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Making room for new memories of Ireland

Making room for new memories of Ireland

The last time I visited Ireland, my brother and I chaperoned the old man around the Southwest, taking in the links at Doonbeg, Lahinch, Tralee and Ballybunion. That was nearly three years ago and our timing couldn’t have been better. I don’t want to go all Jim Dodson on you, but my dad has since been diagnosed with lymphoma. He’s hanging in there, but my brother and I are pretty damned glad we took him to Ireland when we did, because his days of walking 18 on consecutive days are in all likelihood behind him.

I’m turning these things, these most recent memories of Eire, over in my mind here in Dublin Airport, waiting on the rest of my party. A leaden gray sky hangs low over the modernist terminal I spy across the street, through massive picture windows. We have a mighty drive ahead of us, once we’ve all assembled — straight up to the island’s northernmost tip, skirting the new golf capital of the world, Northern Ireland, to the links at Ballyliffin. From there a veritable string of equally hallowed venues await.

There will be plenty to write about in the days to come, plenty of memories to be made. I and my comrades in Gortex will be diligent in relaying them to you via word, sound and image. But for now I’m loathe to shake the memories from last time.

I won’t bore you but one moment stands out: That first day we arrived, in Shannon, the three of us promptly headed straight for Lahinch on a beautiful sunlit morning. There is no better cure for jetlag than a round of golf, first thing, right off the plane. As one enters the tiny beach town of Lahinch, it’s not clear to the novice exactly where to find the golf club. We pulled over and asked directions of an older woman.

“Well, it’s right over there,” she said, gesturing to an intersection where we should’ve gone right. The course lay on the high ground just beyond. It proved pretty difficult to miss, but she didn’t press this point.

“Have you a game today? I see that you have. Well, you’ll love it. Absolutely love it. It’s a wonderful golf course and you’ve got a beautiful day for it. Where are you from?”

Boston.

“Well, I have several relatives living there. They’re not golfers, sad to say. But that won’t matter to you. Just take that right hand turn and the course is on your left. Can’t miss it. Lovely course, lovely weather. You’ll have wonderful day…”

We thanked her profusely, of course, and, duly bathed in the hospitality for which Ireland is rightly famous, we all turned to each other and smiled. We may have giggled. At which point my brother summed it up: “What a bitch.”

We laughed long and hard, then headed off into the dunes at Lahinch.

Edgewood GC: Recalling a Course Blotted Out by Progress
The 16th at the TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Conn. This par-3 is approached today over this pond. Back in the early 1980s, one approached it from the right, high on a hill. (Photo by Jim Rogash/Getty Images)

Edgewood GC: Recalling a Course Blotted Out by Progress

The 16th at the TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Conn. This par-3 is approached today over this pond. In the early 1980s, one approached this same green from the right, high on a hill.

A few years back I managed to hook up with a former college golf teammate of mine, Stuart Remensnyder, for a friendly reunion/grudge match at TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Conn., site of this week’s PGA Tour stop, The Traveler’s Championship. Stuart and I spent a lot of time that day musing about the delightful scam that was Division III college golf (we had played for Wesleyan University, in neighboring Middletown). Golf wasn’t like other varsity sports, after all. “Practice” amounted to playing free, fully sanctioned golf three or four days a week.

In any case, Stuart and I were standing in the 1st fairway at River Highlands, musing over past conquests/humblings and waiting on the group in front of us, when I abruptly cut off our conversation and pointed with some urgency at a row of homes sitting high on a hill, deep in the right rough.

“You see those houses?” I ventured. “That’s the old 13th hole.”

“You mean the 13th at the old TPC?” Stuart asked.

“No, the old, OLD 13th — at Edgewood!”

Stalwart New England golf fans might recall that the Greater Hartford Open — today known as the Traveler’s Championship — moved in the mid-1980s, after years at Weathersfield CC, to an ill-fated facility called the TPC at Cromwell (it was, at times, also called the TPC of Connecticut). This Pete Dye design didn’t meet with the slavish approval associated with Dye’s work today. Indeed, the players didn’t like the TPC at Cromwell; the PGA Tour didn’t like it; for all I know, Dye’s late wife Alice wasn’t crazy about it either.

Long story short, architect Bobby Weed — himself a Dyesciple and the PGA Tour’s in-house architect back then — was brought in to renovate the place just a few years later. The joint was renamed the TPC at River Highlands, and everyone loved it.

What New England golf fans might NOT remember is this: The short-lived TPC at Cromwell was not a “new” golf course in the strict sense. It didn’t just materialize from scratch, springing fully formed from the brow of Deane Beman, there by the Connecticut River. No, the TPC at Cromwell resulted from a complete and utter renovation of an existing layout called Edgewood Golf Club, home course to the mighty Wesleyan Cardinals for years. Indeed, the University had owned the club for decades in the middle part of the century.

There were strong holes and weak holes at Edgewood, but during my first two years at Wesleyan, it was my “home” course. I enjoyed many a practice round there with teammates and took many a licking there at the hands of New England’s finest collegiate players. Stuart did, too. We all did.

Now it’s gone. Replaced not once but twice by completely new incarnations in the space of just a few years.

Golf courses do change, after all, for good and for ill — sometimes by design, at the hands of man; other times via naturally occurring phenomena like tree growth and erosion. Some alterations, like those undertaken annually at Augusta National, garner breathless headlines, while others are conceived and authored without a hint of public awareness or concern.

Changes are welcomed by some, reviled by others. Only one thing is universal: All of these evolutions take less time than one might ever imagine.

At Edgewood, the situation was unique because so far as the Wesleyan golf team was concerned, the transformation happened completely without warning. Toward the end of my freshman year, spring 1983, new golf holes started popping up like mushrooms betwixt and between the existing holes! Unbeknownst to us, Dye had already been retained and had begun radically reconfiguring the layout right before our eyes. We didn’t have a clue what was happening. When we asked inside the clubhouse, no one else seemed to have a clue either.

When we returned in the fall of 1983, more new holes had emerged. This was only a few years post-Sawgrass, and Dye’s now familiar mounding — quite mysterious and exotic back then — appeared to be bubbling to the surface. He didn’t just build new holes in former rough areas either. He completely reversed existing holes. He combined a few. Eliminated others. He fashioned new holes that played to existing greens from completely different directions. The entire routing was turned on its ear.

By this time we’d learned of the Tour’s grand plans for old Edgewood. And for one fleeting moment — I can’t honestly remember how long it lasted: 10 minutes, a day, a couple weeks — we, the Wesleyan Golf Team, entertained fantastical thoughts of practicing and playing our matches at this completely retooled golf course, a resplendent-sounding place: The TPC at Cromwell. Home to a future PGA Tour stop for chrissakes!

That’s about when they booted us.

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Desert Golf Safari Conjures Memories of Bob Labbance

Desert Golf Safari Conjures Memories of Bob Labbance

So I’ve been thinking a lot about Bob Labbance lately. Bob was a good friend, a golf writer and historian, a counter-culturist after a fashion, and, as my grandfather would have described him, one of nature’s gentlemen. Note the tense. Bob suffered a traumatic fall and paralysis in 2007. He fought back to regain a great deal of motion and a large measure of his life, only to contract Lou Gehrig’s disease, degenerate quite quickly and pass away in Aug. 2008, at the tender age of 56.

You learn a lot about a guy when horrible shit befalls him. You talk more deeply and seriously about things with that person. You learn more about the man — more than you ever would have if, as we do with most acquaintances, both parties were to skate together through life largely unaffected by tragedy.

Bob loved the desert, and I thought of him as my family and I toured the American Southwest last week and played a fine Johnny Miller design in St. George, Utah: Entrada Golf Club at Snow Canyon. Bob grew up in Fairfield County, Connecticut, went to school in Maine, and lived much of his adult life in Vermont. He was a New Englander through and through, and he was what I like to call an unreconstructed hippie. But he loved golf, and the counter-culturist in him allowed an appreciation of desert golf — something a lot of golf design nerds reflexively disdain.

I first met Bob in about 1994, and only later in his all-too-short life did I learn that he fancied the idea of retiring to Flagstaff, Arizona. I got the impression his family wasn’t as keen on this particular idea, and in that way his untimely death mooted the issue. I thought of him as we passed through Flagstaff twice last week. We were there to play some disc golf but found far more than an excellent track tucked beside the athletic complex at Northern Arizona University. More than a mile high, surrounded by open chaparral and sitting in the shadow of the 10,000-foot San Francisco Peaks, Flagstaff is physically gorgeous and a pleasing college vibe pervades. Many towns in the north of Arizona — hell, in all of Arizona and much of the West — are striking (to a New Englander especially) for just how new or post-modern they feel. Flagstaff has some of that, but it also has a proper, turn-of-the-19th-century downtown where today funky galleries and a wide variety of non-chain, quite excellent restaurants abound.

I didn’t start playing disc golf until after Bob had passed away, and playing in Arizona made me wonder what he’d have thought of it. Hardcore golfers tend to look askance at this golfing cousin, and while Bob was in many ways a counter-culturist — he lived in a commune after college on the shores of Sabbathday Lake, for chrissakes — he was something of purist when it came to golf. He revered the old course designs, soaked up the game’s rich history, and collected old clubs and books… But when he wrote books on course design, his subjects were Wayne Stiles and Walter Travis, not Donald Ross and Alistair Mackenzie. Bob also organized an annual Cayman tournament at his place in Vermont, where competitors holed out by chipping the ball either against a car tire (1 stroke) or into said tire (no stroke).

I’m betting Bob would have liked disc golf, recognizing that between the ears it’s essentially the same game — minus the status-seeking, the collared shirts, and the reliance on expensive, ever-upgradeable equipment. I’m also betting that as an eminently practical unreconstructed hippie, Bob would have recognized that to love one game doesn’t prevent the love of another.

The Joys of Disc Golf: Yeah, you heard me right…

The Joys of Disc Golf: Yeah, you heard me right…

Starting this weekend, in honor of The Masters, we’re “Fighting the Pieties that Be” here at halphillips.net by celebrating golf’s non-traditional, even subversive appeal. Friday we featured the internally illuminated, colorfully sequined mannequins I recently came across in a Vietnamese pro shop. Today’s topic: Disc Golf.

Nothing rolls the eyes of traditional golfers than a discussion of disc golf. Well, I’m here to tell you that not only does disc golf totally rock, but I played more disc rounds in 2010 than actual golf rounds.

Why? Well, there are lots of reasons: First and foremost, between the ears the two versions are uncannily similar. Let me give you an example: Driving. We all know that over-swinging is a recipe for disaster, especially when wielding the big stick. The dynamic is identical with the disc, including the urge to vacantly muscle a drive out there in order to 1) satisfy some animal urge; and 2) gain 5-10 extra yards that won’t, in the end, truly enable you to play the hole in fewer strokes. Managing this dynamic is a dead-on crossover shared by these two incarnations of the game.

Here’s another: When you’re standing over a 4-foot putt, the traditional golfer must weigh the merits of charging said putt, taking the break out, and, should he miss, living with the consequences of another 4-footer coming back — or lagging it, increasing the break one must play, but pretty much guaranteeing one won’t three-jack. The same thought process and consequences are extant with a putting disc in your hands. Exactly.

I could go on and on. There are differences. The most striking is disc golf clever rendering of the body and club as one. But it’s the same game.

I plan to blog more on this topic because there are so many aspects to disc golf’s striking appeal — aspects that tend to address directly many misgivings we have concerning actual golf: A disc round takes no more than 90 minutes to play, for example; there is no dress code; there is absolutely no barrier to entry — anyone can become competent in a few weeks; rounds are $5-10; the courses themselves are really cool, all of them distinct 3:1 miniatures of actual golf courses — with the added dimension that forested areas, if thinned a smidge, produce a corridor of play unlike anything in the actual golf world.

I’ll leave you, for now, with a word on the game’s aural sensations. There are no “cups” in disc golf. One holes out by landing the disc in a basket. I’ve included a picture here, to give you an idea of what I mean. But imagine a circular metal basket that sits halfway up a 5foot metal pole. Atop the poll sits a metal disc the same diameter as the basket. Draping down from the top disk are chains that deaden the oncoming disc, dropping it into the basket.

Holing out in actual golf only makes a sound on TV, whereas holing out with a disc produces a distinctive sound: faintly metallic, a bit plinky, but definitely audible from a couple hundred yards away and pleasing in a communal sense. It’s sorta like the sound a kid makes as he mounts a chain link fence, with the idea of clambering over. Not exactly the roar of a crowd filtered through Georgia pines; indeed, that’s something that most of us will never hear, on any golf course. But to the ears of disc golfer, it’s music.

Masters Week: Fighting The Pieties That Be
Sequined mannequins: You'll never see them at Augusta. And bravo for that...

Masters Week: Fighting The Pieties That Be

As close readers of this blog already know, I possess a highly developed aversion to sanctimony. As a result, Masters Week really is something of a trial for me — until Saturday afternoon, when the inherent competitive attractions of the tournament ultimately win out and take precedence over the weeks of bullshit fawning and musing that routinely precede and general suffuse media coverage of golf’s first major championship of the year.

In this spirit of Fighting The Pieties That Be, I offer this week a series of posts that discuss or otherwise celebrate golf in non-traditional and subversive ways. By mentioning the Masters only obliquely, and with derision, I do my part in diminishing the hype — and perhaps opening our eyes just a bit to the fact that there really is a lot more to like about golf than yet another story on how cheap the sandwiches are at Augusta National, how struck with wonder the amateurs have been in the Crow’s Nest all week, what a fabulous tradition the meaningless par-3 tournament is, and yet another gauzy feature on Arnold Palmer, against whom I have nothing, but let’s get real: The man last won a major in 1964, the year I was born… (Quick caveat: If said story centers on how and why Arnie never won a major once he quit smoking, after the ’64 Masters, I’ll read that with enthusiasm, as I’m fascinated by this little-shared but quite fascinating factoid.)

So, without further ado, see here Fight the Piety Golf Tidbit No. 1:

Check out what I saw recently on display in the striking new clubhouse at Danang Golf Club, on the Central Coast of Vietnam. The image here provided says more than I ever could. Are those not the coolest mannequins you’ve ever seen? I’m not a golf apparel guy; it doesn’t much interest me. For the record, the shirt here was produced by a company called AB Pro Golf, whose own innovations include a line of reversible shirts and high-performance fabrics that include anti-bacterial agents.

But enough about that. I first saw them in March, but I still can’t take my eyes off these mannequins. There’s a cyborg quality to them that I find eerie but irresistible. Howie Roberts, the general manager at Danang GC, reports that such mannequins are quite the rage in Bali, but I’ve not seen anything like them in golf shops anywhere in Asia-Pacific, North America or Europe. They’re sequined, of course, with different combinations of colors: red and black, teal and pale green (pictured), orange and yellow… They simultaneously bring out the best in a shirt’s color while grabbing the eye and never letting go. Check out the shop the next time you’re visiting Danang GC, and bring your sticks; this Norman design may well be the best new course (opened May 2010) you’ll find anywhere.

 

Curmudgeon talks Asia, Tiger, galleries with Kessler

The Curmudgeon, a.k.a. Hal Phillips, made a guest appearance Feb. 22 on Peter Kessler’s “Making the Turn”, a fixture on the PGA Tour Radio network (XM 146/Sirius 209). As a guest on someone else’s show, he kept the ranting and complaining to a minimum, but there was nevertheless lively conversation on the state of the U.S. Tour galleries, the rise of Golf in Asia, the transition of media outlets to web formats, course ranking, Tiger Woods and more. Enjoy.

 

The Curmudgeon: Golf’s Most Bracing Pod

The Curmudgeon: Golf’s Most Bracing Pod

 

We know how it is. You like your golf. You might even love it, but the game’s fawning media echo chamber leaves you cold, and often woefully ill-informed. Perhaps The Curmudgeon — the golf podcast that dares speak truth to power — is for you. Join host Hal Phillips and a panoply of journalists who aren’t afraid to put their access at risk. What’s more, you don’t have to wear a collared shirt to listen in.

Inside this Special PGA Championship pod:
• Should the Masters really be a Major?
• Sartorial Screed: The Case Against Cargo Shorts
• What are the spoils of Ryder Cup hospitality exactly?

2010.08.12 The Curmudgeon

The Golf Tee & Dentistry: Now it can be told
The Aero-Tee: shaped like a giant, inverted, tri-cuspid fang.

The Golf Tee & Dentistry: Now it can be told

Some golfers look at things the way they are and ask “Why?” Dr. Venanzio Cardarelli dreams of things that never were and asks, “Could you open a little wider please?”

Cardarelli, a practicing dentist who holds some 20 different U.S. patents, is the D.M.D. behind the Aero-Tee, a three-pronged, polycarbonate, cuspid-shaped ball platform that he hopes will revolutionize the golf tee genre. It’s a pretty neat little gizmo and a real step forward, if all the independent testing is on the level (see results at www.aero-tee.com). The product’s tri-fluted, helical support structure is designed to reduce resistance by all but eliminating surface-area contact with the golf ball. According to Cardarelli, 55, this scheme also increases the amount of air accelerating all around the ball — including beneath it.

While the new Aero-Tee departs quite radically from traditional golf tee architecture, its designer does not. In fact Cardarelli continues a long, distinguished and quite curious tradition of dentist-assisted golf tee design innovation. To wit, the wooden golf tee was invented by a Boston dentist, Dr. George Franklin Grant, in 1899, and the tee design most commonly utilized today was patented in 1924, by Dr. William Lowell — a New Jersey-based dentist.

Forget for a moment that Cardarelli’s Aero-Tee, if viewed upside down, bears vague resemblance to a mighty tri-cuspid fang, roots and all.

What is it about the practice of dental arts that spurs an interest, much less sustained structural innovation, in golf tees?

The Aero-Tee: shaped like a giant, inverted, tri-cuspid fang.

“Maybe Grant and Lowell were talking to me from the grave,” laughs Cardarelli, who lives in Plymouth, Mass., and practices four days a week in nearby Braintree. “Honestly, I didn’t even know these guys existed until after I came up with the Aero-Tee. I was just addressing the shortcomings of conventional tees in my basement and came up with this model. Why dentists and golf tees? That’s a tough question. I was just trying to fill a need.”

No pun intended?

“That’s right!”

Cardarelli’s enthusiasm for the Aero-Tee is evident the moment he launches into his rapid-fire, heart-felt spiels on the quest for acceptable tee stability and, of course, polycarbonates strong enough to avoid undue breakage. Yet prior to our conversation, he appears not to have considered why dentists have historically formed the leading edge of golf tee technology. “It’s a very interesting question,” muses the good doctor, slowing down to ponder the matter. “Maybe we look at things with a finer-tooth comb than most people. We do deal with very small increments of measurement all day long, fractions of millimeters. We need to visualize and restore at these levels of fineness and quality — golf tees are created on this sort of scale.”

The morning after we spoke on the phone, Dr. Cardarelli, whose friends call him Vinnie, sent me an email. Evidently our conversation had stuck in his craw. “I am still thinking about your question, about the relationship of dentists and golf tees. Maybe the answer will come from the grave,” he wrote, before adding something he’d neglected to mention the day before: the vice president of Aero-Tee is Dr. Joseph Santelli, a close friend and fellow dentist (D.D.S., actually).

Cardarelli is optimistic about the Aero-Tee’s business prospects, though his product has been on the market a relatively short time [it debuted in early 2004] and there is significant competition. PrideSports of Burnham, Maine, produces some 85 percent of the world’s wooden tees, and golfers aren’t exactly massing in the streets and turning over cars to protest a retrograde state of the art. Most golfers believe low-tech wooden tees, despite their “resistance”, do a creditable job — and most golf courses give them away in pro shops.

That said, Pride has ventured into the high-tech, alternative tee market with its PTS Off-Set model whose design recalls a waitress holding a tray over her head. One of its three prongs is shorter than the others. According to the web literature, “for best results, aim short prong at target”.

The Tomahawx model claimed to reduce resistance by…

A product once marketed under the name Tomahawx went the resistance-free route by concentrating on the other end of the tee — the pointed end that goes sub terra. This knife-shaped point allowed the tee to pivot forward, thus reducing resistance upon driver impact.

… tipping over upon impact — without breaking.

Then there’s the Brush-T (www.brusht.com), another alternative tee product whose flat, bristle-brush platform also claims to reduce resistance and accelerate air flow beneath the golf ball. Sort of ironic that after all those years in the basement — after all those years cajoling his patients — Dr. Cardarelli never saw the golf application of brushes. “I’ve told my wife: I’m shocked that I didn’t come up with that as an alternate design,” he says somewhat ruefully. “I guess what’s really amazing is the person who invented it wasn’t a dentist.”

Indeed, the Brush-T was conceived by Jason Crouse, a South African industrial product engineer. In other words, not a dentist. However, the president of Brush-T North America, Paul Krok, while not a dentist, just happens to be president of another company, Oralgiene USA, Inc., which distributes electric toothbrushes for children. Perhaps for this reason, Cardarelli is gracious in discussing his competitor.

Or perhaps he’s just wary of being pegged as the only dentist on earth against brushing.