Bits & Pieces

The Madness Is About To Take Over … And We’re Not Talking About Basketball

By Kim J. Harmon

 

Aside from the fact that I hate to fly (do you remember that old saying – I’m not afraid of flying, I’m afraid of crashing?), I’m not sure this whole thing is such a good idea … going out to Arizona to play golf, I mean.

I thought I had successfully torn myself away from the game of golf back in September with the comfortable notion that I could avoid picking up my golf clubs again until at least April. I have no idea what kind of hell I am going to unleash by swinging a golf club six weeks before I thought I would.

Let’s face it; the game of golf is for nuts.

“Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for that purpose.” – Winston Churchill

 

First off, if you want to play anywhere that isn’t a goat path, you either have to spend hours on the phone trying to get a tee time. Or, if the course you play doesn’t take tee times, you have to get up awfully early just to get in line. My uncle told me the guys in his foursome took turns each week sleeping at their favorite course because to be one of the early foursomes off the tee in the morning they had to be one of the first ones to slip their ball into the chute (and then had to stay there, otherwise the ball would be taken out).

Years ago, my brothers and I used to play Western Hills in Waterbury and since tee times started at 7 am, we figured to get there by the crack of dawn we could just slip out and pay at the turn. One day we got to the course well before the sun came up (I thought only fishermen were that crazy) only to find about 40 people on the tee.

And they were teeing off!

Into the darkness!

“If you watch a game, it’s fun. If you play it, it’s recreation. If you work at it, it’s golf.” – Bob Hope

Once we started playing this course in Plainville (formerly known as Pattonbrook, now known as Hawks’ Landing) we managed to finagle a standard tee time of 6 or 6:30 am (depending on the time of year) and I thought that was heaven.

Nuts.

See, the idea behind getting to the course early isn’t so much that you want to be done early (being done early means you go home early and then have to deal with stuff like mowing the lawn), but you don’t want to get stuck behind people who take an hour to ponder a shot and then promptly dub it 10 yards down the fairway.

“It took me 17 years to get 3,000 hits. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.” – Hank Aaron

So you get out early, get done early, and then spend the rest of the day grousing about those two drives you hooked into the woods, the sand shot that stayed in the sand, or the putt that sailed past the hole on No. 17 because you have all the putting finesse of a gorilla.

“I enjoy the oohs and aahs from the gallery when I hit my drives. But I’m getting tired of the awws and uhhhs when I miss my putt.” – John Daly

And that eventually leads to your equipment.

Back in the days of Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan, golfers were using equipment that was little better than a stick with a piece of iron welded on to the end. Nowadays, golf clubs are made of space age materials and engineered to the point that even the worst golfer in the universe (thankfully – that isn’t me) is starting to shave strokes off his or her handicap.

The worst offenders in this conspiracy to make average golfers spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars that would be better spent elsewhere (like on therapy) are the drivers. Manufacturers quickly realized that the bigger the head on the driver, the less of a chance the average schmoe would miss-hit a ball into the woods.

First there was the Big Bertha … then the Great Big Bertha. Gosh, the heads on these things are enormous … about the size of a throw pillow. Who couldn’t hit a golf ball with one of these things? Who couldn’t add at least 20 to 30 yards onto their drives with something that monstrous?

When I upgraded my driver last summer (going from a steel shaft to a titanium shaft), I uncorked one drive that was a good 40 yards further than I had ever hit a golf ball before.

And I was sold.

I took a peek last summer at the Callaway Golf Company web site and saw all kinds of new-fangled equipment (ERC® Fusion® Drivers; Great Big Bertha II 415 Titanium Drivers; Hawk Eye® VFT® Tungsten Injected™ Titanium Irons; the Odyssey® TriHot® Putter; and the HX® Tour golf balls) that I knew would revolutionize my golf game.

But tell that to my wife. She wanted to send the kids to summer camp.

So besides upgrading my driver, I will still have my old set of Wilson’s for the trip to Arizona – although those clubs probably will be retired once I get back home. I figure I got to get me some of these newfound elements into my golf clubs (and my golf balls, too – the Strata Tour Ultimate ball has a Tungsten Energy Core and an ultra-soft Zinthane II cover … whatever that stuff is).

I honestly hadn’t thought about my golf equipment all winter, but this trip to Arizona (my brothers and I are really going out there to see our father and that would be nice enough, but the prospect of golf is what really got me on the plane) is going to change that.

Somewhere on the par-5, 571-yard sixth hole at Superstition Springs Golf Club in Mesa, Arizona I’m going to wish I had a Big Bertha II Titanium Fairway Wood in my bag and when I’m on the tee box on the par-3, 205-yard 11th hole at the Arizona Golf Resort I’m going to wish I had a Big Bertha II Titanium five-wood that could get me to the green.

Not to mention some Nike® Tour Accuracy balls with softer feel.

Now, that’s when the madness is going to start setting in.