The Downhill Lie (5 page)

On an upbeat note, the new irons felt good. I also sank a fair number of putts in the four-to-six-foot range.

Delroy thinks I should be teeing off from the blue tees, not the shorter whites. When I mention this to Leibo, he suggests that Delroy might be having some giggles at my expense.

Day 126

I shoot 51 on the front side, which is the same score that Jack Nicklaus shot on the first nine holes he ever played. He was, however, only ten years old at the time.

Day 152

Big decision: Following Delroy’s advice, I’m now hitting from the blues. The additional 365 yards translates into an extra two or three lost balls per round.

Today’s outing is exceptionally nightmarish. To torment myself I keep a splash count: On the front nine: five drives in the water. That’s a .555 slugging average.

At No. 10, my tee shot skips into a trap, then bounces into the lake. On the very same hole, I scorch a pitching wedge over the green and into a creek full of mutant, moss-eating carp. Prudently, I quit keeping score.

Tomorrow I have another lesson. I’m bringing a straight razor.

Turtle Golf

A
ccording to the posted handicap ratings, the hardest hole at Quail Valley is No. 4, a seemingly straightaway par-4 that measures a modest 387 yards downhill from the blue tees.

A deceivingly bucolic-looking creek borders the right side of the fairway. The waterway is populated by hefty turtles, mostly yellowbelly sliders, that enjoy crawling up on the bank to sun themselves; during the winter months, it’s not uncommon to count six or seven of them basking together. From a distance they look like a garden of mossy old Army helmets.

Because I customarily slice my drive into their creek, the turtles and I keep an uneasy relationship. Despite having poor eyesight, they seem to sense whenever I step to the tee box, and they move into defensive positions as quickly as turtles are able to move.

Their reaction likely stems from an incident one bright and breezy afternoon when I skied a shot directly into a pod of the snoozing sliders. As soon as I made contact, I knew where the ball was heading. Having owned turtles as pets, I realized it was pointless to yell “Fore!” or any other warning. They simply don’t listen to humans.

So I stood there squinting into the glare, trying to track my doomed drive as it rainbowed toward the shoreline where the sliders slept. When the ball landed, it made a loud
tonk!
and bounced as if striking macadam; simultaneously a lone turtle went airborne, a sight not often observed in nature.

Fortunately, the reptile’s armored shell did its job; the poor fellow was dazed but unhurt. He righted himself and briskly followed his companions as they trundled en masse off the bank, into the creek. The splashes looked from a distance like small explosives.

Not a single turtle could be seen when I arrived to search for my ball; all of them had remained submerged, holding their breath. Who knows how long they stayed down.

The sliders share the waters of the golf course with hundreds of tilapia, perch and exotic carp, which were imported to gobble the hydrilla and keep the shorelines tidy. Some of the fish have grown quite large, up to 15 pounds, and breed with exuberance.

During spawning season, the carp and tilapia use their fins to fan small craters in the sandy shallows where they deposit their eggs. Fiercely protective, they react aggressively when an errant golf ball lands in their nesting beds, as too many of mine have done. I’m not sure exactly how the fish remove the balls—perhaps they nose them off the ledges into the depths, or slap them away with their tails—but remove them they do. On several occasions I’ve had a shot trickle into a liquid hazard, yet when I reached the spot there was only a lone carp to behold, defiantly hovering on her nest.

Having found water on sixteen of the eighteen holes at Quail Valley, I’ve devoted considerable thought to both the price and quality of the golf balls that I use.

Choosing a brand wasn’t easy. Except for their general roundness, the balls on the market today are radically different from the balata ones I played as a kid. The newer models soar higher and roll longer—which in my case ensures that a really bad drive goes deeper than ever into the woods (or farther than ever from shore), and is therefore less likely to be recovered. Hitting the ball longer gets expensive when you haven’t learned how to hit it straight.

No less a slugger than Jack Nicklaus advocates reducing the distance of new golf balls by at least 10 percent. He believes that the extended yardage has altered traditional strategies of the sport, and diminished the specialized skill requirements for both amateurs and professionals.

The first time I smacked a drive 275 yards was a tonic for my fifty-three-year-old ego, since I’d never hit one more than 225 when I was a teenager. It’s a cheap thrill that dissipates the moment you see a lumpy, hungover, chain-smoking geezer waddle to the tee and—between coughs—clobber one 300-plus.

More than a billion golf balls are manufactured annually, and most end up lost. Each type is engineered for certain performance qualities, though the specifications are impressive only if you believe they make a difference. You can choose low-compression balls or high-compression balls; dual-core balls or single-core balls; balls that are meant to bite on a dime, or balls that are meant to run like a scalded gerbil.

One brand comes with a seamless cover and a “speed elasticity core.” Another has hexagonal dimples, supposedly to reduce air drag. The type that Tiger Woods hits is made of four pieces and wrapped with three covers, the innermost of which minimizes the spin when smashed with a driver.

One ball company actually boasts of having the “thinnest urethane-elastomer cover”—a desirable feature for a condom, perhaps, but of dubious benefit in a plugged lie in a greenside bunker.

I’d always thought that a good golfer could play well with any unscuffed ball, no matter what logo was on the box. Likewise, a lousy golfer would never find salvation simply by switching brands; the physics of a slice were inconquerable, whether the victim was a Noodle or a Nike.

So when I launched my comeback, I stocked up on mid-priced balls from companies I remembered from the olden days. Later, several excellent players, including a couple of pros, told me that selecting the right ball really is important, even for a high handicapper. They said that the stuff you read in golf-ball advertisements isn’t just techno-crap meant to impress naive duffers; it’s valuable, stroke-saving data. No two brands are alike, they said.

It was a fantastic excuse for me to start purchasing the most expensive golf balls on the market, Titleist Pro V1s, which are endorsed by many top touring pros. They get their balls for free, of course, while the rest of us pay about $48 per dozen, including tax.

Here’s what I knew about the 2006 edition Pro V1, based on the helpful product information supplied by the manufacturer. It had:

A large, high-velocity 1.530-inch core.

A redesigned Ionomer casing.

Soft compression “for outstanding feel.”

“Drop-and-stop” greenside control (the term “drop-and-stop” being proudly trademarked).

“Penetrating trajectory”—always a selling point for men of my age.

Last but not least, it had 392 dimples arranged in an “icosahedral design.”

Although empirical evidence abounds that the number of dimples on a golf ball is meaningless, manufacturers proudly advertise it anyway. One might assume that they’re charging customers more per dimple, just as computer companies charge for extra megabytes, but that’s not true. For $20 a dozen, a golfer may choose from balls featuring 300 dimples, 333 dimples or 432 dimples, respectively. They all promise greater length, better spin control and a softer feel around the greens.

“To produce optimum lift and increased carry for added distance,” an outfit named Dimplit sells a ball stamped with 1,070 dimples. That’s almost three times as many as a Titleist has, but be assured that the Dimplit doesn’t travel three times as far.

Another heavily promoted factor in the aerodynamics of a ball’s flight is how its dimples are configured. I’d never encountered the term “icosahedral” until I saw it in the Titleist promotional material. According to
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary,
it means “of or having the form of an icosahedron.”

An icosahedron is “a polyhedron having twenty faces,” and there’s the hitch: A golf ball that’s truly spherical cannot be truly icosahedral, because plane faces are flat.

Among the shapes that may be icosahedral are pyramids, decagonal dipyramids, elongated triangular gyrobicupolas, metabiaugmented dodecahedrons, nonagonal antiprisms…but not spheres. Spheres, like balls, are always round.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that my golf ball is merely round
ish,
and that the face of each dimple is a tiny plane. For 392 of them to be set in an “icosahedral design” would be a difficult feat, because 392 isn’t evenly divisible by the number twenty, and (as we now know) every icosahedron has twenty faces.

The makers of Titleists probably have a slick defense for their esoteric geometric claims, but it doesn’t matter. Most amateur players don’t give a hoot how the dimples are designed. If a ball flies straight and rolls true, who cares if it’s got one enormous dimple or ten thousand microscopic ones? I’ll keep buying the damn thing because, like all golfers, I desperately need to
believe.

The 392-dimple ball that I adopted during relapse seemed like a good one, and I’m not getting paid a dime to say that. The folks at Titleist aren’t stupid—an endorsement by a hack with my scurrilous credentials wouldn’t boost sales even slightly. It might, in fact, produce the opposite effect.

In any event, there’s nothing as sickening in golf as the splash of a $4 ball in a ten-foot-deep lake. That’s why I reverted to my high-school custom of deploying “water balls” on high-risk tee shots.

A water ball is any ball that you don’t mind losing—preferably one for which you did not pay. Some golfers swipe balls from the practice range for use on water holes, but that’s tacky. Besides, range balls take such a daily drubbing that they often lose their juice, and can be undependable on long carries.

The ideal water ball is an inexpensive yet unmarred specimen that you stumble upon while searching the rough for one of your own. These little gems go into a special zippered pocket of my golf bag, along with some lower-priced balls that I purchase at a discount sports store.

The theory behind using water balls is to provide the shaky player with a perverse sort of immunity. It’s a known golfing fact that the odds of dunking a ball decline in direct proportion to its retail value.

This makes perfect sense, given the warped and jangled psyche of the average golfer. I tend to take a smoother, more relaxed swing at a found ball because, what the hell, it’s a freebie. More often than not, I’ll clear the hazard with yardage to spare.

And the times I fail aren’t nearly so aggravating, the sting of the drubbed shot being mitigated by the satisfaction of having just saved myself four bucks. That’s the sort of pitifully contorted reasoning to which the insecure and inconsistent golfer clings.

Acquaintances who are excellent players deride the water-ball tactic, saying it fosters a defeatist attitude. They claim that taking a premium ball out of the sleeve and slamming it over a gator-infested lagoon builds character and self-confidence.

Well, I’ve tried that, and guess what? Hooking a new Pro V1 into the drink is like totaling a Testarossa while pulling out of the sales lot. It makes you want to puke.

Luckily, friends with connections at Titleist arranged for me to receive a couple dozen Pro V1s, which, because they were free, I fearlessly began to tee up on water holes. One set of balls even bore my initials, although they are difficult to read when submerged at depths greater than five feet. Perhaps the icosahedral design deflects the light off the lettering.

Once I realized how rapidly my freebie Titleists were disappearing, I transferred the survivors out of the water-ball pocket in my golf bag. Of particular concern were the monogrammed specimens, which I knew could be retrieved from the inkiest grave by eagle-eyed golfers wielding telescopic ball scoopers. I’d seen these characters in action, patrolling the banks and shorelines while they played, dipping their scoopers among the darting carp and cringing turtles. I imagined them chortling every time they salvaged a shiny Pro V1 stamped with “CH.”

Less than half a dozen golfers at the club have those initials, but it’s unlikely that the scavengers would try to track down any of us in search of the ball’s rightful owner.

And even if they did, I’d deny it was me.

Day 153

Another promising lesson at the club with Steve Archer, after which I scribble furiously on blank index cards:

“too much lower body movement”

“practice with a baseball swing”

“time downswing with weight shift”

“on short irons, shift weight to the left; use right hand”

“Rotation—left shoulder over right knee”

“Setup posture, shoulder tilt more right”

“FINISH!”

Day 164

From a sarcastic e-mail to Leibo: “Shot a 49 yesterday on the front nine. No pars, four 3-putts—very inspiring.”

Leibo responds: “Shot a 75 today with 35 on the back. Very inspiring.”

My reply: “Rub it in. I almost killed a turtle with one of my drives.”

Day 165

From another e-mail to Leibo: “Sorry I missed your call. I was on the back nine at Quail, pouring gasoline on my nuts. I’ve now gone eighteen holes without a par.”

Day 175

Four three-putts and innumerable stupidities on the back nine.

At some point my sand wedge comes helicoptering out of a bunker, well in advance of the ball. Fenia, who’s riding along with me in the cart, wishes she’d worn a disguise.

Day 202

The pitfalls of Senior Golf—somehow I’ve hurt my back, and I can barely bend to tie my shoes.

Yet searing pain seems to be the antidote for my swing ailments, because I knock the ball as straight as a cannon on the practice range. I decide to play nine holes and, despite the agony, I’m scoring much better than usual.

Then calamity strikes: For no good reason, my lumbar muscles relax on the par-5 seventh. I’m lying two, only eighty yards from the pin, when suddenly the pain in my back vanishes.

What happens next unfolds with a bleak inevitability. I skull a half-wedge into a sidehill bunker, overfly the green into the lake, and end up taking an 8, the dreaded “snowman.”

And on it goes….

Before every round I should have Fenia wallop me with a crowbar at the base of the spine. I play much better with tears in my eyes.