke 80? Or did he keep it because this was his career best here? Was it merely the first time he ever went really low? He couldn’t have been more than 15, as this card would appear older — in its wear and more Spartan post-war design — compared to those he saved from roughly the same period. When did the stymie go out? A key question as this card features a stymie measure across the top! It’s my understanding the USGA abolished this arcane rule in 1950, so my dad could have been well younger than 14 when this score was posted. He played with someone identified as E, and the kid shot a big number. There’s little else to work with in terms of historical detail/clues, but he must have kept it for some reason as he played hundreds of rounds at OOCC. Old Orchard wasn’t a fancy place. My dad claimed to have routinely caddied there for local mobsters and found at least one gun in the bag. But my grandparents socialized and played bridge  there, too, so I don’t think there was anything inherently untoward about the place. (Wise guys need a place to play golf, too.) He never held the course up as anything special and it wasn’t. But he was sentimental about it, and this was the only Old Orchard card in the shoebox… There was, however, another card in the box and it’s a curious one. It says “Long Branch Country Club, Eatontown, New Jersey”, which is a village just west of Long Branch, or so Google Maps informs me. But there’s a logo top left that clearly says “Old Orchard Country Club”. I’ve compared the cards and while the yardages do not always match up exactly, it would appear to be the same golf course. My dad and I played Old Orchard together in the late 1980s — maybe the club toyed with a new name at some point? Indeed, The Architects of Golf, the definitive reference guide to all courses built prior to about 1995, lists Long Branch CC, but not Old Orchard (today the club is again known as Old Orchard). This odd Long Branch CC card would appear to be from the 1980s; someone shot 78 but this is the sole score line and the player is not identified (though the writing for all the world looks like mine). I’m thinking this was indeed the round I played with my dad at Old Orchard and an explanation re. the scoring  is likely mundane — probably an in-the-car recounting of the round, by me, because the original card had been left behind.

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.