Golf For The Ages

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Charles Prokop

I’m a member of Tom Watson’s generation. I started playing golf when Nicklaus was beginning to battle Palmer, and was beginning my first “real job” when Watson and Nicklaus had their Duel in the Sun. I was crushed as I watched Watson’s 8 iron shot go long at the 18th at Turnberry, and could hardly watch as he lost the playoff to Cink.

SOUTHPORT, UNITED KINGDOM - JULY 16: Tom Watso...

SOUTHPORT, UNITED KINGDOM – JULY 16: Tom Watson of the USA during the third practice round of the 137th Open Championship on July 16, 2008 at Royal Birkdale Golf Club, Southport, England. (Photo by Ian Tillbrook) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I cheered when Watson made the cut at this year’s Greenbrier. I knew it was just making the cut, not winning, but it was more than a pair of current top stars could do. And even though Watson finished near the bottom of the field his performance gives golfers my age a warm feeling deep inside.

I know comparing my game to Tom Watson’s is like comparing a drunk karaoke singer to “The Velvet Fog.” Both do vaguely similar things in similar places, but only Mel Torme is worth a second look. (Unless you like train wrecks, of course.) But Watson’s game at his (and my) age encourages me to keep at it.

Last week I played with a different group than I usually do. One person in my group was 78 years old and another was 93. (That’s not a typo. He was ninety three years old.) We made it around in under 4 hours, had a good time, and everyone played pretty well. As the young kid I was hitting it longer and fewer times, but both of them beat me on a few holes. I actually enjoyed those defeats as much as they enjoyed those wins.

I was once playing with a guy my age and we got behind a group of older fellows. We watched as they shuffled along the fairways and across the greens, and the guy I was with said something like “I only hope that when I get to that age I’ll have the good sense to quit.”

I feel just the opposite. Some would say I’m an old fart now, and I’ve got over 30 years of golf to go before I catch up to that 93 year old. I only hope that when I get there I’m doing what he’s doing now.

 

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Loving The Next Shot

Posted on July 3, 2012 by Charles Prokop

Tiger Woods’ victory at the AT&T National has been sucking all the oxygen from the room of late, but there was another win last weekend that is worth noting. Peter Tomasulo beat David Lingmerth in a 4-hole playoff at the United Leasing Championship, the first event of the newly-named Web.com Tour. How Tomasulo held it together to win is an instructive story.

Tomasulo was leading by one stroke as he stood on the 18th tee on Sunday, with Lingmerth already in the clubhouse. Tomasulo had been driving well all day, but he hit his drive into the water hazard running down the right side and had to re-tee because of where his ball entered the hazard. He managed a birdie 3 on his second ball (a bogey 5 on the hole) to tie Lingmerth. He then endured 3 holes of the playoff, missing a short putt on the 3rd hole that would had given him the win. Then he endured a weather delay, and when they came out to play the 4th playoff hole he stood and watched as Lingmerth, his caddie, and a PGA official went through an extended debate about where Lingmerth could drop after hitting his drive into the same hazard Tomasulo had hit in regulation. Lingmerth got a favorable drop decision and managed to reach the green in 3. He went on to bogey and Tomasulo finally won with a par. All of this happened at the end of a grueling day of 100-plus degree heat in Evansville, Indiana.

Tomasulo had many chances to come apart during all of this, but he held it together to win. Just imagine how many opportunities he had to get down on himself, start cursing this luck or his stupidity, get angry about Lingmerth’s drop position, etc. Somehow he seemed to stay in the moment and let the past be the past, to focus on what he needed to do and not what he had done.

Whether you think of it as forgetting about the last shot, as we’re told to do ad-nauseum, or you think about it as staying in the moment in a more Zen-like fashion, it was an impressive feat. I’d have beat myself to a bloody pulp long before I made it to the 4th hole of that playoff. I can’t imagine what I’d have been muttering to myself during the rain delay, if I made it that far.

In my last round I shanked a wedge from the middle of the fairway, leading to a bogey on the easiest par 4 on the course. I proceeded to 4-putt the next hole and 3-putt the next, so I went 5 over in those 3 holes before I got my mental control back and was able to rescue the round and end up 7 over. My tendency is to beat myself up for going 5 over on those 3 holes, but I could also congratulate myself for the other 15 where I was only 2 over. Of course, beating myself up is probably what caused me to go 5 over.

I bet I know what Tomasulo would suggest I do.

I just finished reading Beautiful Ruins, the new novel by Jess Walter. It has nothing to do with golf, but I highly recommend it. At the beginning of the final chapter Walter includes a quote from Milan Kundera that goes as follows:

“There would be nothing more obvious, more tangible, than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact.”

And much of the sadness of golf, I’d add.

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Thank You, Mr. Harrington

Posted on June 25, 2012 by Charles Prokop

Padraig Harrington was being interviewed after a nice 65 in the third round of the Traveler’s Championship last Saturday. He’d played a pretty smart round, as you might guess with a score of 65, but he’d gone for a sucker pin on one hole and ended up making bogey. The interview about this hole went (approximately) as follows:

Padraig Harrington Winner

Padraig Harrington (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Interviewer: “That’s the great thing about golf. We’re learning something every time we play.”

Harrington: “Oh, I’ll make that mistake again.”

I’ve always liked Harrington’s attitude. He seems to have a good time out on the course and that wide-eyed grin when he’s playing well is infectious. And now he’s given me permission to keep being the stupid golfer I am! I know that I keep making the same mistakes over and over, but if a major champion admits to the flaw, then woo-hoo! Who am I to argue with that?

 

The only problem is that I’ll keep hitting that tree on number eight. But I’ll feel better about it.

 

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Another Word From Professor Obvious

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Charles Prokop

English: Histogram of sepal widths for Iris ve...

A few of my previous posts (here and here) have reported on correlations between my putting, greens in regulation, and fairways hit with my score. The last time I looked at the data, all three parts of my game predicted my score about equally.

I’ve continued to record the data, and now have records from 53 rounds. That’s enough to satisfy my curiosity, and things seem to be stabilizing. My scores in those 53 rounds range from 73 to 88, with a mean of 80.85. That’s pretty typical for me these days, so I think it’s a representative sample of my play.

Overall, I can’t see any noteworthy difference in the degree to which fairways hit, GIR, or number of putts predict my score. All are about equally predictive. As before, a combination index predicts my scores very well (a Pearson r of .83 for you stat jockeys out there). The combination index is derived by subtracting the total of GIR and fairways hit from number of putts, so the lower that index is, the better I’m playing.

The interesting feature is the change in the data over the months I’ve collected it. Putting has become a weaker predictor, and during those moths I’ve started to get back some of the ball-striking skills that I’d lost for a while. In short, I’m not so reliant on my putting for a good score, and that shows in the statistics.

So what do I need to do to get better? The statistics suggest I need to work equally on everything, and that’s how I feel about it as I play. I have my good and bad days at all parts of the game, but I don’t feel like one part is notably stronger or weaker than another. My chipping and pitching is probably my strength, but I can’t figure out how to track that in the statistics without sucking all the fun out of my time on the course, so Professor Obvious is hereby retired from data collection until further notice.

He’s going to see if having fun hitting that little ball leads to better scores. Reports without statistics will follow as needed.

 

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Pecan Valley News

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Charles Prokop

As a lot of folks are aware, historic Pecan Valley Golf Club has been closed for several months. The ownership has been working to change the zoning so as to accommodate multifamily housing for wounded warriors and a 9 hole golf course designed for handicap accessibility.

The rezoning has recently passed city council, so it looks like Pecan Valley in its present form will fade into history. A news story covering the rezoning may be found here.

As a golfer, I’m sorry to see Pecan Valley go. But I have come to know some of the people with Foresight Golf (the current owners of Pecan Valley) through my patronage of Pecan Valley and other Foresight courses. My impression is that they would have expended every effort to make Pecan Valley profitable.

Pecan Valley had changed hands several times as different ownership groups tried and failed to make it work. San Antonio is a major military medicine city and the course is well located for easy access to military medicine centers, so the plans make sense.

I’ll miss Pecan Valley, but it may provide a truly special place for wounded warriors in its new incarnation. It’s a beautiful property.

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The Longest Shot

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Charles Prokop

If you’re like a lot of golfers, you know that a relatively unknown club pro beat Ben Hogan in a playoff for the U.S. Open sometime in the early 1950’s. Maybe you know that the unknown pro was Jack Fleck, and you might know it was the 1955 Open, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts you don’t know much about Jack Fleck or how the tournament played out. Run out and remedy your woeful ignorance by reading The Longest Shot, by Neil Sagebiel.

The book is a fun read, and is made particularly interesting by the coming Open at Olympic Club in San Francisco. The 1955 Open and Fleck’s stunning upset was at Olympic. Reading the book with the USGA 2012 Championship Preview or the June issue of Golf Digest handy gives you a “you are there” feeling. Sagebiel gives a blow-by-blow account of the playoff, and it’s fun to read the hole descriptions and look at the course maps as you follow the players around the course. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and I’m looking forward to how the book will give me added perspective as I watch this year’s Open.

The Longest Shot is well written, and is in the tradition of books such as The Match, by Mark Frost. In fact, you’ll meet some of the same folks in both books, including Hogan, Byron Nelson, Harvie Ward, and Eddie Lowery. As is true of the best sports books, you’ll come away from The Longest Shot with a good sense of the players as people, not just competitors on the field of battle.

The book doesn’t end with Fleck’s victory. The last several chapters cover Fleck’s career up to the present time, including his victory in the 1979 Senior PGA Championship. Sagebiel gathered much of his information through personal contact with Fleck and many of his contemporaries; I envy Neil for the fun he must have had as a caddie and in the dining and locker rooms at Champions Tour events. The fun and respect show in his writing.

If you’re interested in golf history and want to enrich your experience of the coming U.S. Open at Olympic, this book will be a valuable addition to your library.

(Note: Neil Sagebiel is not only the author of The Longest Shot, but he also blogs at The Armchair Golf Blog. I received a complimentary copy of the book.)

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A Bear Of A Handicap

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Charles Prokop

Marathon Man and I were standing on the tenth tee last Friday, talking about how our games had gone downhill. We had both been 6-7 handicaps a year or so ago, and were both now 9-10, with no explanation for what had happened.  It was like we had been possessed by a game-eating demon, and no exorcism program seemed to work.

The problem wasn’t specific to the two of us. I had been first up in the wolf game, and hit a decent drive down the right side on number 1. It’s an “ease into the round” opening hole, a par 5 with a good shot at birdie and a comfortable par. Cowboy Roy matched my drive so I waited for something better to pick. The rest of the group was the Chipping Lizard, Potatoes, and Marathon Man – all good players – and I figured one, if not all, of them would hit a very good drive, especially with the wind at our back. All three hit it out of bounds right. I had to wolf it, hacked it around for a double, and Cowboy Roy limped home to a winning bogey. It was stunningly bad play from all concerned.

All this got me thinking about realistic expectations for this maddening game, and how to enjoy it in the face of disaster. I’ve never been happy with the “I’m never going on the tour so I’m happy to stink at golf” philosophy. It sounds a little too much like “I won’t live forever, nothing makes any difference, so I’ll just have fun,” and nihilism or hedonism has never seemed a good solution to the existential dilemma. There needs to be some intermediate solution, where good play matters but it isn’t all there is.

The University of Chicago, the birthplace of the Chicago School of Economics. It looks like you could get in some practice on that lawn, don’t you think?

Life is better with money, but it isn’t better if you forget why money helps and you just try to pile it up. It also isn’t better if you try to convince yourself money doesn’t matter. Eventually, you’ll run into reality. Life is undeniably more fun with money, when it is wisely spent and kept in it’s proper place.

It’s the same with a golf score. Golf is better with good play, but not if you forget why you really play and you get mad at every bad shot. Golf also isn’t better if you act like you don’t care about your score. Eventually, you’ll tire of hitting it O.B., making snowmen, and picking up while you see others get better. Golf is more fun with good play, but the score is only a part of why we play.

I know I enjoy life a lot more if I don’t track economic indicators, but I can’t totally ignore them. Maybe I need to treat my golf score the same way.

They don’t call economics “the dismal science” for nothing. I don’t want to play “the dismal game,” even if my handicap’s in the midst of a bear market.

(Image via Wikipedia. In the public domain.)

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An Afternoon Sundae With Phil

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Charles Prokop

Phil Mickelson’s withdrawal from the Memorial Tournament citing fatigue got me to thinking about my optimum golf schedule. Before you laugh too hard, I know comparing my golf habits to those of Mickelson is like comparing how I celebrate my wife’s birthday to how Phil celebrates. I take my wife to Dairy Queen; he takes his wife to Europe. With that understood, here goes:

Now that I’m retired, I could play every day if I wanted to. I know guys who play every day, and they love it. Several years ago I tried to play every day for few weeks, and I began to feel harried.  I wasn’t physically fatigued, but I was psychologically fatigued by thinking about all the other things in my life that needed my attention. Some of them were chores, but a lot of them were things I really wanted to do that I couldn’t fit into a daily golf schedule.

Like a lot of folks, I used to daydream about how I’d like to play golf every day when I no longer had a 9 to 5 job. Now that I’m no longer working (to be more precise, now that no one is paying me for working) I can’t figure out how I had time to hold down a regular job. There would be simply no time for me to go to work and do what I do, even without golf.

I still feel pulled both ways, wishing I was playing golf when I’m not and feeling distracted by things I want or need to do when I play too much. But I’ve discovered that a 2 or 3 times a week golf schedule works pretty well for me. Sometimes it feels like playing 3 times a week is pushing it, but if I cut back to 2 times I start to miss the game and the guys. So I cycle back and forth, averaging 10 or 11 rounds a month. That’s not much different from the golf schedule of some guys who are gainfully employed. But it suits me now.

If I play more than that I start to get a choppy swing, my scores go up, and I get impatient. I feel like Phil looked on Thursday: easily frustrated and distracted.

Maybe Phil needs a visit to Dairy Queen. They make a good caramel sundae.

(Image by Billy Hathorn, via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons License.)

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The Great Tee-Time Debates

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Charles Prokop

My regular golf league is changing its starting time next week. Again. We’re going back to an 8:30 AM shotgun start after an experiment with a starting time window of 8:30 – 10:00, where players could show up at anytime during that window and everyone would tee off on number one. As might be expected, this attempt to make everyone happy didn’t work as well as hoped, so it’s back to the early shotgun start.

We have some players who have a “the earlier the better” mindset. They prefer to finish the round with plenty of time left in the day to do other things, even if those other things are getting in some more golf. They also like an early time because you tee off ahead of the heat of the day, and it can get pretty hot here in central Texas.

Others are of the “I don’t like to hurry to play golf; I get enough of that already” persuasion. They say starting at 9:30 or later makes for a nice, civilized morning, no hurrying required. And they ask “what’s the big thing you have to go do after golf, anyway?”

But the flexible start time took away from the camaraderie of the league. You had no real idea if there was a large or small group on any given day, and you didn’t get to mix and mingle as everyone waited for the hole assignments for the shotgun start. People had more trouble getting playing partners, and new folks had more trouble finding a place in the system. It’s not too hard to find a place to play golf, but finding a congenial group you like to play with can be tough.

Personally, I like the early time. It’s not that I have such important things to do, but starting too late cuts the heart out of the day. It can be tough to do anything before or after the round.

But I was really missing the time before the round, when everyone was milling about and you could connect with a lot of folks, even if only for a minute or two. I usually played with the same group of guys, but there was something about the large crowd at the beginning that added to the experience.

I used to complain about the shotgun start forcing me to start the round on tough holes. But after always starting on number 1 I’ve discovered that my scores are pretty much the same either way. So that’s one excuse down the tubes.

I guess I’ll be reduced to griping about feeling hurried to get to the early tee time and having trouble finding my tempo. That’s always a good one. And there’s frequently dew on the grass. And the sun can be in your eyes on those holes that run to the east.

I’m sure I can think of a few more excuses when I have a bad round. But a good round? That’s all me, bro. All me.

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A New Thing To Worry About In Golf

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Charles Prokop

While watching the Crowne Plaza Invitational today I learned a new thing to worry about. Jason Dufner and Zach Johnson were playing the 11th hole, and the announcers started talking about the grain of the fairway grass and needing to hit drives to the side of the fairway that was down-grain from tee to green. It seems the fairways are mowed in different directions on the right and left sides, so the grain runs in opposite directions on each side. Hit it on the down-grain side and the drive rolls longer.

That’s a new one for me. I have enough trouble figuring out the grain on the greens, and I’ve played Bermuda grass for nearly all of my golfing life. I can’t imagine how confused I’d get if I started trying to figure out where to hit my drive based on the grain of the grass.

And I thought the grain on the greens usually ran toward the afternoon sun. Am I supposed to worry about how they mow the greens? Maybe they”ll start passing out mowing charts along with pin position charts at the higher class courses? I think I’ll start asking about the direction they mowed today when I check in at the pro shop. That should identify me as an informed and sophisticated golfer, don’t you think?

Of course, information about the direction of the grain in the rough would be of more use to me. I spend more time there.

And what about the grain of sand, huh?

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