Fore! Play (7 page)

My son handles the play-by-play à la Mets announcer Bob Murphy calling a Mike Piazza home run: “This ball is high, it is deep,
it is going, going, gone, goodbye, this ball is outta here, folks!”

The drive has carried over the protective netting and landed in the woods. If Mark McGwire hit that everybody would be cheering.
Tiger Woods, too. Pro golfers hit shots like that all the time, hooks and slices that are called “fade” and “draw” shots,
which they hit purposely to go around trees. So shut up.

Drives like this tell me I must somehow be hitting the bottom
and
the side of the ball at the same time—two quarters at once! No mean feat. That was the first of many of my shots to clear
the netting this day. I came to appreciate the wide range of percussive sounds the balls made when they hit the trees, discriminating
amongst those that cracked and crashed against limbs, thunked richly against trunks, made muffled sounds as they struck way
back in the woods, and the rare double or even triple thwacks of a ball ricocheting through the woodlands on this lovely spring
day. It made you wish Robert Frost had been a bad golfer: “The woods are lovely dark and deep, shanks and slices yon forests
keep …”

Willie grows frustrated. If all the drives he hit were bad, it would honestly be better. But this evil enterprise gives one
a fleeting glimpse of solid improvement, then snatches it away. He hits some straight, long beauties, and feels he’s finally
really getting this game, then follows them with a half dozen horrors.

It is at this point that he slowly and gracefully takes a few steps forward and, maintaining complete control, ever so gently
tosses his club just ten yards downrange.

I return to the same driving range with my wife, Jody, whose golf skills are well matched to those of other members of the
family.

Forty golf balls tumble into my basket and it occurs to me that this is just what I need when I play real golf: a basket of
balls. Or perhaps a golf ball machine towed behind my cart.

This time, we are not alone on the range. There are three young boys, about nineteen or twenty years old I’d say, dressed
in T-shirts, shorts, and sandals. I hope they won’t be good. They don’t disappoint me.

They swing hard like baseball players, and like baseball players they miss the ball a lot. (So, why is it called a strike,
when one fails to strike the ball?) Their drives are highly erratic, traveling somewhere in the one- to two-hundred-yard range.

My favorite technique of theirs is one in which they stand back ten feet, then charge the ball and swing at it wildly. They
see this as a way of generating immense power, but it doesn’t seem to work. They’re swinging so hard that after a while they
complain that their backs hurt. So, what does work?

“I took off my shoes and that seemed to help,” says one.

Focus seems to help. A target. A deer wanders out on the course, about 250 yards downrange, and the boys suddenly get a lot
better. They hit the ball farther and with more accuracy as they try to hit the deer. Now, understand—People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals—that deer are not beloved here, where there are more of them than there are of us, where they dispense
lyme disease, cause traffic fatalities, and devour our shrubs and flower beds. Understand, too, that these boys don’t stand
a chance in hell of hitting the deer. It might make for an interesting sport though, come to think of it, combining a driving
range with a game farm, where you’d get 100 points for hitting a deer at 200 yards, maybe 50 for a prairie dog at 100 yards,
5 for an elephant at 50 yards—that sort of thing. Understand, furthermore, that this idea comes from someone who wanted to
liven up the Winter Olympics by having biathlon (skiing and shooting) competitors fire at speed skaters as they went by a
hole in a fence.

We run out of balls at the same time the boys do. We all look at each other, look up the hill to see if anyone is watching,
then the five of us dart out onto the range and as fast as we can pick up dozens and dozens of balls lying within twenty-five
yards or so of the tees, then dart back to the tees again.

Now, you need not practice at a driving range. I’ve seen a guy practicing his bunker shots in the sand box at a local elementary
school.

You can practice golf almost anywhere, even in your own backyard. Indeed, lots of golf nuts are installing regulation putting
greens in their backyards.

I practice putting in the house, using an electric putting hole gadget my son gave me that spits the balls back. My cats love
to chase my putts and bat them about, and frankly are as good at getting them in the hole as I am. I’m getting better as I
learn to read the break on the hardwood floors in our 107-year-old house.

On vacations, we hold chipping and driving contests in the yard. We try to chip balls about fifty feet into swimming pool
tubes we’ve scattered about. Our friend Pam won the contest and the six-pack by chipping one into a bucket! Magnificent shot.
At some point we take aim at the swimming pool itself, although this always results in a certain amount of collateral damage
to the house, the wooden fence, the garden, and the patio furniture—in part, because we’re drunk. I am quite good at chipping
balls into the pool; hitting balls into water just seems to come naturally to me.

We also hit drives toward the bay, endangering beach-goers, protected wetlands, egrets, and neighboring homes. It also ruins
the lawn as we take toupee-sized divots out of the yard. The inlet and marsh is only about 150 yards out, so a golf ball splashdown
is good, but a shot onto the beach (some 200 to 250 yards away) that hits an umbrella or scatters sunbathers is excellent.
For this we use the five-for-a-dollar “previously owned” balls from a stand next to the local course. Around Easter every
year we have a used golf ball hunt in the thorny thickets extending from the edge of our yard to the inlet.

After Jody receives a nice set of clubs for her birthday (even though she’s never played) we decide to inaugurate them at
another driving range on a cool spring day. This is right after Liz’s golf class and I’m most eager to find out just how much
my game’s improved.

Easier said than done here in golf-crazed suburbia. But as dusk settles, spaces do finally begin to open up. I see another
novice put a token into the ball machine, fail to place the basket directly under the spout, and the cascading golf balls
roll everywhere. I am secretly pleased, beginning to think that maybe for once I won’t look like the fool of the day.

There is no privacy. But to my great joy I don’t seem to need it so much anymore. The lessons seem to have helped. My 7- and
9-iron shots are going straighter, some even landing on the greens at fifty and a hundred yards! Of course they roll off the
greens, in shots that TV commentators would lament, and true there are no sand traps here, but for me this is spectacular.
And, I seem to be hitting fewer off the sideboards. Thank you, Liz.

My driving, however, remains as poor as ever. My irons are going straighter and just as far as my driver shots. My drives
are short—even with a titanium driver!—and thickly sliced. And, I still can’t hit the damned guy in the ball retrieval cart
(there is no People for the Ethical Treatment of People). Once the ball retrieval cart went by just five feet in front of
my tee and it was tempting, believe me.

There is a certain amount of chuckling coming from observers on benches behind us, but I choose to believe they are watching
their awful friend next to me. It’s the guy who spilled the balls, and who is now hitting some of them as little as three
feet off the tee. Dribblers. And God bless him.

M
aybe it’s my socks.

“Could very well be,” suggested the helpful salesman … of socks. Maybe it is. Maybe my golf game sucks because of bad socks.

As Americans, we have a deep and abiding faith in, tend to place all of our hopes and dreams for the future in … technology.
We the people do further believe that stuff we buy will make our lives better and happier. And although golfers are among
the best educated of any sportsmen and -women, they have this weakness, this addiction, that leaves them completely vulnerable
to dealers of anything—anything!—that claims to take one single, solitary stroke off their scores.

Which brings us, Jody and me, to a veritable Mecca of golf technology and other assorted claptrap: the PGA Golf Merchandise
Show in Orlando, Florida, to see what sort of breakthroughs the scientific community—physicists and engineers!—has made to
ease the pain of struggling duffers like ourselves.

This show—this lalapalooza of golf technology—is enough to make one wonder how any golfer could
possibly
be bad! Here before us, spreading way beyond the indoor horizon, are
sixteen hundred
booths purveying humongous zirconium-titanium drivers, possum-skin gloves, computer swing analyzers, laser putters, Hole-In-One
nutrition bars, neodymium and polybutadiene core balls, golf global positioning systems—you name it—each and every advanced
product claiming to take strokes off our games.

We spend two full days walking up and down the aisles, each step potentially lowering our golf scores, and each step adding
to our bedazzlement at the overwhelming resources brought to bear on this national priority: getting a ball in a hole.

“To play golf well, you need good socks. It’s as simple as that.” That is the considered opinion of the foot covering expert
at the Winning Greens & Fairways Performance Socks booth, a man who’s spent his whole life in socks. Not just any socks, golf
socks—
performance
golf socks. Crew, anklet, or lo-cut.

Now, how, exactly, will these socks
perform
for me? He explains how the special ribbing increases circulation: “It’s one-by-one stitching. Doesn’t pinch the foot. The
feet don’t get tired.”

How many strokes is a good pair of golf socks worth?

“Well,” he answers, “that varies with the individual, of course, but obviously if you have bad socks, your game suffers.”
Obviously. “On the back 9 your dogs start barkin’, you start thinking about your feet, and there you go. It’s a mental game
and your feet can become very mental.”

Mental feet. Umm-hmm. So … how many strokes?

“A couple of strokes.”

Performance Golf Socks: -2 strokes

Next booth. Shoes.

“If you think good socks can help your game, imagine what proper footwear will do,” says the shoe rep. “Our Cyclonic spikelets
golf shoes with premolded rubber bottoms provide a 25 percent larger platform with strategically placed cleats and treads
to increase traction and stability.”

Also at the show are new golf sandals, which I’m sure violate most country club dress codes, especially those highly provocative
open-toed models. Not for me. I have these new socks and only guys from Bulgaria and Boulder wear socks with sandals.

Staid, old Florsheim offers “biomagnetic” shoes. Another company sells every conceivable style and color of alligator golf
shoes, to include alligator cowboy golf boots. Just how big is golf these days? Well, they claim to have thirty thousand gators
on their farm just dying to become golf shoes. Thirty thousand! Little wonder that every once in a while a vindictive gator
takes revenge and eats a Florida golfer. But: What is lost?

How many strokes will good golf shoes take off my score?

“A few” is the consensus.

Better Shoes: -3 strokes