Architect: Ed Ault
Web: www.eisenhowergolf.com
Phone: (410) 571-0973
It’s 5:40am on a morning in March and once again I am scraping snow and ice off the Corolla. It’s déjà vu all over again. Except it’s different. No red fox slyly meandering along in search of a humble repast, but there’s most likely no fox-worthy food to be had, lest this be a vinyl-siding eating creature…OK, I give…my conscience doth gnaw at me, the guilt and remembering which lie was tied to which untruth and… so I’ve gotta come clean - no red fox to be seen the last time, neither. The entire construct was essentially what is referred to in the industry as writer’s embellishment. Scholarly analysis, after much debate and round-the-clock ad-hoc committee symposia, may well deem it an example of an unreliable narrator. In layman’s terms - a big fat lie. Whatever. (I do so occasionally like to show off my command of current English slang)
In fact none of it was true. I didn’t scrape off the ice, I didn’t peruse the newspaper, I most certainly didn’t man up and head for the job, I didn’t daydream about golf, and I didn’t get hit by a sheet of ice (and if I had, the offending vehicle would not have had an NRA bumper sticker but a license plate more along the lines of MOMMYX3). What did happen was this: I got up for my morning smoke, writhing this way and that away and back again to light the cigarette in the swirling wind, took one sweeping glance at my neighbors industriously scraping away the ice off their cars (no, they weren’t sleeping… please, these are actual grown-ups -- with careers and mortgages and power sanders and life insurance and matching patio sets), texted my boss that I wasn’t coming in (something about a few ducks frozen stuck to my driveway..and yes of course I tried shooing them away with some hoisin sauce and a scallion brush, but even trapped in ice these were fierce fighting ducks and not your timorous climb-in-the-roasting pan and baste-me breed of duck) and headed back upstairs to idle away some time. Perhaps the only remotely verifiable truthful item was the Peruvian chicken emporium, but even that’s a few weeks from fruition since usurping the space of my now-defunct (and seemingly under-frequented) neighborhood Starbucks (what, so now I have to go to the other end of the strip mall for my venti coffee. Life is simply just not fair. And it’s not short.)
But this time I’m at work for real, for real,yo – yep flossin the slang-know again - well I am in my office (technically it’s a storeroom, but there is a desk and a phone and perhaps a stapler), not exactly working but checking out some blogs, some YouTube and last night’s NBA box scores while tweaking my fantasy line-ups and it does seem abnormally slow for the hotel today because of the snow, so my day is basically done and done. Another hard day of nothing much at all.
Is this a golf blog or the journal of an unrelentingly non-eventful existence?
So this golf course here, I have hardly any recollection of playing here. And no, oh droll ones, not because I was in some inebriated blackout state of mind. Certainly Aerosmith circa 1977. And 1978. And some other time, I forget which when…oh yeah, the 80’s.
I’ve been to Eisenhower twice and it’s really pretty astonishing that I have little to no memory of the venue. I do, however, recall who I was playing with last time out. There was my boy, of course. I also seem to recollect some lanky older gent who had come along with this lady who’s been patiently wooing my boy’s mom in some quasi-amorous fashion for the past few decades, but without much good fortune, no matter how much of the ol’ vino she’s plied her with over the years. OK, I’m getting an image of the tall gent now; I seem to remember him never hitting a wood, and I mean never, like he played the course in these 125 yard increments. The little lesbian lady, conversely, almost always hit a wood.
And yet the golf course itself refuses to surface in my memory stew. I’ve still got nothing and close to two years have passed since I began this particular blog bit and I’m struggling to conjure up the golf course (from many years ago) and also my particular state of mind two years ago and what I thought and felt then...
...this while I can’t for certainty recall if I took my happy pill this morning and most assuredly can’t tell you which re-run of which crime/law show that I’d already seen I re-visited last night – I just know I’m not crazy about not having dreams to remember.
Funny, I don’t feel happy though I’m not despondent, either, just my standard flat line emotional numbness. I guess another pill wouldn’t hurt. What’s the worst that can happen – a fleeting wisp of euphoria?
I’m thinking of borrowing a page from the repertoire of my boy’s late sister, who had this uncanny flair for offering up her opinion – heartfelt, poignant, insightful - of movies she had never seen. Much like commentary features you get with DVDs these days – she would talk you through some pivotal scenes, reveal the conflicted relationship between the director and the lead actor, discuss alternate endings the scriptwriter envisioned – sure I know most of this she was getting from reading reviews in The New Yorker, The Village Voice and the NY Times, but still…you’d walk out of the cinaplex having actually seen the film, you’d give her a call, told her you’d just seen such and such and she’d start casually mentioning an aspect of the movie you might have missed, calling your attention to a curious choice the director made in some scene, citing an illusory allusion to some recent trend in cinematic theory - a subject you studied in college (at least in theory), all this while she was waitressing and sleeping off a hangover until her next shift… meanwhile all you’d have to offer in way of insight was you thought Jennifer Tilly was kind of hot. Sometimes I think her memory of films she’d pretended to see was almost as vivid as that of films she had seen and half-forgotten. One of the many things I miss with her passing.
But I can’t just make up a critique of a golf course I disremember, can I? But why not, I ask? I mean who’s reading this besides my boy and a family that’s tippy-toeing on eggshells (we’d better take the occasional peak at his blog and at least feign some kind of encouraging feedback or he might just submerge himself in his room with his boxed sets of Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Wire, go off the deep end again and never come up for air. Thank god he still smokes, at least that gets him out of the house a few dozen times a day…) I mean, I make a claim that Tiger Woods isn’t cool and I get no response. Clearly my substantive and cohesive logic was difficult to penetrate and countermand, but in these here pages I stated that the best golfer ever, who won the U.S. Open on a broken leg(!!), is not cool. But winning Grand Slams isn’t enough so he goes and does this wedge juggling bit, behind his back, between his legs, catching the ball with his club and then lining a double to the gap but you want to know what I think is the most impressive thing Tiger does? He fucking stops his downswing when a camera clicks. That is insane. 120+ mph of coiled torque and he just slams on the brakes. I can’t stop myself on a 4 mph putter stroke when a bug lands on my ball. Speaking of Tiger, I cracked up at the commercial last week in honor of his return from injury – the one where two of the PGA’s nerdiest straight-arrows, Stewart Cink and Justin Leonard, along with brash bad boy Anthony Kim and one-hit wonder, Masters champion Trevor Immelman, are basking in the high life with Tiger gone. Seeing Justin Leonard smoking a stogie poolside with bikini babes replenishing his drinks like he’s Tony Montana just made me smile.
Clearly this was written before the break-up of Tiger’s marriage due to some serial straying outside the wedding bed for carnal fulfillment – this with a slew of cocktail waitresses, diner hostesses and porn starlets. Again, not cool. Tawdry, most assuredly. Clearly he’s a different breed of big cat – he’s a Cheetah (voiced with a Boston accent) and not a Tiger.
One thing in my favor as far as concocting a tenuous review is that Ed Ault, golf course architect unextraordinaire, designed Eisenhower, so I’m fairly certain I can fudge this by a mix & match connect the dots plug and play from the Aultian canon.
So…I turned fifty over the weekend almost 2 years ago. Or as the kids say, fiddy. In order to make the celebration of this distinct anniversary as painless as possible for my friends and family, I opted for the quietude of an NHL hockey game vs. the requisite hullabaloo of a surprise party. Let it be noted that this was not my first choice. Per usual, I thought not of myself but others. As always, my first thought was what would make the most sense for the ailing economy so using an admittedly rudimentary blueprint involving opportunity cost, outsourcing, supply chain, soft currency, leverage, laissez-faire, in-sourcing (cutting your own lawn, changing your oil) my first choice, which unfortunately became obvious after the fact, would have been this summer’s Billy Joel/Elton Joel concert at the new downtown ballpark. Oh this is can't miss stuff right here - a bunch of middle-aged JAPs, their hangdog husbands who recently got nailed trying to hook-up on Facebook with girls they used to bang in college, obviously a few drag queens camping it up and me, in my ass-less chaps. You're a Rocket Man and you're a Piano Man, oh yes you are.
Have you been to a sporting event recently? Ever since tickets went to triple-digits for a decent seat I’ve pretty much stopped going. Oh yeah, and when they cancelled the World Series. That didn’t help. Or when my boy and I went to a Wizards game a few years back and watched these multi-millionaires mailing it in, not even faking breaking a sweat. Now I’m not what you’d call a tireless worker – in that parable of the gallivanting grasshopper and the drudgesome toiling ant, Aesop overlooked my slothful self hibernating off in the story’s corner, not forward-thinking enough to realize work’s benefits and too dejected to gallivant – and I look like a rock-hauling Pyramid-building slave compared to the effort these cats put out. Even the trash-talking was turrible.
After checking out the hockey game, played by two of your better pro teams, I cannot complain about the player’s efforts. They seemed to care. It’s just that I didn’t. I mean I pretended to care; I even wanted to care, just to feel like part of something bigger than me, to high-five strangers when Ovechkin scored, to groan when a ticky-tack penalty was called on the home team. But in the end, the Caps lost and it was like, OK, so what. It didn’t even come close to the emotional high I got after posting the top score on the sit-down Asteroids machine back in my college tavern, a feat which, sadly or not, rates kinda high in the pantheon of my life’s achievements.
What I didn’t expect was the buzzing in my ears like I’d just seen the Ramones in somebody’s one-car garage with a high-speed monster truck chase during a 5-alarm fire. It’s 2-1/2 hours of strobes and heavy metal, kids clacking Thunderstix, T-shirts firing out of rocket launchers, perpetual dance contests, PA announcers clamoring to make more NOISE (oh yeah, like that’s possible) and video screens around the arena updating and reloading commercials every 15 seconds. And then you got the dude behind us with the Viking horn. Man am I old.
Alright, let me muster some clever observation about this track. I sort of remember it’s out towards Annapolis, and there’s a sprawling shopping mall off the exit, then it’s a quick jog past a redneck roadhouse and the course is on the left. The drive curves up the hill, revealing a par 3 on the right and then the lot and the pedestrian clubhouse. Perfectly OK to get you in the mood to play an unmemorable round of golf. OK, let’s see if I can’t just use GoogleEarth to jog my memory – I mean I knew there were going to be mental adjustments with this sobriety deal but this is absurd. The whole point of me is that I can remember not only golf holes but particular shots me or my boys have hit on said holes years down the line. It’s a weird skill, granted, considering I have to replay voice mail messages like 3 times to jot down the phone number (partly because I think I’m experiencing some sort of age-related hearing loss deal – I would’ve welcomed a complete loss of hearing during the hockey cacophony - but its mostly that I just don’t really care about the message – usually it’s job-related or something essentially having little or nothing to do with, well…me). And I’m just about the worst when it comes to remembering punch lines to jokes. But something happened out there at Eisenhower and I’m more than a little suspicious that the tall gent and the little lesbian lady were up to something. Something so heinous that I mentally had to block out the entire experience, like Tommy, the Pinball Wizard. More likely I was suffering grievously from some post-pragmatic dress syndrome – like maybe my sweater-vest didn’t coordinate with the rest of my ensemble. Being the dapper dandy that I am, it’s completely possible that my already shaky mental state was precipitating a long-overdue stay at the nervous hospital… OK, OK, time to conjure up something and move on. See me. Feel me.
Compared to other courses of the municipal/county sort, Eisenhower has a better than expected practice facility. And by better than expected, let’s be clear – my expectations were these: I brought the Astroturf putting green along, just in case. A secluded driving range is set beyond a hedge past the putting green and while you do need to pony up for range balls, the starting fee is reasonable so it’s not that big a deal.
Poor drainage affects the conditioning of this layout, which can get quite sloppy. It is, however, not without its charms, like for instance, some of the greens occasionally have gasoline marks left from a leaky mower. A hilly parkland course, the distinguishing feature is the seven-acre lake on the backside.
This shouldn’t be a golf course I can unabashedly endorse but I do find some of the track, such as the opening stretch on the back side, somewhat engaging. The front side is hilly with some fairly strong par 4s, featuring blind tee shots, a meandering creek and yes, shocking but true for an Ed Ault layout, a couple of prominent fairway bunkers on the 3rd and 4th holes. The afore-mentioned lake makes an appearance early on the back nine but it’s not much of a factor, by which I mean, you don’t have to cross it, except for partially on your second shot on the short easy par 5 12th. The next hole, a long par 3 with water long and right and a devilishly sloping green, will make you think about club selection depending on the pin placement. Did I just use the phrase “devilishly sloping” to describe an Ed Ault green? I think I’d better call my sponsor.
Eighteen is another strongish par 4 uphill to a green protected by trees and a few bunkers. At least that’s what it looks like from the Google satellite, but now that I have GoogleEarth going I think I’ll wrap this up and check out Stewart Cink’s compound. I couldn’t find it but I did manage to stumble onto Boo Weekley’s crib – though I reckon John Daly’s got a time-share.
I guess it’s about a 3.5, maybe a 4. The par 4s have some heft, there are a couple of short par 5s to help your score, a few adequate par 3s and there you have it, a basic golf course. It’s a decent place to chop it around if you are in the mood for cheap and live really really nearby, but let’s be clear, it’s simply unrememberable. I realize if you’ve played close to a thousand rounds of golf some just aren’t going leave an impression. You think Justin Leonard remembers every Heather, Amber and Tiffani that’s stalking him in the hotel lobby bar as he leaves a trail of broken hearts around the country.
