Fore! Play (21 page)

At the next tee, a charming older woman came over and raved about the “Sunday Morning” television program that I’m part of,
then she teed off while we waited for them to get safely ahead. It was a short, par-3 hole so we waited until she and her
partner were all the way on the green, putting, before we hit our drives.

Somehow—somehow—my ball took off for distance, and somehow—somehow—directly at the green. Perhaps the Visualization Department
found my order.

“Oh no!” I gasped. “What’s that word … ?”

“Fore!” Willie yelled, as my ball zipped not three feet past her head. She turned around, this fan of mine, and gestured,
possibly with her middle finger. She was pretty far away. But I could see her shaking her head as she walked off the green.

How the hell was I supposed to know? How was I to know that I—I!—would hit a great drive? Sometimes good shots happen to bad
golfers.

Anyway I was in the zone, baby. I accidentally parred the next hole, a straight fairway with no hazards. I found the scorecard
and penciled that one in. Willie congratulated me, somewhat insincerely. I felt guilty, like I was cruelly breaking a pact
with my own son, a pact that we’d both be bad for so long as we both shall live. If anyone had the luck, I wanted it to be
him. Well, not really …

I didn’t have to ponder that ethical dilemma for long. I went into a bit of a slump for the next, say, hour and a half. That’s
the thing about golf. You hit a decent shot, or maybe even three in a row for a par, and you think that maybe you’ve finally
found the groove, once and for all.

But of course you haven’t. It’s just luck. It’s like shooting craps in Vegas and winning a few rolls before going on a losing
streak from 11:00
P.M
. to 4:00
A.M
. You’re making out like a bandit with the complimentary cocktails and the $5.99 all-you-can-eat buffet, but suddenly you’re
out five grand.

Willie was particularly frustrated. He’s a natural athlete accustomed to excelling at “real” sports. He had played twice before
on this vacation, had improved the second time, and assumed he’d play even better this time. But, no. That’s not the way o’
the links.

His problem may have had something to do with the fact that he is six foot four, and his rental clubs might have previously
belonged to former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich—the one who you always thought hadn’t shown up for his press conference
but was really there behind the podium.

At last, we reached the final tee, he and I. With dusk falling, I hit a chopper down the third base line and decided to take
another try. A mulligan, I believe. And another. A mcmulligan? An O’Shaughnessy? I’m not sure what they call that third try.
And another. Erin go bragh! This was turning into a St. Patrick’s Day parade of drives.

Then my son stepped up and hit a beauty—an awesomely powerful drive, perhaps 250 or even 300 yards, plus a great roll after
it hit the highway. Then he hit another, and another, and another, until a groundskeeper came over the top of the hill on
an all-terrain vehicle. He was probably a member of a search party dispatched to see if those two guys who rented the clubs
hours and hours before were somehow still out there at sundown hacking away.

He was shouting something. Was there an emergency of some kind? No …

“Move it!” he was yelling. “This isn’t a driving range!”

We moved along, Willie and I, the two of us taking turns advancing the one ball we had left. The final 9th hole yielded ground
grudgingly, like the Japanese soldiers dug into those hilltop machine gun nests in
The Thin Red Line
.

It grew late. It was starting to look like we might have to pitch camp and attack the green at dawn.

“Dad,” Willie said in the gathering darkness.

“Yes, son.”

“I hate golf.”

“So do I, son. I think we all do.”

“It reeeally sucks.”

“Yes, son. It really does.” Suck.

I
should probably be buying my own clubs by now, although rental clubs do have their advantages. They’re a great excuse for
playing badly and you can abuse them like you do rental cars.

They say the right clubs can be good for another 10 strokes off your game. (That’s 78!) And maybe I really would play a lot
better with clubs custom-fit to my physique (maybe with shafts that curve out a little at the abdominal area) and to my personal
inability level. I’ve seen advertisements touting certain clubs as “forgiving.” I like that. You used to have to go to church
for that stuff.

The term golf
clubs
bothers me. Shouldn’t they be called golf “instruments,” or “implements,” or golf “tackle,” or golfing “rods,” or “utensils,”
or even “sticks” the way they’re called in hockey and lacrosse—something a little more delicate than clubs?

Tiger doesn’t
club
his ball, he strokes it, fades it, draws it, feathers it, lofts it, spins it, taps it in. Although, in my case,
clubs
may be the more accurate term. Considering the level of refinement I bring to the game, I should probably purchase a single
fat, gnarly club like those the cavemen ran around with beating on woolly mammoths.

But, what to buy? There’s a single adjustable club that performs the functions of fourteen, from driving to putting. There
are clubs that guarantee backspin, clubs that cost $600 apiece, and clubs made from armor-piercing steel that you can fire
bullets at without hurting them. But why? I think it’s to show how strong they are, but who among us has not wanted at some
point to gun down our golf clubs?

Manufacturers spend tens of millions of dollars on golf club research every year to create clubs so advanced that they practically
play the game for you. Someday you won’t even have to show up. As a matter of fact, the testing is done in laboratories using
robots to hit the balls, and I would like to know if we can purchase the robots as well as the clubs.

I want that kind of club, the kind that takes me out of the equation: big, fat-headed drivers that give you a slingshot effect.
Woods and irons that promise not to slice or hook, and ones that loft the ball even when you top it. They’re out there. Of
course those are the ones that cost the most. And there’s probably nothing worse than a guy like me with a $1,500 set of clubs
chalking up a 125.

They sell golf clubs everywhere these days. You can get ’em at BJ’s Price Club or Costco, right next to the forty-five-pound
tins of pepper and the fifty-five-gallon drums of ketchup. Big clubs. Cheap. Just don’t ask for advice from the guy stocking
the shelves with the forty-eight-packs of horseradish. And you may have to buy drivers in a twelve-pack.

You can buy clubs on the Internet, of course, and you can find them in the classifieds, and at country club pro shops (with
the customary 300 percent markup), and at one of those big Golf Galaxy Super Mega Outlet Warehouse stores that are springing
up everywhere you look.

I wandered through one of those Golf World–type stores, trying in vain to fend off helpful (aka on commission) salesclerks.
One finally snagged me and opened up on me with a barrage of terms like “kick point” and “swing weight” and “stem torsion”
and “dual weight ports.” It was that same feeling you get when you’re buying a new computer from a nineteen-year-old techno-geek.
I felt myself reaching my own personal kick point and fled before I lashed out at him.

It’s terribly confusing. Woods are not wood anymore, irons not iron. Everything is titanium these days. The big golf club
manufacturing area in southern California is called the Titanium Coast. Even the golf
gloves
at BJ’s claim to be titanium. Considering my drives go about a hundred yards, I’m more in the market for plutonium—turbo
plutonium.

It’s like the 10 billion bottles of water allegedly coming out of the little Evian spring in France. Can there possibly be
this much titanium in the world? Aren’t our precious titanium reserves being dangerously depleted? Aren’t the United Titanium
Mine Workers overworked and underpaid—if, as we suspect, it is in fact mined? And aren’t they suffering from Gray Lung Disease?
What if titanium is leeching through the skin of golfers and causing inoperable palm disease? And what if our kids suck on
our clubs and score poorly on their SATs? So many questions. How little we know of this ubiquitous and enigmatic element!

There are scary new rogue forms of titanium, such as Black Titanium, “the next generation of titanium,” which actually guarantees
no hooks or slices. But at what price? Science can grow four-hundred-pound tomatoes that glow and throb on the vine, too,
but would you eat a BLT that moves?

There are ominous signs that our reserves—hell, most of them are in Russia!—may already be running out. Cubic Balance is watering
down its titanium clubs with zirconium and calling it “Tizirc.” Other club-makers are blending it with tungsten or forgoing
titanium altogether and using beryllium copper.

The newest clubs are being made of steel, which used to be considered horribly outdated, but now is not. It has been rediscovered
so that everyone will replace their titanium clubs. Callaway has “Steelhead Plus,” Taylor Made touts its “Supersteel,” and
Kasco “guarantees” you’ll never, ever slice a ball again thanks to “super hytech” steel.

All of this space-age technology focused on my pitiful little golf game. Golf scientists from our best research universities—who
really should be doing something more important, shouldn’t they?—recently announced an important breakthrough in the discovery
of an alloy of titanium, zirconium, nickel, copper, and beryllium in which the particles aren’t arrayed in crystalline patterns
that come together in pattern boundaries to form weak spots in typical metals. So, Mr. Lab Coat, why does my ball still sail
into the damned bunkers?

And all these numbers! The old 1–9 irons seem to be on the way out, being replaced by a whole new numbering system: loft degrees.
Celsius? Fahrenheit? Who knows? You want the 8.5 degree wood? These trajectory comparison charts and center of gravity graphs
should be of some help. How about a 21 degree rescue club? Does the 55 or the 56 degree wedge sound better to you? Wedges
used to be sand or pitch but now come in at least 12 degree differentials, some touting “15 percent greater inertia.” You
want that inertia out there working for you every day, brother. The drivers come in 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12 degree loft.
What’s your pleasure? Hmmm?

And the putters! Taylor Made alone has eleven models of the Nubbins putter featuring the “proprietary insert compound” that
golfer Gary McCord says “reminds me of a gummy bear"—and we all know they’re good. Ping offers about forty styles of putters,
such as the Isoforce 2 2000 with the pixilated copper insert, a significant improvement on the nickel-titanium insert. There
is the Hog putter, featuring a fat grip, fat shaft, and fat head that was recently okayed by St. Andrews (the golfing club,
not the saint himself). Callaway offers sixteen kinds with features such as the double radius shaft bend, low flex reverse
taper shaft, and the offset hosel—just like President Clinton! If Monica is to be believed.

At the golf merchandise show, I saw some really odd ones, like blown glass putters, a two-shafted putter, and the Sight Wing
putter with a shiny parabolic-shaped reflector on the head like the Lunar Explorer vehicle so you can see the hole when looking
at the ball—and probably bring in 500 TV channels at the same time. There’s the Fazer Putter with two red lights on top that
come on when you’re perfectly lined up. But nothing quite so strange as Pure Bull Peter Putters. That’s right, the shafts
are “made from the reproductive organ of American bulls.” Buy American. “Only quality, handpicked bull organs are used.” Employees
must wash hands. “Finds the hole every time.” And what happens then?

For our fifth golf class in the gym, Liz had invited a salesman from a golf store to talk to us about purchasing clubs and
his first words were prescient: “Buying clubs is very confusing.” Not like renting, where they might ask you “lefty or righty?"—or
they might not. “We have one hundred different sets in our store,” he says. “Prices range from $200 a set to $2,000. You can
spend $1,300 just for a set of irons, $360 or more for a single driver.”

Questions arise: “What’s in a set?” asks a student. He said a set normally includes the P, not the S, three woods, eight irons,
and a putter. He said the driver is a wood. He said this because he knew we were idiots.

“Titanium or steel?” The salesman recommends stainless steel clubs for beginners, predicting we’d be hitting a lot of rocks
and dirt and asphalt—"and my husband,” added the student who said her husband tried to teach her something on every swing.

“What’s with all the different shafts?” He explains that the new “bubble shafts” offer more speed and less deflection—deflection
apparently being a bad thing.

With irons, he says we definitely want to purchase hollow backs: “They have much larger sweet spots, which used to be the
size of the tip of your pinkie, but are now the size of two golf balls. Clubs today are much more forgiving. Bigger clubs
are more forgiving. They require less skill.” Forgiveness is divine, bigger is better, less skill is just the ticket.

He says the Ping ISI, for example, is a huge driver, 323 cubic centimeters: “It has that trampoline effect and was almost
outlawed by the USGA.” (Another driver, the new Callaway ERC, has been banned by the USGA for its spring effect.) I definitely
want stuff that is almost or absolutely illegal. But if the Ping is $380, and if you do indeed … suck … as we do … it just
means you’re going to be hitting the ball that much farther into surrounding communities.

My head is spinning. His store has two hundred different putters ($15 to $300) to consider, not to mention shoes ($40 to $250)
and bags ($60 to $300) and gloves and balls and umbrellas and scoops to get balls out of the water and all the other necessities.
I think I prefer basketball, where you just buy a ball.