Fore! Play (16 page)

They could be headed to a mental health facility, or they could be headed here, to the Chelsea Piers Golf Club, complete with
the putting green, a golf academy, sixteen golf pros, a pro shop, a sand trap, and a driving range. It is a complete golf
club right in Manhattan—except, of course, for the rather conspicuous absence of a golf course, an amenity people have come
to expect when they join a golf club. But there is a vast bar, which of course runs a close second to golf in terms of importance.
The club offers memberships, camps, even golf stretching clinics.

After 5:00
P.M
. and all day on weekends the place is packed. Molly Lonigan, a twenty-eight-year-old Wall Streeter, says she is probably
going to join the club, which will cost her $1,000, but will give her discounts, a locker, storage for her golf bag, and guaranteed
tee times, among other things.

She likes golf and thinks taking it up will be good for business. “We’re invited to a lot of these corporate golf outings,”
she says.

Her friend Deborah says she is trying to play golf, but isn’t really all that keen on the game.

“I just want to meet men,” Deborah admits. “Seriously. Rich men.”

“So do I,” says their friend Jim.

Okay, then.

The Golf Club is but a small part of this $100 million, 1.7 million square foot sports complex, fashioned from once grand
piers that had of late been reduced to a site for garbage truck repairs, as well as the single most hostile spot in all of
New York (and that’s saying something): the pound where spitting-mad motorists came to retrieve their towed vehicles, after
discussing the matter with city employees hiding behind bulletproof glass and reinforced steel counters.

The indoor sports complex now comprises two ice rinks, two in-line skating rinks, basketball courts, soccer fields, batting
cages, a gymnastics center, a health club, beach volleyball court, fifty-five-foot climbing wall, forty-lane bowling alley,
boxing ring, spa, the world’s longest indoor running track, swimming pool, sporting goods stores, marina, restaurants, and
a brew pub—as well as a fashion photo studio, and TV and movie studios.

But I find the driving range to be the wonder of it all: fifty-two heated, weather-protected stalls on four levels, from where
dozens of balls are flying at any one time, out toward the Hudson River, and Hoboken beyond. Nets sixteen stories high and
two hundred yards downrange at the end of the pier stop the balls before they land in the river or New Jersey. The nets also
enclose the sides of the range, protecting big yachts docked here by the likes of Steve Forbes and Geraldo Rivera.

The range is completely automated. Completely. “You never touch your balls,” boasts the guy at the front desk. Which, come
to think of it, might be something they’d want to enscript in Latin on the Chelsea Piers Golf Club crest, no?

It’s all very Japanese. You see gargantuan net structures like this every couple of minutes as you travel along the highways
in Tokyo. The Japanese are even crazier about golf than we are, if that’s possible, and land is at a premium. You’ve probably
heard tales of their multimillion-dollar golf club memberships, not to mention the golf religion with a driving range atop
the temple. It was a Japanese team that installed these nets here at Chelsea Piers, as well as the completely automated ball
system that vacuums up the balls on the course, shoots them through tubes upstairs, completely bypassing any need for buckets,
and automatically places them on the tees, one after another, so that you never touch your balls.

Tu Numquam Tactus Tuum Globi
.

My wife complained at another driving range about having to bend down to tee up a hundred balls, and how the next day her
legs hurt. Well, here you don’t have to bend down. The range is equipped with Japanese auto-teeing devices, called CompuTees.
You swipe your credit or debit card through the machine at each tee, and you receive anywhere from 65 balls for $15 during
peak hours, up to 625 balls for $100 off-peak, and unlimited balls from 5:00
A.M
. to 8:00
A.M
. for $20. CompuTee gives you your current RPB (Rate Per Ball) on digital readout. It also gives you your tee height in millimeters,
and tee height adjustment capability. You can rent a club for $4.

Five
A.M
.? Golfers are addicts who will rise at any hour to feed their habit. And, New Yorkers tend to have type A personalities to
boot. The range is open from 5:00
A.M
. to midnight.

Six hundred twenty-five balls for a hundred bucks? Does
anyone
ever hit six hundred twenty-five balls?

“Oh yes,” says William, the manager, “one lady has come and hit a thousand.”

A thousand?

“Yes, more than once.”

Was she a good golfer?

“No.”

Did she appear angry?

“No.”

Disturbed? Possessed?

William says he’s no psychiatrist, but then: Who that plays golf is not possessed?

I come on my lunch hour. You take an elevator to play golf! A sign inside the elevator reminds me that no drivers or woods
are allowed on the fourth floor of the driving range, because balls have been hit over the top of the net, striking vessels
on the Hudson. This is the kind of childish thing I would do on purpose—if only I could hit it that far. As it is, I have
to content myself with trying to hit the guy driving the golf ball sweeper.

I take the elevator to the fourth floor and love it up there. I notice my drives go farther when I hit them from forty feet
in the air. Not straighter, just farther.

Also, there are guys up here Worse Than I Am. Honestly. I just wish I’d asked their names. They are Wall Street brokers who
say “the market’s so damned bad we’re playing golf instead”—at one o’clock on a weekday afternoon. This frightens me. If their
golf is better than the market this day, then the crash of ’29 was but a mild dip, a little correction, and thousands of people
must be jumping out of skyscrapers right now. After seeing them hit the ball, I am surprised, frankly, that these men are
not leaping from the tees here on the fourth floor out of total humiliation. Japanese men would. All you have to do is take
three steps forward.

One of them
looks
absolutely
marvelous
. He’s dressed all in black, from his cashmere golf shirt, alligator belt, plush trousers, and socks, down to his black alligator
golf shoes. An estimated $800 outfit I would say, even if he said he lived in New Jersey to avoid the 8 ½ percent sales tax
(although that is not enough to make some people say they live in New Jersey). His driver is, of course, very large and mostly
titanium.

He even looks good addressing the ball, and his swing doesn’t even look that bad to me, although with my knowledge of the
game, Little Stevie Wonder could size up his swing just as well.

But his drives were just … awful. Horrible, 45 degree slices, and 45 degree hooks. It was downright Pythagorean.

But his partner is the one I really want to tell you about, a lanky guy with a new set of custom Callaway clubs that he’d
just received yesterday at a cost of $3,000 (plus $500 for the shoes and bag).

On his first swing—ever—with his Great Big Bertha driver, he hit on his backswing one of the steel trusses that hold the place
up. Thick, strong steel girders riveted in place in 1910. Strong enough that when the
Queen Elizabeth
docked here, the girders wouldn’t move. His swing was one of the worst moments here at Pier 59 since the
Titanic
failed to show up as scheduled in April of 1912.

You’ve heard of Ping clubs? Well this was a CLANG! Everyone stopped to look. He should have leaped off the fourth floor tee—hari-kari-style—but
did not. Miraculously, the club and the pier appeared to be okay and he continued. Brad, who works here, says he has seen
balls ricochet off the pier superstructure but this is the first time he’s ever seen a golfer hit the pier with a club. Brad
suggests we preventatively move away to a safer distance.

On the pier-whacker’s second swing—ever—with his new driver, which he said cost more than $500, he did not hit the pier, which
was good. He hit the Astroturf behind his ball with an emphatic THUD! before the club struck the ball.

Not a bad hit, though. Not bad at all. I see it sailing off toward the Garden State.

But wait! That’s not the ball in flight … it’s Great Big Bertha’s humongous head! The head was recovered by a rescue team
more than a hundred yards downrange, which I thought was pretty darned good distance.

This made me feel good, sort of like when a soldier in combat sees someone else shot and is secretly glad inside it’s not
him. I’m not proud of this.

But it was a reminder: No matter how bad you are, somebody’s always worse.

I went downstairs and wandered through the Greg Norman pro shop. I wasn’t ready for any of that stuff. Not ready for the expensive
Taylor Innergel balls, and definitely not ready for the Greg Norman hat. I’d look like … me … wearing the World Wrestling
Federation title belt.

When I returned my rented club with the head still on, I was feeling very good about my game.

I told the guy who’d lost his head that I was just taking up golf.

“I have a word of advice for you,” he replied. “Don’t.”

M
aybe advanced computer technology can help. I’d seen the SwingCam Advanced Visual Learning System at the PGA Golf Merchandise
Show and here it was again at Chelsea Piers.

“This is the twenty-first century,” a sales rep at the Golf Show notified us. “Time to bring computer technology to your golf
game. Could take off half a dozen strokes.” (That’s minus 68 now, and counting!)

He generously offered Jody and me complimentary computer golf swing analyses, using his SwingCam Advanced Visual Learning
System with Doppler radar. Wow! Doppler radar, just like the weathergal uses on NewsChannel 4! I worry, however, that it might
show the fog and scattered showers in my armpits. Playing golf in front of others, not to mention before a video camera, makes
me sweat.

But in desperate need of help, I agreed to swing at a ball while a computer sat hunkered down across from me analyzing my
every move. It did not laugh when I swung (as others do), or even say anything, it just professionally recorded my swing with
a video camera and left the talking to a golf scientist person who interpreted the results using Advanced Planar Analysis.

“We can see on the digital readout that you drove the ball ninety yards,” the expert pointed out to me. Not good. He told
me my clubhead speed was slow, as was my ball speed, and noted that my front foot moved a lot and my head went up way too
soon. None of it good.

“Do people ever just
slap
you?” I asked.

“We try to be as positive as we can and still be helpful,” he replied.

The IRU (Instant Replay Unit) digitally captured my golf swing and had the temerity to show it to me in slomo and freeze frames.
It wasn’t pretty.

The golf scientist said the Main Kiosk Unit was linked to the IRU and could provide my body sway measurements as well as my
swing plane. But I figured I’d had enough bad news for one day and besides, I had no idea what he was even
talking
about. The unit could also provide a side-by-side (unfavorable) comparison of a golf pro’s swing with my own. No thanks.

He said my swing was now on their Internet Web site and could be downloaded at any time by a golf pro for further study. I
told him that would be tantamount to calling in the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to analyze my kids’ finger painting.

He said I can “cyber-rent tools” to fix my golf swing, but I am afraid I would cyber-forget to return them and have to pay
virtual late fees. He informed us that tips and suggested drills can also be provided “to develop and reinforce the latest
in biomechanic training.”

At which point my wife informed
him
that she objected to the low camera angle employed by the SwingCam Advanced Visual Learning System with Doppler radar, which
she felt made her ass look big.

I again encounter SwingCam out in the real world here at Chelsea Piers, where one of the tees is SwingCam-equipped. It looks
something like an ATM sitting there, except you pay it, not the other way around.

You put in your credit card, it charges you $9.95, and for the next ten minutes that same damned machine sitting on the other
side of the tee records your swings and plays them back in slow motion for you on a monitor. Talk about bad TV! Although,
really, how many sitcoms are
this
funny?

Two terrible golfers are using the tee equipped with SwingCam, even though they are not using the Swing-Cam itself, and even
though furthermore it’s a rainy, cold weekday at two in the afternoon and most of the other fifty-two tees are wide open.
What they are doing is
hiding
behind the SwingCam machine—an unintended, but fair, use. When your golf swing’s as grotesque as theirs, you
should
hide yourself from public view. They are the golfing equivalents of the Elephant Man.

When they finish, I step up to SwingCam and the first thing I notice is that there’s a large chunk out of the machine, either
from an errant swing that would warrant the help offered by this advanced visual learning system, or from a golfer pissed
off at the machine for what it’s telling the customer about his or her game.

I swipe my card and have to decide which of the three unlabeled buttons to press—kind of like a shell game. Unfortunately,
I choose a button that turns the machine off. I swipe my card again, hit another unlabeled button and this time get lucky.
I do a lot of swiping before it’s over and will not be surprised to find several $9.95s on my Amex bill totaling around $200.

This SwingCam also videotapes your swing, plays it back, and provides digital readout of the distance you hit the ball, club
speed, and ball speed.