Glenn Dale

Year Opened: 1958

Architect: George Cobb

Web: www.glenndalegolfclub.com

Phone: (301) 262-1166

If you have happened to wander onto this page, you can basically surmise, not incorrectly, that booze has featured prominently in my existence and you would not be remiss in gleaning that the back-end hitting-bottom revolving-door detox days weren’t even vaguely a stroll in the park. But trust me; I wouldn’t have done it for as long as I did if there hadn’t been some serious big-time soul-enhancing mind-expanding payback of just pure plain mad-cap devil-may-care fun. I might be insane but I’m not crazy. And let me tell you, rambling off to Glenn Dale in the old bomb-ass Buick Regal with my boy and stopping off at Tic-Toc Liquors to pick up some adult beverages for the ride to the course was one of those times. Another time was that night’s Letterman. Another time was next morning. Then there was the night my boy got this trivia board game, something to do with guessing when famous people died. We peeked at the rules, decided to ignore them, and made up our own game, adding up the total years we were off from the actual year of a person’s death. We were pretty much even-up until my boy got dealt people like JFK, Hitler, John Lennon and Roberto Clemente; while I got Mozart, Hannibal, St. Francis of Assisi, Shakespeare and Nostradamus. Nostradamus? Are fucking kidding me? I’d be lucky to guess the year of his death to within half a millenium. So my boy jumped to such a big lead that he would have had to pick like…I don’t know…Noah or Sun Tzu or Aristophanes or something and I would have to be dealt Martin Luther King, Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe or somebody else I could nail within a year or two. When I was dealt Nostradamus my boy lost it, literally falling out of his chair (though that could have been the 2nd fifth of Absolut doing its thing). There’s no way you do this if you’re not drinking, right? I suppose you could play a board game when sober, but what’s the point? I mean you can read or check out your Tivo for any “The Office” reruns, or Google Jessica Alba websites or....take a nap whilst “reading”. Another drinking highlight back near the tail end of my semi-enjoyable drinking days was the annual Fantasy Baseball draft in Jersey but that gets its own blog entry.

Theoretically it wasn’t a long drive out to Glenn Dale, not like we needed a cooler or nothing to keep our drinks in order, just enough to take the edge off the previous evening’s proceedings (wait,we’d already taken care of that bit of business a mere few hours earlier) but the drive took longer than it should have -we had difficulty finding the place (this is the pre-Mapquest 1990s) and our somewhat befuddled state didn’t help, because either we couldn’t understand our back of an envelope scribbling or we were more fucked-up than we imagined. OK, now I understand what the folks were saying about the whole not drinking and driving deal – Christ, I hit a pot hole, and my drink went all over the front seat (the Regal circa 1983 did not come with cup-holders).

Something about this place conjures up memories of inebriation. You think? Maybe it’s the afternoon we spent sitting in the clubhouse bar, watching people making their approaches onto hole #9. It had to be the booze because it doesn’t sound even remotely captivating, and I was there.

As far as practice facilities go, umm, well, there is a bar. I’ve never tried putting in it. There is some elevation change between the bar and the restroom, which is downstairs. There you have it: concise and loaded with information. One of the tenets of my personal mythology…er…mixology…

Lately there’s been a bunch of nasty terror business in the Indian city of Mumbai. Very disturbing, obviously, but not nearly so much as my not knowing that Bombay had changed its name. And not just in the past month, but about a decade ago. Yikes. I know I’ve been out of touch with the world but wow, man, that just mumbed me out. Remembering a globe as a kid in the 60s – foreign, far-off strange-named wondrous places like Peiping, Tanganyika, Ceylon, and the Congo of Stanley and Livingstone, running my small fingers along the raised globe’s ridges of the Himalayans and the long length of the Andes, hearing my parents talk of their homeland, Ukraine, and something about the Austro-Hungarian Empire but the globe didn’t back-up their take, sure there was an Austria and a Hungary and a Ukrainian S.S.R. but no empire. I tried to find Victoria Falls, seeing it finally in an oddly named White Rhodesia (what did that mean, I mean sure, I’d seen Tarzan movies and Africa was pretty much lions, crocs, some quirky monkeys, Tarzan, Jane and a bunch of wide-eyed dancing grass-wearing face-painted darkies that were pretty much always boiling water in a cauldron to cook-up Tarzan or some other valiant white-skinned folk) so sure it made me wonder but not very much. Perhaps it was nothing more or less than a color like the Red or Black Sea or the Yellow River or the Blue Nile but still, it raised some doubts, but not enough to keep me from listening to the Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Mumb on Me”. And the globe kept changing - Peiping became Peking then Beijing. East Pakistan: Bangladesh. That was some bad karma there. And so on.

And you wonder why I didn’t turn to the bottle earlier? Fascinated by a…globe?

It’s a good thing Bush/Cheney didn’t stay in office another term or the globe would have to be reworked yet again: Iraq would become, oh I don’t know, East Virginia with a capital city of Bushdad. Now that I’m all growed up I understand the conceit behind the White Rhodesia/Black Rhodesia deal. It’s racial. Just like that holiday chestnut, "White Christmas". I imagine some folks here wouldn’t mind something along these lines, like you’d have White Georgia, which would be basically all of Georgia except Atlanta and the caddyshack at Augusta National.

Back to yesteryear’s news…

On Black Friday there was a bit of unpleasantness around the nation: an employee crushed in a stampede at Walmart and a double shooting at Toys R US ( when they typed up the police report I wonder if they used backwards Rs for “murder”?) There’s only one reason you can even remotely have a stampede at a Walmart. And that’s if Natalie Portman and Marisa Tomei are in the employee lounge, making out in see-through teddies. Wait, I doubt Walmart even has an employee lounge. I’m seeing a pattern here and I’m gonna have to lay off reading ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons, a very funny writer whose references typically veer to either a) silly television like 90210 or The Real World b) Internet porn c) his college apartment-living days and d) The Shawshank Redemption. Though once in a great while he’ll surprise you with a David Foster Wallace reference. Why Black Friday? Is that supposed to be a good type of Black vs. Black Monday, which I think was kind of a bad scene back in the late 80s, though it didn’t affect me even a little bit, as lowly leveraged as I was? Shouldn’t Good Friday really be the true Black Friday? And shouldn’t Black Friday be called what it is – The Friday After Thanksgiving. If you choose to use your hard-earned off day to set an alarm to traipse in a mall to dig up a Christmas present for Uncle Bucky, well, I feel for you. Everyone knows the only true day suitable for Christmas shopping. It’s called Christmas Eve. Setting an alarm on your day off? To go shopping? I’d rather go to work. In a coal mine. Well lemme think that through. Punch-in vs. driving in traffic? Punch-in in a TKO, easy. Descending down tram into mineshaft vs. circling mall endlessly for parking. This one’s a tougher call but yep, mineshaft it is. OK, chop, chop, chop vs. shop, shop, shop. Another tough call. On one hand you’re in the dark, the claustrophobia element, you can’t breathe and you’re basically mind-numbingly chopping at rock all day until lunchtime, which is a pickled egg and a mayonnaise sandwich.. On the other you’re being jostled by people and strollers, you’re looking at crappy merchandise, chicks are spraying you with the new Calvin Klein cologne, Apathy, all while listening to “Granma got Run over by a Reindeer”. But let’s be real, mining has to just plain suck, though you can probably kinda stay in your own head. The not-breathing part’s a pretty big negative, I guess. But it’s real close. I suppose with shopping you can always leave, if you can remember where you parked your car.

After one particular round at Glenn Dale, we had a few hours to kill before heading off for our respective evening plans so we perched above the ninth hole and watched the groups approaching the green while knocking back a few cocktails and smoking some cigs. We made a pact that we’d leave as soon as someone reached the green in regulation. 4 and a half hours later we stumbled out. No one even came close to hitting the green. I guess after playing the hole (an uphill 400-yarder) it was pretty obvious that the odds of anyone hitting the green in two were pretty slim. If we wanted to drink ourselves into a twisted state (and we did) we should’ve just gone ahead and got to it but then again, we liked making up silly “games” while we were drinking. One of my favorites was: I’m only going to drink on weekends, or…no more than a 12-pack on working nights..or…no drinking before noon on weekends or…no drinking while actually at work but I was always able to tweak the rules in my favor so basically I would head for blackout every chance I had. What a juicehead. Naturally my beat-up old Buick wouldn’t start and I called out from a job I’d stopped going to a month ago. This is who? Man, ish Greg and my car won’t shtart so I cain come in shuday. OK. Duly noted. But you haven’t been here for a month. Please don’t call here anymore.

In between the inebriated excursion out and drinking the heart out of a fine fall afternoon there is a decent golf course with some quirky holes, a few true tough ones and the rest - a whole lot of je ne sais I could care less.

The first hole tee box, next to the historic Georgian manor house, is one of your better ones, with a dramatic downhill tee shot off the high plateau of the teeing area. Avoid the strand of trees on the left and try to put a smooth swing on it since there is a tendency to want to crush one from the high perch above the fairway. You don’t need to crush a drive (that should be saved for the brutal third hole) but given the setting and the situation I have seen some vigorous, quick and mostly ineffective swipes at the ball. It just makes you want to kill it.

After the short second with its funky-contoured green we get to the third, one of the most difficult par fours in the area, where water definitely comes into the mix. Number 3 has always given me difficulties because I don’t nail my drive, leaving me an awkward distance to go for the green just on the other side of the lake. Hit a decent drive and you will have about 150 to carry the lake. The same lake comes into play on the next hole, a left bender around the water. The rest of the nine is pretty much ho-hum until hole # 9, a long dogleg right par 4 with a really tough green and a fairway bunker that dissuades you from trying to cut too much off the right side. I like this hole. You par this and you’re doing alright. Sure it probably cost me a dozen brain cells but let’s face it, those brain cells were doomed one way or another when the sun came up that morning.

After the rolling straight-forward uphill-approach tenth, you get a breather with the downhill dogleg left 11th. The hardest hole on the inward nine is the 13th, which is a very tight uphill par 4 with a lake to contend with (well, hopefully not really, but it gives you something to mull over)' not much fairway and a contentious uphill approach to a largish back-to-front sloping green. The last two holes are short dogleg lefts which are a bit gimmicky but basically OK. From the back tees, 18, which is a par 5, comes out of a narrow chute. If you can manage that you can hack your way up to the green in two. There are some challenging shots on the course and it can be an enjoyable though not exactly inspiring place to while away an afternoon. And while it away we did.

A step below Enterprise – I guess it’s a 4.5

And now off I go to an AA meeting, wistfully thinking about a Mumbai Sapphire martini.