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No Depression-Era concern Went Under quite like Dugmar Golf Club

No Depression-Era concern Went Under quite like Dugmar Golf Club

by Hal Phillips 5 Comments
Lost Golf Courses
Ed. — This story first appeared in March/April 2003 issue Golf Journal magazine.

By HAL PHILLIPS
The Swift River started rising in the rural Massachusetts town of Greenwich on Aug. 14, 1939. Soon enough the fairways at Dugmar Golf Club had become unseasonably soggy. After a time the bunkers and teeing grounds were completely submerged. Had the pins not been removed years before, their flags would have been some of the last things visible before this 9-hole track and the rest of Greenwich were lost for good.

It’s been 68 years since Greenwich and three neighboring bergs were systematically condemned and flooded, all in the name of Metropolitan Boston’s chronic thirst. This massive, Depression-Era public works project, on whose ass the loss of Dugmar GC was but a pimple, created the Quabbin Reservoir, then the largest man-made, fresh-water reserve on earth.

The Lost Towns, as they’re known today, were literally erased by the Quabbin’s introduction; every tree, every man-made structure in the Swift River Valley was burned or bulldozed to make way for it. The river itself having been dammed — in Belchertown, to the south — some 412 billion gallons of water gradually rose behind the Winsor Dam and Goodnough Dike. Not until 1946 did they first lap over the reservoir’s massive spillways.

By then Dugmar GC had been largely forgotten — but not erased, for memories are made of stronger stuff.

Dugmar Golf Club: The First Disposable Course

Other layouts have been lost to history, of course. Some have simply been abandoned; others were sold off to make way for post-war suburbia. But so far as we know, Dugmar GC — opened for play in 1928, hard by Curtis Hill — was the only golf course to meet its end in a purposeful deluge, sacrificed along with four 200-year-old communities to supply tens of millions of faucets in larger communities some 60 miles east.

Hundreds of golf clubs were built, as Dugmar had been, during the heroic age of Jones and Ruth, when the moneyed classes sought to bring the same sort of bravado to their own lives (not to mention a place to drink hooch in a country gone dry). More than a few of these establishments “went under” during the ensuing Depression, but none quite so purposely or literally as Dugmar Golf Club. You see, Dugmar’s developers KNEW the club’s fate before the course was ever built — before the bentgrass was imported from southern Germany, before the elegant stone patio was laid beside the farmhouse-turned-clubhouse, before the first crate of Canadian Club was hidden from view.

Dugmars creation was, in short, a set up: a crafty land deal with golf at its core; a trifle built to amuse its backers, for a time, before enriching them at the public’s expense. “Those guys knew what they were doing; they made out,” recalls a chuckling, 85-year-old Stanley Mega, who caddied at Dugmar GC and still lives close by Quabbin’s shores, in Bondsville. “Those guys knew the reservoir was going in and they made a killing.”

In essence, Dugmar GC was conceived and ultimately proved to be the world’s first and only disposable golf course.

Lost Golf Courses
This aerial of Dugmar GC was taken in 1931

Canny Chapman Valve Co. Executives

“Those guys,” the men behind Dugmar Golf Club, were a pair of canny executives from the Chapman Valve Co. in Springfield, then and still today the hub of Western Massachusetts. In 1924, Chapman President Thomas F. Mahar and Treasurer John J. Duggan together purchased a pleasant chunk of property some 30 miles northeast of their corporate offices — in the tiny hamlet of Greenwich (pronounced green-witch), conveniently located on the Athol branch of the Boston-Albany Railroad.

The towns of Greenwich, Dana, Enfield and Prescott were poor farming communities and had been for centuries, but their lakes and myriad points of river access were popular with holiday-makers from the big city. It was common for Springfielders to own summer camps and cottages up there.

Duggan and Mahar had far grander plans. After paying $6,850 for 147 acres of abandoned agricultural land, they immediately set to work refurbishing the property’s existing farmhouse. In 1925 its value was assessed at $2,000; two years later this homestead was valued at $7,000. Next, Duggan and Mahar built a striking fieldstone lodge on the south-facing slope of Curtis Hill. Completed in 1926, it was assessed a year later at $12,000.

Once an additional 15 acres had been purchased, they commissioned Orrin Smith to design and build Dugmar’s golf course. Opened in 1928, the nine-hole layout occupied ground southeast of Curtis Hill, in full and magnificent view of the lodge with its distinctive stone-pillared porch.

The layout at Dugmar — a moniker created by combining the surnames Duggan and Mahar — was not some bit of amateur course design. Smith had been a respected and quite prolific New England architect, one who had apprenticed with Willie Park Jr. and Donald Ross before starting his own Hartford, Conn.-based practice in 1925. Dugmar GC measured a stout 3,160 yards from the back tees, boasted state-of-the-art putting surfaces of South German bentgrass, and featured 8,000 feet of underground irrigation pipe, something only the better courses could afford in those days.

An unforgettable place

“It was an unbelievably beautiful place right there in the valley. I’ll never forget it,” says Mega. “It was a very nice golf course, but I was too young to play back then. We caddied. I used to travel up there with Dave Belisle and Jimmy Fitzgerald. We spent a lot of time up there. If I made 35 cents a round, well, that was great!”

Mega and his older brother Alec would often rise in Bondsville, their tiny home town just south and west of the Swift River Valley, and take the train up to Greenwich. Or they’d hitch a ride via Belchertown on Route 21, the only paved road that ran north/south through the watershed. “It was quite a place up there. A few of the holes I forget, but I remember everything else. Between the 1st and 2nd there was a big stand of pine, sort of squared off. There were more woodlands guarding the 3rd, on the right. That’s where I found all my golf balls, you know. Now that was a nice hole, a great dogleg par-5.

“The greens were what always impressed me,” Mega continues, gathering steam. “Tiny things. You had to be accurate! And boy were they in great shape. Beautiful. Imported! People were always bragging about how they were imported. In fact, before they flooded the place, someone came in, picked up those greens and took them away! … I just caddied up there but my brother, he was a good golfer. He played Dugmar quite a bit. So did another good player, Whitey Wisnewski, who was almost like a pro. He used to play with [Henry] Bontempo here in Springfield. He played the best around. Good golfers played up at Dugmar. I still remember.”

A Raucous Close to Phase I

The 1928 opening of Dugmar’s 9-hole course fulfilled the “Phase I” vision of its founders. This was now a fully fledged country club, complete with a golf course ana clubhouse. It featured several guest rooms and a lively social calendar — because, lest we forget, this was the decade of Prohibition.

“There were raucous parties up there; they certainly took advantage of the remoteness of the place,” explains J.R. Greene, an historian who’s been researching Quabbin and the Lost Towns since 1975.

“The Greenwich Village train stop was very close to the golf course, a short walk. So it was very convenient for these ‘bit city outlanders’ to travel there from Springfield. And I have it on very good authority that Dugmar members brought plenty of liquor up there — and women who weren’t necessarily their wives. This was a heavily Yankee, Protestant region; there were no bars or taverns there, even before Prohibition. So that sort of behavior was duly noted.”

“It was a wild place,” Mega concurs. “To be served drinks, well, you had to know the right people. There was a lot of drinking. Those guys were really something; they knew what they were doing.”

Curtis Island
The fieldstone lodge serving Dugmar used to sit on Curtis Hill. Today, it’s Curtis Island.

Phase II? Depends on Whom You Ask

Duggan and Mahar’s Phase II vision for Dugmar GC remains, to this day, the subject of some speculation. The idea of creating Quabbin Reservoir, you see, was put forward as early as 1919. The Legislature formally proposed the measure three years later. In 1927, the state legally impounded the mighty Swift River, thereby clearly declaring its intention to take the towns of Dana, Prescott, Enfield and Greenwich by eminent domain. That act that would eventually displace some 2,500 residents.

In other words, by 1929, when Dugmar Golf Club’s curious, boisterous run was just beginning, many residents of The Lost Towns had already sold their condemned properties to the state and moved their lives elsewhere. Others had sold out and rented their own homes, buying time to determine where and how exactly their lives might continue.

“This area was dying unless you raised livestock or fowl. For the younger generation it was an obvious opportunity to get out and start fresh,” says Greene, whose history, The Creation of Quabbin Reservoir, was reissued by Performance Press in 2001. “But for people in their 40s and up, their lives were torn apart – during the Depression no less! This was a tragedy. And of course, these folks didn’t want some peckerwood from the state telling them to move out. You have to remember, this was a very wrenching thing. There was no job-relocation assistance. Nothing like that. They had to find a new house, a new job, a new life — in the heart of the Depression.”

So why build a remote country club here, on land legally destined to sit under 40 feet of drinking water?

“It was an investment,” Greene says flatly, fighting a wry smile. “Just a part of the game Duggan and Mahar played. I believe they knew the reservoir was going to happen and this golf project was pure speculation on their part. I’ve had older residents say as much to me. It’s received wisdom, if you will.”

Claiming Qualified Ignorance

Of course, Duggan and Mahar claimed no such wisdom, not publicly anyway. They didn’t claim ignorance of the proposed reservoir project; when pressed in court, they claimed to have considered the Quabbin in the same way many Commonwealth residents still view certain state-funded, public works initiatives: I’ll believe it when I see it.

In any case, by the time the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had formally taken the Dugmar property — on Sept., 15, 1933, by eminent domain — Duggan and Mahar had naively or shrewdly (take your pick) drawn up an 800-lot subdivision plan for their property. A “gentlemen’s estate,” they called it — with “beach access.” They had secured access to Curtis Pond and harbored visions, on paper at least, of selling these lake-front lots to Springfield swells in search of a holiday home.

As the creation of Quabbin Reservoir was going to happen after all, Duggan and Mahar sought “fair” compensation from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts — to the tune of $436,500, or some $11.2 million in 2026 dollars.

For the record, the town of Greenwich in its entirety had last been assessed, in 1932, at $640,000.

The state, which valued the golf property at no more than $56,000 — basically, a sum of the club’s biggest assets, plus maintenance equipment and whatnot — immediately balked at Duggan and Mahar’s asking price. The matter was referred to a Board of Referees, a body specially appointed by Quabbin’s administrative entity, the Metropolitan District Water Commission, to arbitrate disputes such as this. At first the Referees awarded Duggan and Mahar a split-the-difference sum of $221,000, pending approval by the state Supreme Court. The court would offer no such approval; it remanded the matter to the Referees.

Determining fair market value for Dugmar Golf Club — at the time of its “taking” in 1933 — would prove an arduous task. The legal process took nearly four years and produced some gloriously arcane golf course-related testimony. An endless parade of real estate experts took the stand, but so did an assembly of New England golf luminaries, all of whom offered their varying opinions on the quality (read: ultimate monetary value) of Dugmar.

Golfing Luminaries Take the Stand

Appearing for the state, among others, were Walter Hatch, longtime construction superintendent in the employ of Donald Ross. Fred Wright, a 1923 Walker Cupper and 7-time Massachusetts Amateur champion, took the stand. So did Dr. Lawrence S. Dickinson, distinguished agronomist and longtime member of the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in nearby Amherst. Produced by the Commonwealth to argue for Dugmar’s lower valuation, Dickinson was particularly critical of the property’s soil. As evidence, he toted several samples to the Springfield District Courthouse in masonry jars.

Appearing for Duggan and Mahar were Orrin Smith and fellow course architect Wayne Stiles, both of whom offered testimony well ahead of their times. For instance, while the nine holes themselves were built for $18,000, the architects testified that Dugmar’s golf course actually increased the value of the property around it, including these would-be housing units. Similar arguments would be trotted out for several decades to come.

Assistant Attorney General John S. Derham, a bombastic figure of the non-golfing variety, wasn’t buying any of this conjecture.  At one stage, he pointedly asked Stiles whether it was “good architecture” to place larger greens on holes requiring a long approach and smaller greens where only a short carry is necessary. “Any fool knows that,” snapped Mr. Stiles — or so reported the Springfield Evening Republican, which doggedly covered the hearings from start to finish.

Long story short, the state’s witnesses agreed that Dugmar was worth anywhere between $52,000 and $56,000. Duggan and Mahar’s cadre of specialists all agreed the property was worth between $340,000 and $360,000, mainly on account of all the house lots they might have sold.

In the end, on June 11, 1937, the Board of Referees ruled that Duggan and Mahar be awarded $150,000 for their condemned property, plus 4 percent interest accrued from the land-taking in September 1933. That brought the total payout, including legal and court fees, to $179,042.

Not bad return for a disposable item.

Ultimately, Duggan and Mahar received more than $1,100 per acre for Dugmar GC. On average, Greene asserts, other landowners in the Swift River Valley towns of Dana, Prescott, Enfield and Greenwich were compensated at approximately $100 per acre. Contemporary press accounts in the Athol Transcript described Duggan and Mahar as “aggressive, up-to-date businessmen”, and so they were. It took a while, but eventually they beat the state at its own game — in its own eminent backyard.

One Step Ahead of the Flood

Once the June 1937 judgment was handed down, Dugmar GC beat a hasty retreat into the deeper recesses of public consciousness. Our Chapman Valve executives had up and left Greenwich in 1933, content to pursue their Dugmar concerns in court. The putting greens, if Stanley Mega is to be believed, were uprooted and sold, perhaps to some long-admiring greenkeeper at a nearby course. “When did the course close for good?” Greene asks rhetorically. “We have reports of people playing there well after it had been abandoned, in 1933. But other than that, we don’t really know.”

One thing’s for sure: the water started rising on Aug. 14, 1939. By that time Dugmar GC had been thoroughly disposed of.

Mahar didn’t long enjoy his share of the $179,042. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage just six weeks after the judgment came down. He was 52 years old. Duggan lived a while longer. He became a member of Longmeadow and Springfield country clubs. Duggan would succeed Mahar as president of Chapman Valve and make a name for himself as a philanthropist and Democratic Party bigwig, though he never stood for office. He too suffered a debilitating cerebral hemorrhage, in 1953, and died a year later at the age of 65.

The Quabbin Reservoir project was originally budgeted at $65 million. Amazing though it may seem to educated observers of Massachusetts’ infamous public works scene, the job was completed under budget. A mere $54 million was spent, thanks to depressed labor costs and federal grants.

“So, paying Duggan and Mahar was a drop in the bucket,” Greene notes. “Even so, that was taxpayer money. Their attitude was, ‘We’ll do this, have a good time and if things work out, we’ll make some money on it.’ ”

And so they did. Duggan and Mahar even managed to fashion a lasting, relatively dry testament to themselves and their anomalous, dually eponymous endeavor: The fieldstone lodge on Curtis Hill still stands — on the south-facing shore of what became Curtis Island. It remains the only man-made structure, the only above-water evidence of The Lost Towns in the entire 89-square-mile Quabbin reserve.

“I find that extremely ironic,” says Greene, “because here’s something that was built by outsiders — and it was one of the very last things ever built in the valley. It’s really quite a monument.”

To what exactly?

“To the cupidity of Duggan and Mahar.”

Chasing Pre-Pollution Fauna

Biologist and scuba enthusiast Dr. Ed Klekowski is way into pre-pollution fauna. This explains why, for years, he had tried to get a close, forensic look at the Quabbin’s floor — to study the organic legacies of lakes and streams long ago overwhelmed by 412 billion gallons of river water. Several years ago, he succeeded. Klekowski led a dive of the area during the 2001 filming of “Under Quabbin”, a Massachusetts public television documentary which chronicled the lives of humans (and pre-pollution fauna) in the Lost Towns.

Klekowski, his cameramen, and their guides in the Mass. State Police Underwater Recovery Team are the last people to see Dugmar up close.

“Diving the golf course was much more interesting to think about than actually do,” reports Klekowski, a professor of biology at UMass Amherst. “Flooded fairways are probably the planet’s most monotonous dive sites: endless vistas of algae-covered flatness! We spent most of our time searching for something, anything, to film. Golf will never be an underwater sport.”

Klekowski’s team did find several of Dugmar’s irrigation pipes protruding from what is now the reservoir floor. They found the stone patio Duggan and Mahar had built beside the old farmhouse where, six decades earlier, martinis had been served (despite federal law) and beknickered sportsmen (despite their marital status) had flirted with flappers.

“Our goal,” Klekowski says, “was to find and video the remains of the buildings associated with the course. When we finally found the old foundations, you couldn’t but feel a bit nostalgic. It was actually sort of creepy being down there, where there had been so much life at one time.”

Lunch on Curtis Island

It’s illegal to set foot on Curtis Island today, but Bradley Gage has done it. Twenty years ago, as a member of the state Fisheries and Wildlife Board, he and his fellow board members lunched there. The day trip was an odd homecoming for Gage who was born in nearby Enfield — some 40 feet below the reservoir’s surface and two miles north. He spent the first 8 years of his life there before his father, Roy, moved the family to Amherst in 1932.

“My dad played Dugmar,” Gage says. “He talked about it with pride and interest, that he and his friends had played it.” Gage had been too young to have experienced the course himself, to remember much of anything about the place. Fact is, the number of folks with first-hand memories of Dugmar is small and getting smaller.

Gage grew up to become a golfer and the state official wishes he had spoken more of Dugmar with his dad, while they had the chance. This memory is a false one. Still, it’s one he might have cultivated further — because some memories are worth having, even if they’re not your own.

They are complicated things, these memories. Stanley Mega retains many of his own, but they can prove a burden. It had been 30 years since Mega had spoken or thought of Dugmar Golf Club, he says, and one could see the act — exhilarating for a time — eventually led him back to the realities of an 85-year-old life. Mega doesn’t play much golf anymore. After 20 minutes of animated recollections, his voice trailed off in that way an older man’s sometimes does. His brother is gone now. So are Dave Belisle and Jimmy Fitzgerald. Whitey Wisniewski, too.

Dugmar GC may as well be gone. It exists only in the suspended, dreamy netherworld of algae, pre-pollution fauna and would-be tap water — utterly hidden from all those lacking scuba gear and a state police escort. The train doesn’t stop in Bondsville or Greenwich any longer. Route 21 survives, but only in part. The road terminates outside Belchertown, its asphalt ribbon slowly descending toward, then disappearing beneath the Quabbin with an eerie, incongruous finality.

Lost Golf Courses
The stone patio beside the converted farmhouse is the only underwater evidence that Dugmar GC was ever there…
 
Coats, Ties and Foursomes: UK College Golf in the ’80s was a Breed Apart

Coats, Ties and Foursomes: UK College Golf in the ’80s was a Breed Apart

by Hal Phillips 2 Comments

SUGAR GROVE, Ill. (May 5, 2017) — For all the trans-Atlantic DNA we share with our British cousins, it’s easy and, I daresay, natural to assume that UK college golf is pretty much a comp for the exercise here in the U.S. Not so. Not today, not forty years ago when I played for the University of London.

Today, top players from the U.K. (and mainland Europe) routinely travel stateside to hone their games at American colleges and universities. At scale, this “study abroad” drains the bBritish collegiate game of talent, obviously. Indeed, many of these men, women and their games will be on display here later this month (May 19-31) at Rich Harvest GC, site of the 2017 NCAA Championships.

But why do they make this trip in such appreciable numbers? Because collegiate golf in the U.K. — like all college sports there — is decidedly low-key, even compared to the low-stakes Division III golf I played at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., during the early 1980s.

For my money, however, one can place UK college golf alongside proper ale and period cinema as something the Brits still do better, with more nuance and panache. Yes, our universities turn out more tour professionals, but for the majority of college golfers, in both countries, that’s not the point. It’s about competition and its sensible integration with the game’s social niceties — and no one does that better than the British upper crust.

That posh ethos dominated my university golfing experience abroad: Coats and ties, foursomes in the morning, singles in the afternoon, and no less than two proper English piss-ups sandwiched between them. You can have your vans, your matching shirts and golf bags. To Yanks, collegiate golf in the U.K. may look and feel more like a club sport. Having played both sides of this fence, I’ll go with the Pommies.

UK College Golf: No Vans

At mighty Wesleyan, a perennial golfing doormat, the exercise during the ‘80s remains recognizable: Throw on a pair of khakis and a golf shirt; pile into a van and meet a different college team, or two, at the course venue. We’d play 18 holes of medal, shake hands, tally up the scores, pile back into the van and drive home to campus. Big-time Division I golf schools don’t play many dual or tri-matches like these any more, I understand. More often they play various invitational tournaments whereby dozens of schools show up in one place, seven guys from each team play medal, and the best 5 scores count. We did this, too, though only once or twice a season.

Collegiate golf in England during the mid-1980s, when I played for the University of London, was nothing like this. Nothing. For starters, and perhaps most important, we rarely played other schools. Instead, university teams were hosted by golf clubs themselves, which trotted out their best players for a day of intergenerational match play and assorted reverie. Here’s a typical match-day regimen:

Put on coat and tie, pack some golf clothes in your golf bag and hump it to the nearest Underground station. Yes, we all got ourselves to the golf course, somehow — by bus or subway or some teammate’s car. We played a lot of matches in Greater London, at places like Roehampton and Royal Wimbledon, and I fondly remember riding the Tube with my golf clubs in tow.

Having arrived at the club, we would literally partake of tea, crumpets and scones with our opponents. As with most British golfing clubs back then, coat and tie were mandatory in the clubhouse, hence the need to dress for breakfast. The University of London Golf Team never once faced another school the entire semester I participated. We played the top 7 amateurs at various clubs who had deigned to host us for a day of matches. They were damned good players, as you might imagine, and they took great delight in showing off their home courses and, more often than not, kicking our asses around them.

The 13th at Royal Wimbeldon GC.

Thirty-six holes, Two Outfits

Our first change of address took place in short order, after tea. We’d slip into golf attire and head out for 18 holes of foursomes, or alternate-shot, at match play. This was great fun but very, very difficult. We typically see this format only in the Ryder Cup or President’s Cup contexts. Even then, a world-class professional, if just a bit off his game, can make life truly miserable for his partner. Just imagine teaming with a 7 handicap who’s probably hung-over, hasn’t picked up a club since the last match two weeks prior, and is seeing some course for the very first time.

Ater this first match, we’d change back into coat and tie for lunch. There were matches where we convened for casual buffets “at luncheon,” but more often than not these were grand affairs: four-course meals with elaborate place settings replete with wine, port and various toasts (read: shots of whiskey). If we students had fared well in the morning, the object of our hosts was mainly to get us as drunk as possible in preparation for…

Afternoon singles. Having changed back into golfing attire, we played 18 holes of singles, at match-play, of course. Depending on the luncheon miniseries, these could be quite entertaining affairs.

To complete the golfing day, one more costume chjange — back into coat and tie so as to hang around the clubhouse bar drinking pints of properly pulled ale with our new, middle-aged friends. Sometimes there were “antics”. At Roehampton (or Royal Wimbledon; I can’t remember which), someone suggested a 1-club tournament, whereby we went back out onto the course, at dusk, still dressed like Harry Vardon, pint in hand, to play a short loop of holes using but a single club. Great fun. I recall choosing a persimmon 4-wood. Remember them?

I honestly couldn’t tell you the first thing about whether we won, lost or drew any of these overall matches against the golf club teams. First of all, from a team perspective, I don’t think it mattered to anyone all that much; second, by the end of these marathon golfing days, I was far too drunk to give a fig.

The Semester’s Final Match

Oldest club in England
Royal Blackheath GC

I do remember well my last match before heading home to America, however. It was played at Royal Blackheath, which, if memory serves, is the oldest golf club in England, i.e. south of the Scottish border. We had arranged this match because a fellow on our team has been a member there growing up. He arranged it and, for him, the exercise prove equal parts homecoming, competition and piss-up.

Luncheon had been a complete free-for-all. Some two hours of eating and drinking had finally given way to the singles matches. Our Blackheath alum went out first against one of his oldest friends, while I — because it was my last match before going home, back across the pond — was given the honor of going out last vs. the club captain. He was 50-something fellow who kept offering sips from his flask all along the outward nine. I politely declined; I was plenty buzzed from lunch and wanted to win my swan song. On 12, I went 3 up and we set about finishing his brandy together.

When we arrived at the tee box serving the par-3 15th, our match nearly decided, we came upon the first group. They had decided to park themselves on a bench, wave everyone through, and concentrate on their drinking, reminiscing and needling. In the three years of college golf I played at Wesleyan, the idea that my opponent and I might blow off or otherwise back-burner our match in favor camaraderie like this? Never have occurred to us. Pity, that.

As we gathered in the clubhouse bar that evening, my teammates — in honor of my pending departure — presented me with a formal and quite stylized summary of the day’s results, complete with my skunking during the morning foursomes and my full point (!) from the singles. I’ve just gone and consulted this document in a scrapbook I keep. It was a touching gesture…

The fact that someone like me — an American, but really just a guy who showed up entirely unannounced, for a single semester — could join the golf team, compete in 5 or 6 matches, and be so thoroughly welcomed, then bade such a fond farewell. It speaks both to the informality of the collegiate golf exercise as it existed in England back then and to the oft-maligned English social character. Yes, they can be a bit stand-offish at first but once they let you in, perhaps with the aid of proper lubrication), they are great fun, quite warm and perhaps more prone to overt sentiment than we Yanks.

I don’t honestly remember how I got home from Royal Blackheath that night. My last concrete memory is playing snooker with several guys in the club’s ornate billiard room, a vast mahogany-paneled expanse beneath impossibly high, pressed-tin ceilings. cloud of cigarette and cigar smoke settled over the tables. Every once in a while, people find out I played college golf in England. They often ask, “So, what was that like?”

In a word, exhausting.

Hal Phillips, A Fine Golfing Ambassador: 1936-2011
Big Hal and Little Hal, crossing the Shannon on the way to Ballybunion in 2008.

Hal Phillips, A Fine Golfing Ambassador: 1936-2011

by Hal Phillips 17 Comments

Big Hal and Little Hal, crossing the Shannon on the way to Ballybunion in 2008.

My father and namesake, Harold G. Phillips Jr., passed away Saturday, Aug. 27, after a 15-month battle with lymphoma, and so I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about him this past week. Most of this bittersweet rumination has nothing to do with golf but some of it surely does. He’s the guy who introduced me to the game, taught me the game, claimed to do most of his “fathering” on the golf course, and took great satisfaction in the fact that I once played the game well and have ended up making my living, to a certain extent, writing about it.

Golf differs from most sporting and recreational pursuits for its heavy reliance on venue. Unlike those playing grounds accommodating tennis, baseball, soccer, football or whatnot, golf courses are all unique and, like a fragrance stuck in the deep recesses of the mind, they summon things that other stimuli cannot. I can’t possibly remember each round I played with my dad, but if I think about where we played, the memories — some fully formed, some mere bits and pieces — come flooding back. Indeed, I can begin to appreciate and readily recall, in quite extraordinary detail, the long coincidental relationship he and I had on courses stretching from the sands and forests of New England and the Northeast, to islands in the Caribbean, to the Mull of Kintyre and Ring of Kerry. Here are a few that come to mind:

As he looked when we started our golfing adventures, in the mid-1970s.

• Powderhorn GC, Lexington, Mass.: This joint is where I started out in the game, at my father’s side. I was 8 or 9, and we had just moved to nearby Wellesley from northern New Jersey. Powderhorn was a par-3 course but that unfairly belittles it. There were 18 holes and while some were no more than 100 yards, others measured well over 200 and none were flat, rinky-dink or boring. I remember my dad and his game seemed sort of god-like back then, in that I played a lot of these holes like par-4s and -5s and there wasn’t a single hole he couldn’t “reach”. Powder Horn stood us in good stead for at least two years, and I remember playing there with my grandmother, a steadfast player in her own right (for some seven decades). I recall that I once pitched a mighty fit here after butchering the uphill 11th hole. There were tears. I recall her being sort of perturbed at my behavior but my dad, as per usual, never was… We picked up games with all sorts of people at Powderhorn — another lesson learned early: that one always invites people to join him, even when one might rather not. Made my first-ever birdie on the 17th hole there, a 130-yarder over water. We were playing with a fellow named Mr. Jolly; when that ball dove into the cup, he was nearly as excited as we were. Powderhorn is gone now, converted to a condo development in the early 1980s, which is a shame because I’ve often wanted to go back — and play it like a god.

Claiming some tournament hardware from Ken “the Hawk” Harrelson, second low gross, if memory serves (Why does it serve? because I was third!).

• Stow Acres CC, Stow, Mass.: We were public golf vagabonds, my dad and I, never belonging to a private club, at least in these early days. We played all over Eastern Massachusetts at places like Juniper Hill, Sandy Burr, South Natick CC and Saddle Hill. South Natick was just nine and survives today as a mere driving range surrounded by housing; Saddle Hill has since gone private and goes by the name of Hopkinton CC. But when we wanted to play somewhere truly fine, we ventured 45 minutes north to Stow Acres, home to a pair of really fun Geoffrey Cornish/Bill Robinson designs. They didn’t take tee times and I recall hanging around that clubhouse, sometimes for an hour or more, before finally going off. From the time I started playing until the time he turned 55, some 20 years, my dad played off anything from 7 to 10. A good player and very steady; did nothing super well but nothing at all poorly. One day at Stow North, when I was 14 or so, he went out in 33. I self-destructed at some point on the back nine, went into a funk, but managed to pull myself out of The Dark Place about the 17th hole, at which point I consulted the scorecard. “Hey dad: Par 18 and you shoot 72!”

“I know!” he shot back, clearly wishing I had continued to pout and leave him alone with his demons. He made that par and I’m pretty sure it was his best round ever, though I know he shot 73 in competition a couple times during high school matches at Fort Monmouth CC (I’ve seen the newspaper clippings). He had a great story about the one year he played collegiately, at Lehigh University. He scrabbled his way onto the varsity as the 8th and last man for a match at Penn State, apparently, and managed to put together a 79. The guy dropped 71 on him. “The 8th guy! And it could have been 69!” he would later explain, still amazed that there were seven Nittany Lions better than that. Thereafter my dad resolved to concentrate on his studies.

Rocking the Merion 1981 U.S. Open hat, as he would for many years.

• Pleasant Valley CC, Sutton, Mass.: My dad and his business partner, Harvey Howell, owned a polystyrene manufacturing operation south of Worcester, Mass., and they commuted an hour each way from Wellesley and neighboring Dover, every day, my whole growing up. There wasn’t much great golf to be played out that way, not back then. But there was Pleasant Valley, which for years hosted one of only two PGA Tour stops in New England (the other was The Greater Hartford Open, now The Travelers; PV hosted its final Tour event in 1998). So, while it was no design masterpiece, Pleasant Valley was sort of a big deal club among golfing Massholes. Because my dad was a local business guy of some standing, he could arrange games for us there. He arranged a lesson for me at PVCC, too, the only formal one I ever had as a kid; the teacher was Rick Karbowski, quite a good player out on satellite tours back in the early ‘80s… I played a match there once in college, vs. Assumption College. I was playing no. 1 for Wesleyan that day and drew a guy named Frank Vana, who would go on to win a bunch of Mass. Amateurs. We were dead even on the 12th or 13th hole when I spied my dad walking along the fairway; he had snuck away from the office, just a few miles down the road. I remember being pleased he was there, though I promptly doubled the next hole and bogeyed two more. My dad had played enough golf with me to know what sort of volcanic response was coming. He got out of there pretty fast.

I had all sorts of blow-ups like this as a kid, as a young adult… okay, as a full-on grown-up, too. My dad’s temperament, on and off the golf course, is really nothing like mine. A very mellow dude, he was. The worst he would ever say after botching some shot was, “Oh, Hal…” He was surely embarrassed sometimes by my behavior but he never really called me on it, beyond a quiet-but-stern, “That’s enough now.” When I heard that, it was time to pull myself together.

• Pine Valley GC, Clementon, N.J.: When one serves on any sort of course-rating panel, the inevitable question is whether one has played Pine Valley. Thanks to my dad, I’ve played it twice, both during my college days. He had business contacts at Dupont, and whoever it was (Hugh something?) invited us down during the fall of my freshman and sophomore years. They have a bet there, at the other PVCC (!), as you readers may know, that guests can’t shoot within 10 shots of their handicaps. I never came close to cashing in. My dad won that bet twice. In his day, he could shoot 84-85 pretty much anywhere. This was pre-cell phone, of course, and it would’ve been quite bourgeois to bring a camera, so no pictures exist to mark

At The Equinox in Manchester, Vt. After he had arranged so many games for me, at places like Pine Valley and Merion, it was nice to arrange them for him.

our visits. But I do have the paper placemat (a nice map of the layout and scorecard) from our luncheon, which I framed and have hanging in my office. One of the years we played Pine Valley, it must have been the first, we followed up the round with another just a few miles west, in the Philly suburbs, at Merion. This was only a year or so after David Graham’s win there at the 1981 U.S. Open. My dad closed me out on the 16th hole, the famous Quarry hole, where I four-putted, snapped my putter in two and left it in the little waste-basket below the ball-washer on 17 tee. I parred in, putting out with my 2-iron. We were not invited back… However, the Merion legacy proved long-lasting: My dad picked up a commemorative U.S. Open bucket hat there, and he would wear it for years on golf courses and soccer sidelines far and wide (see image of that above: white with a blue band). The entire time I knew him, my dad had a head of hair not unlike Albert Einstein’s. And so he always wore a hat on the golf course or anywhere the wind might make for unreasonable coiffure-maintenance. He rarely wore baseball caps, always some sort of bucket hat with the brim turned down on all sides. Before he procured the Merion model, he had a green one that he wore for years (see that model further up in this story). I dabbled with it for a time. Wish I knew where that thing was… In later years he went to the wide-brimmed straw model — see the lead image for an example of this mode — which my mother never liked. Half in jest, she claimed made him look like a fruit vendor.

• Old Orchard CC, Red Bank, N.J.: This was the course my dad grew up on, where he learned the game at the knee of the pro there, George Sullivan. My grandparents would play with my dad, along with me, and they’d often marvel that he still had “that same, smooth George Sullivan swing.” It was indeed smooth, quite effortless. He never, ever overswung (unlike some of us). Of course, my dad also learned the game from his own father, my grandfather, Harold Phillips Sr., in his prime a high single-digit player in his own right,

That smooth George Sullivan swing, circa 1952

a lefty who had a penchant for aces. Poppy would post 5 or 6 over the course of his many golfing days, at least two while he lived at Shadow Lake Village, a N.J. retirement community with a par-3 course. I remember going to visit there as a lad, by which time Pop had become a bit dotty. He was bragging to me on a hole-in-one he’d just made and I looked over at Gram with circumspection — “No, it’s true,” she exclaimed. “He had another one!”… In any case, one time during the late 1980s, my dad and I went back over to Old Orchard; it had been decades and he really got a kick out of going round there again. He had caddied there, too. Apparently there were several gangland figures whose bags he toted in the 1940s and 50s. Good stories were related that day. Plus I shot 76 and totally torched the Old Man on his own turf… I would love to have gotten him back down to the Jersey Shore in later years to play Hollywood GC in Deal, which is supposed to be a great old Dick Wilson design, recently restored, and where Pop had been a member in the 1930s. Thereafter we’d have scooted west across the Pennsylvania border, on Route 22, to play Saucon Valley, Lehigh’s home club, where my dad hadn’t played since college. But we never did find the time. File that one under “Regrets”.

• Nehoiden GC, Wellesley, Mass.: This is the 9-hole, private club across the street from which my family lived for 20-odd years. It’s owned by Wellesley College and while it’s nothing stupendous from a design standpoint, it was notorious in the 1970s and ‘80s for having a 10- or 15-year waiting list. Why? Membership was open to college faculty and staff, to folks who worked for the Town of Wellesley, and it was cheap compared to the swanky clubs all around us (Wellesley CC, Woodland GC, Weston GC, Dedham Golf & Polo, Brae Burn CC). The first 10 years we lived in the chocolate brown Victorian across the street, my dad didn’t gain membership at Nehoiden. He didn’t really play the course at all. However, I played the course ALL THE TIME: My friends and I would sneak onto Nehoiden constantly, in addition to playing in the sprinklers there on hot summer nights, looking for golf balls, sledding, playing hockey on the 7th fairway, and generally treating the place like our own personal playground, which, from sundown to sun-up half the year, and 24/7 the rest of the year, it was.

Oddly, when my dad did become a member, in 1983 or so, he

My ace, recorded at Nehoiden 7.16.90 … The poor man was witness to several but never had one himself.

started playing a golf course that he hardly knew — but his sons knew intimately.

My dad was sort of shy socially and by that I mean he didn’t seek out social situations. Once in them, however, he was famously genial, almost courtly (a quality his NOLA-bred father exhibited in spades). So it’s no surprise that he became an active and, I think, extremely well liked figure across the street. He served on committees and enjoyed regular games with different sets of guys; he was a sought-after partner in the various scotch foursome events — because he was courtly, because he would never make a woman or any lesser player feel badly about being lesser, and because he played off 7. Though I had a big head start on him, the universe of our shared experiences at Nehoiden would prove vast. We were together there the first time I broke 80; the time he pegged that car crossing the 9th fairway; the time I aced the 4th hole (my only hole-in-one; the poor man never did post one); the many times one of us would hit what appeared to be a perfect, blind approach on 6 only to see the ball bound back into view after hitting the unforgiving pavement on Route 16; and the time he came closest to winning the club championship — finishing second, with me on the bag for the final round… He let his membership lapse over this past winter, as he didn’t think he’d be well enough to play. My brother and I called the Nehoiden powers-that-be in June, seeing if we could arrange what had become our regular Father’s Day game. They bent over backwards to make that happen, even hooked him up with a riding cart (which are banned at Nehoiden), something for which we remain eternally grateful. It was the last time he set foot on the property… Until we sprinkled his ashes in the bunkers surrounded the 8th green.

• Western Gailes, Ayrshire, Scotland: For all his travels, my dad was 60 or so before he ever played golf in the U.K. My brother Matthew and I sorted that, in 1998, when we arranged a mini-tour of Scotland’s west country: Gleneagles, Turnberry and Machrihanish. However, our very first game took place at Western Gailes, and it stands out for me because 1) it really was an eye-opener for the man, walking and playing amidst the dunes as opposed to watching them on TV during the British Open; and 2) my dad, for all his wonderful traits, was one of the slowest men on earth. I’m not talking a slow golfer,

Stalking a putt at Machrihanish in the late 1990s.

which, to be fair, he surely was. Physically, he did everything slowly and deliberately. This just naturally spilled over into his golf game: always the last one to his ball; never altering his pre-swing routine or undertaking it before it was his turn to play (partly because he was so frequently the last one to his ball); always coming over to look for your ball, but often disappearing into the woods/rough and having to be coaxed out. Surrounded by Scots, his game proved positively glacial. We had prepped him on this, telling him we had to keep the pace good, that there would be precious few if any yardage markers, and, of course, no riding carts. I remember walking up the first fairway at Western Gailes and there was my dad, behind me, standing over the ball, looking around: “What do you think I’ve got from here?” Dad, there are no markers! Eye it and hit it. Of course, he continued to ask this same question over and over, throughout the trip, never registering the new reality. During some later round, when I was just finished admonishing him yet again to move his ass — and to stop asking me where the the non-existen 150 marker was — I turned to my brother and said, “You know what? I sound just like mom.”

• Lahinch GC, County Clare, Ireland: In retrospect, the timing on this trip couldn’t have been much better. In 2008 my dad was 71 and, so far as we knew, in pretty good nick. But even in fair health he’d arrived at the stage of life where walking four rounds in 4 days was too much. And little did we know that in less than three years, he’d be gone. So, this trip to Ireland was a godsend and we made the most of it (see video capsule from that trip below). The round at Lahinch was our first, the one we played fresh off the plane, in brilliant sunshine and 70-degree weather, with one set of rented clubs (my brother’s had been misplaced by the airline), around one of the peerless links on God’s green earth. It’s not fair to single out Lahinch at the expense of our rounds at Doonbeg, Ballybunion and Tralee; they were lovely all four and we even wangled a buggy for dad at the latter. Indeed, the day before he had been able to walk only 14 holes of Round III, at Ballybunion. We met him that day back at the clubhouse where he was chatting up a group of fellow Americans in the bar, pint in hand, grinning ear to ear. “This Guinness is really pretty good,” he said. My God, Dad: How old are you? You’re just figuring this out? … Not much of a drinker, my dad.

I remember asking him once — when I was quite grown-up, working in the golf business, and ever more curious about courses, design and travel — exactly where he had played his golf when we’d all lived in northern New Jersey. This would have been the early 1970s, before we moved to Greater Boston, when he was still in his golfing prime (30-35 years old) but when I, his eldest son, was too young to play with him.

“Oh, I didn’t play much of anywhere really.”

What do you mean?

“Well, I had a wife and kids and a job. I didn’t play much at all until you were old enough to play with me.”

 
The Joys of Disc Golf: Yeah, you heard me right…

The Joys of Disc Golf: Yeah, you heard me right…

by Hal Phillips 1 Comment

Starting this weekend, in honor of The Masters, we’re “Fighting the Pieties that Be” here at halphillips.net by celebrating golf’s non-traditional, even subversive appeal. Friday we featured the internally illuminated, colorfully sequined mannequins I recently came across in a Vietnamese pro shop. Today’s topic: Disc Golf.

Nothing rolls the eyes of traditional golfers than a discussion of disc golf. Well, I’m here to tell you that not only does disc golf totally rock, but I played more disc rounds in 2010 than actual golf rounds.

Why? Well, there are lots of reasons: First and foremost, between the ears the two versions are uncannily similar. Let me give you an example: Driving. We all know that over-swinging is a recipe for disaster, especially when wielding the big stick. The dynamic is identical with the disc, including the urge to vacantly muscle a drive out there in order to 1) satisfy some animal urge; and 2) gain 5-10 extra yards that won’t, in the end, truly enable you to play the hole in fewer strokes. Managing this dynamic is a dead-on crossover shared by these two incarnations of the game.

Here’s another: When you’re standing over a 4-foot putt, the traditional golfer must weigh the merits of charging said putt, taking the break out, and, should he miss, living with the consequences of another 4-footer coming back — or lagging it, increasing the break one must play, but pretty much guaranteeing one won’t three-jack. The same thought process and consequences are extant with a putting disc in your hands. Exactly.

I could go on and on. There are differences. The most striking is disc golf clever rendering of the body and club as one. But it’s the same game.

I plan to blog more on this topic because there are so many aspects to disc golf’s striking appeal — aspects that tend to address directly many misgivings we have concerning actual golf: A disc round takes no more than 90 minutes to play, for example; there is no dress code; there is absolutely no barrier to entry — anyone can become competent in a few weeks; rounds are $5-10; the courses themselves are really cool, all of them distinct 3:1 miniatures of actual golf courses — with the added dimension that forested areas, if thinned a smidge, produce a corridor of play unlike anything in the actual golf world.

I’ll leave you, for now, with a word on the game’s aural sensations. There are no “cups” in disc golf. One holes out by landing the disc in a basket. I’ve included a picture here, to give you an idea of what I mean. But imagine a circular metal basket that sits halfway up a 5foot metal pole. Atop the poll sits a metal disc the same diameter as the basket. Draping down from the top disk are chains that deaden the oncoming disc, dropping it into the basket.

Holing out in actual golf only makes a sound on TV, whereas holing out with a disc produces a distinctive sound: faintly metallic, a bit plinky, but definitely audible from a couple hundred yards away and pleasing in a communal sense. It’s sorta like the sound a kid makes as he mounts a chain link fence, with the idea of clambering over. Not exactly the roar of a crowd filtered through Georgia pines; indeed, that’s something that most of us will never hear, on any golf course. But to the ears of disc golfer, it’s music.

Unsightly American Soccer Podcast: April 4, 2011

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Join Hal Phillips and a cast of characters/correspondents spanning the Globe to discuss  the burning, hot, molten issues of the footballing day. This week we talk with Tom Wadlington about the two international friendlies the U.S. played last week, vs. Argentina and Paraguay. Hal and Tom also touch on the fate of Jozy Altidore, the Champions League quarters that begin Tuesday, and the new statue of Michael Jackson that was unveiled this weekend outside Craven Cottage, home to Fulham FC. If you’re wondering what the connection is between Fulham and the King of Pop, you’re not alone.

UASP 2011.04.02 2

The Curmudgeon: Golf’s Most Bracing Pod

The Curmudgeon: Golf’s Most Bracing Pod

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

 

We know how it is. You like your golf. You might even love it, but the game’s fawning media echo chamber leaves you cold, and often woefully ill-informed. Perhaps The Curmudgeon — the golf podcast that dares speak truth to power — is for you. Join host Hal Phillips and a panoply of journalists who aren’t afraid to put their access at risk. What’s more, you don’t have to wear a collared shirt to listen in.

Inside this Special PGA Championship pod:
• Should the Masters really be a Major?
• Sartorial Screed: The Case Against Cargo Shorts
• What are the spoils of Ryder Cup hospitality exactly?

2010.08.12 The Curmudgeon

World Cup Nostalgia: Ultimately, it was televised

World Cup Nostalgia: Ultimately, it was televised

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

The inimitable Archie Gemmel, on the rampage against Holland in 1978.

Like the Olympic Games, the World Cup comes round but once every four years. Unlike the modern Olympiad, the World Cup has only recently attracted the exhaustive attention of television programmers, a fact driven home to me by my friend and colleague, Dieter Schmidt, in his debut column at halphillips.net. There was indeed no international soccer on U.S. television in the early 1970s (before Dee got a bit too stoned and spent the next 32 years frozen in a northern Manitoba trash heap). Indeed, the World Cup final — the most watched sporting event the world over — was not televised live in America until 1982, and each game of the tournament was not available on TV until ESPN undertook the task for the 1994 games, staged here in the U.S.

The United States’ thrilling last-minute victory over Algeria on Wednesday was testament to the overwhelming power of the shared televised sports experience. My fellow podcaster Tom Wadlington and I watched at DiMillo’s Bayside, a nice little sports bar in Portland, Maine. It’s not every day that two strangers leap into my arms while screaming with unbridled joy, as happened when Donovan buried the winner. It’s the latest in a series of World Cup TV Memories that I will take with me always.

I have fairly visual, broadcast-enabled memories of each World Cup starting with 1974, some more vivid and complete than others. Catching a World Cup match pre-1994, even a final, took some real doing, some planning. Here’s the first in a two-part rundown of how I managed it.

1974: West Germany

I don’t know who the chick is, but that’s Hubie, at right, just as he looked in the 1970s.

I grew up playing for the Wellesley United Soccer Club in suburban Boston, and club wide for many years our uniforms were, for reasons unknown to me, a fairly exact copy of the German national kit at that time: white socks, black shorts, white shirt with black piping. So, we had a kinship with the Franz Beckenbauer, Paul Breitner, Gerd Muller teams of that period. One of my very first coaches, in fact, Mr. Krause, was a German national whose son, Dirk, would fling himself about the goalmouth during practice making saves and yelling “Sepp!”, in honor of the Mannschaft’s imperious, talented keeper, Sepp Maier. Even so, while I knew the Germans had won the 1974 World Cup, I didn’t see the final until 1977, when I attended the Puma All-Star Soccer Camp — run by another Teutonic type, one Hubert Vogelsinger, an Austrian national who, rumor had it, had been banned from his native soccer community (and emigrated to San Diego) after head-butting a referee during a match in Vienna. In any case, Hubie showed films every night after running us ragged all day long. He was understandably Germanophilic and it was there, in the Taft School cafeteria, in Watertown, Conn., seated beside my Wellesley roommate Mike Mooradian, that I finally saw the 1974 final, in its entirety: Holland with its kick-ass Orange uniforms; both teams with their amazingly long hair and mustaches; Holland’s 15 consecutive passes to start the game, culminating in a penalty and converted spot kick by Johann Cruyff to put the Dutch ahead 1-0 — before the Germans had even touched the ball (!); Breitner’s PK to tie the game; Bertie Vogts dogging a sub-par Cruyff the rest of the game; and the Germans’ ultimate 2-1 triumph, with Franz raising the trophy overhead two-handed. There was a great deal of slow-motion included in the game film, an effective motif for the game action but also for visceral reaction shots of these impossibly hirsute Germans, who very much looked the part of marauding Visigoths. Even three years late, it was impossibly exotic and heroic.

1978: Argentina

Just a year later, I returned to Hubie’s camp and, if I’m not mistaken, we saw the ’74 final again one night. But we also saw a highlight reel of the just-completed World Cup in Argentina. This made less of a lasting impression, maybe because we only saw snippets from the tournament. I remember Mario Kempes on a mazy run and scoring a goal in extra time. Was it the second goal in the 3-1 Argentina victory, or the third? Who knows? … I recall a hail of goals from Argentina in a 6-0 drubbing of Peru. Only much later did I learn that this was a match Peru and its Argentina-born keeper were accused of throwing, to put the host country in the final at Brazil’s expense (back then, teams qualified for the final directly from group play; confounding)… And then there is Archie Gemmel, the Scot who scored one of the great goals in British football history vs. the Dutch in some group game. Scotland won the game but didn’t advance out of the group, while Holland went to the final. Still, Gemmel’s goal was so sublime, it’s the highlight from 1978 I remember best — maybe because it remains so talked about and, thanks to the Internet, ubiquitous. Check it out on youtube. You won’t be sorry.

1982: Spain

This was a big deal, seeing the game live. I watched it with my high school girlfriend, Renée, at her parents’ house. There were breaks for advertisements, but I don’t recall that being controversial at the time. Not to me. I was American. I couldn’t yet conceive of a sporting event that didn’t accommodate such interruptions.

1986: Mexico

I watched this game at my house in Wellesley, and I have to admit that I don’t recall anything about the game or the event that was particularly memorable. Just graduated from college and spending the requisite jobless downtime at my parent’s place, no doubt I was stoned at the time.

1990: Italy

A few years ago, my friend Dave called and asked me a cryptic question.

“Remember that time I came over to your house in Watertown and we watched that World Cup game?”

Um, yeah…

“Well, what day was that?”

What do you mean, ‘what day’? It was June 1990; I don’t know the exact day…

“Oh. Okay…”

Dave, why do you want to know this?

“Well, we ordered cheeseburger subs from that place, and I’ve just realized that was the last time I ate meat.”

Well, thanks to the Internet, now it can be told. Dave last ate meat on June 25, 1990, the same day Romania eliminated Ireland on penalty kicks in the Round of 16. I remember quite a bit from that day, and that tournament. Not every group game was televised, on ESPN, but every knockout game was. For a soccer nut who was getting only the semi-finals and finals up to that point, this was Nirvana. At the time, I was 26 and working as city editor at a daily newspaper, which meant I didn’t go to work until 5 p.m. As Italy was 6 hours ahead I could get up and watch World Cup matches all day long before heading to the newsroom. Fabulous.

One more delicious note from 1990: “That place” was The International, a fabulous pizza and sub shop that delivered — and delivered to my address with great frequency. That same day that Dave at his parting cheeseburger sub, I was in the shower and he was in the kitchen doing something when the delivery guy, Ahmed, walked in without ringing the doorbell, as was his custom. I was a regular customer; we had an understanding. With Dave looking on, Ahmed proceeds to set the food on coffee table, sit himself down in front of the television set and take a hit off the bong that was a fixture on said coffee table in that apartment. Dave, who knew nothing of our understanding, was understandably taken aback and hid in the kitchen until I emerged from the bathroom. I’ve always loved that memory, and was only too happy to add the cheeseburger sub aspect.

The Golf Tee & Dentistry: Now it can be told
The Aero-Tee: shaped like a giant, inverted, tri-cuspid fang.

The Golf Tee & Dentistry: Now it can be told

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Some golfers look at things the way they are and ask “Why?” Dr. Venanzio Cardarelli dreams of things that never were and asks, “Could you open a little wider please?”

Cardarelli, a practicing dentist who holds some 20 different U.S. patents, is the D.M.D. behind the Aero-Tee, a three-pronged, polycarbonate, cuspid-shaped ball platform that he hopes will revolutionize the golf tee genre. It’s a pretty neat little gizmo and a real step forward, if all the independent testing is on the level (see results at www.aero-tee.com). The product’s tri-fluted, helical support structure is designed to reduce resistance by all but eliminating surface-area contact with the golf ball. According to Cardarelli, 55, this scheme also increases the amount of air accelerating all around the ball — including beneath it.

While the new Aero-Tee departs quite radically from traditional golf tee architecture, its designer does not. In fact Cardarelli continues a long, distinguished and quite curious tradition of dentist-assisted golf tee design innovation. To wit, the wooden golf tee was invented by a Boston dentist, Dr. George Franklin Grant, in 1899, and the tee design most commonly utilized today was patented in 1924, by Dr. William Lowell — a New Jersey-based dentist.

Forget for a moment that Cardarelli’s Aero-Tee, if viewed upside down, bears vague resemblance to a mighty tri-cuspid fang, roots and all.

What is it about the practice of dental arts that spurs an interest, much less sustained structural innovation, in golf tees?

The Aero-Tee: shaped like a giant, inverted, tri-cuspid fang.

“Maybe Grant and Lowell were talking to me from the grave,” laughs Cardarelli, who lives in Plymouth, Mass., and practices four days a week in nearby Braintree. “Honestly, I didn’t even know these guys existed until after I came up with the Aero-Tee. I was just addressing the shortcomings of conventional tees in my basement and came up with this model. Why dentists and golf tees? That’s a tough question. I was just trying to fill a need.”

No pun intended?

“That’s right!”

Cardarelli’s enthusiasm for the Aero-Tee is evident the moment he launches into his rapid-fire, heart-felt spiels on the quest for acceptable tee stability and, of course, polycarbonates strong enough to avoid undue breakage. Yet prior to our conversation, he appears not to have considered why dentists have historically formed the leading edge of golf tee technology. “It’s a very interesting question,” muses the good doctor, slowing down to ponder the matter. “Maybe we look at things with a finer-tooth comb than most people. We do deal with very small increments of measurement all day long, fractions of millimeters. We need to visualize and restore at these levels of fineness and quality — golf tees are created on this sort of scale.”

The morning after we spoke on the phone, Dr. Cardarelli, whose friends call him Vinnie, sent me an email. Evidently our conversation had stuck in his craw. “I am still thinking about your question, about the relationship of dentists and golf tees. Maybe the answer will come from the grave,” he wrote, before adding something he’d neglected to mention the day before: the vice president of Aero-Tee is Dr. Joseph Santelli, a close friend and fellow dentist (D.D.S., actually).

Cardarelli is optimistic about the Aero-Tee’s business prospects, though his product has been on the market a relatively short time [it debuted in early 2004] and there is significant competition. PrideSports of Burnham, Maine, produces some 85 percent of the world’s wooden tees, and golfers aren’t exactly massing in the streets and turning over cars to protest a retrograde state of the art. Most golfers believe low-tech wooden tees, despite their “resistance”, do a creditable job — and most golf courses give them away in pro shops.

That said, Pride has ventured into the high-tech, alternative tee market with its PTS Off-Set model whose design recalls a waitress holding a tray over her head. One of its three prongs is shorter than the others. According to the web literature, “for best results, aim short prong at target”.

The Tomahawx model claimed to reduce resistance by…

A product once marketed under the name Tomahawx went the resistance-free route by concentrating on the other end of the tee — the pointed end that goes sub terra. This knife-shaped point allowed the tee to pivot forward, thus reducing resistance upon driver impact.

… tipping over upon impact — without breaking.

Then there’s the Brush-T (www.brusht.com), another alternative tee product whose flat, bristle-brush platform also claims to reduce resistance and accelerate air flow beneath the golf ball. Sort of ironic that after all those years in the basement — after all those years cajoling his patients — Dr. Cardarelli never saw the golf application of brushes. “I’ve told my wife: I’m shocked that I didn’t come up with that as an alternate design,” he says somewhat ruefully. “I guess what’s really amazing is the person who invented it wasn’t a dentist.”

Indeed, the Brush-T was conceived by Jason Crouse, a South African industrial product engineer. In other words, not a dentist. However, the president of Brush-T North America, Paul Krok, while not a dentist, just happens to be president of another company, Oralgiene USA, Inc., which distributes electric toothbrushes for children. Perhaps for this reason, Cardarelli is gracious in discussing his competitor.

Or perhaps he’s just wary of being pegged as the only dentist on earth against brushing.