Bad Golfer

 Still cold in Vermont. A bunch of snow still in my backyard. Mounds of it in the corners of our parking area. Golf is still a ways away.  Today, though, for about two hours, it was glorious. after a very chilly and damp morning it gave way to sunny skies and temperatures, miraculously, in the low 70s. (I should add that now, as I type this, it's cold and rainy again, and there was thunder and lightning a couple hours ago. Vermont. If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes.)  Earlier, though, my buddy Phil and I, once it penetrated our brains that it had suddenly turned lovely out, pulled out the chairs from the basement and sat outside, letting the isolation, cold and claustrophobia of winter moult off us, savoring the gentle air. Before long, as it will on a gentle sunny day, my mind turned to golf, and I decided the weather demanded that I grab a golf club and try to hit a ball into the woods behind by back yard.  As a note of backstory, and to fill readers...

 My old buddy Calvin, who was my college roommate 100 years ago, is one of my regular golf partners. He comes to Brattleboro once a month on business and we usually try to squeeze in a round if the weather's pleasant. He's a pretty good-golfer, or at least a slightly less bad-golfer than myself, and we always have a good time.  Last month he had no business to tend to in Brattleboro but made the 90-minute drive to town anyway just to play golf with me, so yesterday I returned the favor and got in my sporty little Mazda Miata (a gift from my friend Adam, ha ha) and drove to Concord, NH,  just to play golf with Calvin. We met at his nice little house, on which he works industriously doing small jobs like replacing the roof and siding, things I couldn't do in a hundred years, then drove over to Beaver Meadow Golf Club to play eighteen.  It was quite a day. The weather was warm but not too unpleasantly so, so we stocked up on fluids and made sure we had a couple of spare...

 I was surprised as anyone when I had what was, for me, a not-too-awful, pretty decent round of golf yesterday. Mind you, for a good-golfer it would be an embarrassment, but for this bad-golfer it was a pretty enjoyable day.  The day started out inauspiciously. I decided it would be fun to go somewhere I hadn't been in a while, and set off on I-91 south to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Thought I'd go to a place I hadn't been to since accompanying my dad there some 35 years ago, the little Oak Ridge Course in Gill, Mass. After a couple of wrong turns I finally found it, on a little rural road. As I pulled in, it seemed awfully quiet, and there was a notable lack of golf carts outside the humble little clubhouse. Well, turned out that Richard and Janet Giverson, the course's owners since 2003, went bankrupt in 2018 and bailed out of the golf business (not before they sold a bunch of memberships for the 2018 season and promptly split with the money.) Anyway, when I pu...

 Among bad-golfers, it's scripted that when you complain about how terrible, how stinking bad, how horrendous you're playing, you look at the beauty of the golf course and the pretty white clouds scudding across the lovely blue sky, and say "Well, the important thing is that it's beautiful out and we're having fun." This is bullshit.  Okay, it's a nice day. The clouds are ever so pretty, and the green of the course is indeed attractive. But who gives a flying fatootie, really? I care about playing well. I want to hit satisfying thwacks and see the ball flying in a nice straight line towards the green. I want to not 3-putt. Sure, it's a nice day, but it would be a nice day if I was mowing my lawn, too, but that doesn't make it fun to mow my lawn.  Thursday was one of those lovely days. And my bad-golfing reached new levels of stench and rottonness. I started out with two sleeves of new balls. I thought that would be enough. After completing the firs...

 I hadn't been golfing with my best buddie, Calvin, all season. He's been feeling under the weather with a sore elbow for a few weeks now and using this so-called injury as a handy excuse not to come play golf with his old roomie. Poor bubbie. Cry me a river. You and I both know he was just afraid of being humiliated on the golf course by my shining, stunning golf skills.  So I sent him an email the other day, ordering him to man up already, eat a whole bottle of ibuprofen and come play golf with me! And that's an order! To my immense surprise, he obediently wrote back, "Yes sir. Book a tee time." What he didn't say is that he was already planning to be in Brattleboro anyway. Ha ha.  So, wearing our very smart and almost-matching coral-colored golf shirts, we headed over to the Brattleboro Country Club to play nine.  It seems to me that every time I play, a brand-new weakness in my game pops up to bedevil me. Sometimes it's the putting, resulting in my pin...

 Well, not exactly. First of all Mr. Kipling is dead these 85 years, so it would be a dull game. Though the way I play, he might be a good partner for me.  Nevertheless, my wife and I had the good fortune to attend an open house and garden tour of a house that Kipling lived in right here in Brattleboro. Called "Naulakha," after the book he co-wrote with his father-in-law (now there's a good son-in-law), it's a marvelous mansion that sits atop a hill in Dummerston. Owned by The Landmark Trust USA, the house is rented to well-to-do vacationers who can thrill to live for a weekend in the house where Kipling wrote "Captains Courageous," The Jungle Book (parts 1 and 2) and many of the "Just So" stories, which he read aloud to his little daughter on the very deck where we sipped an ice-cold lemonade.  This being a bad-golf blog, it would be remiss of me not to inform you, gentle reader, that there's a golf angle in my accounting of our visit to Naula...

 It was on the fairway of the ninth hole at the Bellows Falls Country Club, after another average round of bad-golf.  I'd hit a pretty decent shot off the tee, which got me just shy of the trees you see on the right side of the fairway. Picked up my 6-iron, my favorite iron these days for fairway work. Addressed the ball, took a breath, emptied my mind (never a difficult job) and thought only about hitting through the ball. Took what felt like a normal backswing, low and slow, and let fly. Simply, modestly and truthfully put, it was the single greatest golf shot in the history of the game. Perfectly shaped, long, straight as an arrow, absolutely gorgeous. Landed just shy of the green, just where I'd hoped to place it. It was not only the best shot of my round, it was probably the best shot of my entire golf journey. Man, it felt wonderful. Sounded great off the club, got a good followthrough, and the ball just arced and arced and flew and bounced perfectly. It was perfection....

 Two rounds last week to report on. To be sure, there's no danger of having to change the name of my little blog. I'm still a very bad, horrendous, stinking-awful golfer. But I comfort myself by looking on the interweb for some statistics that say that roughly half of all golfers are as bad as I am (meaning we shoot around 100-110. Not counting Mulligans or "practice shots" or gimmes or screw-its. But I guess I'm not the only bad-golfer out there, which is a little comforting. A little.  So I had made a tentative date with my buddy Alan to play a round last Sunday. I figured I'd go out on Friday and play a practice round to get into shape for my first round of the year not playing alone. It did not go well.  That's not entirely true: My first shot off the tee was textbook. Straight, long, beautiful, satisfying. Got a bogey on that first hole, which always puts me in a good mood. But I got a 10 on the second hole (not the first time on that hole,) which alw...

Address the ball.  Feet apart but not too far (aligned with shoulders, more or less) Don't groove the waggle Back straight, good posture, butt sticking out a little bit Deep breath Strong grip (knuckles visible) Club face correct left foot angled out just a smidge grip the club like you're holding a bird Deep breath again visualize shot shape Backswing inside the plane Trust your backswing low and slow hands, arms, shoulders, hips (in that order) head down, watch the ball straight left arm wrists hinged left knee bends a little inward but not too much club parallel to ground at top of backswing hips, shoulders, arms, hands (in that order) swing down to the ball, not at the ball swing through the ball pronate left wrist slightly at impact swing hard but not too hard (80%) swing just outside the backswing plane power in hip speed follow through belt buckle facing target arms straight only just after impact elbows toward target keep head still!!! don't spring up at impact Don...

 Back in the 16th century, when I was a kid, I loved baseball (still do, of course, Go Sox!) and I wanted badly to be a bad-baseball-player. My poor long-suffering Dad tried to help me in this hopeless endeavor, coaching me on a good baseball swing, and he always emphasized a good follow-through. This made no sense to me, and frankly still doesn't. How can what happens to the bat after you hit the ball make any difference whatsoever in how well you hit the ball? I'm still mystified by this, if I'm honest.  But it turns out the same is true in golf. Who knew? If you follow the impact of the ball with a full follow-through, the ball goes further, and it goes straighter. This I found out on the range, and it was confirmed the other day when I played my first round of nine holes of the 2021 season.  It started off well. I felt confident, thought about my follow-through as I went through my pre-shot routine, and hit the first ball of the season with a satisfying thwack. It fle...

 Are there many things as satisfying as the sound and feel of a well-struck golf stroke? And the sight of that little white orb whizzing into the distance? If there are I can't think of many.  The weather has been weird here lately. Some weeks of very mild temperatures in early April, much to the consternation of the maple syrup industry, unfortunately; the yield this year will be smaller than it has been in years, since you have to have a few weeks of mild temps during the day and cold nights, and our nights have not been very cold. Anyway, a bunch of mild, sunny days. Step outside and you could smell golf in the air. The courses opened up gleefully quite early, sending out joyous emails to golfers. Then it snowed. Few things are more discouraging than a mid-April snowstorm. Any little plants you've put out die an awful death (We carefully nurtured a couple of geraniums over the winter which even gave brave little flowers in December, but when we put them outside the sudden c...

 A couple years ago, before nasty horrible viruses were attacking us from every direction, I played a round at the lovely Bretwood Golf course in Keene, NH. It's a really nice course, actually two courses in one, thirty-six holes winding around a former dairy farm, with the scenic Ashuelot River meandering around the course, providing ample opportunity for lost golf balls as well as adorable little covered bridges through which to drive your golf cart.  I played with two new friends I had made here at the hotel, Eric and Lucy (they call themselves Lucy and Ricky, ha ha.) They live in Florida and every year they come up to play golf in Vermont for a month or so, staying at the super-luxe Hampton Inn while they're here, going through their Hilton Honors points, of which they have enough to stay for free for the whole month. We got to talking during their stay, lovely people, really, ex-New-Yorkers, music lovers, funny and gentle people. And horrendous golfers, as I found out. Er...

 Calvin and I played nine at the Country Club last week. It was a pretty miserable outing, but we had a fun time anyway. Two bad-golfers out on a gorgeous day, hitting the stupid little white ball every which way but straight.  The badness of our game has blotted out some of the details, but a few high points stand out: The first tee, where I usually have a good start on things, I hit the first ball 30 feet and the second ball a miserable pop fly off to the right. Being a proud man I only allow myself one mulligan per tee, so I had to play the terrible second shot and actually hit a pretty good mashie. One of the few good shots of my day. But of course, it being fall, there are lots of leaves lying around on the fairway just waiting to hide a ball, so my nice mashie effort got lost, the first ball of many on this day to disappear completely into golf-ball purgatory. Maybe I'll find them next season.  "Calvin, be sure to hit it to the right of the fairway here on two," and...

 Feeling a bit restless, and bored with playing the same old course week after week, I got in my luxury 2011 Nissan Sentra and drove up the highway to the fantabulous, wonderful Bellows Falls Country Club  for what turned out to be one of the most enjoyable rounds I've played this year.  Ah, Bellows Falls. Consistently listed in the top 10 Most Mediocre Towns of the United States, it's truly an odd little village. It doesn't know if it's Bellows Falls or Rockingham, first of all, and the town itself has a similarly schitzo personality; the lovely tree-lined streets with handsome old Victorian houses hide a decades-long festering drug problem, crime is high, domestic violence is the town hobby, and a lingering morose,  apologetic air hangs over the entire village. Not as big or self-important as Brattleboro, 30 miles to the south, Bellows Falls just takes up space that might be better devoted to maple trees and fields.  Even the town center is undecided. A single...