Silly’s main “dining room”, home of the Key Lime Pie Shake and the Slop Bucket
PORTLAND, Maine (Aug. 31, 2019) — Two pillars of the Portland food scene have exited the city’s vibrant but transititory culinary tableau. First came the announcement that Silly’s, the longtime boho totem on Washington Street, would shutter its operation on Sept. 1, 2019. Two days later, Brian Boru — the peninsula’s “It” dive bar for much of the 1990s — announced its doors would close.
In a
Facebook post equal parts trenchant and heartfelt, Silly’s owner Colleen Kelley
explained that the city, in general, and the Washington Street corridor, in particular,
were rapidly becoming too chic for her tastes. She also has an aging father who
requires her 24/7 attention, something the restaurant had commanded for the
past 31 years.
“My sister Shelley and I have sold the buildings — not Silly’s, just the buildings,” Kelley wrote on the restaurant’s Facebook page. “As much as Erin and Will, the managers, and the rest of the staff are taking care of me and the business, it is constantly challenging to do business with the city of Portland, which also wears me out. Another huge factor in my decision: I am smart enough to know my business model won’t work in a city destined to be Seattle, which isn’t meant to be a slam. It is just my opinion of where Portland is going. I don’t want anything but wonderful things for Portland, Maine. I have enjoyed many years here. However, I am a fat woman who serves fat, over-portioned food and I won’t charge 24 dollars for 4 oz. of dip and some pita bread.”
Portland Food Scene goes Posh
Not 24 hours before this news broke, a Portland friend had raved to me about a new southwestern restaurant that had just opened on Washington Street, for many years a gritty thoroughfare that, of late, has gentrified thanks to a raft of restaurants, breweries and distilleries. To call these “upscale” is to look past the inherent casual vibe that pervades all things Portland. I can’t think of a single restaurant in the city where jackets are required or shorts frowned upon. Still, this much is beyond dispute: Portlandia East is an increasingly posh place; the owner of Silly’s has recognized this and wants no part of it.
This dynamic was even more evident with the Boru closing. It was announced on Thursday, August 22 that its last day would be Monday Aug. 26. This bar sits more or less all by itself in the middle of an open, undeveloped lot — half the size of a full city block. It’s adjacent to the Old Port, walkable from Congress Street and the tony West End. It’s right across the street from the civic center.
One key to understanding both closings has nothing to do with Portland’s national rep as a city for ever more haute bourgeois foodies. Note the first sentence Kelley wrote: She mentioned buildings twice. The real estate market in Portland is blowing up; the opportunity for businesses of all kinds to cash out is only a phone call away.
Someone clearly made Boru’s owner an offer — based on potential/developed real estate value — he couldn’t refuse… Decision-making is rarely so simple as that, of course. See a sensible rundown of the factors contributing to the phenomenon here… It’s not capitalism run amok, just more evidence (as if we needed any) that its churn never rests.
My 40something dad, his kilties well and truly shorn, in the 1980s
[August 12, 2019] — Recalling my father, one should know that he abided by few fashion trends and set even fewer. However, on the 8th anniversary of his pasing, l will claim on his behalf one initiative to which he proved an early and canny adopter: He depised kilties. His aversion to those oddly fringed, seemingly vestigial, lace-obscuring flaps — which, for decades, adorned all manner of golf shoes — would prove well ahead of his time. For us, it’s a portal down the Golf Shoe History rabbit hole.
My nephew’s boots, complete with kilties
I was reminded of my dad’s rare fashion-forward stance when my 20-something nephew recently visited at Christmas. Nathan graduated from college a few years back with a degree in fire-suppression engineering. The job he obtained in this field quickly bored him. Living in suburban D.C. further depleted his life force. So today he’s out West fighting forest fires with a crew of badass, axe-wielding Latinos. In any case, he arrived in Maine for the holidays wearing a pair of high-laced, black-leather firefighting boots that, to my surprise, featured small kilties down by their steel-tipped toes. If Dr. Martens made golf shoes, this is what they’d look like.
What’s with the kilties? I inquired of young Nathan.
“Is that what they’re called?” he replied. He went on to explain that when one is tramping about the forest floor, these fringed swatches of leather prevent sticks, leaves, pine needles, mud and other bits of underbrush from lodging between one’s tongue and boot laces.
In the mid-1970s, when I was first introduced to kilties (and to golf, for that matter), this description of their historical utility was never advanced, not to me anyway. I knew my dad didn’t care for them. Beyond that, they were more or less understood to be yet another whimsical affectation specific to golfing attire, along with Sansabelt slacks (from the French apparently: sans belt, get it?), bucket hats and polo shirts.
Golf Shoe History: A Field Little Explored
The evolution of golf shoe fashion is not a popular avenue of exploration. Though it must be said: Any research into the subject inevitably leads one down a rabbit hole of pleasingly arcane information.
For example, it’s possible (quite logical to assume even) that kilties predate golf spikes in that evolution. Spikes emerged only in the mid-19th century when Scots started hammering nails through their boot soles in order to gain better purchase on dewy fescues.
More recent history tells us that my dad and his cohort of 40-somethings spent much of the 1970s dispatching with all manner of societal expectations. They fled corporate America, experimented with drugs and divorcef in record numbers. This helps explain why my father looked so dimly upon kilties as an impractical, foppish tradition worth chucking. And so, from my earliest recollection, he would immediately remove them from new golf shoes.
Why did they become traditional? Mid-19th century links were hardly the manicured landscapes we know today. At best they were meadows, managed lightly (and largely) by herds of sheep. The centuries prior featured even more rugged/primitive golfing environments. In short, as Nathan pointed out, during these early, less formalized days, anything that kept the prominent undergrowth from mucking up your shoes and bootlaces made a world of sense for golfers — and their caddies. So kilties did in fact, at one time (for quite a long time actually), serve a purpose.
LYON, France (June 27, 2019) — Ever wondered why women’s professional sports are watched and otherwise supported so meagerly by women themselves? The underlying premise here may strike one as obtuse, even churlish this week, what with thousands of women in the stands watching the 2019 Women’s World Cup in stadia all over France. But none of last week’s Round of 16 matches sold out and World Cup crowds can mislead. You’ll recall they were enormous during the 1999 Women’s World Cup, here in the U.S. That event was seen as a tipping point for the women’s game in North America, and yet three separate women’s professional leagues have been attempted in the two decades since. The first two folded and the third — the National Women’s Professional Soccer League — continues to teeter on the brink of financial collapse and cultural irrelevance.
Soccer remains a funny duck in America. More than those in other footballing nations, soccer fans here are beguiled by and pay outsized attention to their national teams — as opposed to the privately administered clubs that compete in domestic leagues. And surely there are entrenched gender biases that have worked against the serial iterations of women’s pro soccer in this country, or the WNBA, or women’s professional hockey wherein the Canadian professional league just folded. U.S. hockey international Kendall Coyne Schofield told the New York Times in April that, “People are drooling for women’s hockey. But the product we deliver isn’t being shown.”
Are they drooling for it really? And what does she mean when she says, “people”? I don’t have numbers on how many folks consume women’s hockey at the Olympics, for example, and how that audience breaks down by gender. But it might surprise you to learn that nearly 70 percent of the WNBA’s viewership is male. That surprised me.
Women’s Professional Sports have ‘a marketing problem’
The WNBA has been around since the late 1990s; it has never turned a profit, despite being financially backed and marketed by one of the most savvy organizations in world sport, the NBA — an organization that has every incentive to create a larger audience for both of its on-court products. The core of that new, larger audience would presumably be women who don’t otherwise follow the NBA. But women have responded to the WNBA with the same relative indifference they exhibit toward women’s professional soccer and hockey. Here’s Adam Silver on the subject in 2018:
“It’s interesting: Women’s basketball is largely supported — just in terms of the demographics — by older men, for whatever reason, who like fundamental basketball, and it’s something I’ve talked a lot to the players about,” he said. “We’re not connecting with almost the same demographic that our players are. Our players are roughly, let’s say, 21 to 34, in that age range. I’m saying [to the players], ‘Why do you think it is that we’re not getting your peers to want to watch women’s basketball?’
“So in a way I think it’s a good problem to have, in that I think the game looks fantastic, and it’s amazing where the league now is from over 20 years ago when it launched,” Silver added, “but we still have a marketing problem, and we gotta figure it out. We gotta figure out how we can do a better job connecting to young people and how they could become interested in women’s basketball.”
[Ed. This story on golf course organics appeared in the January 2018 issue of Golf Course Managementmagazine. In April 2019 it won the Gardner Award from TOCA, the Turf & Ornamental Communicators Association. I’ve won a bunch of these over the years but the Gardners are new — a sort of Best in Show among all the annual winners apparently. So I figured it was worth sharing here. There’s a link in the story body to another profile I wrote about the same time for GCM, on Dr. Frank Rossi. That one came out pretty well, too, especially if a) you’re a fan of kunekune pigs; or b) you want to know why Bethpage Black has agronomic relevance outside this week’s PGA Championship.]
By Hal Phillips When Kevin Banks was a turfgrass management student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, it wasn’t uncommon for decorated or otherwise experienced golf course superintendents to drop in for guest lectures. When Jeff Carlson, CGCS, came by in 2005, Banks says he remembers thinking, “Wow, this guy is crazy!”
Frankly, that’s how most students in the midst of a traditional turf management education might have appraised Carlson’s work at the Vineyard Golf Club. When permits were being sought for building this golf course on environmentally sensitive Martha’s Vineyard in Edgartown, Mass., in 1998, developers were obliged to promise the local conservation commission that the prospective golf course would be managed in an entirely organic manner.
The Vineyard Golf Club opened for play in 2002, and Banks graduated in 2008. He would then apprentice at several traditional clubs before this story came full circle — Banks took over for Carlson as head golf course superintendent at the Vineyard Golf Club on April 1, 2015.
“I guess I’m the crazy one now,” the nine-year GCSAA member says.
Two-plus years into his tenure, Banks has more than warmed to the nonconforming aspects of his job, one of the few in golf course management that takes the organic approach from mere trend or direction to guiding principle. “It’s definitely been a challenge, but I’ve also definitely become addicted to it,” Banks admits.
Just 31, Banks today finds himself at the crux of another nascent industry trend, a phenomenon where head superintendents hire and groom their replacements, having accepted another position at the same club. Carlson stepped aside in the spring of 2015, but he remains at the Vineyard Golf Club as property manager, where he oversees capital projects — a just-concluded Gil Hanse redesign, for example.
Golf Course Organics and Politics of Succession
The idea of having the previous superintendent at the club — perhaps hovering, perhaps exerting undue or unwanted influence — may strike some as awkward. Not Banks, and here the organic dictates governing turf management at the club intertwine with these issues of succession.
“Before I took this job, I knew who Jeff Carlson was. Almost everybody in New England and New York did too, and I’m sure that reputation extends even farther than that,” Banks says. “He has been the organic ambassador for my entire turfgrass career. Having him help manage the golf course with me my first season here was a really sensible transition. I knew it would be very different for me, at first, but Jeff knew exactly where to expect an outbreak. He knew where we would first see weed pressure, and all this input came with his very relaxed and calm presence.
“I will always thank him for being patient and mentoring me into a truly organic manager — something I take great pride in today,” Banks adds.
Can Banks imagine having taken on the organic learning curve without Carlson there, on-site?
“Not really,” he answers. “Jeff was very patient. My first year, the disease we encountered in certain areas maybe should not have happened. I believed moisture levels were adequate and acceptable enough to fight disease pressure. They weren’t. But Jeff sat back and let me learn from my mistakes, and watched me grow.
“From the beginning, I was talking to anyone and everyone to get my head around the issues. And I still do that.”
Banks says he frequently talks with colleagues, companies and researchers about the specific issues he faces. Frank Rossi, Ph.D., of Cornell University and recipient of GCSAA’s 2018 President’s Award for Environmental Stewardship, is “a great resource,” he adds.
“But the way I look at it, Jeff is my best researcher. As often as I do interact with all these organic contacts and their ideas, I still take most of them with a grain of salt. They can recommend what they think is right, but you must compare that to what I’m finding here on the ground and what I think is right — and to what Jeff thinks, because he’s done it.”
The first new golf course to be built on Martha’s Vineyard in 30 years when it opened in 2002, the Vineyard Golf Club was designed, built and is maintained in an all-organic manner to satisfy the community’s strict environmental standards. Photo by Larry Lambrecht
[Ed. This story appeared in the August 2015 issue of Golf Australia magazine, as a preview for October’s President’s Cup.]
By Hal Phillips SEOUL, South Korea (May 8, 2019) — Let’s get straight to the irony: Koreans are hands-down the most ardent and prolific golf travelers in the world. For a variety of reasons, however, their collective reputation in these golf destinations, particularly those in Asia (their most frequent ports of call), remains less than sterling. For the first time, this October — on the occasion of the 11th Presidents Cup Matches — the golf world returns the favor, en masse, as thousands of internationals will descend on the Peninsula to exprerience golf in Korea, observe four days of competition and make their own golf holidays.
What will
they find? One of the game’s singular golf cultures, highly stylized (sometimes
to the point of curation) and complemented by a collection of first-rate parkland
courses, immaculately kept. The Presidents Cup is a showcase event for the Korean
golf community, the biggest international golf event ever staged here, and
while public courses remain somewhat rare (and definitely dear), many private
clubs are throwing open their doors to welcome the international golfing public
— and make a few won (855 to the Australian dollar) in the bargain.
But
Aussies who do venture north this spring — especially those who may have cooled
their heels behind a glacial Korean foursome in Pattaya, or perhaps witnessed a
Gold Coast waitress endure another East Asian browbeating — will be pleased to
find a kinder, gentler, quicker brand of Korean golfer on home soil. One might well
ask about the phones, to which Korea golfers seem permanently affixed. Well,
don’t expect miracles. This remains the most wired, technologically obsessed population
on earth, and that extends to their golfing habits, home and away, for better
and worse.
To be
fair, there are sanguine byproducts of this high-tech mentality. In June, while
striding down the 2nd fairway at Whistling Rock Country Club — a
private club northeast of the capital and home to one of the nation’s top 5
tracks — the visiting golfer is immediately struck by two things: First, my playing
partners and everyone else on the course that day are dressed to the absolute
nines. Second, as my caddie walks beside me, our golf cart drives itself down
the path — thanks to an electric-eye mechanism embedded in the concrete and caddie-operated
by remote control. It goes without saying these drone carts also come complete
with sockets, for phone charging.
Golf in Korea: Totally Wired & Sharply Dressed
“I love
Korea, totally wired and everyone looks sharp, man or woman, 25 or 65,” says
David Dale, a partner with California-based course architects at Golfplan, who
have designed 22 courses in Korea. “Golfers arrive at the course in sport coats
and slacks, carrying small grooming bags with golf shoes and change of clothes.
They go to their lockers with their 4-digit security codes and change into
these highly fashionable pants, shirts and caps (with ball markers on the brims).
Most of the time, they’re putting on sleeves to keep the sun off them, even the
men.”
Dale and
Golfplan have designed courses in 75 different countries, “But I’ve never been
to any other country that had a stronger sense of fashion,” he says. “They have
these awesome golf slacks that are fleece-lined with waterproofing and pin
stripes. I’ve got a pair. They’re thermal. I use them for construction visits
in cold climates — but they’re stylish enough to wear with a sport coat!”
The clubhouse at Whistling Rock is typical of the genre here: palatial, modernist and staffed to the gills. Upstairs, a long, narrow Zen garden splits the hallway leading to a massive but still-elegant dining space, where picture windows look out onto the golf course.
Downstairs, some 40 members of a course-rating panel (representing GOLF Magazine Korea) populate a sumptuous meeting space of burled wood and overstuffed chairs. Back upstairs, I pass a golf shop that is, well… remarkably modest: mostly golf balls and a few shirts.
The Fashions are Ever Changing
According
to Whistling Rock Vice President David Fisher, this is typical of Korean clubs,
which stock very little logoed merchandise because the lion’s share of golf
apparel is purchased not from clubs but direct from top designers. The golf
apparel industry in Korea has been estimated at USD$3.5 billion — this for a
country of just 1.5 million golfing souls.
“In Korea, the fashion changes. We have four distinct seasons and the manufacturers come up with new designs for each season,” explained Michael, a Korean-American living in Korea and working for a golf industry company (he asked that his real name not be used). “People tend to keep up with the season and they don’t have loyalties to the club they belong to. Elsewhere it’s common that members will wear shirts with the club logo, but in Korea that’s not the case. People tend to lean toward designers shirts, which can be very expensive, 200-300 dollars. Even if they don’t have a good game in terms of golf skill, they try to look good. In Korea, if you don’t dress up, you’re pretty much looked down upon.”
For men, shorts on the golf course are considered
particularly frumpy. “Most of the membership golf courses,” Michael says, “do
not permit shorts — and golfers must wear hats outside the clubhouse. Without
hats, you cannot go out on the course.”
Um, why is that?
“I don’t know.”
The shorts thing is good to know, though daytime temperatures for October typically range from 7-18 degrees (and these days hats make good skin-care sense most anywhere, anytime). Still, Dale suggests that exacting standards and high fashion are just what we should expect from a population with “the highest level of elective cosmetic surgery in the world and the no. 1 destination for these procedures in Asia. I’m even thinking about getting something done, around my eyes… I’m serious.”
SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine (April 27, 2019) — Golf course closures typically elicit howls of indignation and despair, as locals countenance their stark, newly diminished reality. Still, it’s fair to wonder exactly how the public golfing population here in Southern Maine processed the news, received here late in January, that Sable Oaks Golf Club would not reopen this spring. The land will instead be marketed to housing developers.
I loved Sable Oaks. Consider this my own, contrarian howl of indignation.
However, most of the Maine golfers I know never cared much for Sable Oaks. Too penal, they said. Too often the course took driver out of their hands, they howled, on account of wetlands too often cutting across fairways in constricting fashion. For walkers, hilly Sable Oaks was a death march. It was an extraordinarily demanding 6,300 yards. In every sense.
Still, I must protest. It’s bad manners to speak ill of the dead, and I’m here today not merely to praise Sable Oaks but to defend her — for perhaps the last time.
All the things people hated about Sable Oaks recommended the course, to me, when I moved to Portland in 1992. I was 28 years old and a pretty good player back then — breaking 80 at Sable, something I managed only three times in 30 years, really meant something.
I didn’t carry a driver for much of the ‘90s, relying instead on a 1-iron and a persimmon Ping 2-wood. Walking 18 holes at Sable with a bag on my back was certainly a workout and a half; the hike from 17 green to 18 tee in particular was a heart-stopper. But I was young in the early ’90s! A round at Sable meant I need not go to the gym.
Sable Oaks: A Great Walk, Rarely Spoiled
And what a taxing-but-comely walk it was. Designed by architect Brian Silva — who laid out the once-private, now semi-private Falmouth Country Club at exactly the same time — Sable Oaks made for golf in an undeniably gorgeous secluded setting. The dramatic terrain was uniformly lush, with gargantuan specimen trees framing the greens and colorful wetlands everywhere one turned.
Okay. Those wetlands required forced carries on four of the first five holes. Come Fall, however, those wetland went technicolor — something we noticed because Silva brought them into play SO many times.
Yes, Sable Oaks was located directly in the Portland Jetport flight path — but the forested environs otherwise muffled the sound from nearby I-95 (!).
I arrived in Portland that March of 1992 to take a new job: editor-in-chief at Golf Course News, a national business journal published by Yarmouth-based United Publications. When I stumbled upon Sable Oaks that spring, I was honestly blown away. The greens were inventive and fun — always in superb shape, too, something Sable could boast to its dying day. Opened in 1989, the place seemed pretty brand new. The overall conditioning, the contour/detail around those greens, the bunkering throughout seemed way too nice for a public course — especially one that charged just $20.
Sable had been conceived and built as a private golf/residential community. A late-80s recession obliged it to open and operate as a public course. Ownership would change several times through the years. The housing and other commercial elements? Never built. An oversupply of competing courses meant Sable would never do more than survive. National trends didn’t help matters: The U.S. course stock has suffered an annual net loss of some 150 properties each year since 2008. Ironically, Greater Portland’s red-hot housing market today — and Sable’s prime location on a wooded hillock right across I-95 from the Maine Mall — made the closure decision, from current owners, Delray, Fla.-based Ocean Properties Hotels Resorts & Affiliates, something of a no-brainer.
Why was Sable Reviled? It’s complicated
Curiously, though, none of this existential chaos accounts for Sable Oaks’ poor reputation among Greater Portland golfers. Did it get a bad rap? Or was it simply too hard to enjoy? Are Southern Maine golfers a bunch of pussies? Is course difficulty something they want to observe on television but avoid for ourselves?
The answers are complicated. I can tell you this much, having spent 30 years in the golf business rating courses and writing about course-design issues: Difficult tracks are, more often than not, successfully marketed on account of their resistance to scoring, not in spite of it. Throughout the 1990s, Portland-area golfers eagerly drove 2-plus hours for the pleasure of losing 10 golf balls and shooting 117 at Sugarloaf GC, where river crossings are celebrated.
The Woodlands in Falmouth, another track that debuted about the same time as Sable and Falmouth CC, is a much harder golf course than Sable Oaks, in my view. And yet, to this day, it has succeeded in attracting private club members in this market.
What’s more, Sable Oaks was not a long course. It played only 6,300 yards from the tips. Indeed, the choosing of one’s tees at Sable was key to maximizing the fun and strategy Silva created there. Too often, in my view, Sable-haters didn’t manage this aspect particularly well for themselves.
Here’s what I mean: There were only three par-5s at Sable Oaks. Two of them, nos. 5 and 14, played directly alongside each other, in the old-world routing tradition. Both featured the same riparian corridor cutting across the fairways some 220-240 yards from their respective greens. So yes, driver on both holes was risky. But if you cozied up to that wetland, both greens were eminently reachable in two strokes. In the course design trade, they call this risk/reward. Architecture Nerds swoon over this stuff. At Sable, they turned up their noses.
From the back tees, on both holes (especially 14), it was frankly difficult for mere mortals to even reach the hazard with driver… But most guys played the middle tees and complained about not being able to hit driver. Pick your poison, I say.
Fourteen was a striking-if-peculiar hole. Its peninsular green, buttressed by a stone retaining wall and surrounded by those colorful wetlands, proved a demanding target. Going for that green in two shots was very risky – even a pitching wedge approach to that putting surface was difficult… It was also pretty thrilling.
Legitimate Issues at 12 and 15
The two holes at Sable Oaks that stood out to me for being legitimately overtaxing were the par-4s at 12 and 15. Yet, again, both got bad raps in my view.
Twelve was a monster measuring some 460 yards and requiring an accurate drive up and onto a plateau, followed by an approach playing all the way back down to sea level. There was internal out of bounds all along the right side, where the par-5 2nd hole played, in the same direction. Internal OB is never ideal, but without it, folks would have played down the 2nd — a clear safety issue.
Yet 12 remained a classic half-par hole, the likes of which design legend Donald Ross created routinely. The Nerds praise him for such things still today. The key is convincing one’s self the hole is a par 4.5, meaning 4 would indeed be great but 5 is just fine. The adjoining 2nd hole played about the same yardage with the same expectations. The simple fact that it was listed on the scorecard as a par-5 elicited very few complaints.
On a course that played to par 70 where all three par-5s were reachable in two shots, the difficulty of no. 12, and the ease of no. 2, have always seemed reasonable to me. Off-setting even. To its lasting aesthetic credit, No. 12 was also a stunningly beautiful, topographically gripping golf hole.
The 15th was another outwardly difficult hole that just required a bit of imagination. What made this par-4 so hard was the landing area — or rather, the lack of one. Nothing to defend here: Silva was clearly obliged to get from point A to point B along the northern boundary of the property. Yhe massive wetland at left, and the steep slope at right, made the landing area on 15 almost ribbon-like.
But the green at 15 — and the contours/bunkering right and left — were superbly rendered. Solution? We often played the 15th as a drivable par-4 — from the women’s tee high on the right slope. The hole still played tight but the prospect of eagle or an easy 7-iron/wedge par changed our outlook and expectation, two factors over which we golfers enjoy total control.
Family Matters
That June of 1992, my brother and father came north from Massachusetts to play our annual Father’s Day match. I took them to Sable; they were similarly struck and smitten. We moved our annual game around from year to year, but they were always more than happy to revisit Sable Oaks. I was all too happy to oblige.
In 1997, I left Golf Course News (today known as Golf Course Industry magazine). I started a media company, a family. We moved from Portland out to New Gloucester. My father passed away, in 2011. My brother and I maintained the Father’s Day golf tradition. We didn’t always play Sable but often enough we did. Matthew lives in coastal New Hamster. Sable remained reasonably equidistant from our respective homes.
Some 5 or 6
years ago, however, I noticed a change.
So, I’m a better golfer than my brother. Always have been. He would cop to this, if asked. If we play 10 rounds together, I’ll beat him 7-8 times. Yet somewhere in the middle of the second Obama administration, the competitive worm turned in a specific way: We came to realize that he was building an anomalously successful record, against me — at Sable Oaks specifically. We both remarked on it. Then I treated him to a subsequent birthday round there, and he beat me again.
I could have just as easily avoided playing my brother ever again at Sable Oaks. But that would’ve been churlish. And I loved the golf course! So we kept going back. And I’m glad we did, because now it’s gone.
When I read this winter of Sable Oaks’ imminent demise, I sent my brother a link to the Portland Press-Herald story. “Sorry, dude,” I texted him. His reply was swift and brief:
“Noooooooo!!!”
One of my final strokes on the 15th green at Sable Oaks GC.
NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine (April 18, 2019) — So my wife and I have a 12-year-old girl staying with us for a while and last Thursday evening she settled down beside me — armed with a big bag of magic markers and a sketch pad — as I watched a DVR recording of The Masters first round. She wasn’t paying much attention. In that way she was a credible stand-in for the broader American public, which, let’s face it, doesn’t pay much attention to golf, even its majors. Indeed, when she did take notice, she playfully mocked the idea of watching golf altogether — that is, until she noticed Tiger Woods walking off a tee.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
That’s Tiger Woods, I told her. I swear to god, I did not prep her in any way; she picked him out of the crowd of players all on her own. The next afternoon, during the live broadcast of round two, she wandered back into the living room. Unbidden she asked, “How’s Tiger doing?”
He’s
doing quite well, actually. You like him?
“Yeah.”
Why?
“He’s handsome.”
What
else do you like about him?
“He’s cool. Look at the way he’s walking around. He’s very confident.”
What
about that mock turtleneck? Is that cool?
“Oh yeah. Those are in.”
Tiger Woods: The Anointed One
Watching golf with a 12-year-old, distaff, golfing neophyte is a fascinating exercise in its own right. This one in particular had strong opinions: She thought Jon Rahm looked like a fat punk; she didn’t like him at all and rode him without mercy throughout (“He should just go home”). She quickly remarked on the unusually lanky stature of both Tony Finau and Matt Kucher. Brooks Koepka was notably swaggy — but nothing like Tiger, in her opinion. Surprisingly, Ricky Fowler’s youthful mien did nothing for her — something about his eyebrows being too dark (“And I don’t like his shirt”). Norwegian amateur Victor Hovland was pilloried for his prominent schnozz, which, in fairness, was fair comment.
But these were all bit players in the drama so far as she was
concerned. Tiger was the anointed one.
A lot has already been written about how Tiger’s victory on Sunday has introduced his phenomenon to an entirely new generation of golfers. I don’t anticipate this girl will suddenly want to play the game, or start wearing mock T’s. But it has been 11 years since Tiger won a major. This weekend’s performance reminded many of us of what we’ve been missing.
Forget the 15 majors, the renewed Nicklaus chase. We’ve missed this
man’s naked charisma most of all. No golfer in history has half the presence
Tiger exhibits just walking down a fairway. Charisma is a hard thing to
quantify, but it’s also one of the few things that readily spills over from a niche
sport like golf into the larger culture. And that’s another thing golf has been
missing these past 11 years.
I watched Sunday morning’s finale at Tomaso’s, a fashionably down-market, diner-sized cantina in Portland, Maine. At 10:30 a.m., when I showed up, there weren’t but 3 or 4 us there. An hour later, the brunch crowd had attracted a full house of young, bearded, IPA-swilling hipsters. This was no sports bar, much less a golf bar (Does such a thing exist north of Pinehurst?). Even so, when Tiger birdied 15, the place went crazy. The barman quickly turned off the music — a pleasant alt-country playlist featuring the likes of Ryan Adams, Old Crow Medicine Show and Jason Isbell — and turned up the CBS television feed. Tiger had this unlikely place in the palm of his hand. When his tee shot on 16 came to rest 2 feet from the hole, the patrons inside Tomaso’s erupted.
About this time, I noticed a text had arrived. A friend of mine was
down in Boston at the TD Garden watching the Celtics-Pacers playoff game, an
inelegant affair he referred to as a “game/rock fight.” He reported there were
“tons of people clustering around TVs on the concourse watching golf. It’s
amazing how much love there is for Tiger.”
Stupid Amounts of Charisma
There’s really is something about this guy — something non-golfers
can appreciate. Yes, he has battled back from considerable personal/physical adversity,
but this obscures the larger point: He was stupidly charismatic when he
appeared on the Mike Douglas Show at the age of 2, when he won three straight
U.S. Amateurs, when he debuted as Nike’s cross-over pitch man, when he claimed
those 14 majors… Apparently, after a decade away, he remains stupidly
charismatic, not just to core golfers but to casual fans and mere onlookers
around the world.
Sunday night, my daughter
sent me a text: “Is Tiger Woods good again?”
She’s 20 years old, a junior in college, and couldn’t care less about golf. But somehow word of his resurrection had reached her via the broader cultural news drip. I asked exactly how she had learned of his Masters victory.
“I saw him on the TV at this
bar! Some people were watching.”
Do you find him charismatic?
“Not really. He’s cheated on a
lot of women.”
My daughter is clearly not so forgiving of Tiger, in part because she’s a woke young woman, but also because she’s yet to make the mistakes that Tiger and the rest of us 40, 50 and 60somethings have made. But her admonition is well taken: Recognizing and appreciating anew Tiger’s ungodly magnetism doesn’t mean we should get all crazy (again) about what that charisma really means.
It doesn’t mean, for example, that we should start believing Tiger’s
mere presence will bring millions of kids (or Millennials, or Baby Boomers)
into the game. That never held in 2003; it doesn’t hold now. Nor does it mean
we should start building new golf courses willy nilly to accommodate this chimerical
wave of converts. It doesn’t mean Tiger has, on account of his victory,
instantly become a particularly good man or father. It made no sense to ascribe
him these qualities in 2007 frankly; knowing what we know, it makes even less
sense now. Why we blithely attach these sterling personal traits to men (or
women) who exhibit extraordinary sporting skill is beyond me. One hopes we’ve
learned our lesson here.
Golf is Different Now
But it does seem clear that Tiger and the professional game in which he competes have changed more than a little in the 11 years since he limped to his last major win. Today’s Tiger is 43 years old, his hairline in full retreat. He’s been through a world of shit, both physical and personal. The process of dealing and coming back from all that would change anyone. His swing and his outlook on life are forever altered.
And here we confront what might be the most interesting
manifestation of all this change: Sunday’s victory was the first time Tiger has
ever come from behind in the final
round to win a major tournament. The greatest front-runner in history has
learned how to come back.
Tiger won from the front so frequently because, from 1997 through 2008, his outsized aura truly cowed most all of his would-be competitors. Remember how they’d wilt when paired with him? Francesco Molinari and Tony Finau did not play well beside Tiger on Sunday but here, too, the game has changed a great deal in 11 years. Today’s PGA Tour is stocked to the gills with young, dynamic, swaggering talent. It will be fascinating to watch this generation of professionals compete with the man many of them grew up idolizing.
Because one thing has not changed: You can’t take your eyes off this Tiger Woods fellow. This was true over the weekend; it was true through 2008. If we’re honest with ourselves, it was true afterward, too, through his many trials. We rather shamelessly rubbernecked the wounded, struggling Tiger like we ogle an accident on the side of the road. More than a decade has passed and we still can’t look away. Why? Because he still has more charisma than anyone who has ever played this game, more perhaps than all the major winners in history, combined. Even a 12-year-old, non-golfing girl can see that.
Roger Goettsch and his pride and joy, a ’49 Chevy pickup he restored.
[Ed. I once heard at an Associated Press seminar that anyone, in the right hands, could prove the subject of a prize-winning profile. This one may or may not qualify, but it’s pretty darned good and has been widely shared in golf circles of late. Mostly because the story of Roger Goettsch, even in my hands, is damned compelling. A published version appeared in a 2019 issue of Golf Course Management magazine. See below a slightly longer, more casually profane original draft. Note: The subject here has since moved on to Coto de Caza Golf & Racquet in Trabuco Canyon, California.]
By HAL PHILLIPS LONGGUN, Hainan PRC (April 9, 2019) — I received the following email from Roger Goettsch, CGCS, in the spring of 2018: I recently designed and built two different wetting forks for applying wetting agents to the soil in our LDS [localized dry-spot] areas. We have had issues getting wetting agents into the soil due to the thatch layer and this seems to have helped… He attached pictures of the wetting forks in action, along with shots of the “Plug Pushers” he also designed and built, to remove cores following aeration.
Goettsch
is the head superintendent at Shanqin Bay Golf Club in the small town of
Longgun, on the island of Hainan, in the People’s Republic of China. Like many
American-trained supers working overseas, Goettsch can’t get his hands on every
last piece of equipment his little heart desires. So he just builds what he can,
himself, putting to work his AutoCAD skills, his welding and fabrication
expertise, and a mechanical imagination born deep in the American heartland.
Goettsch has worked all over North America, and now Asia, leaving behind him a
trail of custom-designed and custom-built equipment — like breadcrumbs in the
woods.
“You have no idea all the shit that I’ve built,” he says, upon compiling for GCM a list of Top 10 Greatest Hits. “Literally, what you’re seeing there are just the big items from the last decade or so. There’s at least another 20 big-ticket items I’ve leaving out and several hundred more I’ve just sort of forgotten.”
Like
those sprig planters you built for all those contractors? Or the fairway
aerifier you whipped up that one night?
“Well, not
one night. We were growing in a Palmer course in Ft. Worth, Texas, working with
Arnold’s project architect, Bob Walker. He’ll confirm this story. The soil was
horrible there, dark heavy clay. We just had
to aerify it. So I decided to build an aerifying machine with my head mechanic,
Bill Hess. We had to get this done because I promised Bob Walker I’d have it
ready for his next site visit. So me and Bill had been working on it several
days, but we worked till 4 a.m. that last night and Bill — I had trained him
how to weld — all of a sudden hollers over at me: Roger we gotta quit… I fell asleep welding.”
When
pressed for why exactly he’s compelled to build so many things — while
simultaneously working full time, taking care of first-class courses from the
Gulf to the South China Sea — Goettsch chalks it up to self-reliance, a quality
his dad embodied and passed along to young Roger in the farmlands of western
Iowa.
“That’s the
through line for all this stuff, based on my upbringing — being
self-sufficient. You know what they say: The DNA precedes you.”
Roger Goettsch, Heartland Figure
Goettsch was born on a small farm in Holstein, Iowa, a burg of 500 souls, most of German descent, where his parents grew corn, soybean, alfalfa, oats, and clover. “The clover and alfalfa mainly served as feed for livestock,” Goettsch explains. “We sold the other crops locally. We raised cattle, pigs and chickens routinely and had a couple horses on the farmstead.”
Roger, his two
brothers and three sisters were involved in all the works. The girls
de-tasseled corn in the summer time.
“We grew
everything: all the garden vegetables; we had an orchard with peaches,
cherries, plums and apples. Our freezer was always full of meat and my mother
was always canning something. From the time I was a 5-year-old kid, I was also
working on the farm. But my father’s workshop was the most interesting part of
that operation. He built everything for us: wagons, cattle chutes, a bail
elevator. He also built a riding lawn mower! I have two older sisters who swear
that he was the first person to ever manufacturer a riding lawn mower. I have a
picture of that I need to dig up. He built so many things.
“In my
spare time I used to hang out in his shop. I was more of a pest to be honest.
Very curious, always wanting to tear something apart and see how it worked.
Typically, I didn’t put things back together, which sorta pissed my dad off.
Compared to modern shop, dad’s was so small. He made his own cut-off saw, to
saw metal. He didn’t have an acetylene torch like I do today.
“Not only
did he build a lawn mower, he took old bicycle frames and built motor scooters
for us. He took the bicycle wheels off, then modified the frames, welded a
plate on there to mount an engine, and new tires. I could draw you a detailed
picture of those things; I’ll never forget riding them around. You put your
foot down, it tightened up a belt and you just went down the road! My dad
bought my mother a Honda Dream 150cc motorcycle back in 1965. They knew it
meant a lot to me, so they willed it to me when they died. My dad also had an
Indian motorcycle that he totally refurbished — one of his pride and joys.
“You name
it, he could build it. Every time I tell my sister that I’ve built something,
she says, You are so much like your dad
it is not even funny.”
The young
Goettsch took every metal working class he could in high school. He became so
good at welding that he was chosen to help construct a metal school bus barn
for the local district. “That was the first project that got me thinking this
was something I could really do. A career maybe.”
The golf
business just sorta happened to Roger Goettsch, the way it does for kids
sometimes. In fact, if it weren’t for Dennis Wiebe, Goettsch might be somewhere
in America, welding and/or fabricating something right now.
As the
story goes, “My friend Dennis dragged me to go golfing one day, even though I didn’t
want to go. I might have been around 12 or 13. I fell completely in love with
the game. That was all it took. During my junior high school days, folks
started to build a 9-hole golf course in town. Cow pasture pool, that’s what my mother always called it.
“I could
not wait to be on the golf team when I became a high school freshman. Even
though we didn’t have a course in Holstein before that. My friend Dennis — his
family had built a house that backed up to this new golf course they were going
to build. By then I’m playing regularly with him and I’m not too bad. From then
on, I couldn’t play enough. My entire four years of high school, all I wanted
was to be a pro golfer.
“I gained
another friend, Steve Kofmehl, who lived just three houses away from Dennis. His
dad was the key guy who put the whole golf course construction deal together,
Charles Kofmehl… So my friend Steve and I would wander over there and walk the [course]
site when it was under construction. We were there often and began to volunteer,
helping to build the course when we had time. When the course opened for play, we
continued to hang around with the new greenkeeper there, a guy named Tim Hupke.”
Hupke was the next key player in this budding golf industry drama. He was one of the best young golfers around, too, and soon he was hired to run the shop and take care of all 9 holes — by himself. He was just out of high school when he landed this job. Goettsch recalls that while Charles Kofmehl and the Board of Directors had pulled together the money to buy Hupke the equipment he needed, “Tim didn’t take care of the golf course that well his first year…
“So the summer after my sophomore year, Tim decides to go off and get married. Because Steve and I were hanging out there all the time, and because his father was involved in building the club, they came to us and said, Would you boys like to take care of this place for 2 weeks while Tim is on his honeymoon?You can work as many hours as you want — and we’ll pay you. Well, we went crazy down there, working sun-up to sundown and they paid us what we considered a king’s ransome.
“That
winter, at school, Steve comes running down the hall: Dean Vollmer wanted to
talk to us. He was chairman of the green committee. He and his brother Don
owned the Chevy dealership in town. So we go down to the dealership after
school and Dean says, Boys, I want you to
know that the golf course was in so much better shape the 2 weeks you worked
there. We want you guys to take care of the golf course this coming season. You
want the job as a twosome? You can work all you want, we’ll pay you… and you
can play the course all you want.
“Believe it
or not, what was rolling through my mind: Would
we be able to golf for free? We didn’t wind up playing golf so much — but I
used that money to buy my first car, a 2-door hardtop Chevy Impala. Dean sold
it to me for $700 and I paid it off in two years. To this day, I have never had
so much fun working on a golf course in my entire life. That’s where I decided
I wanted this to be my career.”
First, the Oil Business
The
rest, as they say, is history. Goettsch went to Iowa State University and
studied turf management, interning all four years at Des Moines Golf &
Country Club under the legendary Bill Byers (though he also took as many
metal-working classes as he could). After graduating (1978) and serving time as
an assistant at several courses, he left the golf business altogether to pursue
a welding career in the oil fields of west Texas. “I made a
lot more money there than I ever made in the golf business,” he recalls. But
golf work is steady; the oil business is not. In fact, when it collapsed in
1983, Goettsch went back to growing grass, his welding equipment in tow.
He landed his first head superintendent’s job at Squaw Creek GC near
Ft. Worth. Eventually, he would come to specialize in the construction and
grow-in of new courses, something he did all over North Texas before landing
his first high-profile head super’s gig at the Arnold Palmer Golf Club
at Fossil Creek. He moved from there to a regional director’s position with the management company
RSL (now Arcis Golf) before going overseas (Thailand and Indonesia) in the
early ‘90s for two more construction/grow-ins. He returned home to do the same
at The Bandit in New Braunfels, Texas, Blackhorse GC down the road in Cypress, and
Redstone Golf Club (now the GC of Houston) in nearby Humble. He was Director of
Agronomy at Barton Creek’s 72 holes when he was lured back to Asia in 2014 —
first to India, then to China.
But that thumbnail sketch, diverse though it is, leaves out nearly all of his creative, metalworking history.
“Bill Byers had so much faith in my ability, he bought an entire pump station and I did all the fabrication and helped [pump engineer] John Tucker install it at Des Moines Golf & Country Club,” Goettsch recalls. “At some point, after I’d become a super, I went out and bought all my own welding and fabrication equipment — and I brought it all with me from job to job. I do think that was a consistent benefit to my employers. These skills have honestly never got in the way of my relationship with the mechanic. Quite the opposite. I always had a great relationship with the mechanic, because he could see that I could help him and my passion for his work was real.
“At Squaw
Creek we hired a mechanic who was a real machine shop guy —he could work a
metal-turning lathe. Between him and me, we made things like a mechanical edger
for the greens. Built the whole damned thing, because he could do all the
shafting. We built some unbelievable stuff at that time… I don’t believe
there’s single mechanic I’ve had the pleasure of working with in the golf
business who doesn’t absolutely love me. We would collaborate. I built things
they would never think of themselves: roll-around benches, shelving, custom
things for their shops. You can buy that stuff, sure. But if you got a shop
with small rooms, we made it all fit. I built a boat trailer out of aluminum
one time — for a pontoon boat. I repaired things out of steel, stainless steel,
cast iron. Back in the day cast iron was difficult to weld. You really had to
know how to do it. I had one Toro representative who used to yell at me: Goettsch, put that welder away so we can
sell you more iron!
“One more
thing mechanics loved me for: When you brake or sheer off a bolt flush with the
top, there’s a special welding rod that I could use to remove it 9.5 times out
of 10 times — saved the company a ton of money each time. Most of my mechanics
were pretty amazed at that.”
These
skills tend to get the attention of various engineering types, too, whom
Goettsch greatly admires. Squaw Creek was where he met P.C. Schedule, who ran a
pump station business. Goettsch would end up doing all manner of jobs with/for Schedule
and John Tucker, on the side, though he gathered as much as he contributed.
“They’re so
smart, those engineers; they’ve got the math. John Tucker has stood by me
forever and taught me so much, as did P.C, who has sadly passed away. Lee Niles
at Southern Irrigation Consultants was another extremely intelligent guy. Lee
hired me at one point and I went to work for him doing GPS and irrigation work.
I would help him draw as-builts — and that’s where I learned AutoCAD. After
that, I did all my own drawings for all my own stuff. That has really helped me
do things quicker, more efficiently. I used to do stuff from memory and just
wing it.”
Ignoring Work-Life Balance Came at a Cost
This sort of efficiency should have given a Goettsch a bit more time for himself, for his family. But only recently has he achieved that sort of balance in his life.
“I was a
workaholic. It’s probably why I’m single now,” he says. “A lot of golf course
supers send everyone home when it rains. I couldn’t wait for it to rain! I
would go into the shop and weld, train my guys. Early on Saturday mornings, I’d
be there in the shop… That was the old Roger. I was very career driven and it
did cost me some things, in my personal life. It did. I’ve always loved what I
do and still love it to this day. I just know how to balance it a bit better.”
The past
few years, Goettsch takes digital images of all his projects. Pre-digital, it
was all old-fashioned photography. Those snap shots — documenting his many,
many creations through the years — can today be found in a storage unit outside
Dripping Springs, Texas, near Austin. That’s also where you’ll find Goettsch’s enduring
pride and joy, a 1949 Chevy pick-up that he helped refurbish (a classic
restoration that took 16 years). In Goettsch’s absence, his car buddies still
display it at various shows around the American Southwest.
When one
looks closely at Goettsch’s lengthy resume and building history, it seems clear
this native Iowan’s admiration for self-reliance isn’t the only thing that
drives him. That turf roller he built for Daniel McCann at Oak Hill CC in San
Antonio… that pontoon boat trailer… those two special Hydro Cyclone
Water Separators he and Tucker installed at Lochinvar Country Club in Houston,
to clean the drinking water… a BBQ for his GM in China… 90 percent of the hand-made things he has
lavished on his mechanic, his maintenance staff, his various employers…
These acts
of creation are a form of friendship and intimacy — the same things his dad
provided to him, for the same reasons.
“I think
there’s some truth to that,” he says. “While I’m building things for the golf
course, I’m usually building other stuff for other people. It gives me a real
good feeling, building relationships in the process.
“When I did
spend a lot of time doing that sort of thing — projects outside the golf course
—I guess there might have been a perception that maybe the club wasn’t always
getting my full attention, their full money’s worth. But I don’t think the
owners ever felt that way. The mechanic definitely never felt that way. And
believe me, wherever I’ve been, we’ve had the best greens around.”
RALEIGH, N.C. (Dec. 10, 2018) — The term Jim Crow is rightly loaded down with socio-racial connotations. But it’s important to recognize that, at its core, Jim Crow was a political system. Yes, a central byproduct was a social system that consigned black folk to second/third class citizenship. But this construct was enabled and perpetuated by overarching political power. At its elemental core, Jim Crow was a system of voter suppression and nullification that allowed a political minority of white southerners to wield unchecked political power and maintain a culture of white supremacy in their respective states — not merely election to election but for a period of some 100 years.
With this in mind and the November elections behind us, pending a few recounts and lawsuits, Republican-controlled legislatures today are busy trying to similarly subvert the will of voting majorities while they still can, however they can. Accordingly, it’s high time we bestowed the next Harris Nightmare Award (HNA) for nakedly self-hating political mendacity.
Our choice for the 2018 post-electoral HNA: The GOP-controlled North Carolina legislature. In the face of U.S. Circuit Court rebukes — and the failure of state and federal investigations to identify meaningful in-person voter fraud — this less-than august body has succeeded in amending its state constitution to permanently suppress the vote via strict voter ID requirements.
This effort alone would not distinguish the NC legislature from dozens of other Republican-controlled bodies across the nation. However, November’s election in North Carolina did manifest what appears to be actual voter fraud — of a kind that 1) the newly ratified amendment would not begin to address; and 2) appears to have been perpetrated entirely by consultants directly employed by Republican U.S. Congressional candidate Mark Harris. His razor-thin victory over opponent Dan McCready was apparently enabled by brazenly illegal efforts centered on absentee ballot vote suppression.
Congratulations and 50 lashes with wet noodles to all the GOP members House member and Senators in North Carolina. Nathan Bedford Forrest would be proud.
Voter Suppression: No Fraud? No Problem!
Republicans generally and the North Carolina legislature in particular have cited rampant in-person voter fraud as foundational to their arguments for requiring photo ID. There remains vanishingly little evidence of such fraud. These claims are rhetorical cover for efforts, in the shameful tradition of Jim Crow, to hold down or nullify the votes of Democrats and independents.
But lo and behold, we’ve finally identified actual voter fraud and it’s specific to NC Republicans themselves!
In a striking note of bipartisan resistance, North Carolina’s State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement — a body comprising four Democrats, four Republicans and one independent — has unanimously voted to postpone certification of the Harris election, which he won by 905 votes, pending an evidentiary hearing scheduled for Dec. 21, 2018.
Named for Dr. Thomas Harris, author of the 1969 pop-psychology treatise I’m OK—You’re OK, The Harris Nightmare Awards call out the cynical, pre-emptively tit-for-tat nihilism that has informed Republican politics since the mid-1990s. In the Age of Trump, this phenomenon has been raised to high art. Hence the need for suitable rituals of public shaming, like the HNAs.
Most folks will be familiar with the title of Harris’ book, which refers to an optimal state of human relations, one that most of us do indeed strive day-to-day to achieve. “Treat they neighbor as thyself” predates the good doctor’s coinage, but they go together. For one cannot hope to treat his/her neighbor well if, to begin with, one does not possess an edifying sense of self-worth.
There are two more middling, less healthy states that Harris used to describe people suffering from undue superiority (I’m OK—You’re Not OK) and undue inferiority (I’m Not OK—You’re OK).
It is the fourth state, I’m Not OK—You’re Not OK, that is generally reserved for inveterate grumps and outright sociopaths. Go here for a more lengthy treatment of why this phrase so cogently describes today’s GOP and the media apparatus that supports it. In short, GOP candidates allege fraud while committing it themselves. Right wing media are more nihilistic. They assert the rampant political motivation and outright fakery of all media. By doing so, they stake out their own position and self-worth quite clearly: “We’re fake; they must be fake.” Or even, “We’re fake because they’re fake.”
I’m Not OK—You’re Not OK.
Shaming the Unshameable
But this phenomenon extends well beyond right-wing media circles. Hence the need for the Harris Nightmare Awards, our humble attempt to shame the unshameable.
Since 2013, The Tar Heel State has, in fits and starts, been home to the nation’s strictest voter ID laws, implemented to curb what Republican backers termed “widespread” voter fraud. Again, fraud of the voter impersonation variety (i.e., fraud presumably addressed by laws requiring photo ID) is so vanishingly rare as to be non-existent. Opponents were quick to point this out, adding that the true goal of this statute was a form of voter suppression, as many of the state’s African-American citizens (who tend to vote Democrat) did not possess such photo ID. Indeed, the 2013 statute also markedly curbed early voting practices — for the simple reason that African-American citizens in N.C. tend to vote early at higher rates than whites.
In July 2016, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down these key provisions of the law, ruling they effectively (and unconstitutionally) “targeted African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”
In April 2017, the State Board of Elections released the results of an extensive, objective audit of the 2016 election. It found that out of nearly 4.8 million votes cast, a single fraudulent vote “probably would have been avoided” with a photo-reliant voter ID law.
In January of 2018, a federal commission formed by President Donnie Trump and administered by serial voter-fraud evangelist Kris Kobach was disbanded after finding similarly vanishing evidence of voter fraud nationwide.
After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the state’s appeal of the 2016 4th Circuit decision, in 2017, the Republican led legislature in North Carolina went to Plan B: a “legislatively referred” constitutional amendment, whereby the same voter ID provisions were put before voters as a single ballot question. Voters passed that ballot initiative, thereby amending the state constitution, on Nov. 6, 2018, 54-46 percent.
Enter Harris and McCready, whose race would appear to have been crucially affected by voter fraud of a very different stripe, a stripe completely unrecognized by the state audit or federal commission, a stripe left unaddressed by the voter ID law added to the state constitution in November, a stripe that leads directly to the NC Republican Party’s Jim Crow-style determination to rule the state indefinitely, even from a minority position.
Actual GOP Fraud, Complicated & Sordid
The voter fraud alleged to have underpinned Harris’ thin victory is nearly as complicated as it is sordid. See here a thorough roundup of what we know. Suffice to say, according to The New York Times, “Mr. Harris won 61 percent of submitted absentee ballots in Bladen County, even though registered Republicans accounted for only 19 percent of the ballots submitted. To do that, he would have had to win essentially every independent who voted absentee, as well as some registered Democrats. In every other county in the district — even strongly Republican ones — Mr. McCready won the absentee vote.”
Harris’s campaign has expressed shock, SHOCK at this development, a supremely misplaced emotion because it paid more than $400,000 to the consulting firm Red Dome to administer a “get out the vote campaign” that concentrated specifically on absentee ballots. Apparently, this effort involved going door to door and intercepting those ballots, which must, by law, be mailed. Where the intercepted ballots supported Harris, apparently, they were posted to the clerk’s office. Where they did not, ballots were discarded.
At first, Republican legislators in North Carolina fell all over themselves to respond, while resisting the idea that Harris’ victory should not stand. Now they have indicated openness to an entirely new election pitting Harris against McCready — which tells you just how firm the case must be against Red Dome and Harris.
More important to the NC electoral system, GOP legislators have floated the idea of addressing this Republican-style absentee ballot fraud via more stringent voter ID requirements — because that’s the only dog whistle these one-trick ponies seem to know! Whatever is sent to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is sure to be vetoed. The legislature’s Republican super majority, achieved via hardcore gerrymandering techniques, is sure to override that veto and amend the state constitution to reflect its political will.
Again, this is the essence of Jim Crow: reducing, disallowing or otherwise invalidating the political will of your opponent, to ensure that your own minority will continue to govern/rule. If you thought the above gerrymandering sentiment was harsh, consider this: According to the State Board of Elections there are 2,694,556 registered Democrats in North Carolina, as of Dec. 1, 2018. There are 2,119,956 registered Republicans (and 2,261,637 unaffiliated voters). Somehow, this mix has resulted in a Republican super majority in both the state House of Representative (75-45) and Senate (35-15). This is a state where the governor is a Democrat; Cooper’s thin, statewide victory 2016 illustrates the extent to which North Carolina is purple, split right down the middle.
And yet, the Legislature is administered by Republicans holding super majorities in the upper and lower houses. This is all the evidence one needs to prove state legislative districts have been massively gamed by Republicans, to favor Republicans. Indeed, so ruled the Supreme Court of the United States, in June 2017, when it affirmed a federal district court decision finding that 28 state legislative districts had been subject to an illegal racial gerrymander — a decision that has been the subject of enough stays to get this 2018 election completed.
Republicans in North Carolina don’t care about any of the niceties involved in heeding Supreme Court decisions, just as James Calhoun and the Nullification Movement didn’t care, just as late 19th century southern whites didn’t care. I’m Not OK—You’re Not OK.
Previous HNA Winners
Fans of the Harris Nightmare Awards will recall that our previous recipient, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, was defeated in November by Democrat Tony Evers. In response, the gerrymandered Wisconsin state legislature has voted into law several measures that effectively restrict the power of the incoming governor — just as the North Carolina legislature did to Cooper upon his election, in 2016. Among other things, the bill blocks Evers’s ability to alter state welfare policy, or withdraw the state from a lawsuit opposing the Affordable Care Act — two things Evers campaigned on, two things a majority of voters demonstrably supported. It also limits the state’s early voting period, a move that would make it harder for Democrats to win future elections in Wisconsin.
The Assembly in Madison is another body that, on account of brazen Republican gerrymandering, maintains a 63-35 majority in the Assembly, and a 17-16 majority in the Senate — despite the fact that Democratic Assembly and Senate candidates together garnered 55 percent of the overall state vote in November.
The same thing is happening in Michigan. We have entered a new, modern era of nullification.
I read a very interesting interviewlast week with Russian-born Gary Kasparov, the political activist and former world chess champion. Kasparov is vehemently anti-Putin and quite apart from any role the Russians may have played in affecting the 2016 U.S. elections, he sees in this country the slow erosion of voting rights and a gathering disillusion with the entire democratic process. These strike Kasparov as Putinesque developments, which is to say, our will to vote and our trust in the vote are degenerating to the point of indifference.
“Putin’s great advantage is that, unlike Soviet propagandists, he is not selling an ideology,” Kasparov said. “I call him the merchant of doubt. His message is, We are shit, you are shit, and all of this is bullshit. What democracy?”
Dr. Thomas Harris could not have put it better, had he awoken from a nightmare and screamed it out loud.
NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine (Nov. 14, 2018) — I don’t want to blow anybody’s mind. But here’s the thing: The classic cartoon Go-Go Gophers is further evidence of a little acknowledged but fascinating, mid-century trend in pop culture. Over and Over again, animators actively ripped off popular, live-action television shows of the time, essentially mining and co-opting them for themes, plots and personalities. These cartoons were the stuff of my GenX youth — on Saturday mornings, after school — and I expect much of my cohort will read this and nod dismissively: “Duh. The Flintstones.”
Yes, but it’s way bigger than that.
The Flintstones are the best-known example of this dynamic. It was also the first cartoon ever to air on network television in prime time. Launched in 1960, the show was a blatant rip-off of The Honeymooners. Its 39 episodes had aired from 1955-56, though star Jackie Gleason would intermittently reprise the role and the show for years. Fred and Wilma Flintstone were clear homages to the lead, live-action roles played by Gleason and Dorothy Meadows. Barney Rubble was even more distinctively based on Art Carney’s character, Ed Norton. I think everyone realized what was going on here, even at the time. It was part of the imprimatur that led to featuring The Flintstones in prime time, something unprecedented for an animated series at that time and frankly, still today, apart from The Simpsons.
But cartoonists would eventually prove some of the most facile and prolific rip-off artists in 20th century media history. The Flintstones formula worked. Accordingly, producers reprised the process without shame — to a degree we kids didn’t realize at the time and, I’d wager, few appreciate still today.
Exhibit A? The inimitable Go-Go Gophers, an under-appreciated cartoon and based completely on another live action (and culturally tone-deaf) TV show from that era, F Troop. Indeed, Go-Go Gophers was the cartoon that decades ago tipped me off to this weighty matter.
Classic Cartoons: A bin of Questionable Taste
As a kid, I thought F Troop was sorta funny. It was raucous confection, with a catchy theme song. Its cartoon incarnation did it one better in most every respect. Each episode of Go-Go Gophers begins with one of cartooning’s all-time great theme songs, followed by an uncanny, even cheekier homage to F-Troop’s fertile-if-untoward frontier theme.
One wonders today how anyone could see the opportunity for such broad humor in the slow-moving genocide of an indigenous people. We could include in this bin of questionable taste a sitcom based in a German POW camp. Of course, when Hogan’s Heroes was airing, perhaps folks were similarly dumbfounded by our bygone acceptability of black minstrel humor, like Amos & Andy, just 30 years prior. Three decades from now, we may similarly come to grips with other such untoward manifestations of white supremacy and the patriarchy.
Be all that as it may, the creators of Go-Go Gophers were ad guys from Dancer Fitzgerald Sample. They created the show to allow their client, General Mills, to advertise cereal. The producers of Go-Go Gophers — Total Television, then CBS starting in 1967, as part of the brilliantUnderdog Show — devised a cast of characters that also did the live-action show one better. The two aboriginal characters, members of the Hakawi Tribe, are straight cribs from the TV show. But you’ll recall the cartoon Colonel inhabits a Teddy Roosevelt milieu, while the Sergeant (played by Forest Tucker on TV) is animatedly morphed into a laconic John Wayne-ish figure.
Larry Storch’s memorable TV character, “Agarn,” didn’t make the cut. Neither did the Colonel’s live-action love interest. She was a sort of Annie Oakley figure clearly inspired by Ellie May from the Beverly Hillbillies. During the 1960s, no matter how incongruous to the sitcom premise, producers were sure to write into the show some hot young blonde. See The Munsters and, for that matter,The Jetsons. Television producers did a lot of shameless things, then and now. They borrowed from any genre or competing show that worked. And so, they could hardly complain when cartoon producers did the same.
