Grigorian Rants

Eisenhower

2010-12-22T16:45:00.015-05:00

Year Opened: 1969

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.

Queenstown Harbor

2009-02-26T10:27:00.027-05:00

Year Opened: 1991

Architect: Lindsay Ervin

Web: www.mdgolf.com

Phone: (800) 827-5257

It’s 5:30 in the morning in early February, the temperature gauge reads a cozy comfy 8 degrees (comfortable if you’re a bottle of vodka or …a cadaver) and I’m out here chipping away at a frosted glassy sheet of ice on my windshield. The defroster won’t kick-in until I’m halfway to work so I scrape and I chop with vigor while my neighbors slumber. A lone red fox surreptitiously crosses the street down a ways in search of a hen-house, not realizing this isn’t exactly hen-house country though there’s gotta be a KFC or a Peruvian chicken joint around somewhere. The feeble plastic scraper isn’t making much of a dent and I think of pulling my 6-iron out of the trunk, but that too is sealed-in by an even sturdier ice block. Gambling that there won’t be a lot of traffic on the Beltway I head back inside with the morning paper, which I jackhammered off the driveway, this while I wait for the defroster to loosen up the ice. It’s an old car and the fan barely works but the car won’t fit inside the microwave so I’m basically out of luck. I glance at the front page headlines and more dire economic news is forecast, so crawling back into bed and blowing off work probably isn’t the smart play. And if a red fox, which can hardly have any remotely promising leads in the quest for food and shelter, is out and about, then certainly I suppose I can venture out, as well. Sure, why not me.

I’m finally on the road and for once a gamble of mine pays off – there’s hardly anyone on the road, so I begin to daydream a bit while on autopilot to work. Thinking about the last time I played golf, which was after my boy’s wedding in Jersey and I’m wondering when next I’ll hit the links. I’m also thinking that the way things are going, a lot of local golf courses are going to be hurting big-time, especially the over-blown upscale ones that seemed to all open simultaneously when a) the dot-com boom was in full swing, b) Tiger Woods made golf seem cool, and c) the baby boomers were beginning to contemplate a leisure-filled recreational retirement (as if their entire lives weren’t already an all-you-can-eat buffet at the self-indulgent amusement trough). But to keep things in perspective, the Washington DC area was definitely in need of a golf course upgrade in the mid-to-late 90s – besides the local county and municipal courses, there were only a couple of high-end golfing destinations in the area: the resort at Lansdowne near Leesburg, Virginia and Queenstown Harbor on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Now there are close to fifty within an hour’s drive from DC (over a hundred within 2 hrs) and it’s unlikely there will be enough business to sustain all of them during this economic decline, though there are other factors which had already manifested themselves before the recession:

Besides being simply expensive, golf takes up a lot of time. A round of golf, between travel time, an hour of practice and warm-up before the round and the round itself takes about 8 hours out of your weekend. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for the kids, the spouse and the honey-do list.
Once the dot-com bubble blowed-up, a lot of disposable income simply disappeared, especially among the demographic that would be likely to spend a day at the golf course – the young moneyed professionals without kids. These days it's hard for me to imagine anyone without a golden parachute or a 6-figure severance package being able to talk themselves into spending $100 for a round of golf at one of the local upscale venues.
Golf is just a frustratingly difficult game to play well (or even not so well), end of story. The average weekend golfer shoots over 100, which is close to double-bogey golf, which is, well, not good. It would be like riding a bike or roller-blading and falling every 10 minutes. Or making 35% of your foul shots. Or double-faulting every other service point in tennis. And this while using equipment where every possible performance-enhancing alteration has been developed: from large-face cavity-back irons, graphite shafts, over-sized big-headed drivers, hybrid irons replacing the hard-to-hit low irons, hi-tech steroided golf balls that go straight and far and still...breaking a 100 is unattainable, even with mulligans, do-overs, giving yourself 5-foot putts, tickling in the rough, whatever...
The new golf courses are simply more difficult than the ones built in the 50s, 60s and 70s. This is partly due to recent environmental concerns, whereby a certain percentage of the land must remain an environmentally protected area - be it marshy wetlands, a scrubby ravine or a field of wildflowers. In the days of yore, these areas would have been simply bulldozed, filled-in, sodded-over and become part of the playing field. Now architects have incorporated these elements as potential hazards in their designs, forcing average golfers to now fly their shot over these areas; whereas in years past they could have just scuttled it along the ground on a mis-hit. So now they've lost their $4 Pro VI in the marsh and have to re-hit with a penalty stroke to add to their frustration. Also, in response to the new hi-tech gear, golf course developers were all caught up in providing the "ultimate test of golf", this while the average golfer could rarely consistently carry the ball off the tee 180 yards, which means more re-hits, which means more waiting, leading to longer rounds, which means...a lot of folks decided this ain't for me. And finally...
It turned out Tiger Woods wasn't all that cool. A DaVinci genius or Mozart-type prodigy, sure, but cool, no, not really. In fact, he's a bit of an aloof robotic prick among an amalgam of either prissy, whiny country club brats or the recent NASCAR-ization of the PGA Tour, where good ole boy aw-shucks rednecks are suddenly in vogue.

So yeah, the golf industry has to be seriously worried, though I have been wide of the mark before, even as recently as this morning (was that a fox or just a large orange cat?), this as my daydreaming is cut short by a sheet of ice smashing into my front grill. I think of giving the driver the what-for but remember that I’ve got a small iceberg on my own rooftop so I let it slide, plus he’s got an NRA bumper sticker and is probably packing.

While there are many (well, less than many and more than a few), ok, while there are some courses that I wouldn’t miss all that much if they shut down, I would be really bummed if Queenstown Harbor was one of them. Before the proliferation of the upscale daily-fee concept the past 15 years, this was the preeminent golfing destination in this area. A quick jog through Kent Island after crossing the 8-mile Bay Bridge, the course is located opposite the Queenstown Outlet Mall along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. I still recall my first drive into the golf course grounds - a fountain spraying off the clear, crisp lake; tall decorative grasses wafting in the bay breezes, flowery shrubs – no grand, majestic gate - just a simple and sublime drive past a few perfectly manicured golf holes, followed by a canopy of trees to the clubhouse. It reminds me for some reason of the scene in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca”, when Laurence Olivier is bringing his naïve, nervous new bride, Joan Fontaine, to his manor estate, Manderley, which reveals its splendor after a long tree-canopied drive in, except my eyes aren’t limpid and my lips aren’t quivering like Ms. Fontaine’s. At least not noticeably. Queenstown gets most of it just right, even the parking lot has reeds and grasses and a large magnolia to add to the ambience of the clubhouse area. Two old barns were renovated, brightly painted and now house the maintenance equipment and the golf carts.

Aerial view of Queenstown, with Chesapeake Bay in the distance

The low-key farmhouse clubhouse was renovated years ago, with vaulted ceilings and a bag-drop turnabout in front though it still retains its considerable charm. What do I remember from that initial visit? The fairways were so lush I wanted to immediately kick off my golf shoes and play barefoot. Even the sand traps had that fine-grained talc-like sand you seem to only find in Florida. We chose to walk the course (back then we always walked, before creaky knees and balky backs made that an ordeal), even if it was close to a 100-degrees out, though the breezes off the bay made it seem like oh, about 97. The first 18 holes we were OK, hot and bedraggled, sure, but it was the final 9 holes that just did me in – I felt like Frodo crossing Mordor on his way to Mt.Doom (yes, agreed, a strange reference coming from me, but maybe because of its recent advent in the pop-culture canon, more accessible than citing, say, “Lawrence of Arabia”.) There was this one wooden bridge across a marsh that had to be close to a half-mile long (and you get to cross it coming and going). I was ready to simply give up, toss my heavy clubs into the marsh, lie down in some soft moss under a tree and wait for MediVac assistance, or some truant kid on a skateboard, or a St. Bernard (more with the ice and less with the hot cocoa) …all I know is I was all done with the walking.

Back when we first came here there were the three 9-hole tracks: the Lakes, the River and I forget what, the Bay, the Marsh, maybe the Estuary (mayhap not); but now Queenstown boasts 2 eighteen-hole courses - the Lakes and the River - and the drive in has been diminished by the construction of some houses around the 2nd hole of the Lakes course, not exactly the most scenic sector of the property - with no views of the bay, no artificial pond, no majestic trees, nothing really; though it is within strolling distance of the outlet mall across heavily trafficked route 301, if that’s your thing, and why wouldn’t it be – getting last year’s rejects and factory seconds and irregulars (like pillow-cases with the opening sewn shut or shoes with mismatched laces or the leopard-motif plate set – hmm, that’s got to make my grilled gnu-steak a tad jumpy)

Again, I am probably not the most reliable arbiter of what passes for entertainment or recreation in our society. Because for me, spending time of any significance in a shopping mall is simply not an option. Even as teenager I didn’t care for it, well except for maybe going to Spencer’s Gifts and checking out the posters of Linda Carter or Marcia Brady or the gals from "Charlie’s Angels". Yeah I know, different time, before the Internet or 1-900 numbers or Girls Gone Wild videos…I mean, for us, there wasn’t anything hotter than "Summer of '42", the original cougar film. Or was she a MILF? No, she was definitely a cougar. I reckon now it would be about as titillating as “My Name is Earl”. Mall shopping is just wrong on so many levels – the homogenization factor (is there any noticeable difference between Old Navy, the Gap, and the Banana Republic? Actually, no, there isn’t; they’re all owned by the Gap, they’re just targeted to different market segments: business casual, preppy casual and slacker-stoner casual. But isn’t it all just Ts, hoodies, jeans and chinos? And Barnes & Noble and Borders are different how? Staples vs. Office Depot vs. Office Max vs.Dunder Mifflin? (just seeing if you’re paying attention. You might need a double tall Red Bull to get through this bit)); the shopping-as-entertainment phenomenon (the loud upbeat music, the flashing lights, the balloons and streamers - all you’re missing is the hot chick in the bikini dancing in a cage with the fog machine set on full-bore Golden Gate Bridge); the mediocrity of merchandise (it’s the contra-artisan movement, though you know the marketing boys will embrace this new buzzword, “our new artisan-made Air Jordans,” even if they’re still stitched by 11-yr old children in a Malaysian sweatshop. I guess 11-yr olds can be sneaker artisans; me, when I was eleven, I was trying to figure out how you could have two different Darrins on "Bewitched").

I’ve always steadfastly maintained that you don’t become a delinquent because of movies or images or TV shows or song lyrics (though reading “Tuned Out” in 6th grade didn’t help) but now…now I have to reconsider, what with “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” and “Confessions of a Shopaholic” raking it in at the box office. See, shopping is fun. And funny.

Queenstown could certainly do with a better driving range - it’s completely lacking in targets and visual appeal (plus you’re hitting off an Astroturf mat, not grass) – simply a big field with some flags stuck in the ground. The putting green is adequate and allows chipping. The gazebo behind the range doesn’t hurt a bit, but then I’m always OK with any gazebo, be it where it may. Any discussion of the range would be deficient without mentioning that we saw former Maryland Terrapin and NBA star Buck Williams taking a few swipes with the driver. Strong rebounder, not much of a golfer…

Set along the Chesapeake Bay, many of the holes on the River Course have wonderful views of the bay, sailboats and the majestic steel suspension bridge beyond. There are a number of lovely lakes and ponds, all kept in pristine condition with not a pesky goose in sight. Marshes meander through-out the course, with the cattails and reeds and grasses swaying innocently in the breeze, while herons and egrets stand one-legged in the shallows.

View of the Lakes course: #1 on the left, the 9th in the center
and the heavily bunkered #18 across the road

So besides the lovely views and the country-club conditioning, what else can you look forward to? Well, out of the 36 holes on the complex, 26 have some sort of lake, pond, marsh or swamp in play, often multiple times on the same hole. This being the case, Queenstown is a course that clearly needs to be attacked through the air to circumvent these various and sundry watery obstructions. So if there is a criticism of this first-rate facility, a lack of variety would be about the only one (besides the driving range). And it ties in with my observation about the increased difficulty of the post -modern golf course. In fact, Queenstown Harbor, while winning awards for its eco-centricity, is not for the faint of heart. These days when I arrive at Queenstown, sure, of course I’m still Joan Fontaine, but now I’m in “Suspicion”, another Hitchcock thriller, where the golf course is like Cary Grant – suave, dapper and charming, but you suspect some menace coming down the pike. Of the two courses, the Lakes is certainly no pushover but it's nowhere near as difficult or pretty as the River, which has to be one of the most challenging and scenic layouts in the area.

The Lakes starts out fairly benignly with two relatively straight-forward par fours, though there is a pond to the right of the first fairway and a narrow carry over a marsh on the tee shot of the second hole. It’s the fourth, a lovely classic cape hole wrapping itself around the lake on the right, which begins a maddening 3-hole stretch. The tee shot is visually daunting: you’ve got the lake in front of you and woods behind a seemingly narrow sliver of fairway which you can barely see beyond the lake. The water, oh, that you can see, all the way up to the green perched above the end of the lake. The tendency is to hit farther right than necessary on the tee shot because you’re somewhat concerned that you’ll knock it into the trees if you get a good piece. Ok, easy, cowboy. First off, the carry over the lake is not that big a deal, probably 180 yards. Second, there’s plenty of fairway before you hit the treeline. Third, it’s a par 5, and a fairly short one at that. Still, the tee shot here is one of those shots that seem to be made for the SkyCaddie, an electronic GPS gizmo which is supposed to give you distances to various trouble spots on the golf course, but mostly gives you green depth and that’s about it. Cool concept, lousy implementation. Well, Greg, if it’s such an easy hole, why have you never parred it? Hey, I’ll blame it on the mooks that yell “Fore” from route 301, just left of the teeing area. High-larious.

The next two holes are just pain-in the-ass scorecard-tarnishing difficult . At the fifth hole you get to cross the swamp twice while on the next one you need to cross the marshland off the tee, go past the trees on the right and then face a ridiculous approach to a peninsular green which juts out into another lake. You’ll be fortunate indeed to play the same golf ball through this trio of holes – they are that challenging.

The back nine of the Lakes is easier – besides the back-and-forth par 3s over the same pond, the lakes and ponds are all lateral hazards and really aren’t in play except for the most egregious misfires. As a bonus, you get a quaint covered bridge next to the pair of water-bound par 3s. Unfortunately, the closing hole of the Lakes course is a lackluster mundane offering, though one of the few legitimate chances for a birdie. The nicest hole on the back nine is the par 5 fifteenth, kind of reminiscent of a Pete Dye hole, with the lake on the right and a series of bunkers lining the sloped bank left of the fairway. All that’s missing is the trademark Dye waste bunker adjacent to the water. Pretty hole. I wish I had a photo. Oh well, my remarkably descriptive prose will have to suffice.

Between rounds, we grab a quick bite at the clubhouse, where you can get one of your better golf course hot dogs (or even a half-smoke, a local sausage/hot dog with some kick to it) – grilled until the skin is basically charred, the way it should be.

The River Course starts off with an attractive hole towards the bay with nary a bunker. For some reason the serpentine lake on the right gets a ton of action though there is plenty of room off the tee. A huge wide-crowned maple blocks the left side and there is OB up beyond, near the fence of the grand old farmhouse behind the oak. (Did I say maple before? Well it’s either that or an elm or a… well, it’s big and it has leaves) Up by the green you can see the bay right over the mounds. It was here that my buddy, Scott, holed out from the fairway with a 9-iron and without a hint of irony, asked Irish Denny if it was the right club. Gee, you think?

Then you come to just about the prettiest hole on the property, River #2 – an island-type par 3 surrounded and fronted by a collection of sand bunkers, with beautiful views of the bay. So why is the River course so friggin’ hard? I direct your attention to #4 – a dogleg right with not one, but two carries over water; #7 – a tree-lined par 5 with marshes affecting each shot to a wide green with tree limbs hanging over the opening; the 10th – a 440-yd monster typically into wind with a swamp jutting into the fairway just about where your second shot will land; #11 – a lake-lined par 5 with a nice approach over water to the tiered green; the scenic 14th with its views of the bay on the left, a lake on your right and a marshy estuary beyond the green and #16 – a peninsula par 3 over water from an elevated tee.

Your best chance for birdie is the wide-open shortish par 5 fifth, another hole with tremendous views of the bay from its lovely raised green complex.

And then we have the 18th – a great (and I mean great) par 5 with serious carries over marshes on your first two shots and featuring a lovely wildly undulating green tucked in a corner of the trees, with bunkers all around it. I have come to this tee, mentally and physically worn-out after 35 holes on two difficult golf courses, facing a long drive over the marsh and I have not exactly come up large. In fact, after dumping a couple of weak drives into the swamp I essentially turn into Johnny Fontane, blubbering that I can’t do it, I don’t know what to do. My boy slaps me like Don Corleone and says: You can act like a man! What’s the matter with you?

I end up dropping on the other side of the hazard after a few more feeble attempts because the groups behind us are becoming restless. The Don cuts me some slack when he deposits his 2nd shot into the next swampy ditch. Marshial law has been declared.

When it opened, Queenstown justified their higher prices by doing a great job spacing out tee times, meaning less foursomes per hour, which was definitely worth the extra few bucks - less waiting for the group ahead of you to clear and you didn't have the group behind you on your ass all day. But some bean counter realized that they could boost sales by squeezing in an extra 4-some per hour so it was golf per usual, with the typical waiting and hurrying along. Too bad, because it was a noticeable improvement in pace of play. It reminded me when basic cable first came out. Remember that? It was all going to be paid for by subscriber fees with no commercials. Hmm. Some suit said, "Well, what’re they gonna do, go back to rabbit ears and 4 channels? Eff em", and just like that, commercials we got.

The course has lost some cachet – partly by the arrival of grander competition – partly by subtle neglect. It’s not what it once was but it’s still really first-rate and a great way to while away 9-10 hours. Just don't expect to shoot a low score here because Queenstown will wear you down, even if you're in top form. Kudos to Lindsay Ervin for a thoughtful, attractive and challenging design.

River: 8
Lakes: 7

Twin Shields

2009-02-11T08:19:00.036-05:00

Year Opened: 1969

Architects: Ray & Roy Shields

Web: www.twinshields.com

Phone: (410) 257-7800

It's the early 90s. Driving along the Beltway in post-rush hour traffic, I’m morose and maudlin (possibly a touch hung-over) after another attempt by my girl to serve me my walking papers, this after yet another alcohol-laced evening on my end, where I basically blew her off so I could get liquored up and watch a meaningless Monday Night Football game. I make another empty promise, something involving giving up the booze for good. To keep from being alone. There was some definite weeping and pleading, mixed-in with some beseeching and begging. Finally I pulled myself together and manned up with a box of Kleenex, some warmed-over quiche and a 90210 and Melrose Place mini-marathon. Somehow I’ve become the histrionic schoolgirl who gets all blubbery after finding out that her folks replaced her peanut butter & jelly with Nutella due to the latest peanut recall. Hey Nutella trumps peanut butter easy…it’s got that swanky nut…I forget what it is now, but it’s the swinging dick of nuts …right, got it now, the hazelnut. I suppose I should do up my hair in pigtails, just like when over-30 porn stars have to do those seduce-the-principal-during-detention scenes. I haven’t said a word as my boy maneuvers the Honda CRX along the Beltway, vying for a bit of lane space, veering across a couple lanes on our way to a round of golf. He’s nibbling at his vodka, a mix of Aerosmith, Prince and John Prine on the tape player. I’m knuckled down without a drink, annoyed at the music, the traffic, the whole damn scene. I just want to get to the golf course and get outta my effin’ head. And it’s still a l-o-o-n-g ways to go before we get to Twin Shields, out near Waldorf. I’m wondering if my saditude is from letting down my girl or not being able to drink in order to salvage said relationship. I mean, let's face it, she has moved on...that train has left the station, and I should accept this, but she does have that uncanny resemblance to seminal MTV VJ, Martha Quinn, dimples and all. See, the booze has pretty much always had my best interests in mind, and even though it will have me on my back on occasion, it will definitely have my back while I spend the next decade mourning and wondering where it all went to shit. And I have no idea who even played that Monday Night. But the girl still creeps occasionally into my dreams, either as a cautionary figure or a wraithlike wood nymph, lovely but unattainable. All things considered, getting drunk and watching a football game I don't remember (and probably couldn't care less about) seems like the right play, no?

I did not even consider that writing a blog is comparable to swinging a golf club, but it is, Blanche. Obviously I’d let the writing fester and stew over the holiday doldrums and after re-reading my last entry, oh it shows. Just like my golf game wobbles when I haven’t swung a golf club for a few months. That’s why I had to veto the golf trip next month to Kiawah and Hilton Head that my pals were planning for our respective 50th birthdays (with the economy in the tank we had to forego our original plan of the once-in-a-lifetime trip to Scotland). Golf is a hard enough game when you’re in mid-season form on your local muni; imagine standing on the first tee at Kiawah’s Ocean Course (allegedly the hardest course in the US, what with the forced carries, the lateral water hazards, Pete Dye’s typical pot-bunkered fiendish greens. and oh yeah, 25-30 mph winds off the ocean) after not having swung a club for four months. It would be like…oh I don’t know… providing background vocals for the latest family member’s Happy Birthday rendition, then trying to sing that Whitney Houston My Bodyguard song while that limey bastard l’enfant terrible, Simon Cowell, mocks you on national TV. Perhaps it's more akin to being a decent home cook and then competing on Iron Chef against some rock star uber chef with sea urchin as the mystery ingredient. Chef dude is making soufflés, grillades, risottos, etc. and I’m trying to figure out how to slice the sea urchin paper thin for a cold-cut sub.

Funny story. I was checking out my blogcounter (which basically let’s me see who’s checking out my blog - so far mostly family and friends with the occasional hit from Smolensk or Djibouti – and how they came across my site). One chap got to the blog by doing a Yahoo search for “dick hardeners” (a phrase I used in a recent blog). I have a feeling my blog is not exactly a panacea for erectile dysfunction, but hey, who am I to question how one gets aroused?

Finally, we turn into the Twin Shields drive, marked with an attractive emblem sign-gate deal. An oddity in the age of corporate golf management and star architect design firms, this course was designed by twin brothers Roy and Ray Shields, two self-made rakish hustler-types (at least that’s the image conveyed by their photos on the Twin Shields website) who worked at Hain’s Point in the the late 1930’s and 1940’s, and later moved to Annapolis to work at and then purchase the 9-hole Annapolis Roads Club. After WWII, they returned to Annapolis and brought the long-neglected course back to respectability. Then in the 50s they leased the 9-hole White Flint golf course and later in the decade they purchased the afore-reviewed Glenn Dale golf course and helped renovate it to its present layout and semi-stature. In 1968 they purchased 300-acres of tobacco farmland (no wonder cigarettes keep going up in price – the old supply and demand conundrum. Hold on there, cowboy, what conundrum? There’s no real demand except from me and a handful of other mostly disgruntled service industry workers so I guess the closing of one tobacco farm probably doesn’t have much to do with pricing or really much of anything at all, now that the only place you can legally smoke is…your car, unless you’re in Virginny or the Carolinas, where the non-smoker workers huddle outside in the cold during breaks. That is until this week, when Virginia caved.

Once you get to the Twin Shields parking lot you realize this ain’t Barack Obama country. Lots o pick-up trucks and Joe the Plumber types milling around the putting green with corduroy camo hunting vests, and fishing poles wedged into their golf bags instead of a 3-iron, which, based on my spotty success with that club, isn't that bad a play. But how often do you get an octagonal snack stand/bar? The pro shop is housed in a shack resembling an old Western general store, with a railing in front for hitching up your steed.

There are a lot of things I like about this low-brow family-run course, including the 8-sided snack stand perched above the attractive be-fountained lake with a pleasant arboreal island accessible by a wooden bridge, and the striking stone Twin Shields logo tucked in the hillside behind the lake.

View of the 9th fairway with lake, island and logo

Golf wise, you’ve got three par 3s over water, some blind tee shots, a virtually drivable par four (the uphill 90-degree left 16th hole) and some tough par 4s where the lake definitely plays a prominent penal role.

So one resolution I made this past New Years Day was that I would expand my social circle. This shouldn’t be too difficult since it’s not even a circle now, really more of a social dot. So expansion to like one of those small circles certain people use to dot their i’s seems doable. I doubt my boy and me will be sharing some tapas and an indie film with Clem and Luke after our round is done, so ok, here we go, alright... first, I’ll actually respond to the e-mails sent occasionally by my few remaining friends, let's say, within a week's time, no later. So let's see, my social circle is now like a deuce cubed. Else what? Join a writer’s group? A golf league? No, veto. Between work, lunch at the local Chinese buffet and 6 hours a day watching “Law & Order” re-runs or NBA doubleheaders, I don’t see how I can possibly manage a real friendship. But a virtual friendship, oh that I can handle. Rattle off some e-mails during commercial breaks and sit back and watch the emotional payoff kick-in.

I mean, my girl told me her bizarre cousin joined Facebook and has…oh...I don’t know…like 700 friends. But somehow she eats dinner alone every night. She doesn’t actually see any of these friends, apparently they just type at each other endlessly. And if you luck out and somehow a friend of a friend thrice removed sees Lindsay Lohan at a club during one of her jags, you get to call her entire network your friends. Wow, hey, now I’m pals with Shannon Doherty, crazy lopsided eye and all. Apparently, still plowing the Bill Simmons field, even though it’s been tilled and reaped to almost Dust Bowl conditions. If I really want to get down with it, I’ll add the Twitter feature so I can know exactly what you 700 cats are up to at any given moment. Hey Stavros, you’re getting your oil changed? ‘Scool, dude. Mimi’s getting a haircut, that little scamp. Me, oh nothing much, just checking out plumprumps.want.

So some random thoughts about the Inauguration, which was a pretty big deal here in the DC Metro area…loved seeing that arrogant condescending prick Cheney in his wheelchair, looking all Dr. Strangelove on his way to Argentina to see if any old-time Nazis are still kicking it old school in some underground bunker, though truth be told, our boy doesn't really need to fly to another continent for the companionship of some simpatico fascista.

The somber tone of Obama’s speech seemed about right, especially on how we need to all sacrifice and pitch in. First thing I noticed when the event ended was how much trash there was all over the Mall. I mean, people, c’mon now. OK, I’ll begin doing my part…starting…right... NOW. That evening I was working a hotel gig in Virginia for the Inauguration and while hanging out in a room next to the hotel ballroom, I couldn’t say for sure, but I could swear the DJ was playing the “Electric Slide”. Nah, no way, that was so 1989, and went back to working on my crossword. Finally I walked into the ballroom and no mistake, oh it be, the Electric Fucking Slide and there they were - a handful of people dancing the requisite line dance. How can this be happening? I mean, this has been going on for over 20 years. Why won’t it die? This dance groove is beyond a cat with nine lives or the regenerating hydra from Hercules, it’s bordering on being like something Undead, harder to kill than...uh...hmmm...I'm terrible at these analogies. Harder to kill than Rasputin is the obvious go-to move but it's not remotely entertaining. Harder to kill than, uh...god, my head hurts.

The sad truth is that the folks on the dance floor honestly seem to be enjoying themselves while me, I grimace and condescend from the sidelines. What am I so afraid of? That I might actually get pleasure from the comforting conforming shimmy and shake? Maybe in some strange final irony I would find true joy by embracing the conventional – I’d be able to, at long last, appreciate the subtle restrained nuances of a Will Ferrell performance, I could get a dog and stop strangers and discuss the charms of little Puddles straining at his leash while sharing a cathartic conversation about the weather, the price of gasoline or last night’s Dancing with the Stars; later maybe I’d actually join some co-workers for a good-time lunch at some local chain restaurant, be it TGI Fridays, Ruby Tuesdays, Bennigans or Applebees (really, is there any difference here?), hell, maybe you’ll even find me at the local big box church on some Sunday morning, praising and warbling and extolling the mysterious virtues of the Creator. I mean, let's be real, it’s not like I’m a real rebel – I drive a Corolla, smoke Marlboro Lights, drink Starbucks coffee and used to knock off Budweiser by the case – so clearly somehow I feel a need to fit in. But the Electric Slide? Does my reconnecting with my fellow humans have to involve the Electric Slide? Isn't it really just a gateway drug to the next dance fad – the Cha Cha Slide, the Lambada, the Macarena, god forbid, a Conga Line?

In the words of Dennis Miller, “Man, I’m at the edge of the precipice here, I think I’ll just pivot and jete back to Coolsville”.

No need to get to Twin Shields early – there’s no driving range and the putting green is pretty lame, just a big round flat circle with some holes. Though sure, you always have the octagonal bar.

The octagonal snack bar next to the putting green

Now that we’re here, I half-heartedly hit some putts, thinking the whole time I wouldn’t mind a cold beer at yonder octabar. I know, I know…I promised my girl. But I’m kinda annoyed and I’m kinda thirsty. Hey, she knew I drank when we first got together, when I’d bring home sacks of groceries and bottles of wine, cases of beer and we would laugh and dance, play some ping-pong, watch the Red Sox; though maybe, just maybe it bugged her that after she’d go off to bed, I’d stay up for hours, listening to my depressing break-up music (the Smiths, Janis, Leonard Cohen, the Cure, the Call) while lighting cigs off the one flickering candle. Occasionally a glass would break. Sometimes I would fall. Or knock over a bookshelf. I guess I see her point. This time, as I order the first one of the day, will be different. Praise god I’m cured.

Once you get going, the first hole, a straight-ahead downhiller, has nothing much going for it besides the flock of pines short and right of the green. On your way around the course, you’re not going to get much in the way of fairway bunkers though the greens are well-protected by a combination of bunkering and water hazards. The hardest hole (and the funkiest) is the 4th – a quirky dogleg left with a second shot over a watery gully to a skinny opening between the trees that reveal the green off in the distance. The tee shot is tough – the fairway seems to get tighter the farther you hit it, and even if you put it in a reasonable position, there are over-hanging tree limbs if you’re a wee bit off on your approach to the green, which also has a big drop-off if you miss to the right.

The next hole might be the prettiest, a shortish par 3 over water from an eye-catching elevated tee.

The par 3 fifth hole. Nice

Other than that, no great shakes on the front, though the 8th is a decent uphill par 4 shorty that actually has a fairway bunker or two to navigate. The ninth is a serious golf hole, gently curving left around the lake, with yet another pond on the right if you try to bail too much on your approach (or lay-up). More pines overlook the vast putting surface. Tough par. Easy triple.

Number 10 is a fine way to start the back side, with the lake and its accompanying island and wooden access bridge on the left and more water lurking further along on the right. The green sits up high, slightly to the left, flanked by pine trees and an old barn.

The backside features the almost-drivable uphill sixteenth but any misses left will leave you a tough pitch amongst trees to a shallow green. The smart play is a lay-up to the right side of the fairway, leaving a short shot in.

The closing hole requires an accurate right to left drive over a small creek with a lake in play if you don’t work your ball left. Try to cut the corner and trees will knock your ball into the creek.

A nice once-in-a-while break from the upscale experience. It’s a pleasant little track with some quirky holes. For what it is, it’s quite decent, though not particularly noteworthy, plus it’s a pretty fair hike out here.

I give it a 5. I'd probably ponder this rating a bit longer but I'm running late for my Electric Slide dance class. I'll betcha I'll make all kinds of new lifelong friends there; maybe this spring we'll even take in a ballgame and do The Wave...

Good times.

Glenn Dale

2009-01-27T11:01:00.017-05:00

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.

Enterprise

2008-11-19T21:24:00.014-05:00

Year Opened: 1976

Architect: Robert L. Elder*

Web: http://pgparks.com/places/sportsfac/golf.html#Enterprise

Phone: 301-249-2040

Phew. Man. I was glancing at the last entry, the one purportedly on Patuxent Greens, and even I’m confused and I wrote it. Chelloveck? Couldn’t I have just channeled “Swingers” and been all “you’re sooo money, baby” or “who’s the big winner?”or “it is so on”, though, truth be told, I don’t think that would have conveyed the mood I was striving for. Think something along the lines of “The Lost Weekend”, except longer and without the eerie violin bits.

Today’s segment will focus on Enterprise Golf Club, the so-called “Augusta of the North”, which has about as much in common with the real Augusta as I do with George Clooney. A pretty apt analogy, this, since while Enterprise is a golf course and I am ostensibly a man, both Augusta and Clooney take those basic concepts and kick it up a notch, well more than a notch really, but I’m kinda clueless as to what’s like bigger than a notch – kick it up a slash? kick it up a gash? Right? No good. But I bet George would know. Well, anyhoo, Enterprise stakes its claim on the numerous perennials and annuals (these would be like your technical terms for your various floral types) scattered about the property. Well, numerous might be an exaggeration and scattered seems a bit careless as a word choice – what I remember is this: some petunia-ish numbers planted around the back of the 18th green. There might be a flowering dogwood around somewhere. Oh yeah. You know what, there are the formal gardens of the imposing Newton White Mansion behind the 10th tee box, named after the first commanding officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise prior to WWII. I guess he wasn’t up to running the ship while Japs were flying around, he was more of your peacetime dry-dock type of commander. Hey, I’m with him – who needs a bunch of kamikazes nose-diving into the Ledo deck during afternoon calisthenics when you can hang in San Diego, washing down mojitos and canoodling with surfer-babes.

Enterprise has a very secluded and pastoral feeling considering its proximity to the Beltway and Rte. 50, with a horse farm next to the parking lot and not a house in sight - well, except for the mansion. A coiled metal sculpture depicting a golfer greets you by the large putting green. Most golf course artwork runs to a particular type (hilarious posters like the Three Stooges in golf get-ups, or two cartoon fish yukking it up at the pond bottom among a bunch of golf balls and broken clubs, or a cartoon of a guy nailing his monitor with a golf club with the thought-provoking slogan: Born to Golf, Forced to Work; or motivational posters portraying concepts like Frustration, Patience, Determination, and Risk with suitable photographs and appropriately pithy captions)…compared to these, this piece is like Rodin’s “The Thinker”.

Beyond the putting green you’re welcomed by the dark, low-slung clubhouse which sits on the highest part of the property and is nicely landscaped, this being the Augusta of the North and all. And since when is Prince George’s County in Maryland considered “the North”? Have you seen the PG cops in action? God help you if you happen to be pulled over for DWB (Driving while Black). Allegedly there’s a driving range located somewhere remotely off the parking lot but I can’t tell you one way or another since I’ve never been.

A strollable course, the first hole is down the path from the clubhouse a ways, past the mansion on your left to the starter’s gazebo. The hole itself isn’t much, a short right-veering four-par with a semi-blind tee shot and a huge green flanked by pines. You can get lucky cutting the corner off the tee as there’s but a few sparse trees on the right. Me, I got lucky. And then again when I grounded a 4-iron onto the green and bombed in a putt to start off one round at 1-under. That’s happened perhaps one other time. But I didn’t stay in red figures for long, about 3 minutes, in fact, this after losing a ball left into the trees with my tee-shot on the next hole.

There are really no great highlights on the front nine but no real dogs either. When you get to the 5th tee, you’ll see a sign not to hit until you hear a bell that the group in front of you is supposed to gong once they’re greenward-bound. So you wait. And wait. Knowing what I know about human nature, I’m always a bit suspicious that the bell-ringing might be over-looked. So wait we will….

So I suppose I would be remiss without confessing that I feel somewhat to blame for the recent economic “downturn”, the one where we dabbled in socialism by having the government take over certain “under-performing” industries and basically “punished” the corporate malfeants by essentially putting them in “time-out”. (OK. Cool. I just effin stomped my previous record of using quotation marks in a sentence, though even I have to throw the challenge flag on “time-out”) And I’m to blame how? After a year or so of trading in putters virtually every weekend, I have basically come to terms, however reluctantly, that my stubby center-shafted Never Compromise, while definitely short on looks, is perfectly suited for my contrarian semi-sidesaddle open-stanced set-up. Sure, my contribution to the overall GNP might seem a paltry sum, but I definitely kept the UPS trucks moving about. What can Brown do for me? Bring me a goddam putter that looks good and can make an occasional putt. How would that be?

And now that the US banking and credit sectors are in freefall, I’ve got to rethink some of the Nigerian e-mail offers I’ve been deleting without compunction, you know, the ones that tell me that one of my ancestors has left me several million large; all I need to do is send a few grand to facilitate transfer of said funds. I suppose I could block these scammers, but now that the johnson-lengtheners and dick-hardeners have seemed to stop selling me their ointments and elixirs and salves (perhaps they have a window into my sexual ambiva…oh whatever), it would be pretty depressing opening my e-mail account and finding like 2 messages, one from GoogleAds and the other …something about online drugs, so at least the Nigerians fill up my inbox. The pertinent question is - what is it, this place Nigeria? Back in the day, I remember it was a country in the continent of Africa, but now that the Palintology revisionists have accorded Africa country status, what does that make Nigeria? A township? A province? Another thing. Why do they write so much? Don’t they realize I have the attention span of a drunk teenager texting and uploading a photo of her tits while driving 70 mph in rush-hour, trying to uncork a bottle of Shiraz and downloading a song from XM onto the iPod, this while rummaging through the Louis Vuitton bag for a lighter to fire up the one-hitter and calling LoveLine to ask Dr. Drew whether the curling iron jammed in her vulva might pose a health risk? I don’t need all the details of the demise of the late Ambassador Mboku Dioya, just give me the pertinent details: how much should I send and when can I expect my $5.3 million? I’m not no professional venture capitalist, but this Nigerian investment gambit seems to be a slam dunk, a win-win, a low-hanging fruit, a no-brainer…

Oh yeah, about those corporate crook CEOs. You know what? They can have their golden parachute. Really, no problemo. But here’s some caviar, I mean the caveat. We’ll give you a parachute, you can paint it gold I don’t give an ess, up onto the Gulfstream V you go and all that stuff you hijacked along the way comes with. Like the absurdly preposterous house you live in – not the whole thing, mind you, just the unnecessary crap. Like the Great Room. And the granite-topped kitchen island with the 8-burner Viking stove, the indoor grill and the built-in sink. Out that goes. You can keep the microwave because that you actually use. The 3-story entrance foyer. You're fuckin' kidding me, right? The six Jacuzzi-equipped marble-tiled bathrooms with plasma TVs, I think not. There’s just three of you and when’s the last time Junior took in a soak? The manicures, the spa treatments, the $350-a-head dinner tabs, the massages, and the $400 haircuts? Christ, you’re a friggin’ banker, not Louis Quatorze. The Terrain Rovers? You won’t be needing those anymore. The house in the Hamptons, oh, that goes, no question. The elephant in the room you’re always babbling about and the 800-lb gorilla – just for ballast, sure, why not.

What about your assorted lackeys and Blackberry-toting toadies and yes-men? Well, somebody’s gonna have to clean up the mess after we strap the loaded parachute onto your major-player plate-is-full take-no-prisoners envelope-pushing master-of-the-universe paradigm-shifting big-swinging-dick, set the altitude for 30,000 feet (so you can get a global view of your predicament), aim for the bull’s-eye on the box you’re always thinking outside of, and a quick shove out the door and off you go. Now let’s see you hit the ground running…

…Alright, we’re ready to hit, the bell has finally rung.

The strength of the course is holes 10-12. Keeping with the Augusta theme, this would be your Amen Corner. The tenth, a winding downhill then uphill par 5 past a large sycamore on the right of the fairway, is a fun hole, with a blind tiered green and a number of small church-pew bunkers up the left side awaiting errant second shots. #11 is a testy, tight tee shot over water that you have to shape right to left to get a good look at the narrow, bunkered green. Then you face a really tight tee shot out of a chute of trees with a creek in front of the fairway. The hole is short so anything over the creek and not in the woods on either side is fine, though left is a better angle on this short dogleg. My typical play is somewhere near the fence along the left side. The most difficult hole to par is the sixteenth, a long dogleg right par 4 with a creek and pond below the elevated tee, culminating with a large green on an upslope. It’s a wide-open tee shot but the tendency is to get a tad greedy and try and sneak it past the few large trees on the corner of the dogleg.

The round culminates with the pretty 18th, a short but sneaky-hard par 4. The tee box is set in a stand of pines and it’s difficult to pick a target line with all the trees around the teeing area and beyond the fairway. The approach shot is difficult considering its modest length as the green is very narrow, and any off-line shots either direction will end-up in a bunker, a mulchy flower-bed or trees - so if you’re gonna miss be short or right, since the land slopes down towards the green and you might get a lucky kick out from the trees. Going left is just plain no good.

The rest of the course is perfectly decent: a good mix of short par 3s, some blind tee shots and changing elevations, the aforementioned flowers and shrubbery and decent conditioning for the price.

A basic 5.5.

* Countless minutes of Internet research have not revealed whether Enterprise designer Robert L. Elder is one and the same as Robert Lee Elder, the first black golfer to compete in the Masters, held at Augusta (of the Deep South). Some facts suggest it may indeed be the same person: Lee Elder, though born in Texas, married a woman from Washington, D.C., however, he apparently resides in (or has been to) Pompano Beach (which was the Washington Senators spring training site before they moved to Texas, the state that happens to be where Mr. Lee Elder was born, see what I’m saying, it all ties in); Robert L. Elder’s golf designing credits are fairly limited and relatively local – a course in southern Pennsylvania is the furthest from DC, so it’s possible Lee Elder dabbled in golf course design while still playing a modest schedule on the Senior Tour. However, somewhere in Lee Elder’s bio you would think it would simply mention that he designed a few golf courses. It mentions parents dying while young, dropping out of high school, caddying, playing a match with boxer Joe Louis, hustling, changing his clothes in the parking lot because the club didn’t allow blacks into the clubhouse, winning his first tournament to gain entry into Masters (which generated a lot of hate mail, gee, I’m shocked), and becoming the first black golfer to make the U.S. Ryder Cup team. But nothing about designing golf courses.

Tying this piece neatly together, Elder won the Nigerian Open in 1971, the year the Washington Senators moved to the Lone Star State and became the Texas Rangers, confusing an 11-yr old boy that eventually became me. In 1989, current el Presidente George W. Bush bought the Rangers from a Bush family friend and oilman, Eddie Chiles, the year dad became President. Continued feeding at the Bush family friend trough will lead to the Texas governorship and eventually to a catastrophic mind-numbing historically ineffectual 2-term Presidency, the repercusions of which will be felt for a very long time, or at least until I get my check from Nigeria.

In 2008, Barack Obama became the first black elected President, in no small part because of Mr. Lee Elder, the Jackie Robinson of golf and possibly the designer of Enterprise Golf Course.

Patuxent Greens

2008-11-05T16:55:00.011-05:00

Year Opened: 1970

Architect: Russell Roberts/Buddy Loving

Web: www.patuxentgolf.com

Phone: (301) 776-5533

O you should viddy me now, O my brothers, shamefully shivering and shaking and quaking after a fretful bezdoomny and not so refreshing blackout, a real frightful strakh of restless and dinful zvook-filled spatchka, delirium-stained and soiled bedcoverings coiled around my ailing self. This dire circumstance of unwellness, however, isn’t so unexpected, O my brothers, now is it, given that my drunken pyahnitsa has reached a fortnight’s duration. The tick-tocker is like hammering rabbity in the face of hawk-like doom, the talons ready to stamp my passport at death’s frontier, but even my half-hearted attempts at snuffing it seem real pathetic-like, I mean as snuffing-it goes - isn’t the point of doing-oneself-in proper to accept a brief moment of discomfort and then eternal peace like with no…pain; not a monthlong of terrible twitching and nasty and not insignificant pains in the gulliver and guttiwots. This was nothing like that horrorshow picture “Leaving Las Vegas”, which I viddied at the sinny, where this real despondent like chelloveck snuffs it with the old whiskey but not before having some of the old in-out in–out with a zoloto-hearted devotchka of the night, a real like sympathetic sort, not whatsoever resembling the cold-hearted cunny leaving gloopy messages on my phone recording apparatus, some talk of dinner dalliance in the offing.

However, today would be like rather differently lived, the start of a new way, this is what the malenky goloss in my head bespoketh. What then did this portend, this talk of a new way?

But the bolshy more powerful voice was gentle encouraging and prodding my poorly feeling self to pour another swig of stale sourish beer into the dry and slimy-yahzicked opening of my gaping rot. Unfortunately, the desperate diminished pilsner provisions (to wit: two mere cans remained, well now it was but one..) in the barren tundra of the ice box meant, O brothers, that your ailing taleteller must avail himself of some more libation, this to quell the harsh punishments and like grievous retribution of great God and All His Holy Angels and Saints, who were arranging for a real all-mighty comeuppance against your faithful droog and woedraggled writer.

And it was clear to me what needed to be done. Clear as an unmuddied lake, as an azure sky of deepest summer. And I dropped to my knees, O my brothers, not in humble supplication but to scrabble about for various dribni coins strewn about the brudniy dirty kilim. I must admit that thoughts of passing off cent-pieces as ten-centers crossed my distressed malnourished mind, but I also recall yesterday’s misadventure, a real weepy and like tragic part of the story, when your faithful droog and long-suffering narrator was tolchicked real spiteful-like by the liquor shop bruise boys after me having a go at this coin-switch ruse for a second day in a row. But the sumny and honest truth, O my brothers and sisters, was that only meagerly and miserly cent-pennies were of avail in my wanton and wretched flat, and I’m not much for shop-krasting or purse-snatching and possessed little of value that I could place as collateral at the pawn shop, so I busied myself with rolling the last of the cent-pieces into the dime wrappers and trudged down to my automobile. And O my faithful friends, I had like a moment of dulcet heaven-sent inspiration as I fumbled with the klooch on the car lock, (an inspiration, no error, like an artist's encouraging Muse or when some sumna and grievesome missus hears or sees the ghostly yet beneficent apparition of Mary the Virgin, Jesus' mum) for tis then that I remembered the rear storage compartment of the car and most especially the golf bag lying therein. So as varied and scowling and reproachful-looking chellovecks scraped and brushed the brittle snow off their cars on the way to their drudgesome robotas, I knelt grovelling real pitiful-like beside my car and started to toss it for the odd shiny silvery speck. In my desperate and hasty and hurried state (for the withdrawal forces were storming the beach and erelong they’d be laying siege to my already long-suffering and overtaxed tick-tock ticker), I floundered shivering sprawled in the damp snow, prompting one kindly sort to ask if I was alright. And alright I was, O my droogs, right as rain, as it were, as I triumphantly pocketed the coins I’d recovered from my vehicle, scrambling up the stairs, mokry and frost-gnawed, paying little mind to the znak posted on my front door informing me that the State policia will be tossing me and my unhockable belongings out on the street erelong, making me a bezdomny homeless car-dwelling chelloveck.

I was able to get a brief day’s supply of booze and cancers, enough to get me through until afterlunch, and I had to be like real coy and watchful while driving in such a state as was mine, wanting as I did to avoid the stripey hole with its leering criminals and drooling prestoopniks ready to have their way with a luscious young malchick such as myself. So I drank quickly and with purpose, knowing (hoping) I was nearing the end of my time. But snuff it I did not, for I would not be here to tell what I have told.

This all took place a long time ago, almost a decade has passed, in fact, since I’d holed up in Laurel, MD to give the drinking life another shot. When I finally got myself taken to the ER, I asked the doc after he gave me the stethoscopal once-over, “what didst thou, on thy mind, have?” so he scribbled something on his clipboard and told me to quit drinking, like forever. So like clockwork (not orange), I began the lengthy road back to resurgence and recovery, a road that has had a few off-track mishaps but I’ve somehow been able to steer back (a bit wobbly, sure) to this new way.

It would be nice to mislead you and tell you that I chose Laurel because of its diversity (mostly it’s just plain old poor) or even that I’d taken an interest in following the ponies at historic Laurel Racetrack and would lose like a 100 lbs and fulfill my dreams of someday being a jockey and winning the Freakness or Angus Steaks or whatever, but the sad pathetic truth was that I’d fallen under the spell of a woman - a driven, type-A Julia Roberts look-alike with a profound streak of meanness and Me-ness. And so part of my recovery process has entailed avoiding all Julia Roberts movies, which really wasn't at all difficult, come to think of it.

What’s odd is that up until that time I’d had pretty pleasant memories of Laurel – some from computer classes I’d taken at one of those vocational IT institutes, but mostly at Patuxent Greens, which me and my boy discovered while we were still residing in Takoma Park. This golf course had a few things to recommend it back then: it was distinctly unlike anything else in our regular rotation: a flat, walkable piece of land with a bunch of ponds and lagoons. Also, it was close enough to Takoma Park to make it an easy jaunt, and not too burdensome on the wallet.

The club seems to be part of a small development but the housing is non-intrusive to the golfing experience. The white siding clubhouse is reminiscent of a yacht club, at least that’s what I, in my mind, imagine an inland yacht club might look like, knowing little as I do about boating in general and less so about the specific yacht club segment of the boating industry. So let's just stay with yacht club – perhaps its location overlooking the lagoon surrounding the 18th green helps foster this impression.

No need to arrive early since there’s no practice range but the bar/restaurant is a perfectly agreeable room with the requisite amenities, much as you’d expect at your typical yacht club, except without the brass-buttoned blue blazer with epaulets docksider set.

The first hole is a fairly scruffy S-shaped par 5, with nothing particularly to recommend it other than the challenging final approach to a small mounded green protected by a pair of bunkers fronting the putting surface. Patuxent Greens plays like a basic parkland layout until the various lagoons come into play – the 3rd hole is the first of many such holes: a short par 4 with water all the way up the right side and trees encroaching from the left. The sixth hole features a 75-yard deep waste bunker with a smattering of reeds jutting out, followed by probably the most attractive hole on the property – a lily-pond fronting the 150-yard par 3 with large tree limbs hanging over left of the green and a pair of bunkers in front of the single most dramatically sloping green. Things keep going strong on the dogleg right par 5 8th with a large tree getting in the way on your 2nd shot and then the front side closes nicely with the right-turning 9th, where you need to fit your tee shot in between the lagoons.

The key shots on the backside: the all-carry over agua par 3 eleventh, the lagoon which cuts across 50 yards short of the green on the otherwise non-descript par 5 14th and the club selection on the longish par 3 16th, which brings up some water issues long and right. And then we come to the 17th, by far the hardest hole on the course and also one of the least attractive. The tee shot is daunting – over a pond with marshy OB left and then a pond right of the green, which is tucked into a mucky lowland a bit left of the fairway. On a course which doesn’t get high marks for conditioning (the flat land and abundance of water give the whole place a swampy demeanor) the area in front of the 17th green is better suited for rice farming or mosquito breeding than it is for chipping.

The round ends with a fun shorty par 4, featuring a green with a few wispy birchsome trees jutting out into the lagoon (the green does the jutting, the trees - not so much) , so you’d better be on point with your approach or you’ll be hitting again.

Patuxent Greens was my first foray into the Myrtle Beach or Florida style of golf – very flat landscape with water as the primary obstacle and it’s a look I like when done well (Caledonia in North Myrtle or obviously Doral in Miami come to mind, but let’s be real, these are top-100 in-the-U.S.-type courses while Patuxent Greens is, well, not). That being said, it is still a pleasant place to play, even if the conditions are a little hinky. I have to think it’s about a 5.5.

1-3 Pretty Darn Poor. Bad layout, poor conditioning, few redeeming factors, crowded
4-5 Mediocre. Some redeeming qualities, a few decent holes
6-7 Decent A fun, challenging course that doesn’t awe or wow you
8-9 First-Rate Among the best in the region
10 Perfect The best golf experience imaginable

Obvious acknowledgments must be made to Anthony Burgess, who wrote "A Clockwork Orange" in 1963 and from whom I borrowed freely in spirit and context.

Pohick Bay

2008-09-29T22:09:00.021-04:00

Year Opened: 1982

Architect: George Cobb

Web: www.nvrpa.org/parks/pohickbaygolf/?pg=golfcourse.html

Phone: (703) 339-8585

I first ventured here with the Dawgs, my boy’s old golfing crew, back in my formative golf years. They reminisced and joked around while I sat quietly and pensively over on a picnic bench, trying to level out after getting my drink on the night before. One dude, who had a country club background growing up, had a sweet smooth swing, clearly polished by substantial time spent with his club pro. What he didn’t have is a complete set of clubs. I don’t remember the details, if he’d come in out of town or what; what I do remember is that as a fellow southpaw he used my clubs – and lemme tell you, they were a little off-put being hit in the sweet spot so often. So mostly I remember kinda being this dude’s caddie.

Pohick Bay’s terrain is heavily forested (it’s in a regional park along the Potomac River near Lorton) and fairly hilly. Play moves along in a reasonable manner once you get going since there are no fairway bunkers at all and no water hazards until late on the back nine.

George Cobb, a fairly prolific course designer in the Southeast US, has a pretty cool accomplishment on his epitaph – he teamed with Clifford Roberts (co-founder of Augusta National with Bobby Jones) to build the charming par-3 course in 1959, site of the well-known par 3 tourney the Wednesday before the Masters. And how do I know it’s charming? Well, actually, truth be told, because I played it. Now you wouldn’t think , what little you know of me, that I’d be the sort of fellow who hobnobs with corporate honchos or the United States power elite (though I do know someone who recently saw Jane Curtin on the streets of NY), and back in the early 80s I attached a lapel microphone to Loni Anderson’s dress strap (that was a bit of a show) and I was once in the urinal adjacent to Dean Martin, who was slurring “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometimes”…oh yeah, and Dennis Eckersley once gave me the snub at an airport car rental joint. I thought as a fellow recovering alcoholic we’d find more of a connection, maybe share our thoughts on the 2nd Step. What a dick. I should’ve done the Kirk Gibson one-handed limp-off home-run imitation off Eckersley in the car rental lobby - that would’ve showed him. So I had to be honest with myself, I didn’t move in the social circles of Augusta-types. I smoked a lot so maybe I could work that admittedly distant connection with the Southern plantation Big Tobacco tycoons but I couldn’t quite visualize the way from buying cigarettes at 7-11 to garnering a seat at the Philip Morris boardroom. So let’s see, I’d never broken 85 so I probably wasn’t going to play my way into Augusta. And I didn’t(don't) know anyone. Augusta doesn’t allow women so I couldn’t even use the Ukrainian gigolo kept-man angle as an unrealistic possibility (I can only imagine the nightmarish dames that would go to Augusta if they could – think Anne Coulter or the Julia Roberts character in “Charlie Wilson’s War” (to quote Anthony Lane, film critic from The New Yorker: “the pro-Pakistani Texan hostess (how many of those do you know?)”), or the Donald in drag, sporting a sundress). Plus I’m not exactly gigolo material – I haven’t done more than a couple dozen sit-ups in a decade’s time (I'm more of a Chairmaster work-out devotee), I’m bald and sort of scowly-jowly, not into navy blue blazers at all, I don’t make a great whiskey sour and I most certainly can’t quote Scripture. So it looked like I’d have to go the servile routine – put all that humiliating hotel experience to use. Alright then. I could caddy, no? Wrong again. The Southern crackers that run Augusta use only black caddies – “Boy, hand me the 5-iron and hold dis here ceegar” “Yessum, boss”. Else what could I do? Bingo. I would master the art of the pimento- cheese sandwich and that would be my ticket into Augusta. Bam! And you know what? They didn’t take long to master. I loaded up my pimento cheese mix, a jar of mayo, a few loaves of white bread and I started the long trek to Augusta, Georgia. Outside the club I set-up shop, putting to work all my marketing acumen: I opened up the rear of the hatchback, put on some Charlie Daniels CDs with the Confederate flag fluttering haughtily off the radio antenna, and made up a cardboard sign, “Klan Special: Hoods Bleached & Ironed with Purchase of 3 Sandwiches”. Guess what? I didn’t get even a nibble. Oh, the New Tolerant South. Former Masters champion Fuzzy Zoeller, in his trademark aviator shades, did slow down as he passed, merrily whistling "Dixie".

OK, ok, so I never played the par-3 course. But I read somewhere that it’s quite charming.

So not surprisingly, Pohick features a strong set of par 3s, especially the long uphill fifth and the lakeside downhill 15th. While the tee shots are fairly straightforward, Pohick gets some marks for its greens, which are decidedly more interesting than the run-of-mill fare you find at other munis, with lots of contouring, swales and distinct tiers. About half of the holes here are doglegs so even though the tee shots don’t have much going on, you’ll need to at least reach the corner of the dogleg so you’ll have a clear look at the well-bunkered putting surfaces.

Even though they are out of character with the rest of the course, the 13th through 15th, which wrap around and over a central lake, offer the most thrills (and possibilities for some big scores), especially the par 5 thirteenth, where the lake needs to be carried on your second shot to have a short approach to the tricky uphill angled green. The 14th is a semi-blind lay-up short of the water, followed by a short-iron approach over the lake to a green tucked into the hillside.

As I made my way around with the country club dude, I found out that the 3-iron (which I had heretofore used pretty much exclusively as a punch out club from under tree limbs) could indeed be hit properly with a real golf swing. In fact all of my clubs could be hit with a real golf swing. And here I thought it was the clubs. I guess it was the old golf adage, it’s not the arrows, it’s the Indian. I mean Native American. No, hell with it, I'm sticking with Indian. What, no good? Ok, fine, how about it's not the chopsticks, it's the Chinaman? Also no good? Damn. Well, I'm kinda stuck here, I've gotta tell you. Anyhoo, as far as the 3-iron goes, it and its long-iron kinfolk were on the verge of extinction - thankfully the boys in the lab were hunkered down and drawing up the plans for the prototype hybrid-iron, 21st century panacea of the weekend golfer.

As far as Pohick Bay goes, it’s a perfectly adequate municipal track, but its location for us Maryland golfers (you had to deal with the absurd traffic from the 8-year Mixing Bowl project in Springfield) makes it a less than desirable destination. In fact, I have returned here exactly once – it was definitely a casualty of the proliferation of course-building in the mid-to-late 90s.

I’ll give it a solid 5.5.

Penderbrook

2008-09-25T08:28:00.013-04:00

Year Opened: 1980

Architect: Ed Ault

Web: www.penderbrookgolf.com

Phone: (703) -385-3700

Penderbrook, off Rte. 50 in Fair Oaks, Virginia, was my first experience with the golf/housing development concept and my first foray into the Commonwealth. Houses and condos galore line the drive in, with the clubhouse located below a respectable stand of trees. The houses lining the fairway are by far the most prominent design feature – certainly that doesn’t bode well, now does it? So what in the world can I, staunch defender of all that embodies conformity and homogeneity in our society, find wrong with the bland banal community before me? Hmmm. Staunch defender indeed. It’s bad enough I have to live in a vinyl-sided suburban enclave; when I go out for some recreation, I certainly don’t need to be reminded of this unfortunate predicament.

I can sort of understand the golf course community model in a retirement setting in, let’s say, Florida or Scottsdale, where the residents should probably avoid driving as much as possible. Hey, I’m seeing this with my own father, who used to be a great driver but now seems to drive about half the suggested speed limit. Maybe he’s recalling his European heritage and is using Kilometers Per Hour to gauge his speed – where 65 kph would be 40mph, maybe that’s what’s going on – all I know is this, if he’s driving us to see a movie in Bethesda, we have to leave about an hour and 15 minutes ahead of time from Gaithersburg to avoid sitting in the front row. But Penderbrook is not a retirement destination – though given the fiasco on Wall St. the past week, it just may become one, though I’ll take my chances that this blog will actually lead to some unforeseen financial windfall and I’ll be able to properly retire in the Ciutat Vella (Old City) of Barcelona, although I might have to re-think that since I can’t imagine my insomnia improving with age (why else would I be posting blogs at 5:30 in the morning after hitting the hay around 3am?) and those god-forsaken church bells with their incessant eternal gonging were troublesome a year ago, imagine 20 years from now, when the chickens come home to roost from my decades of daily many-multiple venti French roast coffees, though on the plus side my hearing has deteriorated (that damn rock n roll) to where I need to watch DVDs with the English sub-title feature activated so maybe the gonging will seem like a slight ping on the triangle, which naturally can’t help but evoke fond memories of Martin Short as Ed Grimley …. well ok, then, hello Penderbrook, here we come.

The distinguishing feature here? Obviously, the ubiquitous condos and houses. The first time I played here I sliced a 3-wood into a child’s playpen in the backyard of the condos lining the left side of the 4th hole. Luckily the child was not in the playpen. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a great lie, right up against the Mr. Potato-Head. The layout is quite claustrophobic (the houses abutting the fairways certainly contribute to this sensation), with a number of ponds and lakes which are undeniably in play. The conditions are lackluster and it’s crowded, even when the prices shot up when the Palmer group took over. Did I mention that it’s overpriced? (Well, it most certainly was back when I came out here some years back, though I’ve noticed that the prices are now back in line with what you would expect from this track) And let’s not forget that horrible feeling as you descend the clubhouse steps and see 6 groups lined up at the first tee. Still, there are some decent golf holes here, some of which are damn challenging.

There’s no rush to get here before your tee-time since there’s no driving range – just a practice net. Might as well go to one of those indoor places and hit into a screen showing a blurry photo of Pebble Beach. There is, however, a small putting green next to a pretty pond below the clubhouse, the emphasis on small.

The first hole hardly distinguishes itself with one of the uglier tee shots around to a scruffy, muddy landing area and an uphill approach to a green with a large sloppy bunker in front. As an opening experience, it’s pretty dismal. Too long to wait, too much activity around the tee, a sloppy tee-box leading to a shoddy hole. #2 isn’t a bad short par 4 and the next one is a decent pond-fronted par 3 if you don’t mind a road and guard-rail as the scenic backdrop. The eighth hole is a perfectly pleasant short downhill par 4 with water in play left of the fairway off the tee and then again on an all-carry approach to a shallowish green. Shouldn’t be an issue but I’ve dumped my share of balls in the water.

The same lake needs to be carried on the closing hole of the front nine and then the fun begins, the queue at #10, one of the hardest par 3s in the area. It’s an all-carry shot over a lake with no bail-out (a heroic shot, if you define heroic by diving onto a hand grenade, because it’s gonna blow-up your scorecard in a similar fashion) and there’s a snack shop which helps pass the time for the unavoidable wait as you watch the preceding groups flail away in vain. But I’ve gotta tell you, you’d better relish your hot dog and chips because you’re in for a long break. Truth be told, they’d be better off putting in a multi-course French restaurant, and depending on the skill level of the golfers, you might want to leave some room for the cheese plate, factor in the obligatory sneery laissez-faire flair of the French waiters, the ones that come to your table about as often as Halley’s Comet, and then the tee box should be all clear by the time the petit-fours arrive. The 12th, with its 175 yard approach over water to a green bound by a railway-tie retaining wall was also on the short list of hardest par 4s but I hear #12 has been redone (they moved the green back to this side of the water – I guess not many weekend golfers have a high, soft 175 yard shot off a tight, patchy fairway) but I have no idea what the new configuration plays like and doubt I ever will, capiche?)

It wouldn’t do at all not to mention that I witnessed that golf rarity - a double eagle. And I do mean rare, like drawing a royal flush (remember that, Scott?) or Bill O’Reilly not starting a sentence by “what say you…Wichita?” or OJ finding Nicole’s killer or Britney Spears wearing panties while hitting the clubs, or me not leaving a rambling pathetically desperate voice mail message, a la “Swingers”…I refer you to the end of the second paragraph above and that is but a half-haiku to the Homerian epic you can expect should I ever leave you a phone message…

So, anyways, about that double eagle, well, it occurred on the 17th hole, a short rolling par 5. The guy I was playing with spent a good 5-10 minutes looking around the green for his ball since we didn’t see his second shot land beyond the knoll in front of us. I mean, we knew he hit it pretty good, we just didn’t know how good. Finally I decided to look at the hole (why not?) and there it was. Wow. Dude was trembling, big-time. Of course I had to have a drink with him and listen to his double-eagle story for the next half-hour or so. Hey pal, remember, I was there.

The back side alternates between hard and easy holes, though there are some testy shots over water and marsh. I always liked the short par five 14th, with a boo-hoo willow jutting alongside a marsh that meanders all the way up to the left of the green. It also might be the one hole where the condos are not really a visual factor. Well, actually, that’s not possible here, but if you squint and look real hard from a particular angle, you might think you were in…Patuxent Greens in Laurel, Md.

After sitting and waiting for the better part of 6 hours, the last few holes become irrelevant. Upon seeing a few groups lined up on the 18th tee box, I have quickly veered to the parking lot, dumped the clubs in the trunk and gotten the hell outta there.

Weird. I have played here many times over the years. When I really sucked, it was an OK place to lose some balls, occasionally pull off a shot over one of the many ponds, and it wasn’t too pricey. Then the Palmer Management Group took over running the place in the early 2000s and it became absurdly overpriced, like double what it should have been. Perhaps they were trying to discourage excessive play by raising prices. Whatever. They sure discouraged me, and I won’t be back, even if the prices have since come down. And so I discourage you, unless you really enjoy eating a bunch of hot dogs at the turn.

5 is the number I’m thinking of between 4 and 6.

Falls Road

2008-09-22T05:40:00.011-04:00

Year Opened: 1961

Architect: Ed Ault

Web: www.montgomerycountygolf.com/FR_home.html

Phone: (301) 299-5156

Considering its setting in the midst of some of the wealthiest folks in the country, there used to be an almost in-your-face lowbrow feel to this course: the corrugated roof “pro shop”, the muddy path heading to the equipment shed, the vacant snack bar attached to the pro shop. We would come here quite a bit in the early 90s, mostly because…I guess we were masochists – certainly not because the golf course was hard (it most definitely wasn’t) but due to the aggravatingly slow pace of play. Our spirits (never exactly in a state of grace) would plummet when we’d find ourselves behind a gaggle of visor-wearing soccer moms (perhaps they were moms of soccer moms or wanna-be soccer moms or soccer momdom had passed them by – all I know is they drove mini-vans, thought Reagan was a genial populist bloke and spent more time comparing foyers and granite counter-tops than actually playing golf). Sometimes we’d really get lucky and the bratty kids would join mom in the fun. Yikes. It reminded me of an Ionesco play – repetitive, absurd and too fucking long. They’d hit off the tee and then all four would slowly saunter to the first ball, gather round, maybe balance their checkbook or participate in a ten-minute panel discussion on that week's episode of "Desperate Housewives", watch their partner hit a 20 yard grounder, spend a minute or two consoling her and then off the four would go to the next ball, though a mulligan per hole was certainly an almost mandatory part of the drill.

This used to be a mediocre offering. A big hilly field with some tees, some trees and some flags. Too many hacks, too slow, very little to look forward to, though admittedly there were a few holes on the backside that warranted a look-see.

Now then, fast forward 15 years. I’d heard that there had been significant upgrades in the course and despite my better judgment, I decided to check it out. And you know what, improvements had been made. The clubhouse is sunny, airy and pleasant and they even offer micro-brewed beer – great, where was that gimmick back when me and my boy would be detoxing while waiting to get off?

The entire front side has been re-routed and decorative wheat grasses have been planted, and while the changes have definitely enhanced the playability and aesthetics, pace of play remains a problem. When I returned, there was a dearth of soccer moms (I guess the Container Store was running a sale) but you still had the hack factor and the grasses lining the first and second holes were prime searching-for-lost-balls real estate. Oh, and they will search, like clueless kids at a scavenger hunt. The original Ed Ault routing started off where the current driving range is located and at least had a respectable green site at the top of the hill, followed by a featureless par 5 and then back to back drive-and-pitch 285-yard par 4s on the northern edge of the property. Ault’s son’s firm, Ault & Clark, did a respectable job of altering the routing – blowing up the two weak par 4 shorties and replacing them with an OK 3-par (#3) and the best hole on the front side – the serpentine par 5 fourth, which utilizes the rolling topography adeptly and features a large oak tree which poses some problems for the big boppers who decide to have a go at the green in two. The rest of us can pop it over a gully to the fairway right of the tree, leaving a pretty testy approach to the recessed green well below the fairway. Mostly what Ed’s boy has done is bring some fairway bunkering into the mix, a concept the old man just wasn’t comfortable with.

The hardest hole is unquestionably the twelfth, a narrow long par 4 with a substantially raised green sloping from a mound on the right. As you stand on the tee, on your left you see some seriously hooked-up property, with swimming pools, tennis courts, gazebos, like that. 13 through the retooled 18th are the strength of the course, but again, by this time you’ve been out there 5 hours, tired of yet again looking at the visored crew reloading on the tee after a weak slice grounder into the woods. There’s a lake on the short par 5 sixteenth which requires a minimal carry of the tee with some new fairway bunkers planted into the hillside left but beyond that there isn’t much to say, though the completely new finishing hole utilizes fairway cross- bunkering in a strategic thoughtful manner, something unseen back in Ed Ault’s day – well, it was seen, just not by him or his obvious mentoring influence, Robert Trent Jones.

It used to be a 2.5 but after the renovations it’s about like Needwood – a 4.5.

Poolesville

2008-09-19T22:01:00.011-04:00

Year Opened: 1959

Architect: Edmund B. Ault

Phone: (301) 428-8143

Web: www.montgomerycountygolf.com/PV_home.html

Me and my boy had ourselves an off day so he suggested a mini-road trip out to Poolesville. I could see by his packing a cooler with some cold ones and the remnants of last night’s Absolut (c’mon, there’s like a jigger or two left – let’s just kill that and stop off for another fifth) that he wasn’t kidding around about the distance out there. This course is off in the western lands of Montgomery County, about 45 minutes from the Beltway, closer to Leesburg, Virginia than it is to Rockville. The drive down River Road is pleasant enough -- past vaunted Congressional Country Club and the much-panned TPC at Avenel (to the point that they’re basically blowing it up and rebuilding it) and the mansions of Potomac and then the area becomes distinctly rural as you approach Poolesville. When I come out here I get the sense of a club, not exactly deal-making corporate-raider captain-of-industry Macallan single-malt scotch and Cohiba Cubans but pick-up truck huntin’ ‘n’ fishin’ git ‘er done BBQ and beer. It always amazes me that not even an hour outside the Nation’s Capital you feel like you could be in Appalachia: old washing machines, rusted car-casses and heaps of old tires strewn about on the dusty front lawn, all kinds of dilapidated sheds and ragamuffin kids and three-legged hound dawgs scrabbling about on the property. It’s eerie. To me, anyway. But Poolesville itself has a decent salt-of-the-earth feel, kind of a “Cheers” golf course, with lots of regulars, like a neighborhood bar. My boy, back in the bad old days, used to come here because of the full-service bar; in fact it wasn’t a problem waiting for the first tee because you could get yourself liquored-up but quick at the friendly, though obviously rednecky clubhouse bar.

What practice? Gimme an Absolut and a Bud and a dog and it’s all good. Of course we haven’t been back since we got the booze monkey of our backs; it might just be a good idea to stay away.

What I remember from this course, and I must have played it about ten times or so back in the early 90’s, is that it played long. Of course when you ground it off the tee, miniature golf seems long. The land is flat and there are some trees lining the fairways, but sparsely. There’s lots of action playing from neighboring fairways. Back in the days of the Concorde, about 3 pm or so, you could check out (and hear) this space-age plane landing across the river at Dulles Airport. Other than that, it’s a pretty laid-back place.

After spending an hour in the clubhouse bar getting loose and limber, as it were, the idea of teeing off in front of a line of carts can be humbling. Heck, just standing without weaving and wobbling was a trick. The first hole is a dogleg right over a small creek and a stand of trees on the right. You can go over the trees without a problem with a big left to right ball. This is a wide-open hole on a wide-open course.

Hardest hole: the second hole is a real 600-yard par 5, straight –ahead, no-nonsense, though the green has a bit of bunkering. After that it’s all a bit blurry. There is a decent-length par 3 over water, hole #8, that used to create all kinds of difficulties for me. Then hole 11 was a nice dogleg right par 5 with a pond on the right (which is definitely in play, especially if you try to cut the corner on the dogleg), a bucolic stand of trees beyond the pond and then a creek crossing in front of a nice uphill green. Hole 16 is a rolling par 4 with a cornfield left and the pond right, which needs to be avoided from tee to green. It’s a pretty hole. It helps that the pond has a natural look and is tree-lined and filled with geese sauntering in the water. I’m perfectly fine with geese in the water (no really, I am), it’s when they take their business out on the golf course that we’ve got some problems. I thought we had a deal with the geese – we don’t go in the water and they don’t shit on the greens, though I sort of violated that unspoken pact when I flung some recalcitrant club into the lake, definitely the first time I’d worked that particular cliché of golf frustration.

I guess I must’ve been really out of sorts when I wrote the Northwest Park review because in retrospect it’s hard to imagine I didn’t mention the name of the architect, Ed Ault, the John Grisham of local golf course architects (sure you’ll turn the page but it won’t exactly nourish your soul), whose bland, monotonous handiwork is visible throughout the DC area. Anyways, he designed this one, too. You can always tell you’re playing an Ed Ault course when you step on the tee and find exactly nothing exhilarating about the experience. His greens are typically large without a hint of undulation, protected by a bunker left and a bunker right. Fortunately, his son, Brian Ault, teamed with Tom Clark, has created some rather enjoyable thought-provoking courses over the last dozen years or so.

Like I’ve said, I haven’t been back here in years, and with the recent golf course development in Maryland, I doubt I will return. It’s too far out of the way with too little to intrigue. And if I’m going to fall off the wagon, I’d rather it be somewhere other than Poolesville. Still, it has its place. If nothing else, the folks that live out there seem to enjoy it quite a bit and that’s fine by me. Another 4.

Northwest Park

2008-09-18T10:42:00.022-04:00

Year Opened: 1964

Architect: Ed Ault

Web: www.montgomerycountygolf.com/NO_home.html

Phone: (301) 598-6100

A pleasant meandering drive in Northeast Montgomery County, hence the name, oh wait, it’s called Northwest Park (apparently there’s a local watershed, the Northwest Branch, which empties into the Anacostia, if you’re into that sort of thing, which I, by the way, am not, gee what a shock); well then, ok, the drive into the course is essentially the highlight of the afternoon (by a lot), with pretty pine trees lining the tarmac. The clubhouse is purely function over form and not much of that.

There is a flat putting green and a lit driving range and a decent instructor where I took my first lesson years ago, though naturally my contrarian nature thwarted that clearly quite proper swing-maturation process and wayward self-tinkering became my chosen method of development. Well, strictly speaking, that’s not altogether the case. First there was the Ben Hogan book – the one with the plate of glass illustrating the concept of the swing plane and the whole wrist supinating at impact deal. That didn’t take. Go figure. Then the countless Golf Digest lesson tips with completely contradictory theories – first swing shallow, then attack steeply, hinge the wrists early, keep wrists stiff, stand tall to the ball – by the time I was through I had like 17 swing thoughts to organize, all while trying to get my cigarette lit in the wafting breeze. Here’s a tip – don’t start playing golf in your 30s. So anyways, me and my boy and Irish Denny and another chap jetted off to Arizona for golf school. The setting in Sedona, red rock vista-ed land of mystics and crystalline healers and aroma-therapists, was suitably awe-inspiring and transcendentally serene. What wasn’t so peaceful was our delayed flight to Phoenix and the inevitable hold-up at the car rental, necessitating Irish Denny driving 95 mph to make our tee-time at the Sedona Country Club, where we’re lacing up our golf cleats in the pro shop as we hear the pro shop attendant’s pronouncement: “Gentlemen, you’re on the tee”, words we’ll hear pretty much any time we go on a golf trip. Sure, wake-up before dawn, pack (that’s a given, what, pack the day before, are you effin’ kiddin’ me?), drive to the airport, 6 hour flight, drive 110 miles in 70 minutes and off to the first tee we go. Nice relaxing way to start your round.

The next morning we met our instructors, Ralph and Tom. Ralph was the epitome of the southwest golfer: sunswept hair set off just-so by a jaunty visor, a natty taupe/mauve sweatervest/polo combo that tapered down to his pleated twill trousers and a copper bracelet encircling his tanned wrists. Yeah so, OK, I had a bit of a man-crush on Ralph. During that morning’s initial tutorial on the golf grip and posture, Ralph was demonstrating the proper location of the hands during set-up and for some reason (perhaps he was hip to my uncomfortable feelings of sexual disorientation) he asked: “Greg, where are my hands?” Well, Ralph, I don’t want to talk out of school, but it looks like you’re about a centimeter or two from fondling your crank. After that, Ralph pretty much focused on this one single-digit handicapper while our gang got learned by Tom, the jean-shorts wearing, untucked shirt, porn-mustached, acid-trippy goofy dude that Irish Denny repeatedly pummeled in match play. I gotta tell you, it broke my heart. I even adopted Ralph’s visor-wearing until I remembered that I’m bald. So we didn’t learn much, though years later, “Greg, where are my hands?” will still pretty much crack us up.

Once gain, an offering from the folks at the Montgomery County Revenue Authority. I don’t understand why, but this course gets more play than any other in the area. The staff is surly and the course is kind of a yawn. Sure it’s longish but I don’t get it. And don’t even get me going on the starter, who must’ve been a former high school vice principal or a Bobby Knight disciple (think Soup Nazi from “Seinfeld”). There’s a whole procedure here about checking in, which color copy of the receipt to give him, when you can go to the putting green, lining up three groups deep at the first tee, having your club pulled, where you can take a practice swing before teeing off, and well, me and my boy knocking off a pitcher or two before the round while waiting to be called wasn’t quite standard operating procedure, especially with me fumbling through my pockets to find my receipt, tees and ball markers tumbling to the ground. So we’d tee off “slightly buzzed” (as if) with this dick glaring and barking out orders in the middle of our backswing. Good times.

I suppose I should mention the golf course at some point in this treatise, though I really ain’t feeling it, in case you haven’t noticed. You definitely get a sense of what’s ahead here on the first tee. A longish par 4, not exactly defined or anything, grip it (but be quick about it, damn it), try and ignore Joan Crawford bitching over by the starter shack and away you go. You will be spending lots of time waiting in between shots, not only because of the unwarranted popularity of the place but also because it’s popular with really bad, as in not good, golfers.

The second is a challenging long downhill par 4, but it’s not exactly attractive. The area in front of the green is in a lowland and always seems to be either torn up or just slopped-up and muddy. #13 and #14 are decent enough, but the whole course lacks delineation between fairways and rough and the conditioning is pretty beat. But I can overlook all that (I can, really) but I can’t ignore the utter lack of variety. Every hole basically plays the same. Forget about using every club in your bag – hit the driver, pull out a wood, chip-on (if necessary) and repeat this ritual 18 times while waiting 10-15 minutes between shots. I guess #18 is kind of a fun hole, a dogleg right uphill to a well bunkered green but there are just too few shots of any redeeming value and too long a time between those shots. There is also an executive 9 which is OK, but not by much.

I guess I’ve had some unpleasant experiences here, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps it’s because I was such a hack when I played here but whatever, I don’t like this course. I genuinely can’t think of one hole that I can even somewhat admire. To me, it’s Hain’s Pt. with an extra 1000 yards, larger greens and no monuments or Potomac River. I can’t explain its popularity but then again, I’m confounded by how Keannu Reeves still holds onto his SAG card (he’s not acting, hell, he’s not even behaving) and I’m perpetually perplexed (and aghast) how the stupidiotic Bushes became America’s political dynasty. I will never, ever come back to this golf course. Because I might be moving to Canada if the Republicans win again and I’ll have to rant about…oh I don’t know…curling.

In the words of Richard Dawson, survey says: 3.

Needwood

2008-09-14T18:33:00.010-04:00

Year opened: 1969

Architect: Lindsay Ervin

Web: www.montgomerycountygolf.com/NW_home.html

Phone: (301) 948-1075

Another no-frills offering from the Montgomery County Revenue Authority, I don’t mind this one too much. The parking lot is always crowded so there is always that dread of realization that you’re in for a wait, which you will be, no question. The pro shop sits on edge of a hill and when you come around back to check in, you at least get the feeling of a golf course. Some nice decorative grasses, a few pine trees and a hedge separate the pro shop from the putting green. But mostly you have a bunch of golfers milling around impatiently, like the sex-hungry cub scouts in Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex”. That’s a particularly disquieting analogy…I think I might want to tweak my meds a bit or at the very least show a little more get-up and go during my online porn gambits, now that my girl has cut me off from the occasional sexual dalliance.

Note the name of the architect, Lindsay Ervin, and remember it well since he has designed some of the Metro DC area’s premier courses and will be mentioned on this site in rather hushed and reverential tones in the future. Clearly this was his first project and Needwood certainly lacks the boldness and scope of his later work, but the holes flow nicely along and nothing seems forced except for the odd 17^th, a short strange par 4 that has since been converted to a three-par, no doubt to protect the golfers on the 16^th green from sprayed tee shots.

I like the starter with his chalkboard - writing, circling, erasing with a damp towel, crossing names off – and always with a pensive look on his face, as if he’s re-defining the formula for absolute zero or something. What I don’t like is the honking horde of geese on the course – it’s a goddam goose feces-fest out here. You might want to bring a shit shovel to clear your line on any pond-side putting greens, it’s that bad. Either that or you’re gonna have a pretty funked-up putter.

A decent starting hole gets things going - a par 4 dogleg left, with a lake left, some willow trees beyond the lake and an uphill second to a large bunkered green. The lake is not in play and there is plenty of room to place your drive as long as you don’t go left into the trees.

Needwood has a wide open front nine without a whole lot going on, followed by a much tighter, more challenging back side with some ponds, a few dramatic cliff-side tee shots, a hillside bulls-eye target for the unseen green of #16, and a sturdy finishing hole. Most of the greens are pretty nicely defined - either flanked by trees or sand traps. Some of the greens are elevated; others are set considerably below the fairway, giving you a variety of looks. The tee shots are pretty mundane, except for the 2^nd, the 13^th and 14^th holes, where you are hitting from well above the fairway. There are hardly any fairway bunkers and the conditioning is so-so. Obviously, with all the cars in the lot, the course is a bit crowded, but it moves along at a reasonable clip, reasonable compared to, let’s say…standing in line for tags and title at the MVA, or waiting to activate your new iPhone at the Apple store.

And lest I be remiss, I’ve got to mention that Needwood is where I posted my first ever birdie – a curving downhill 15-footer on the par 3 7^th, which I’m sure I attacked with some sort of fairway wood – but truth be known, anything over 155 and I’ll be pulling some sort of club requiring a head cover…what a pussy I am. Hey, you are what you eat. I guess in that case I must be an Italian cold-cut sub.

The 17^th, formerly a par 4 but now a throw-away par 3, is weak, though again, the green is nicely defined with bunkers in front and a cluster of pine trees behind. The signature hole, and the hardest, is the 18^th, with a nice willow guarding the middle-right side of the fairway about 180 yards out, leaving you a downhill lie on your second across a goose-filled lake. This is a real golf hole and will definitely bring double-bogey in play if you are in a tight match. Some might consider the pond-carry par three 15^th to be the signature hole and it’s OK, though the ever-present geese are certainly irksome. A few years back, a stolen car was found submerged in this pond, so you have that scrap of local hooliganism to ponder as you pick your club. The best chance for birdie is either of the back-to-back short par 5s on the front side or hole #8, a short par 4 (less than 310 yards) with a deep bunker fronting the green angled to the right. On the back side you can find some opportunity with the short 14^th – which has a super-elevated tee, followed by a benign uphill approach.

If the regulation course is super-packed, you can always try the pretty nice executive 9, which has a moundy, fescued links feel on the par 4s and a few par 3’s over ponds. Not a bad place to work on the irons at all.

I give this one about 4.5. There is enough variety to keep you thinking, but it’s not particularly challenging and it can take awhile to play once you even get your name on the board. I certainly like it more than Falls Road, Northwest, Laytonsville and Poolesville, but that's not a very high bar there.

Redgate

2008-09-11T16:08:00.011-04:00

Year Opened: 1974

Architect: Thurman Donovan

Web: www.redgategolf.com

Phone: (240)314-8730

After chopping and hacking about on the easier courses around DC, my boy decided to take me to Redgate for my first proper test of golf. Even the entrance to the course was pretty special, like going from lowdown White Castle to mid-scale Hamburger Hamlet (my editor, should I ever meet up with such a mythical being, might want to..what is it, blue pencil this or something?) – the wooden semi-rustic (what else) red gate as you enter the facility, the embedded rock-mosaic Redgate sign in the hillside as the driveway curves around the par 3 sixth hole and the tee box of #7 to the narrow shady parking lot. I recall the conditions – the closely mown tee boxes and greens, the distinct fairways and the sculpted sand bunkers – this was an obvious upgrade from what I’d been working with so far. I recall being genuinely jazzed, back when stepping onto a golf course for the first time really got me keyed up. Even the scorecard was cool at the time, with nifty diagrams and tips on playing the hole. Man, was I a greenhorn, not like now when I’m a jaded all-knowing…older sort of..uh...been around the block-head. But before I go completely over-the-top with the gushing, this is Rockville’s municipal course and Rockville, as in REM’s 1984 single “(Don’t go back to) Rockville”, is the poor, dull, gap-toothed, stupid cousin of posh Bethesda, which in turn is the bland, boring, untalented but hard-working and well-mannered step-child of every edgy, cool urban city in the States.

I enjoy the putting and chipping green by the 10th tee, which has a good amount of undulation and is large enough to attempt a variety of putts and chips without being a nuisance to others on the green. There’s a practice bunker by the irons-only mat driving range but I have never ventured over there, preferring to work on my short game rather than scuffing around on the worn-out plastic mats.

There’s one annoying ritual here at Redgate – the starter’s requirement that you show a green-repair tool, sure, like I’m peppering the greens with majestic approach shots. Once this little bit of housekeeping is taken care of, it’s off to the first tee and the downhill tee shot. Back before I really had any semblance of a golf swing I had a pretty untamed lefty slice and the parking lot left of the first hole was right in my wheelhouse and though the hole has a high net fence protecting the parking lot, it wasn’t enough to contain some of my errant drives and then we’d close our eyes and cringe, waiting for the crash into the glass or metal/plastic of the cars in the lot. It’s no way to start your round, let me tell you, but at least now I know where to park with some assurance that my car won’t get pummeled by golf balls, though truth be told, I don’t think my 1993 Corolla would look much worse for the experience.

As you continue your round, you will face a variety of challenges – elevation changes, ponds, creeks, forced carries over ravines and some blind shots to unseen targets. (I guess that’s what a blind shot is, now, isn’t it).

Unfortunately, there’s always a jam-up on the second hole because it’s a 3-par, a nice one, a 160-yarder downhill to a kidney-shaped green with a creek in front and bunkers back and a pretty severe forward sloping green. The 4th used to really intrigue me, a short par 5 with ponds awaiting the downhill tee shot long and left. The second shot is over the pond but you can’t drift too far right or trees will block your semi-blind approach to a lovely downhill green nestled in a hillside and fronted by a creek. Purists complain that one shouldn’t have to lay-up on a par 5 (the pond on the tee shot is merely 220 yards away) but for me it’s a non-issue.

#8 and #9 are testy long pain-in the-ass tree-lined par 4’s that I couldn’t reach in regulation in the best of circumstances. The best chance for a birdie are holes 5 and 6. The sixth is a short par 3 with a deep bunker front right which needs to be carried, and usually is. On the back side, the standouts are 13, 16 and 18. The 13th is a nice par 4, with OB left and a stand of trees down in the lowland which block your approach to the large downhill green. Anything long and you have a difficult bunker shot as the green slopes severely from back to front. Lots of 3-putts here if you find yourself above the hole. 16 is a cool par 5 where you tee off from a chute of trees and need to hit it long and straight to give yourself a reasonable second over two ponds way down the hill. Then it’s a short iron straight up hill to a blind green with bunkers left and a steep fall-off right. Big hitters can carry the ravine and leave themselves a short chip to the hole. The closing hole is a long par 4, featuring a short-carry pond off the tee, with bunkers right of the fairway and then a small pond front left of the green, along with a series of small bunkers to the right of the putting surface. I usually have to lay up because I don’t catch my drive but this is a strong closing hole. Best chances for birdie on the back side are 11, a very short downhill par 4 with lots of room left and 14, a short par 5 off a cliff, where the drive is the key. Put it in the fairway even 210 yards out and you are a cinch to knock it on the green, which like most of the greens here, has some pretty severe undulation.

This course has deeply personal cachet for me. Maybe deeply personal is a bit of hyperbole – any golf course having this much spiritual effect on me would seem to make me appear a bit shallow (or even slightly unhinged) - but years ago I spent 28 days in the county drug and alcohol treatment center across the street (a place that has as much in common with the Betty Ford Center as a Civil War medic does with the Mayo Clinic) and one of the rare rays of light in a bleak and depressing time was being able to look out the cafeteria window while queuing up for some fried foodsticks with a side of canned greens and check out the 14th hole. It kept me going, no question. Some would say love of family and friends and belief in a Higher Power gave them hope; for me it was gazing out at a short, easy, kind of bullshit par 5.

Because I played here so often in my early days, this track gets a lot of props from me. It’s in nice condition, it’s a fun lay-out and a good test and it’s a great value. So I give it a 7. Maybe that’s a half point too high because of length (it’s only 6200 from the tips), and there are a few throwaway holes, notably 15, a short par 3 flanked by an ugly cell phone tower. Perhaps years from now cell phone towers will have a quaint nostalgic appeal, the way we now feel about windmills and silos and Civil War cannons, but at present a soaring spiny metallic monstrosity is all it is.

Rock Creek

2008-08-28T15:40:00.014-04:00

Year opened: 1923

Architect: William S. Flynn

Web: www.golfdc.com/gc/rc/golfcourse.htm

Phone: (202) 863-4444

The scene: A Takoma Park bungalow circa 1992. An energetic, frenetic former Minnesota Timberwolves apprentice mascot now turned political pundit dances to Prince turned way too loud. I stumble out of my room and grumble, as I am wont to do. My boy lumbers out of his lair and prods his lithesome partner to turn up the music. Sure, he likes them lithe but he’s getting a little envious, watching me, prickly and petulant on the couch, sipping a beer and smoking a cigarette. The lithesome one doesn’t know he drinks and smokes. That’s a tough trick because basically he is always smoking and drinking. My jangly nerves are being tested, no question, and when landlord Jay starts hammering up on the roof I give my boy the air golf swing. We have to be at work by five and it would be nice to sneak in a quick nine. At this juncture, I was beginning to hope a real timber wolf would leap through the window and snatch the euphoric dancer away in its fearsome jaw. Or a feral cat. Or a serial abducting religious cult. Anything. Please, I beg of you, stop with the dancing. Between the bassy, syncopated thumping of Prince and the incessant hammering from above, I was willing to do anything to get away, hell, I’d go back in time and sit on my haunches in a muddy WWI trench with mortars exploding around me, that had to be more peaceful than this. But mostly what I wanted to do was get Dancing Wolf out of the crib, hustle into our ride before Jay asked about the back rent and play nine holes.

And invariably this meant a quick jaunt over to Rock Creek Golf Course, a mere ten minutes away. Situated in Rock Creek Park along 16th street, the golf course was carved out of a hilly forest by the eminent architect William S. Flynn (The Homestead Cascades Course, Shinnecock Hills, The Country Club at Brookline). Pretty cool deal playing a noted architect’s creation for less than a double sawbuck. It’s like those nights at the Stoned Pony in Asbury Park when Springsteen would show up to play a set long after he’d become a mega-star. Well, actually, it’s not really like that at all. I guess it’s more like seeing the Stones and they don’t play anything from their vintage Greatest Rock n Roll Band era – no Brown Sugar, no Gimme Shelter, no Honky-Tonk Woman - just a bunch of 3rd rate twaddle from the 80s and 90s. Nah, that's not quite it, either - you’d still have to pay full freight ... but if I think of anymore analogies my head's gonna explode.

Since the 1st hole is a downhill, virtually drivable par 4, a big, annoying logjam of impatient golfers awaits on the first tee. The front nine is the gentler, more wide-open nine and the highlights are the uphill front-bunkered par 3 third, the downhill par 4 knob-fronted green of the sixth and the attractive tree-bordered dogleg right ninth. It’s slow going here, even after you clear the holdup at the first tee. Since we had to get to work, such as it was, we wouldn’t get to the back nine too often, which is probably a good thing for my early golf psyche since the back nine is a tight ball-swallowing hilly tree-lined affair. After the dull uninspired initiation at Hain’s Point, this was probably too severe a contrast and too harsh for the beginner golfer. Or at least too much for me. There’s a couple of back-to-back holes (15 & 16), that even after becoming a better than average golfer, I wouldn’t want any part of - so visually intimidating with little slivers of fairway between the large stands of trees. It’s a pretty helpless feeling standing on the tee and knowing you have, like, an 8% chance of not losing the ball in the woods.

There are some interesting, thought-provoking shots on the back nine: the blind approach to the semi-punchbowl 10th green, avoiding the overhanging tree limb on the par 3 11th and the downhill dogleg tee shot of #14. The par 3 over-the-gully tee shot of the 17th is not without some thrills. Otherwise just keep the ball in play – lots of bunting drivers rather than full bore grip it and rip it.

So you start with the most basic of golf course designs – a flat field with some flags (Hain’s Pt) and now here you add elevation, green contouring, and trees. I’m slowly beginning to develop a notion of my golf course aesthetic. So while this is a definite step-up from Hain's Pt, it's too short, too busy and too scruffy to give it much more than a 3.5, possibly a 4, but that's about the limit.

But me and my boy need to get to work so we can make enough for tomorrow’s round and the nightly commute to Tic Toc Liquors . And if I hear Prince in the morning, I'll be the one joining a religious cult, preferably one that practices the vow of silence...

Rating Scale

I’ve always been more comfortable with numbers rather than stars, so this will be simply be a number on the 1-10 scale.

1-3 Pretty Darn Poor. Bad layout, poor conditioning, few redeeming factors, crowded

4-5 Mediocre. Some redeeming qualities, a few decent holes

6-7 Decent A fun, challenging course without a lot of awe or wow factor

8-9 First-Rate Among the best in the region

10 Perfect The best golf experience imaginable

Hain’s Point

2008-08-25T22:30:00.021-04:00

Year opened: early 1900’s

Architect: Walter Travis

Web: www.golfdc.com/gc/ep/gc.htm

Phone: (202) 863-4444

This is where I played my first round of golf (besides the two rounds where I went along aimlessly with a few college buddies at Rutgers). Set on the peninsula jutting out behind the Jefferson Memorial, it was a pleasant drive through Washington - past the Washington Monument obelisk, yep, paddle boats in the Tidal Basin, watch out for the catatonic tourists photographing the impermanence the grace the splendor of the cherry trees, the fish and crab hawkers across the inlet on Maine Avenue, the occasional john looking for a quickie noon blow-job, weirdies fishing in the Anacostia (like what’re you gonna catch, an old can of tuna fish?), and busy National Airport across the Potomac River. Down at the end of the peninsula there was this pretty awesome sculpture of a 100’ Greco-style giant embedded in the earth, struggling to break free from the Hain’s Point soil. (Unbeknownst to me, the sculpture was relocated downriver recently, after a quarter-century run in East Potomac Park – now how am I gonna impress my dates après dinner, wait a second, I stopped dating when I quit drinking… hey, shouldn’t I be working on my Match.com profile instead of writing this blogbit and was the sculpture really that critical, was I bringing so little of myself, sure it was always a go-to move, like Bryan Ferry on the audio track or the blue-neon poster in my hallway once the deal was virtually sealed…but still...)

What’s pretty cool about this place is that it’s cheap, it’s easy and did I mention… it’s cheap and easy? Also, the dress code was…what’s the opposite of stringent? Accomodating? There were many times we’d swap our frayed-collared polos for tank-tops once we broke free from the starter shack. Else what? You have to really work at losing a golf ball and if the big boy course is packed, there are a couple of other 9-hole options available.

Strolling up to the rec center pro shop you pass the old black dudes passing the time betting on putts while nipping at 40s, and then you take your chances getting your name on the starter’s chalkboard and since it’s cheap and easy, there can be an annoying wait time and we don’t do lines, certainly not since college when Irish Denny blew through his late father’s inheritance on a coke spree. The last time me and my boy waited in line for anything was in the early 70s, staying overnight at the mall Ticketron for George Harrison tickets…right…the less said about that the better. I avoided getting a car for years because of the lines at Motor Vehicles. When we cruised Manhattan in the gogo 80s, you would find us invariably in some bucket of blood old man alcoholic dive rather than being herded into a stanchioned line at some happening club du jour. Hell, I’d take my chances on the odds-on heart attack climbing the Washington Monument’s thousand+ stairs rather than wait in line for the elevator to the top. But sometimes one must wait - so depending on the previous night’s revelry (well truth be told, it didn’t really matter one way or the other), we’d grab a couple of cold ones, park ourselves on the steps and check out the old timers wagering on putts while occasionally stumbling over to the green to smooth our stroke or poke a peek at the starter’s chalkboard.

The course was apparently laid out by the venerable Walter Travis, one of golf’s seminal figures - as writer, amateur champion and course designer – but whatever remains of his influence seems to have been squandered by the uninspired imagination of his wastrel grandson, Walter Travesty. Purportedly links style, I guess, but the mounds of dirt strewn around the course hardly invoke Ballybunion and the course conditions varied from swampy to patchy since drainage was non-existent on the flat field. The greens are smallish so skull chipping became an acquired skill out of the surrounding areas of dirt, clay and clumpy rough. The tee boxes are just a few markers staked in the ground. And with nary a water hazard, this was the ideal place to perfect my chop, chop, chop, up-down bogey style of golf.

Since the time I frequented this course in the early 90s, a double-decker driving range has been erected, filled at lunch-time with young shirt and tie clad bureaucrats hitting balls towards the Potomac; the hookers have moved on to another stroll and the Maine Avenue crab fisherman are selling crabs from the Gulf of Mexico since the Chesapeake Bay’s crabs have been essentially depleted. The mounds of dirt have been used to build-up a few distinct tee boxes. The starter still has his chalkboard and I haven’t had the desire to flaunt the dress code since I quit drinking.

It gets a single point for its location and another point for having views of the Washington Monument. Otherwise, this is strictly for folks just starting out. So it barely earns its rating of 2.

Rating Scale

I’ve always been more comfortable with numbers rather than stars, so this will be simply be a number on the 1-10 scale.

1-3 Pretty Darn Poor. Bad layout, poor conditioning, few redeeming factors, crowded

4-5 Mediocre. Some redeeming qualities, a few decent holes

6-7 Decent A fun, challenging course without a lot of awe or wow factor

8-9 First-Rate Among the best in the region

10 Perfect The best golf experience imaginable

In the beginning...

2008-07-20T19:13:00.016-04:00

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...

2008-07-05T13:48:00.017-04:00

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.