Category Archives: golf philosophy

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Golf manners, and a bit about DMGCC’s Pete Dye greens

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Waiting for the faster group behind to play through

I was recently invited to play at Des Moines Golf and Country Club by my neighbor down the street. It was over the July 4th holiday, and I expected a crowded course, but rain kept everyone but the most serious golfers away. I played with JD, and we invited two other friends to join us, and the round was memorable for this.

A twosome came up to us on what had been an empty course, and we let them pass with a smile and wave. They thanked us, and played on with little delay, bothering us not at all. This little interaction speaks volumes about golf etiquette and why I’m so passionate about golf. Everyone there understood the rules and the conventions of play -the faster group is allowed to play through. When playing through, you understand that it’s a gift, and you play briskly and thank the group you’re playing through.

This is all taught, and universally understood. If only the world at large played in this way. It used to be that everyone went to the same schools and had a common civic culture that emphasized the importance of public life of the citizen. Then things became atomized and it’s difficult to find the same levels of socialization. Today, the country is split along socioeconomic class lines that make collective action for the public good difficult or in some cases impossible.

Life really is no different from golf -for a society to function well, there have to be not only laws but unwritten rules.

Addendum:

I am finally getting the Pete Dye greens. Where old line courses like Wakonda’s will have one general slope split by a secondary slope to the terrain, Dye placed topography creating miniature maps of mesas, plateaus, lowlands, and valleys so that two changes in slope will occur not within 30 feet which is typical of most courses, but within 5 to ten feet. He also emphasized the artificial organic -think avant garde white plastic furniture from the late sixties. Wakonda is art deco like the Chrysler building, while Des Moines Golf and CC’s Pete Dye layout is decidedly modernist like 2 Columbus Circle before it’s renovation.

Nothing wrong with it. The important thing was, after this epiphany, my putting improved because I looked for the giant beach ball buried in the green above the buried giant banana.

Speaking of which, putting has become the center focus of my efforts this summer, and it is beginning to pay off. I started a miserable 9 holes earlier today at Wakonda, going 10 over through the first four holes, and finished the latter 5 holes at 2 over after I turned on the putting. The key today was emphasizing the putting stroke as a stroke, with putting as a process, and focusing on seeing the line.

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Close Your Eyes in the Bunker

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Chalk this up to the weirdest thing to ever happen to me on a golf course. I am a big fan of Bill Pennington, golf writer for the NYTIMES. He recently posted a video about hitting bunker shots (link here), which I watched with amusement. At Wakonda Club, we have sunrise golf, which for me works out well because I can slip in 9 holes at the crack of dawn and be done by office hours.

The gist of Pennington’s mad video is that once you set up your bunker shot, you really don’t need the extra visual stimulus of vision to accomplish your goal. Yesterday, on number 18, I was in the right green side bunker on the front lobe, meaning I was easily over 50 feet away. The lie was a partially plugged lie in a previous sand divot which had eroded from the constant recent rain. Typically, the wet sand gives me fits. I set up and visualized my shot, and closed my eyes and swung. I heard a nice thud of my 54 degree Cleveland wedge hitting sand, and I opened my eyes. The ball tracked over the greenside lip and I lost sight of it, but a few seconds later, there was a satisfying rattle of ball hitting the pin. It scooted off to the side about a foot!

I figured it was a fluke, but again this morning, I found myself in the left bunker on 18, this time on wet sand that had been raked but close to a collection of water that would have allowed me relief. I decided, hell with it. I was this time about 30 feet away, and I used my 58 degree wedge. I set up, closed my eyes, and again, the thud of the wedge traveling through wet sand. I opened my eyes and panicked when I saw the ball rise very high, much higher than I had wanted -I thought, but the ball landed with sore feet about three feet from the pin, bounced and stopped on the spot.

Two times in bad bunker conditions is amazing. You have to try this, and thank you Mr. Pennington. I’d hand you a zucchini out of my garden if I could.

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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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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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Golf Passage of the Mysteries

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A poem written driving from Detroit to Des Moines after we missed a connecting flight, we were returning from a spring golf trip to Hilton Head, myself and several most excellent golfing companions. As we pulled out of a convenience store lot, I had the vision of a wizened old man, a specter, hailing us with the following words…
Five and One man, on a journey!
Heading westwards, on into the night.
Burdens shared, and sleep neglected,
Y’all crossing the river, and arrive at first light.
Great joy you have found, and more do you seek
Onwards and onwards, for promises to keep,
Hammer on the right foot, no shoe on the left
Still many hours, before you shall sleep.
So go, I say go, and listen No More,
I am an illusion, but so is your labor,
That ball is not a ball, that hole is not a hole,
And that last hasty meal, you will not savor.
And when you are home, and you lay in your bed
Alive you will feel, alive with no dread
And in seeking all that golfin’ pleasure,
You realize the truth that the company is the treasure.

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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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my life, my shoes, my style. docpark style.

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the docpark OR shoe

As the winter drags on, I find myself now dabbling in fashion design. I have decided to release a line of lifestyle related sneakers. Actually, you too can launch your own blingy shoe line at http://www.zazzle.com.

And why not. Why is it that celebrity athletes get to get on cereal boxes. Why do they get the shoes? Why aren’t we supporting the mail carrier, the school teacher, the soccer mom, and the hospital nurse in the same way? Where are our priorities?

This guy will no longer wear other people’s labels. You are welcome to buy mine.