In the beginning...

So when did this golf obsession begin? All I know now is it was way, way, way too late. Certainly my 1st generation immigrant, liberalish upbringing didn’t exactly anticipate this obsession – as a middle-class son of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, golf was ridiculed as a Republican Wasp friviality (though I could always justify golf to my Ukrainian ancestors by pointing out that, like them, Wasps also hated commies). But I’ve always been somewhat of a ridicule-seeker.

Let’s face it; golf didn’t exactly have much “cool” going for it back in the 70s - what with the plaid check pants, the lily-white country club prissiness, even the now-irreverent Johnny Miller seemed especially prep-school bratty, and forget about athletic; Jack Nicklaus was the Man back then, pudgy-strong but not exactly ripped. But to be fair, nothing about the 70s exactly embraced "cool" - when John Travolta strutting down the street to the BeeGees soundtrack in the opening bit of Saturday Night Fever was one of the signature moments, then the decade seems a touch short on cool. But that changed some when I ventured off to college. My freshman-year roommate, Irish Denny, was on his high school golf team and was also a pretty damn good athlete and really cool guy (sure he was a touch tightly wound but the bong hits and beers seemed to even him out) and him and my other great college friend, Scott, took me out to the Rutgers golf course for a round or two but the golf jones began in earnest in the liberal DC suburban enclave of Takoma Park in the early 90s. My life was in a fairly regressive phase of rather preposterously epic boozing and smoking to help contend with the conspicuously inconsequential hotel work I’d been doing for countless years. My best friend and I were going to tap into that progressive Takoma Park vibe to help get out of our respective regressive ruts but despite some limited progress, nothing really changed…until one morning when I heard him crushing ice in the kitchen, which in itself wasn’t odd, sure it was 8 am and maybe, just maybe, a bit early for a vodka, but again, not like it was a workday or nothing, but here’s the weird part: he was wearing a collared polo, no tank-top and…people were calling. On the phone. Before noon. Not the usual bill-collectors. Now that was odd, I must say. And then a bit later these same people were out front honking the horn and they too were wearing collared shirts…and now my boy was wearing a straw chapeau, hoisting his golf bag, and out he went.

And me, I was ruing an evening of “When Harry Fried a Green Tomato While Sally had Insomnia in Seattle” and well, there you have it. I don’t need to get it into it any more, do I?

On one side of the ledger: you got booze, boys laughing and trash-talking, Skins, scorecards and hot dogs at the turn. On the other side: you got a couch, a girl, a box of tissues and some spinach-artichoke dip.

So next time my boy went out, there I was -- a new starter set, a dozen Pinnacles, some ironically tasteless tasseled spikes and a bag of tees. Now I’ve gotta be honest - at first, I was pretty clueless. I didn’t know what was what. Divot-repair tool? OB? Waste-area? Forced carry? Lateral hazard? Fried-egg lie? Slope? Nassau? I might as well have been reading Dante’s Inferno in Gaelic. I had nothing. Perhaps a certain craftiness around the greens. Like Irish Denny would say years later: Chop, chop, splash, chop, up-down, double.

I’ve tried and tried to balance the two sides of the ledger: the booze, the keeping score, the couch, the girl; I figured I could find some semblance of equilibrium if I could just lose the hot dogs and the box of tissues.

But golf won out. Big-time. Probably because golf was considerably more open-minded about my escalating problem-drinking; the womenfolk seemed to find the boozing a trifle puzzling at best and a clear relationship deal-breaker or non-starter at worst. It’s about the only place where I forget all of my trivial BS, where the only thing that seemingly matters is the shot at hand, this while contemplating the often picturesque, sometimes perilous landscape. Not to say I don’t look ahead. I might even occasionally carry the disgust of a brutal 3-putt with me for a hole or four, but it’s nowhere near as dreamy and unfocused as I am in other areas of my life.

So I’ll be honest, I’m still a mess, though I no longer think slope means a course is hilly. I’ve managed to knock a couple of chops off per hole. My craftiness around the greens seems to have left me when I quit drinking. I’ve got dozens of collared shirts, I’ve got wind-cheaters, sweater-vests, fleece pull-overs, a half-dozen putters, and I am…

Hooked.

So this little guide is really a memoir. A memoir of the last dozen or so years of a fresh approach to life: a decidedly idiosyncratic recovery program based on Starbucks coffee, Seinfeld re-runs, detective fiction, golf (and then some more golf) and the semi-pursuit of quasi-relationships with women of a particular sort, the kind with severely limited emotional (or even physical) availability - be they married, incarcerated, recently widowed, schizophrenic or just plain uninterested. But mostly this is a memoir of a personal odyssey to consistently break 90. Not a very high bar, granted, but it is what it is. That five hole stretch when you’re in the zone and it feels like you could play this way forever and then yikes - not a blade from the trap, NO, stop, hit something, and then back to fighting your swing, back to the range, back to the Internet for a new driver…

Boyz in the mood...

So we're sitting around a while ago, me and my golfing mentor (the Doral Lama), watching the Masters and waiting for the pizza guy to show up, scoping out the latest Golf Digest Places to Play Guide to plan our annual summer golf trip. That's not a bad day right there. We've done Myrtle, Ocean City, Pinehurst, south Florida, Arizona, Jacksonville and Ohio (yeah, we're still wondering about that one though we did discover Longaberger, which immediately vaulted into the top 10, no small feat, that), and Williamsburg/Virginia Beach, some of them multiple times. And as we're checking out the latest course ratings and rankings we notice that Michigan has a bunch of 4 and 5-star courses plus my boy is a Wolverine, so we'll hold off on Bandon Dunes and Monterrey Peninsula until next summer and Michigan it is.

We had a few main event courses picked out - Arcadia Bluffs and Bay Harbor, so now it was just a matter of filling in the undercard of the rest of the trip, sort of like...having decided on the centerpiece meat dishes for the family BBQ you have to wrangle a bit about the various sides and appetizers, simple in theory but more trouble than it should be. But, then again, you never know when you might unexpectedly discover a diamond in the graduated US Open rough, though it becomes harder and harder to surprise and almost impossible to astonish.

So to the Golf Digest guide we go. As I mentioned, Michigan had a boatload of 3-1/2 and 4 star courses, so it was merely a matter of doing some Internet cross-referencing to get the locations and logistics down. But just for kicks, we flipped through the guide to look up some of our local Maryland/Virginia standbys and what do you think we found? Huh, go figure, almost every course in the area - from the trappiest, most uninspired muni to the over-hyped must-play condo-lined upscale daily fee country-club for a day - all of them were at least 3 stars in the Golf Digest guide. Let's put it this way, if some of these places merit 3 stars, then Pinehurst #2 must rate like, oh, I don't know, 18 stars. So the heretofore indispensable GD guide had become, well, a touch unreliable.

Scroll back to the Ohio trip. Despite my friend's skepticism (Ohio was simply an uninspired flat waythrough on the way to Michigan to his mind) the Golf Digest top 100 list had come out for that year and there were at least 6 courses that were within proximate distance of each other, or close enough that you could fashion a reasonable excursion. So what was the upshot of our venture - well, disappointing, to say the least. I mean, think about it, top 100 - in the country. You're expecting some pretty serious golf courses and only two of them would be included in my own top 100, so, not exactly a successful trip. To put it in non-golf terms - imagine going to Mario Batali's NY dining mecca, Babbo, and you find out that Batali's in Mali on holiday and Mario Andretti is running the kitchen or you've laid out some serious scratch for ducats to the latest Broadway smash starring Meryl Streep and you get understudy Merrill Hoge in drag or...ok, I think I'm done showboating...

Subpar golf and the dismality that is Ohio - not great.

Great. Kind of a misunderstood word, lately. Akin to: "of the ages", as in "a fight for the ages", "sweet", "boy that was a sweet play", "killer", like "that chick has got a killer body" or even "mad", used in the classic "that was one mad dunk, yo". When did "really good" become better than "great"? Lately, everything is great - that was a great game, what a great party, I loved the restaurant, wasn't the food great? Boy, that was one great movie!!

If everything is so great, why do I see so much out there that blows? I guess great has become the new mediocre. It must be a nice life to eat at great restaurants, see great movies every weekend and play great golf courses wherever they tee it up. Yessiree, a night out at the Olive Garden, followed by the latest send-up starring the indomitable Will Farrell and next day, a foursome at a 4-star Golf Digest course, complete with perpetually aerated greens, rocks in the bunkers and a $5 surcharge for range balls on top of the C-note you've ponied up for greens fees. Gee, that does sound great.

So that's it for now. I'm gonna head to the range. I shot a lousy 96, though I did have a world-class double bogey save. It even bordered on being great.