Category Archives: golf news

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Thought Block

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This picture above shows #1 at Wakonda during the time when the fairways were being reseeded with a new hybrid bent grass. The hole is a dogleg left with a hump of about 10 foot tall and forty yards long, transecting the fairway of the dogleg’s bend. This small hill acts as a shield, and most average drives of 230 yards drawn or hit into this mound will roll right, and leave an approach with an uphill lie and greater than 150 yards (the marker is on the upslope of this inclined impediment). When I first played this hole ever five years ago, I looked out and saw the dogleg and the trees marking the bend, and I thought -“jack it over those trees with a draw” and I did, leaving me with a 100 yard pitch. When I later explained to an established member, he looked at me with some concern, and said, “you can’t do that!”

To this day, I have not been able to recreate that shot because I hear that thought in my head, “you can’t do that!“

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The Rabbit and the Dog -a drill to teach a newbie putting skills

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Rabbits about to run for the hole

The hard part about teaching putting to a child who thinks he already knows putting is the fact the child remembers every crazy putt he drained by drilling the ball straight at the hole. So it was with a bit of excitement that I tried out this drill which may or may not be original. I took one ball -the rabbit, and tapped it out about a foot away from a second ball, the dog, and I told my son, G, to go and chase the rabbit. To get half credit, the dog had to end up within a club head of the rabbit. It took only a few minutes before he was hitting most of the 3 footers, and started making a few of the 5 and 10 footers. The best part was when he began to get bored with the drill, I sent the rabbit into the hole from 8 foot away, and he chased it in with his putt!

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Sunrise Golf

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For several years now I have been asking the club to allow me to play golf at daybreak. It would allow me to get in 9 holes from a cart in way under an hour, 35 minutes was a recent time. This year, sunrise golf has been instituted and it is a roaring success.

Speed golf off a cart is like speed chess, it seems like the same game but different factors come to the fore. first there is the lack of warmup – you knock it down the fairway and play it as it lies. The other is that it simplifies your mental prep – playing alone and fast means I have to find the ball so I become very good at tracking and finding balls but foremost, I try to keep it in the fairway. I count every stroke but will allow a free drop if I never saw the ball in flight -I figure a playing partner if one had been present would have tracked it. The course is mine and that is the most important thing. It’s meditative and calming to be alone in all that splendor.

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Golf Transparency -the egalitarianism of golf

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My GHIN number update came back, and my handicap index is 18.4, with a course handicap of 21 for Wakonda. I have been playing poorly, but I always do better in competition. Golf takes on a different, truer aspect when its played in formal competition. Yesterday evening, I played in the Wakonda Match Play Championship, handicapped flight.

Golf reveals its egalitarian nature in the handicapping system. I played RG, a 16 handicapper who defeated me during my run at the cup several years ago in a memorable match that taught me a lot about myself. He is an excellent player and can spin off some marvelous golf shots that exceed the level suggested by his handicap. Golf allows such unequal competitors to play on a level field with the handicap system. He gave me 5 strokes which were instrumental in keeping the match even. Through 16 holes, we were level, after RG came back from a 3 shot deficit. We were playing in a thunderstorm, barely able to see the shot beyond 20 feet. I was further handicapped by having to wear sunglasses which were prescription sunglasses. Without it, I was basically blind, but due to the waning cloudy light, the ball and target were dark. I do think that the sensory deprivation allowed me to swing better.

I was able to line up, square, square, square and swing with my head still. This allowed me to make a natural bogey, net par with a concession, followed up by a ball on green on the final hole with RG’s unfortunately lost into dark woods. This match was very close, and could only have been so with accurate handicaps.

It makes me wonder why we this concept works in golf but not in life at large. It’s written in the constitution that All Men Are Created Equal, but this is not true, is it?

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Comfort food and Mother’s day

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I was on call and Jen had to leave the house for the evening, leaving me to my fate with regard to dinner. Being the on call surgeon is an exercise in anticipation. I waited like a fire extinguisher hanging in a glass box for that call -a ruptured aortic aneurysm, a cold pulseless limb, trouble in the body’s pipes. I passed the time watching a show from the History Channel about the universe. I fell asleep and woke at 7, way past my usual dinner time.
I walked out in to the family room and made my hungry face -nothing happened. No food. Just silence. I felt existentially as empty as my stomach. Without Jennifer, there was no meal. Just me in a dark box. I sat there for a while chewing on walnuts, contemplating food, and more specifically Korean food. Food holds a central spot in a Korean household and the mom is the one who makes the food. Korean food is time consuming to prepare because of the way a Korean meal is constructed.
The rice is the foundation of the meal. A bowl of rice is a cornucopia to a Korean -a magic bowl of happiness. The rice is eaten with ban ch’an -small dishes of prepared and seasoned meats, fish, and vegetables, sometimes pickled that add salty, spicy, tangy, and sweet to a bowlful of rice. The variety of side dishes is what is so appealing about the Korean meal and so devilishly hard to prepare. Most of the vegetable dishes are created from roots and leafy greens that distill large baskets of raw produce into handfuls of final items in small dishes on the table. The process sometimes takes the whole day, sometimes two days, and typically 3 or 4 of these vegetable dishes are standard.
The meat was a rarity in premodern times, and was usually reserved for festival days but prosperity has made it common. Fish, too, is standard -usually a hand sized cutlet of salted mackerel broiled in the oven is shared among everyone at the table. This emphasis on intensely flavored small portions of meat or fish allows a small quantity to flavor a mouthful of rice. So imagine a Korean war refugee who came into possession of a can of Spam from a US Army C-ration -it was ambrosia. Spam came into such high regard that even today, giving a carton of Spam is considered a suitably generous house gift.
Spam cooks to a beautiful crispness with juicy tenderness in the center of medium thickness cuts that perfectly flavor rice -especially cold left over rice. I found some rice and a can of Spam in the pantry and all thoughts of going out for a steak were gone. Filet mignon does not compare to a bowl of cold rice topped off by three medium thickness slices of Spam crisped to perfection on a frying pan. And in the near darkness of the empty house, I savored my repast to the last spoonful, feeling soothed, sated, happy. Mothered in fact.

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The Honorable

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My Golf Processor and Workstation

I played a wonderful round of golf with my early morning golf friends, BF, BR, and DH. My score of 44/50 from the blue tees at Wakonda was not so great, but in that round were some shots that were of such perfect shape and trajectory that my interest in this game was reinvigorated. Good company, I realize, is as much a part of the game as the game itself. The rules of golf dictate how we play golf, but it also imposes standards of behavior that harken to a different time where honor meant something.
Which brings me to this afternoon’s playoff results from Harbour Town’s PGA tournament. Jim Furyk, a perrenial winner on tour, ended up tied with Brian Davis, an Englishman who currently is 162 in the world rankings. If he could pull out a win, it would change his career in a dramatic way. His approach ended up on the beach, literally. His ball was surrounded by litter, and as he took his backswing, his clubhead touched a reed ever so slightly. If no one noticed, and usually the people in the TV booth would call it if they saw it, Brian could have kept mum and had a chance at par and staying alive in the playoff.
Much to his credit and to the credit of golf, he called the penalty on himself. He even argued with a rules official and asked to have it reviewed on video. With the two stroke penalty, he was done. Having lost the tournament though, he won the admiration of many fans, including myself, at his adherence to the rules of golf, placing honor above reward. This is the true spirit of golfism.
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iPadurday

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The iPad is here! The line at the

Apple Store was impressive, and the Apple Store clerks handed out Smart water, coffee, and muffins. The line moved briskly and there was a festive atmosphere and a fellowship of similarly minded futurists. And I believe that this device is a portal to the future of mobile computing. It untethers you from the desk in a way that laptops never could because laptops were still all about creating a desk.

It is an enabling technology much

in the way that literacy and human language enabled humans to be unfettered by genes and instinct. You may hate Apple and all that it makes, but you will be turning away from the next big thing, if that is important to you.

On opening, the device, like the iPod, wants to be connected to iTunes to be activated. Once set up, the device is beyond words in terms of fit, finish, and smooooothness.

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iPadurday Eve Diorama

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The day is nearly nigh! In celebration of iPadurday Eve, I constructed this diorama of Steven Jobs bestowing upon humanity the iPad (as modeled by the iPhone which is now technically the iPad Mini) all underneath an actual Apple Tree.

The Man in Brown will drive by and deliver our iPad tomorrow. If by some twist of evil fate he is held up, I will drop by the Apple Store (of earthly delights) to pick up my reserved iPad (to sell on eBay?).

So happy iPadurday to All!