Fore! Play Read online

  “To play golf well, you need good socks. It’s as simple as that.” That is the considered opinion of the foot covering expert at the Winning Greens & Fairways Performance Socks booth, a man who’s spent his whole life in socks. Not just any socks, golf socks—performance golf socks. Crew, anklet, or lo-cut.

  Now, how, exactly, will these socks perform for me? He explains how the special ribbing increases circulation: “It’s one-by-one stitching. Doesn’t pinch the foot. The feet don’t get tired.”

  How many strokes is a good pair of golf socks worth?

  “Well,” he answers, “that varies with the individual, of course, but obviously if you have bad socks, your game suffers.” Obviously. “On the back 9 your dogs start barkin’, you start thinking about your feet, and there you go. It’s a mental game and your feet can become very mental.”

  Mental feet. Umm-hmm. So … how many strokes?

  “A couple of strokes.”

  Performance Golf Socks: -2 strokes

  Next booth. Shoes.

  “If you think good socks can help your game, imagine what proper footwear will do,” says the shoe rep. “Our Cyclonic spikelets golf shoes with premolded rubber bottoms provide a 25 percent larger platform with strategically placed cleats and treads to increase traction and stability.”

  Also at the show are new golf sandals, which I’m sure violate most country club dress codes, especially those highly provocative open-toed models. Not for me. I have these new socks and only guys from Bulgaria and Boulder wear socks with sandals.

  Staid, old Florsheim offers “biomagnetic” shoes. Another company sells every conceivable style and color of alligator golf shoes, to include alligator cowboy golf boots. Just how big is golf these days? Well, they claim to have thirty thousand gators on their farm just dying to become golf shoes. Thirty thousand! Little wonder that every once in a while a vindictive gator takes revenge and eats a Florida golfer. But: What is lost?

  How many strokes will good golf shoes take off my score?

  “A few” is the consensus.

  Better Shoes: -3 strokes

  Not to mention cleats, which may seem like a small thing, but are not. (For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the battle was lost, etc.)

  “Cleats can be critical,” proclaims the Eagle Grip soft cleats salesman, and the Softspikes representative agrees: “Our Black Widow model is the new standard, offering unparalleled traction, anti-clogging, and is available in four installation systems: small thread, large thread, the new Champ-Q-Lok, fast twist. They can make an enormous difference.”

  Proper Cleats: -1 stroke (we think “enormous” is hyperbolic)

  “You know your problem?” shouts the barker, literally grabbing us as we walk by. “You don’t have dry hands! It’s ruining your game!”

  Lucky for me, he has Dry Hands lotion, “the ultimate gripping solution!,” which he is now frantically squirting on my palms even though I didn’t ask him to. “It actually repels water and perspiration! Hit those hands with some water!” he blurts at his assistant, who immediately pours a glass of water on my palms—and the water rolls right off!

  I have very dry, very milky-colored hands for the rest of the day.

  Dry Hands: -2 strokes, he says: “At least!”

  Tees! Do you mean to tell me it actually matters what kind of tees I use?

  “Absolutely!” barks the tee man. “Our tees employ advanced technological advances.”

  Okay, then. His Perfect-Tee, for example, has not one prong but two! How’s that for progress? It has two prongs for greater distance, “more confidence,” consistent ball height, and adjustable ball trajectory.

  I tell him that I already have adjustable ball trajectory. Mine adjusts, automatically, without any input from me, from wormburner to the bottle rocket trajectory. But before you go getting cynical on me, just listen to this Perfect-Tee endorsement from James C. White of Birmingham, Alabama: “I had no trouble with my balls falling off in high winds.” Nobody wants that.

  Direct-A-Tee is a bent, 45 degree angle tee, for—guess what? More distance and accuracy through “scientific development.” And! It is the golf tee of the future. Another tee boasts its “biodegradability,” which means it’s wood. Also, “it goes in the ground easier”—and you know how tired you get pushing those damned tees in the ground all day, especially when you use tees for almost every shot (except putting), like I do.

  Also, there’s a “South African revolutionary” tee. We didn’t even know South African revolutionaries were golfers. We figured it was the white guys. With this one, you set the ball on toothbrush bristles, the Brush-T. “Wood and plastic,” said a rather unrevolutionary-looking sales rep, “are over.”

  “How many strokes will it take off my game?”

  “On average? Three or more.”

  Techno Tees: -3 strokes

  Perhaps the greatest advance at the show, although Jody may beg to differ, is embodied in two attractive young women advancing toward us, passing out literature for their services. No one brushes aside their brochures and everybody reads them, carefully.

  They’re the product, offered by Caddy Girls USA, a firm (very) providing comely, young—but legal—women in short skirts to caddie for you, the golfer. The picture on the brochure shows just such a babe going over a (golf) scorecard with a client as they sit together, very snugly, in a cart. The brochure reads: “Need a caddy? Have more fun. From the bag drop until the final putt on the 18th green Caddy Girls will caddy, encourage, and entertain the entire round. Caddy Girls offers a team of attractive, knowledgeable, and entertaining girls that will make any golf outing a memorable event.”

  It stays away from terms like “scoring” and “strokes,” but “encourage,” “entertain,” “bag drop”—it all sounds beneficial to my game.

  Caddy Girls: +5 strokes

  Carts are, of course, critical. I actually own my own. It came with a house we bought, thrown in by the sellers for two hundred bucks. Right away it needed $300 worth of batteries, a new tire, and several other repairs. It has yet to be on a golf course. My nieces and nephews love it, driving it ceaselessly around and around the yard, killing the grass and nearly themselves, while screaming at each other all day over whose turn it is to drive. The guys at the local auto repair shop love my golf cart, which is kind of an annuity for them—a golden goose that just keeps on giving. The shop has done about $1,000 in repairs to it over the last three years. The kids drove it into the bushes and hung it up on a tree stump, destroying the steering. They ruined the ignition system. They crashed it into and through our fence. Finally, they hit the house itself, causing $800 in damage. One time, our nieces and nephews didn’t break it—my daughter’s teenaged friends did. They took it out for a spin (possibly after a few beers) on some rural roads, a venture on which they were spotted (despite having camouflaged it with weeds and tree branches) driving it into the local airport and onto a ferry boat. They returned pushing the broken cart, which bore a cargo of stolen lawn ornaments. You wouldn’t think there’d be all that many things that could go wrong with a simple golf cart, but there are, especially when it’s used as an all-terrain vehicle.

  There are fancy carts at the show costing almost as much as cars. Some look like street hot rods—’35 Chevies and ‘34 Fords—outfitted with coolers under the hoods, phone jacks, brake lights, horns, cigarette lighters, and turn signals. There are classy Duesenberg estate golf carts, too.

  And you know those pull carts? For about $1,100 you don’t have to pull them. You push buttons on a remote control and the TS-1 Lectronic Kaddy runs all over the course, terrifying other golfers. “You’ll want the ‘Hill Tamer’ feature,” says the salesman. Hell yes. Got to have Hill Tamer. And “worm gear drive”! Sure. The company motto is “Break par, not your back.”

  If you don’t want to spend that kind of dough, there’s the Cart Wizard, which Velcros the pull cart to the back of your belt and you p
ull it like a horse pulling a cart.

  “You can’t underestimate the fatigue factor in golf,” says the salesman. “It could cost you five strokes, minimum.”

  Golf Cart: -5 strokes (although the pros walk, and Warning: Golf carts with built-in beer coolers may double your score on the back 9)

  I play bare-handed and that is wrong. Golf gloves make all the difference. For one thing you look cooler, and you have a better grip (especially when you or your beer can is sweating). “Steve” says he wears his when he’s masturbating. That way he doesn’t give himself any sexually transmittable diseases.

  If you give a tinker’s damn about our rain forests you’ll buy possum-skin gloves. Personally, it makes my skin crawl to think of touching that of a possum, but it turns out the little bastards are destroying New Zealand’s rain forests! Read the brochure for the Gripper natural possum-skin gloves: “Brought to New Zealand in 1837, the possum flourished in the absence of natural predators and now poses a serious environmental threat to New Zealand’s native rain forest, consuming 21,000 tons of foliage per day!!! By attempting to keep the possum population in check, the Gripper is helping to preserve and maintain New Zealand’s delicate balance of nature.”

  Kill ‘Em and Wear ‘Em. Now!

  I don’t know if the kangaroo is destroying Australia’s rain forests or not, or if Australia even has any rain forests, but you can help by buying K’Rooz kangaroo leather golf gloves, which are thinner yet last four times longer than cabretta leather, according to a usually reliable source, the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia. “You’ll feel more confidence and have lower scores,” they say.

  There are fleece-lined gloves for nuts who play in cold weather, gloves with magnets and copper inserts, special cart driving gloves, and the Crazy Q glove, which has weights in it and may actually allow you to cheat undetected. Like illegally weighted bats in baseball, these weighted gloves are said to increase impact power by 5 to 10 percent, causing ten to twenty yards of extra distance.

  Possum, Kangaroo, or Cheating Gloves: -3 strokes

  One of my favorite products at the show is “GOLF—the essence of the game” cologne, “crisp and clean with a sophistication associated with low handicappers.” Maybe if I just wear this! Maybe it’s like aromatherapy. “You keep thinking golf long after leaving the course” when you wear this fragrance made with “extract of fairway grass” clippings. It has “grassy overtones … smells like the golf course.”

  Will it actually take strokes off my game?

  “Spray it on your balls and it might surprise you!” is the snappy retort.

  Golf Cologne: -1 stroke

  “To be competitive, you’ll need the modern tools of the trade,” says the guy in the next booth, when I tell him I’m taking up the game. “It’s almost to where you can’t play without this little honey.” Little honey is the Bushnell Yardage Pro Rangefinder, which looks like a pair of binoculars. You point it at the flag—or the beverage cart—and it gives you the distance. “Personally,” I tell him, “I’d really rather not be reminded.” Not to mention I usually can’t see the damned flag for all the trees.

  There are all sorts of divot repair tools, one of them gold. Why? “Status,” says the salesman. “Weird,” we reply. The little gadgets would do me no good. Most of my divots require earthmoving equipment to replace.

  There’s the Deluxe Golf Pro Swiss Army knife, which could come in handy when you hit into the very, very rough and need survival tools and skills. This special model has the club groove cleaner, spike wrench, snap shackle, divot repair tool, cigar cutter, Phillips head screwdriver, bottle cap lifter, can opener, toothpick, and tweezers. “Or,” I suggest, “if your game’s going really badly, you could use the knife to slit your wrists.”

  “Absolutely,” says the agreeable salesman.

  There is one tool I really can use: JTD’s Search ‘N Rescue line of golf ball retrieval units, for recovering balls hit into the water. There are one-, two-, and even four-ball retrievers—in case you’re playing in a really bad foursome or you’ve personally hit four consecutive tries into the water. The salesman says his father started the business twenty years ago in the (presumably wet) basement. What will he do for a living if someone invents a floating golf ball? “Still need to retrieve the little sucker,” he smiles. He does have stiff competition, however, from the likes of the Mud Weasel, which can also retrieve four balls at a time up to fifteen feet away using an anodized aluminum shaft that cannot rust or corrode.

  We see a guy walking around with a car antenna he says is the Finders Keepers golf ball detector. He looks like a product of the patients’ rights movement that emptied so many of our fine mental institutions. He puts a ball on the floor and when he walks past it, the antenna points at the ball. Which is fine, except that when I walk past the ball holding the antenna, it does not point at the ball. “You’re not doing it right,” he advises. Why hasn’t anyone ever come out with a Lo-Jack golf ball?

  And there is a global positioning system device for golfers called the inFOREmer 2000. Jesus, do some people get that far out in the rough? The handheld electronic appliance displays the hole you’re on, distance to the pin and hazards, distance to the front and the back of the green, professional tips for playing the hole, a weather advisory, digital scoring, green contours and undulations, the distance of each shot, and it retrieves messages and memos, as well as issuing 911 emergency calls. The most appealing capability was the suggestion that it could possibly be used for calling in food and beverage orders.

  Tools of the Trade: -3 strokes

  Industro-Weld paste has a booth. “Why?” I ask. “So if you throw your clubs and the heads fall off you can glue ‘em back on?”

  “Exactly.”

  Club Repair Paste: -3 strokes (it could mean a couple hundred strokes if you had to play with your clubheads off)

  You can lose your head and you can also lose the whole club. “Can’t play with lost clubs now, canya?” Nosir.

  The salesman says ClubOut prevents club loss. It’s a bunch of tubes you place your clubs in and when you remove them a red gizmo pops up to alert you that the club is out and probably still lying next to the green where you left it, stupid.

  Can’t play with your clubs stolen either, now, canya? More than 800,000 golf clubs worth about $100 million were stolen last year—so maybe golfers are not a nicer class of people after all, eh? Either that or the good folks at the Club Alert booth are trying to scare us. They insert a transmitter into each club, which emits a light and sound alert when the club and bag are separated by more than sixty feet.

  It remains to be seen if this new product will become as thoroughly obnoxious and universally despised as car alarms, but here in this last bastion of serenity, the golf course, it certainly has a decent chance.

  Club Alarms: +1 stroke

  There’s an almost infinite variety of training aids on display here, most of them really odd-looking contraptions you strap to your body to remind you that you’re doing many things horribly wrong. Would that you could wear all these while you play! You’d look like a B-movie Martian but you’d never make a mistake.

  The Alignment Plus looks like a car antenna that you strap horizontally across your chest—undoubtedly causing immense pain and suffering to women golfers—but: aligning feet and body; promoting “proper take-away” and shoulder turn; keeping you “parallel” to your target; and improving your “alignment.”

  There are golf training devices you strap to your legs, arms, and wrists. There’s the muscle memory Pivot-maker board you strap to your feet like a snowboard; the Mad Jack Swing Machine training system, a huge tubular contraption that’s a “slice breaker/swing builder” and may or may not fit in the house; and the Kneeknocker, which “uses the proven biofeedback technique” to train you to keep the right knee flexed during the backswing. That is: If your knee straightens, the sensor beeps.

  There are lots of items employing big rubber bands—aka “golf te
nsion bands”—offering muscle building through resistance for greater clubhead speed. And there is a Swingometer and the Excel-A-Rater to measure it.

  And there’s a kinky bondage variety that appears to be borrowed from the S&M industry or from restraints used in the transport of dangerous prisoners. One of these straps your arms together to restrict arm separation, another one straps your legs together to inhibit lateral sway, and then there are, well, handcuffs that remind you to keep your hands together.

  All this to turn you into the perfect golf machine.

  Training Devices: -15 combined strokes

  It is unclear to me if the Perfect Grip is a training device or something you can permanently attach to the top of your club shaft. It is pro golfer Mark O’Meara’s grip, something that looks as though the golfer had gripped a wad of clay, then had it molded in plastic. You just put your hands where his were and presumably play just like him.

  Also, there is offered at the show a bronze sculpture of Moe (not Greg) Norman’s golf grip—his two hands gripping the top of a golf club—for study and reflection and to beautify any home. We put our hands behind our backs and admired it. To a golfer, a thing of beauty, one would guess, provided of course that Moe Norman is or was a golfer. We just don’t know.

  Getting a Grip: -3 strokes

  There is a disturbing amount of emphasis at the show on pain relief. Most of it focuses on physical pain, however, when clearly what is needed is help with the emotional and psychological varieties.

  The emphasis ranges from Advil, here to tout its sponsorship of the senior tour, to perhaps twenty booths offering copper or magnetic wristbands that claim to cure arthritis and (most) other maladies.