G O L F TOW N J O U R NA L
Why I Love the Game Pinehurst, LLC; photo by Chip Henderson.
Golf is pure madness. So is true love
BY LEE PACE
I was semi-hooked on golf dur-
ing the summer of 1971 U.S. Open, when I found Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino and amateur Jim Simons to be riveting theater on ABC-TV’s grainy images from Merion Golf Club. My dad bought me some clubs and I tried to teach myself the game from some stupid and dangerous article in Golf Digest called “Square to Square,” which is perhaps why it took nearly a decade for golf to supplant my seasonal devotion to football, basketball and baseball. When I ventured into the newspaper business in 1979 and found the golf beat among my domains, the love affair was ignited. The more I wrote, the more I played. The more I played, the more I wrote.
My love affair with golf has evolved over three decades of writing and playing, of course with the requisite to-and-fro cycles. As a Spanish playwright once mused, “When love is not madness, it is not love.” I have posted sweet scores and nasty numbers. I have met saints and scoundrels. I have discovered “it”—whatever it might be on a given day—and have at other times been rendered clueless. But the tryst continues unabated. Today I love golf because of the number at the end of the round. I am what my scorecard says I am. I am a 75. Or a 92. Period. If I played golf on the PGA Tour, I’d post my score and bolt. No talking to the media. The number says it all. Which is why I run for the hills when I casually ask, “How’s your golf game?” and the guy wants to take me hole-by-hole. And I love knowing, whatever my score says I am today, I can be something better tomorrow. PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills
I love my golf journal, which I wrote about in these pages 18 months ago. My neat little moleskin book fits snugly in my golf bag and is a repository for my scores, swing tips and mental meanderings. “Let your right elbow hang loose at address,” David Leadbetter advised in a “mini-lesson” at an Austin, Texas, press event in 2002. When I’m hitting it punk, I review these pages and always find a kernel of wisdom. And often a funny rejoinder as well: After the golf, Leadbetter, the droll South African instruction guru, said he could identify with Colin Montgomerie being heckled by the gallery. “I suffered the same fate myself as a young tour pro,” Leadbetter said. “Finally I told my wife to stay at the hotel.” I love tinkering on the practice range—long thumb or short thumb? Flared feet or square? Good connection at the top. Dead hands with the wedges. Get the toe of the club through the ball. Good posture (flat back, not rounded). Follow the shot with the body. I love walking an old Donald Ross golf course — Hope Valley in Durham, Forsyth in Winston-Salem, Biltmore Forest in Asheville, Cape Fear in Wilmington, Mid Pines here in the Sandhills, among them. I love the compactness, the quirky and smallish greens, the fairway undulations, the classic old homes lining the fairways. I love to see these heirlooms are being well taken care of by a strong greens chairman who knows the benefit of cutting down some trees. You want healthy grass? Give it some air and some light. I love the outliers in golf — Pete Dye, bunker rakes with wooden tines, poa annua greens, courses with nothing more than a simple mark at 100, 150 and 200 yards, clubs that do not have a painting of a guy in red coat hanging on a wall, small scorecards of uncoated card stock that fit easily into your pocket. And I know the kids need the work and mean well, but I really love it when I drive up to a golf course and am left alone to gather my clubs, shoes and accouterments at my own leisurely pace. I love the quirks of golf course architecture. Seth Raynor had his squared-off edges on some greens and spines running through others, his signature holes like Alps, Redan, Road, Short, Cape, Biarritz and Punchbowl. Mike Strantz had his
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February 2010
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