Tóibín spoke of his recently deceased friend with generosity, admiration and affection. He recalled McGahern’s anguish when a director asked him to doctor some dialogue during a shoot. Tóibín said that his own background in journalism had equipped him to dash off sentences on any subject without inhibitions, but McGahern agonized over every word he ever wrote. McGahern told the director that he was willing to write new dialogue, but it would take him several weeks.

Tóibín may write as effortlessly as he claims, but his work nonetheless sits comfortably on the shelf with McGahern’s among the best contemporary Irish fiction, a stature confirmed by Tóibín’s new collection of stories, “The Empty Family.”

Unlike McGahern, who never strayed far from the rural Ireland of his boyhood, either in his life or in his work, Tóibín represents a modern take on the Irish diaspora, with stories in this collection set in Spain and the U.S., where he has lived, as well as in Ireland. (Tóibín’s most recent novel, “Brooklyn” — also his first major commercial success in the U.S. — likewise dwells among the overseas Irish.)

“Two Women,” for example, chronicles the return of an Irish expat from L.A. to Dublin. Now in her 70s, Frances Rossiter designs movie sets. She has never married. Tóibín’s insider’s view of the movie business, on display at the McGahern event, animates this story, but the energy comes from Frances’ angry solitude, the shield guarding her sentimental soul.

As with all of Tóibín’s stories, the writing is unadorned but careful, and one sees in every line the influence of Tóibín’s acknowledged inspiration, Henry James. “Two Women” is written in the third person, but many of Tóibín’s tales are told in the first person. While his language is never idiosyncratic, and both women and men tend to think and speak in the same clear manner, Tóibín nonetheless creates plausible characters with distinct and particular points of view.

The first story in “The Empty Family” is a direct homage to James, while several others, including the near novella-length story “The Street,” explore the homoerotic terrain that lurks in the interstices of James’ journals and letters and surges to the surface in a number of his stories. “The Street” also deals with the experience of émigrés, in this case Pakistanis living in Barcelona — a doubled exoticism. But without pyrotechnics or obvious stylistic tics of any kind, Tóibín evokes a credible world of loneliness, generosity and hope.

There is nothing blatantly “Irish” in Tóibín’s prose, even when the stories are set in Ireland. Joseph O’Connor’s new novel, “Ghost Light,” is based on the life of the playwright John Millington Synge. It was Synge who wrote in the introduction to his most famous work, “The Playboy of the Western World,” that “every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.” O’Connor’s novel obeys this admonition, while Tóibín’s stories abjure adornment or frills. Each writer succeeds in his own way, but Tóibín’s prose acquires its authority by renouncing flourishes or extravagance, proceeding along a carefully traced narrative path that generates trust in his readers, who will cling to his guidance like tenderfeet following a grizzled guide into the wilderness.

Tóibín’s stories also use recollections of music to set moods, and explore the tension between memory and desire. Families tend to fracture in Tóibín’s world, and loneliness seems as inevitable as death. These are great stories by a writer who is both big-hearted and unafraid.

THE EMPTY FAMILY, by Colm Tóibín

Scribner, 2011, $24.00 Hardcover, 288 pages

This review first appeared in The Oregonian, February 6, 2011.  For an interesting interview with Tóibín go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nq0Gy5M1PY

When we hired him, Bambi knew nothing about golf.  Like a lot of child actors, he’d knocked around a bit after his adolescent success.  He’d been recommended to us as someone who could find his way through the woods, even if the forest was on fire.  We suspected that this ability would translate into a kind of instinctive grasp of what makes a good golf hole.   That suspicion proved correct.  Bambi was an incredibly quick learner.   The first site we visited, he went crashing into the underbrush, leaving broken branches and a trail of surprisingly small and delicate hoof prints for us to follow.   Within minutes, we realized that we had found the design equivalent to Hogan’s secret, an entirely new way to analyze a site.   Within that first hour, Bambi had discovered two incredible par fours and a par five we were sure would soon be featured in a Ron Whitten column.

But we also discovered that he was weak to the point of utter futility on par 3s.   Maybe it was the speed at which he attacked his work.   Maybe his overall grasp of the route plan concept itself was feeble.  The places for short holes would just pass underfoot for Bambi as transition zones between the par fours and par fives, which he loved.  

The idea of the dogleg had made him very nervous at first, too, until we explained that the expression was metaphorical.  Actual dogs were not part of the design process.  Dogs did not play golf, although we did admit that many canines lived on golf courses once they were built to help the green keepers chase ducks and geese away.  Bambi was horrified, frankly, and for a while we were afraid that we’d lost him.    But we convinced him to visit another site, along a secluded lake in northern Saskatchewan that Mike Keiser was looking into developing, shrewdly calculating the long-term impact of global warming on golf.  Once his feet hit the ground, Bambi was back to his old self.

We still struggled for a while over what to do about Bambi’s inability to comprehend not just the importance of the par 3, but the very idea of the short hole.  Over beers one night, tired but happy after tromping across sixty acres and finding more natural holes in an afternoon than exist in the entire portfolios of most members of the ASGCA, we had a heart-to-heart with him about this par 3 issue.  “Short,” we said, holding our hands about a trout apart.  “Not long,” we remonstrated. 

He just stared in his glass.  Around midnight, just before we poured single malt for a rather discouraging and gloomy nightcap, convinced that he would never understand how important the punctuation of short holes was to completing the exuberant collection of par 4s and 5s that was clearly his signature contribution, his eyes suddenly opened wide.   He lifted my shot glass and put it on the edge of the table.  He set his own below it on the arm rest of his chair, looking from one to the other, and then up at us with a hopeful expression.   “Yes!” we said, “Yes!”

Moments later, in a ecstasy of comprehension, he uttered the name that would make our team incomparable: Thumper.

Thumper had been retired for some years and living off residuals when we contacted him.  “Call my agent,” he said.   “Let me talk to him,” said Bambi.  He went over to a quiet spot and was on the phone for nearly an hour.  A smile crossed his lips as he pranced back toward us.  “He’s in.”

Thumper, like Bambi, was a natural.   His hopping technique worked the site in a kind of zig-zag pattern, which turned out to be the perfect mechanism for discovering par 3s hidden in, around and near nooks and crannies.   Thumper was always weary and looking for a place to bail in case he heard a hawk’s cry or the yodel of a coyote, so he was tremendously attuned to the fine print of a site.  His technique was simple and ingenious.    He would ease into a clearing, hop to the high point, lift himself to his full height on his hind legs and survey the surrounding terrain in every direction, his nose twitching with anticipation.  Then he was off, hopping with surprising vigor given his age, and we would wait quietly for as much as twenty minutes until he would reappear, thumping his long right foot into the ground.  We would rush over, plant a marker, and marvel at how precisely his instincts had taken him to a perfect green site.   And while that skill impressed us, what made Thumper unique among the creatures prospecting for golf holes hidden around the planet by Nature’s mysterious means, was how he knew to look for a short par 3, say, and then a long one, and then a medium one—this intuition had to be divine, it could not be random.  So that’s how we came to refer to him as Saint Thumper.

But something was still missing.  We were discovering individual holes without equal, interrogating the sites through the agency of our colleagues’ perfectly tuned natural intelligences, the genetic wisdom of the ages—but how could these discoveries be melded into a whole?  It wasn’t enough to establish the motifs with the brilliance of individual passages—we needed to segue through the site, to link the movements into a single symphonic whole. 

Bambi was drinking more, tired of all the travel and constant requests for interviews.  He also knew that his repertoire of skills had limits, and that he was starting to repeat himself.  That’s what instincts do—they run down the same paths over and over.  It was a troubling insight to such a proud deer. 

And while Bambi’s feet felt the contours of the land, absorbing the terrain with every foot fall, he was also starting to understand that the actual game, as opposed to the course, was played mostly through the air.  To understand golf’s Aeolian aspect, we needed an aerial specialist.   Thumper remembered another old pal, who he hadn’t seen in decades: Friend Owl.

“That guy could spot a mole diving underground at 400 yards,” said Bambi.   “We need him for sure.”

Sadly to say, Friend Owl had passed away some years before.  His eye-sight failing, he flew into the broad side of a barn.  But he left behind a large extended family, and Thumper knew a grandson, Stanley Owlsey, who’d had a difficult youth but had been going straight since getting out of prison.  ‘His vision was so acute he could see into the future,” said Thumper, “so he was always getting ahead of himself.   But he’s got the peepers we need, no question.”

We had Owlsey drug-tested, of course, and he passed with flying colors, so to speak.  From day one, he understood our mission to create only pure, natural, all-species approved courses, whose character was implicit in the attributes of the mother sites.  Our triumvirate revolutionized golf design, leading it back to the 18th century, where it so rightly belonged. 

We lost Thumper first, then Bambi, who never seemed to recover from the loss of his old friend.  (They all thought Flower, who of course had died during his famous humanitarian mission to Canada during the normality crisis of 1966, would have made fundamental contributions to golf design, elaborating on native landscape themes and devising a unique plant palette. But that sweet little skunk never got a chance.)  Owlsey is retired, but still cruises over a site for us now and then, reminding us of what we once had: the perfect, natural alliance of animal spirits devoted to discovering the inner golf hidden deep in Gaia’s soul.

Arcadia

When I was in graduate school at the University of Rochester in the late sixties, the embers of the Second Great Awakening were still smoldering to ash in upstate New York.  Known as the burned-over district because it was aflame with religious fervor, western New York in the first half of the 19th century was as thick with prophets as the eastern Mediterranean had been in the early Christian era.    Just down the street from us, the elderly surviving women of a celibate sect that aimed to proselytize its way to heaven still walked the grounds of their compound in petticoats and bonnets.  

Mormonism is the most enduring vestige of the millenarian, perfectionist, and communitarian impulses that inspired such sects as the Shakers and the Millerites to dream of a better world a coming.   The alienated hippies and lefties of the nineteen-sixties would blow on those ancient embers and summon flames to light the way for a new generation of true believers.  Communes sprang up all over the country, and the perceptive, artistically-inclined children raised in that world—Storm Large or Joanna Rose, to take two local examples—would make art from their complicated childhoods.

Lauren Groff smartly sets Arcadia, her fictional enquiry into this new age version of communal zeal, in that same region of upstate New York.  Over nearly three hundred pages, she brilliantly evokes the earnest hopes and evaporating ideals of the communards. 

Arcadia is seen through the eyes of Ridley Stone, a boy named for the town in Wyoming where he was born.   His birth interrupted his vagabond parents’ travels from Oregon to Colorado, following their charismatic leader, a musician named Handy, who will continue to dominate life on the commune, a sort of benign good ol’ boy version of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.  Handy is not as malevolent or megalomaniacal as the Bhagwan, nor as theologically insistent, but he too claims his sexual privileges.   The group eventually finds property in upstate New York.   The boy believes he has memories of this pre-natal life.

Because he is tiny, Ridley is known as Bit.  When he’s six he looks three.  Enigmatic and precocious, Bit is admired by everyone, but he’s especially beloved by women—his mom and her fellow communards, the mysterious old lady he meets in the woods, the girls of his childhood.   Bit, however, is enchanted only with Helle, Handy’s daughter, whose enigmatic spirit will bring Bit both joy and sorrow.  

Bit’s story is told in four balanced chapters: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and middle age.   The book begins and ends in Arcadia, but Bit is always at the center of the narrative.   Bit and his parents, Hannah and Abe, live first in Ersatz Arcadia—that is, a temporary Arcadia, the preamble phase awaiting the construction of permanent buildings the restoration of an abandoned manor house.  Abe is the commune’s master builder.   He suffers paralysis when he breaks his back in a fall from the roof, rushing to finish the work—a sad symbol of powerlessness.  Bit leaves the commune when he comes of age, but Arcadia’s life lessons, its approach to the proper ways of living and its modes of being never relinguish their grip on Bit’s soul.

Groff’s language in general echoes the voice and tone of a fable, much like those in the mysterious book of fairy tales she has Bit discover when he’s a child.   As Bit creates his new life in the larger world, the language of Arcadia is by turns more mundane and less arch, less intuitive. 

Groff likes to convert nouns and adjectives into verbs, a technique that takes some getting used to.  For example, when Bit senses something wrong that he can’t quite put his finger on, Groff writes that this feeling “vagues in an out.”  Kids at the swimming hole “come sealing wetly up out of the water.”  Daylight “syrups the valley.”  The car “gentles off.”   Rain drops “bullet overhead.” 

Bit attracts the attention of women, but passively rebuffs their overtures.  He suffers heartache induced by  Helle, but soldiers on.  When Bit returns to what’s left of the Arcadian experiment to nurse his dying mother, he reconnects with the boy he was and settles into the man he has become.  This chapter is set in the future, in the midst of a global pandemic, but Groff doesn’t worry much about this big picture, accounting for the arc of global disaster instead with simple ledgers of calamity.    Domesticity sets the agenda for Bit’s life and thus for the novel examining it.   He never really fits into the “outside” world.

There is a lot to admire in Arcadia.  Groff imagines a plausible version of a child’s coming of age in a commune, but I never found myself fully engaged with the characters.   The brilliance of the language sometimes hits the reader in the eye like a spotlight in a dark room, when what we need to see is light from a simple overhead bulb

The Clicgear Push Cart

What’s unique about the Clicgear Cart is, in fact, how easily it can be folded up into a small, portable, and storable unit.  On Saturday, I saw ample testimony to Clicgear’s popularity when I was hanging out at Pumpkin Ridge’s Ghost Creek course in the wake of a long frost delay.   There were more than a dozen Clicgear Carts arrayed in front of the clubhouse and around the putting green.

A couple of dozen accessories are available for the cart, too, so every owner can customize his unit.  You can add a shoe brush (very useful in the Northwest), an adjustable umbrella stand, a cup holder and even a seat.  A couple of GPS holders are available, and one of them can be adapted for an IPhone, which makes it the perfect complement to Grow the Game Golf’s  scoring app.  Followers of the Golf Road Warriors’ Palm Springs and Reynolds Plantation trips are familiar with Grow the Game Golf—“GTGG”.   The GTGG app is especially suited to corporate outings and events.   With it, multiple foursomes can not only keep track of their own scores but see how all the other groups are doing in real time.   The Clicgear “View™ 3.0 Push Cart GPS Holder™” makes the GTGG app even easier to use by mounting the smart phone right onto the cart handle.

iPhone holder for Clicgear Cart. Great for GTGG App

Clicgear is manufactured and distributed by the ProActive Sports Group, a golf products company based in Canby, Oregon, a small town near Portland.   Clicgear is the company’s best-known product, but it also makes and sells hundreds of other items, many of which are created in Canby.   A new ProActive product about to hit the market is a towel called The Looper, which I happened to notice at this year’s PGA Merchandise Show when I walked by ProActive’s stand.   It caught my attention because I have a friend whose nickname is “Looper,” and I wanted to get one for him.  Greg Freuler, Proactive’s Director of Product Development, told me In Orlando that the towel wasn’t in stores yet, but should be by spring.   We made arrangements to meet in Canby so I could tour ProActive’s facilities.

I finally managed to get to Canby last week, where Greg introduced me to company President Steve Skinner.  In a small conference room, Greg had set out samples of some of the prototypes they’d worked on  for new products, including the Looper.  Getting the hole that fits over the club just right was part of the challenge.  Same thing with the mittens that attach to the handle of the Clicgear in inclement weather.  Several generations of proto-mittens chronicled the process of invention.   The mittens needed thumbs, it turned out—the first versions were more like fat socks, while the final product not only lets your hands slip in easily, it has a pouch for a hand-warmer.

Steve and Greg told me the Looper, which like most golf gear is made in China, was just arriving via cargo container in Los Angeles, and would be in stores soon.  I talked them into giving me a prototype for my friend, Larry Colton, whose kit needs an upgrade to offset the decay in his swing.

ProActive also has a product line called Origins of Golf™, which offers a variety of trophies and commemorative gifts.  There’s a shop above the administrative offices where the bespoke products are customized for member-guests and club championships and even professional events.  A laser machine can create a three-dimensional image on a crystal trophy using digital instructions—almost as simple as using a printer.I discovered that ProActive also carries a couple of other of my favorite gadgets.   4YardsMore is my favorite tee.  Lasts forever, always set the ball at the perfect height, and seems to produce on its promise.  (Although my Callaway RAZR Fit driver has added so many yards to my tee ball that I can’t distinguish the tee’s effect so readily anymore.)

And then there’s Ka-Ching!™, a set of coins that add to the pleasure of any competitive match.   Last year at Chambers Bay, a caddy gave us a Ka-Ching!™ Birdie coin, which is a “+2,” telling us that whoever made the last birdie of a round would collect $2 from everyone else.  We’ve been playing that game now for almost a year, not realizing that the Birdie coin was an orphan from a ten coin set.  And there are good coins and bad coins—three pars in a row, for example, earns three points, while a triple bogey costs three points.   The beauty of the game is that coins can and do change hands, right up until the last green.  The coins also double as ball-markers.  I recommend Ka-Ching!™ to any regular foursome.

Ka Ching Coins

CCTV's Underpants, a Beijng Landmark

China Daily reported in 2010 that Beijing’s population had reached twenty-two million people. (Eight to nine million of these are “non-permanent residents.”) City planners hope to cap Beijing’s size at eighteen million, but that seems implausible—how do you shrink a city that’s already a magnet for every ambitious person in a country of 1.3 billion?

Beijing sprawls across 6,489.5 sq miles, which means, according to Wikipedia, that its land area is slightly larger than the country of Montenegro. The Beijing Visitors Bureau says the city has more than 60,000 official taxis and 130,000 drivers, and that doesn’t count the thousands of black taxis, which I avoid.

Yesterday, two colleagues and I visited a potential golf course site northwest of Beijing, just off the Jingping Expressway near Beijing’s main airport. We hailed a taxi on the street in front of our hotel at mid-day, in the Sanlitun district—what locals call the diplomatic quarter, where the foreign embassies are clustered. We drove 70 kilometers to an area called Pinggu, and the driver—who by coincidence was from Pinggu– waited for us while we spent an hour and a half touring the site. The area was typical of rural Beijing–lots of greenhouses dotting the landscape, all constructed in a simple style: brick walls oriented east and west, with a solid wall on the north and pipes arcing from north to south as scaffolding for sheets of plastic facing into the southern sun. Reed mats are rolled onto the roofs when the greenhouses need to catch the sun, and unrolled at night over the plastic to hold the heat in. It’s a simple but efficient system that helps feed the colossus.

The site we visited was bounded on two sides by a small river or drainage way, with dikes on either side to handle the occasional spring flood. Our guides told us that over the last twenty years stormwater had never crested even to the base of the dikes.  There was a plant nursery in the center of the site, and crews were planting trees along a berm on the main highway running north along the east side of the property.

We rolled back into Beijing on the cusp of rush hour, and the driver managed the ebb and flow of cars, trucks and buses with calm confidence. Being a passenger in the front seat of a Beijing taxi requires some practice, so you’re not in a constant state of panic when the driver turns directly into oncoming traffic to make a left turn, or bears down on a bike or pedestrian caught in the crosswalk.   Somehow it all works out….most of the time.

Traffic was thickening as we passed the underpants, the famous CCTV tower designed by Rem Koolhaas. A pink Ferrari blew past us on the shoulder, its high growl audible over the traffic noise. We were about a block from our hotel when it was clear that we could save twenty minutes and a few RBM (the Yuan, or the people’s money) if we just got out on a side street and hoofed the final few hundred meters.

As we walked to the hotel, we discussed the follow-up letters we needed to write to the potential client we’d just met, planning the rest of our day. Then I discovered that my phone was not in any of the abundance of pockets in my jacket or pants. I was slapping my chest and thighs hoping to feel the blunt rectangle of my I-phone when the sinking feeling hit me—that phone was gone. I had a receipt from the taxi—a 150 kilometer round trip and a 90 minute wait had cost us 530 RMB, or about 85 dollars. (Beijing taxi drivers don’t expect a tip.)

Our Chinese colleague, Vivian Zhou, dialed the phone number on the receipt and managed to get the taxi driver’s mobile number. She called him, and he not only confirmed that the next passenger he picked up, who he described to Vivian as a middle-aged lady, had taken the phone when she got out, but that he was parked in front of the building where he had dropped her. Kirk Miles, my business partner, suggested we call the phone number, but Vivian didn’t think that was a good idea. “That phone’s worth 5,000 RMB in China,” she said. “Let’s go meet the cab driver and try to find her.”  Besides, Vivian’s China Mobile phone wasn’t set up for calls to the USA.  Besides, Vivian said, she was sure the lady was taking the phone.

So with a certain urgency we hailed another cab, and within ten minutes were pulling up in front of an office tower near the Kerry Center, one of Beijing’s premier hotel and shopping areas. Our taxi driver was parked in front of the building.  He went to park his taxi so he could come and help us identify the lady. Then Vivian’s phone rang—and it was the lady with my phone, trying to find me! She had already called the other numbers in the recent calls queue—my wife and my sister-in-law back in Oregon, both of whom were sleeping and ignored the calls. As I was pointing to a dark-haired middle aged lady coming out of the building, mouthing “is that her?”, Vivian was shushing me. “It’s the lady,” she said sotto voce.

Just then the taxi driver came up, and Vivian explained what had happened. With a stuttering of “xie xies” I handed him 300 RMB, which Vivian said was too much for his help, but I would have felt ashamed after what he did had it been any less.

I was going to get my phone back! I was astonished that it had been so easy. We went into the office tower, rode the elevator to the 11th floor, and met Ms. Ma, the honorable lady who had found the phone. She was the CEO of a talent agency and television production company whose clients performed on CCTV, where she had previously worked as an executive producer for a “Chinese Idol” program called “Star Avenue.” Vivian knew this program and a number of the actors and actresses whose pictures were on display. We tried to offer Ms. Ma some reward but she refused.

After we took some pictures and exchanged name cards, we took our leave. But I wanted to give Ms. Ma something, so we went to the shopping center and got a little gift package of scented candles and incense, and I found a card and had Vivian translate a flowery thank-you note, expressing my gratitude and telling Ms. Ma that I hoped every time she smelled the fragrance she would remember the good deed she had done. Vivian kept confessing that she felt bad that she thought the lady was going to steal the phone.  “I feel guilty,” she said.  When we gave Ms. Ma her gift she looked pleased but was not sentimental.  She served us tea at her desk, and was clearly keeping long hours.  “Look at that cot,” Kirk said, pointing to an alcove adjacent to her office.  “She probably sleeps here when she’s working late.”

Despite appearances, Beijing works. The chaos hides a deeper order, built on the honesty of the people and deep cultural layers stressing honor. We’re going to send the taxi company a fancy letter telling its bosses how much we appreciated what the driver did. Vivian said maybe he will get a gold star for his taxi. He deserves it.  And I will now ride Beijing taxis with a greater faith than ever in the skills of the huge fleet’s legions of drivers.

How to Spend Millions Building a Golf Course

Four guests joined the Warriors, which allowed us to test the new “Live Event Leaderboard” scoring technology developed by Grow the Game Golf.  GTGG’s website describes it as “the world’s first cross-platform web and smartphone golf app to put up-to-the-second scoring, a live-event leaderboard and effortless event-management tools all in one place.”   I am sure there are people who know what that means.

Warriors Jeff Wallach and Jay Stuller were in the first group, joined by veteran Desert Sun golf writer Larry Bohannan and a GTGG partner.   Jeff kept that foursome’s score with the GTGG’s app on his I-phone.   I was in the second group with Warrior Peter Kessler, who was riding with Classic Club Director of Golf Brady Wilson.  I was assigned to enter our scores on the GTGG app.

I rode shotgun with Dr. Barry Lotz, a Coachella valley real estate salesman, author, and sports coach who describes himself as “a vertically integrated conglomerate in a very small space.”   Born in South Africa but a US resident for many years, Lotz is the director of the Professional Golf Teaching Association of America, and a “coach,” in his words, “to many touring pros.”

Wallach modestly entered his name on the GTGG scorecard as “El Jefe,” suggesting that he might be expecting tribute.  In my case, alas, he was correct, as he would be for the entire week.  Kessler kept asking me how Wallach was doing, although he never actually called him “Wallach.” Kessler possesses an impressively wide and creative range of pejoratives.

Peter hit the ball well on every hole but putted so poorly on the front nine that we started calling the score for a hole played with a green hit in regulation followed by a three putt a “Kessler.”   You can also use it as a verb.  “Man, you really Kesslered that hole!”  Or, “you need to get off the Kessler train.”   Peter had seven three putts on the front before a brilliant lag on the 9th from above the hole finally yielded a tap-in par.  Kessler hit the ball like Mo Norman but putted like Don Knotts.

Brady Wilson said that he doesn’t get to play much, but confessed to spending a fair amount of time on the putting green.   He was using a Scotty Cameron putter custom-fitted by the master himself for Brady’s stroke.  Every putt tracked on line with flawless pace.  Brady was also the perfect guide for a first encounter with the Classic.  He’d show us how to play the hole by hitting his drive in exactly the right place.  Brady also pointed out where the touring pros found trouble during the Hope, although I was perfectly capable of discovering where you should not hit it without any professional assistance.   My new Callaway RAZR Fit driver continued to provide the best service of any driver I have ever swung, and any successfully played holes on my card were attributable to good drives.   Never loved a club so much.

We played the Classic on a windless, warm day, but when the PGA Tour played the course the wind typically blew pretty hard, creating a condition the pros don’t like: firm fairways combined with tricky winds which made it tough to control trajectory.   At a tournament like the Hope, with its history of very low scores, when players suddenly started posting high numbers it was a shock.   The Classic was the kind of test they were using to facing later in the season, on courses whose reputations as championship venues made them immune from criticism.  Oakmont kills everybody, but no one would have the nerve to complain about it.  That’s what courses like Pete Dye’s TPC at Sawgrass or the Stadium Course at PGA West were for: places the pros felt free to complain about all they wanted because the weight of history and tradition didn’t seal their lips.   There was no reverence or respect to counterbalance their grousing at the Classic, so they indulged in uninhibited whining.   The Classic Club’s reputation fell victim to this dilemma.

The Classic Club was a fair test for the Road Warriors, although we played at just over 6,700 yards as opposed to the 7,500 the pros confronted.   The setting was spectacular: panoramic views of the mountains from most tees, unobstructed by buildings, the near horizon backlit by clear skies as temperatures bumped up into the 80s—a perfect day for winter golf in the desert.   Brady shared some background on the course, which was built by Landscapes Unlimited, the premier course builder in the US, with an essentially unlimited budget.   There are reports that the course alone cost around fifty million dollars, and that was before the clubhouse was built.  No stand-alone course costing that much could possible operate profitably.

The basic cost to build a golf course doesn’t vary much, because you need 18 holes with greens and tees and hazards, with an irrigation system to keep 70 acres or so green, no matter what.   The two big variables affecting cost are how much earth you move and how fancy you get with landscaping and other amenities.   At the Classic Club, according to architect Vicki Martz from Palmer Design, they moved three million cubic yards, which is a big number, and then constructed some elaborate water features before planting thousands of trees, in keeping with the trend started by Steve Wynn with Shadow Creek in Las Vegas to make desert courses look and feel as if they were imported wholesale from North Carolina.   In addition to its elaborate landscaping, the course was fitted with underground cables and other high-tech communications gear to make televising the event easier.   This infrastructure investment is now in every sense of the word a sunken cost that cannot be recovered.

The design also provided plenty of room for galleries to circulate, which is part of why the Classic has such an open, accommodating feel.  The huge clubhouse, too, was built to accommodate the tournament, so it’s much larger than a daily fee course built as a would ever need or could justify.

When Hope Was Alive at the Classic Club

The funds to build the Classic Club were provided by the H.N. & Frances C. Berger Foundation.   The completed course was formally gifted to the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic in January 2005.   Since the Hope, too, was dedicated to charity work in the Coachella Valley, providing it with a world-class venue seemed a good fit for the Berger Foundation.   Then the wind kicked up, desiccating the players’ egos, and the course lost its luster.  Golf.com referred to the course as “the hated, ultra-windy Classic Club,” and noted that after Phil Mickelson shot “a wind-blown final-round 78 there in 2007,” he stopped coming.  The final round scoring average of 74.763 in 2007 was the highest in tournament history.  Not one player had a bogey-free round.

When Mickelson stopped playing the Hope, the Hope—now called the Humana, and hosted by President Bill Clinton—stopped playing at the Classic Club.  In 2008, the tournament re-gifted the Classic Club back to the Berger Foundation, so the players could resume their painless, low-scoring annual paid holiday in the desert.

The Classic Club still honors its charitable purposes, with 7,000 of the annual 37,000 rounds played there contributed to local non-profits for fundraising events.  The course was in wonderful condition, the staff was welcoming, and the lakes yielded seven ProV1s, earning my coveted BallHawker Five Star rating.   I thought the course, the setting, the ambience and the conditioning were all first rate, and recommend the Classic Club as an exceptional daily fee experience.

Rating the Classic Club

Pro Shop and Staff        A

Range                                A

Conditioning                  A

Course Layout               A

Ball Hawking                 Five Stars–clear water, gently sloping lake edges, ideal retrieving conditions.

Classic Club

Indian Wells.

Indian Wells Golf Resort

Anthony Holder is the Head Golf Professional at the Indian Wells Golf Resort, where the Golf Road Warriors played on Saturday, February 25, the penultimate day of the Warriors’ 2012 Palm Springs swing.  Anthony joined the Warriors for our round at Indian Wells’ Players Course, and it was my good fortune to share a cart with him.   Not only did I get to witness some exceptionally fine golf, with booming tee shots and tap-in birdies, I also got a tip on putting after I missed a four foot birdie putt with a flinched, shoulders-flailing, head-waving bunt of a failed stroke that was so unnerving to Anthony’s sense of professional pride that he could not have in good conscience declined to give me some help.  It would have been like a physician refusing to perform the Heimlich on a choking diner in a restaurant. 

Facing me on the green, Anthony told me to set up as if to putt, then reached out with both hands to hold my head still.   As I initiated the stroke, I could feel my head pushing against his right hand like a frisky puppy on a short leash.  “Keep your head still,” he said, kindly.  “Just pick out a dimple on the ball and keep all your attention there while the putter head strokes the ball.” 

It worked, of course.   Every putting tip works the first time you try it, just like a new putter, but this was an order of magnitude level of improvement over my previous “technique.”  Deep down I think I knew that if you swayed and jabbed at the ball with the blade open while looking at the tree tops you were probably not going to make a lot of putts, but Anthony’s tip confirmed that there was in fact an alternative approach.   Feeling confident on the greens provided a perfect complement to what turned out to be another ideal day for golf in the Coachella Valley.    

We checked out of the Hyatt Grand Champions at Indian Wells around 8:00, and then managed to make the thirty second drive to the IW Club in our rental van without incident or recourse to the GPS.    

The IW Club is the same impressive facility where I was filmed getting fitted for Callaway clubs earlier in the week, but this morning was all about actually playing golf on what the resort’s website describes as “the only facility in California with two courses ranked in the Top 20 ‘Best Courses You Can Play’ in California by Golfweek Magazine.”    The Players Course is a re-design by John Fought that opened in 2007.

Joe Williams, Indian Wells’ Director of Golf, greeted us when we arrived, and made sure all eight players in our group—the four Warriors, three staff members from the organizers of our Palm Springs escapades, the Palm Springs Convention and Visitors Authority, and Holder—had everything we needed to enjoy a round of golf.  Joe set the tone that would prevail throughout the day.   Every employee we met—the starters, the rangers, the beverage folks, the cart staff—was friendly, eager to assist and expressed the hope that we were having a good time.  We were.

Anthony and I had time between shots to discuss the state of the golf industry, which he, as a 29 year old professional, sees from a vantage point quite unlike my own.   Throughout most of my career in golf, the game was growing, but for nearly half of Anthony’s career, dating from the late fall of 2007, the industry has been contracting.    Indian Wells does very well—82,000 rounds per year on 36 holes—but it has consistently invested in its facilities and thought long and hard about how to provide its customers with an experience that will make them want to come back for more.

The course itself was terrific, and had at times almost a Northwest feel, which should not come as a surprise given that course architect John Fought grew up in Portland and cut his designer’s teeth on two clubs, Pumpkin Ridge and The Reserve, which emphasize a strategic approach.  There are optional ways to play most holes at the Players, and great variety in the length and difficulty overall.  Of the Resort’s two courses, the Players is considered a bit more challenging that the Celebrity.

Anthony and I agreed that golf is expensive and time-consuming, which inhibits the growth of the game.   Indian Wells has come up with a splendid program to address these challenges, which I hope the industry will adopt, called “Walk the Wells.”   After 3:30 every day, Anthony told me, the course is open to anyone who wants to walk and play as many holes as he or she can get in before dark for $25.00.   It’s especially attractive to kids and to older golfers, who can get in a bit of exercise, too, as they work on their games.  There’s a smart phone pedometer app as well.  This is also a great program for working people, who can get in at least some holes after clocking out from the shop or office.   Finding a way to keep the courses full later in the day takes real imagination.

We also discussed my pet peeve, slow play.   How can we find ways to incentivize players to keep up the pace of play?   Again, Anthony had a great idea: for every minute players finish faster than the course’s stated ideal time, they can get a 1% discount off of their next green fee, or on merchandise in the pro shop.  The real problem with any golf incentive system, of course, is that you can only control your own pace of play, and not that of those slow knuckleheads in front of you.   But if we build strong enough incentives into the system, the other members of the foursome should be able to persuade their tardy members to pick it up.   If you’re going to keep me from getting my 20% discount, I am going to say something.

The golf industry is lucky to have people such as Anthony Holder ready to take leadership roles in creating the golf experience for the 21^st century.   Golf is a delightful game, with intrinsic rewards: friendship, exercise, the pleasure of accomplishing something difficult, like sinking an eight foot putt to win your match.   Anthony seems to have some good luck riding with him, too.   Last April, playing in a fund-raiser for Cal State San Bernardino at Tom Doak’s Stone Eagle Golf Club in Palm Desert, Anthony made a hole-in-one on the 7^th hole, a 218 yard downhill par three—and won a Mercedes-Benz C300.    

If we’re going to keep golf relevant in the recreational lives of future generations, we’re going to need the creative thinking of people such as Anthony Holder and Joe Williams at Indian Wells, of Brady Wilson at the Classic Club, and of Brett Meabon and Colin Gooch at Marriott’s Shadow Ridge.  The talented array of golf professionals leading the industry in the Coachella Valley, one of the most influential and important golf destinations in the world, instinctively understand that the game will not survive and grow on its own.   Ideas incubated in the heat of the desert may show the way forward to an industry that is struggling to find its future.

Golf's Midcentury Modern. Ted Robinson's Palms Course at the Desert Springs Resort

The Clean Uncluttered Lines of Midcentury Modern

The Palm Springs Golf Road Warriors bivouacked at the JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa tonight, resting before they launch their assault on the Coachella Valley’s golf courses tomorrow.   Jeff Wallach and I did some early reconnaissance today at the Desert Springs Resort’s Palms Course, designed by the late Ted Robinson in the mid-1980s.   The course has all of the characteristics of Robinson’s style, most notably the hard serrated-edged lakes (in abundance, but rarely strategically placed) and side-walled fairways that invite the use of the driver by shaping slightly mishit drives back toward the center.  The course was in wonderful condition, reflecting Robinson’s preference for minimal rough and long, elegant shapes to the fairways.   The over-seeded ryegrass glowed in the afternoon sun.

Wallach and I were joined by John Faulk, Desert Springs’ Director of Golf, who oversaw a refurbishing of the Palms course last year by Ted Robinson, Jr., for a 9-hole tune-up before our comrades arrived.   John is a crafty lefty with a tidy game who amiably declined to offer Jeff or me any advice on our swings.  A long-time Marriott Golf pro, John worked for a time at Marriott’s Camelback Resort in Scottsdale, which I believe was Marriott’s first golf resort.   Many top club and resort golf professionals throughout the United States honed their craft at Camelback.  Scott Mallory, who is Director of Golf at the Hills & Forrest-designed course in Temecula at the Pechanga Resort and Casino, worked with John in the 80s at Camelback.

Jeff didn’t need any help.   We had five bucks riding on our match.  I lost 5-4, and it wasn’t that close.  Wallach hit every fairway with that new Callaway RAZR Fit driver, and while my tee shots were nothing to sneer at, I couldn’t seem to finish a swing with my irons and flared every shot off to the right, a kind of weak pseudo-fade.  It’s never a good idea to get in a back bunker on a Robinson course, either, because there is more than likely a lake lurking on the other side of the green, just waiting to welcome any thin bunker shot.  

This week, Palm Springs is celebrating Midcentury Modern architecture in addition to the official visit of the Golf Road Warriors.   This architectural style “was known for its clean lines and blending of indoor and outdoor spaces,” according to local writer Monica Hodge.  Palm Springs has one of the largest concentrations of Midcentury Modern homes and buildings in the US.   It struck me in looking at examples of Midcentury Modern buildings that the term could equally well apply to Ted Robinson’s course designs, which share its aesthetic tenets.   Robinson’s lines, too, are clean and easy to read, and the courses blend well with their settings.  There is an admirable restraint in their ambitions.   Just as the accomplishments of the Midcentury Modern architects appeal to an appreciative public worn out by the excesses of the past couple of decades, so too does the pure uncomplicated style of Ted Robinson’s golf courses satisfy the needs of the vacationing golfer.

A twenty-five inch Travelpro MaxLite 2 Expandable Spinner

Willie Nelson’s anthem keeps cycling through my brain as I wrap up my preparations for the Golf Road Warriors’ trip to Palm Springs next week, February 21-27.  “I just can’t wait to get on the road again!”  

I’m not unaccustomed to traveling, but most of my journeys over the last twenty years have been strictly for business.  I’ve flown a couple of million miles, but  I haven’t felt so excited and eager about anything since I was getting ready to play in my first youth league basketball game when I was ten.   I wore my uniform to bed for a week, and dreamed of how high I would jump in my new Converse Chuck Taylor All Star kicks.  

I haven’t actually slept in my AUR shirts, fashioned from EcoSmart fabrics made from recycled plastic bottles, but I thought about it.  I did show the shirts to my next door neighbor, the Happiest Man on Earth, who is a nationally recognized expert in recycling, and he fondled the fabric a bit and pronounced it good.  The shirts are incredibly light, which should allow the old muscles to swing with that graceful tempo that characterizes all–most, some, a few, both–of my best shots.

The golf bag Callaway sent has been loaded with my RAZR irons and hybrids, which I got last summer in Portland after a fitting session with my friend and teacher, Don Otto, and they’re joined now by my new RAZR Fit driver, which Callaway also kindly provided, and which I discovered in two practice outings that I hit almost as well as Phil Mickelson hits his.  The driver looms over the rest of my clubs, which is only fair as it covers the most ground on almost every hole.   It’s the big dog in my bag, and I expect it to do some serious hunting next week.

I'm Packing....

Since I will be checking my own clubs on the flight down, so I will be able to play at my splendid best in Palm Springs, I am also going to be traveling with the wonderful new Travelpro suitcase that is the official luggage of the Golf Road Warriors.   (Most of the rounds I have played on the road over the last couple of decades I’ve used rental clubs, since I never check bags on business trips.   If you’re flying almost every day and the bag gets lost on the first leg, it never catches up.  I once had a bag follow me from Spain to Norway to Ireland and then finally to San Francisco, and I wish I had given it a dairy so it could have told me whether or not it had a good trip.)

The Travelpro bag is a deep, almost iridescent blue, a really classy color that will stand out amidst all the tedious generic black bags coursing around the luggage kiosk.   I am going to be on the road for almost another full week after the Road Warriors wrap up their Palm Springs trip, so I will need to pack for six full days of golf plus another six days of a conference and meetings, which means I have to pack business attire as well as the golf duds.   There’s plenty of room in that A twenty-five inch Travelpro MaxLite 2 Expandable Spinner.

The world’s leading authority on getting ready for a golf road trip is, of course, my colleague, Jeff Wallach, so I have been studying his compendium of golf travel packing tips to make sure I have everything I need.  (Or, alternatively, knowing that Jeff has all the necessary first aid gear and legal drugs for aches and pains, I can plan on mooching off Jeff.)   Jeff has also been getting in my pocket over the last couple of years, somehow breaking 80 with that lunging slap shot he’s perfected while my smooth-as-silk swings are for some mysterious reason sending balls into oblivion.   This is the mystery I expect to solve in Palm Springs.

Another prominent practitioner of this new approach to economics is Richard Thaler, who wrote an OpEd piece in the NY Times on Valentine’s Day outlining how strategies based on positive reinforcement—versions of incentives—can produce real changes in people’s behavior.   One example Thaler describes is from New Taipei City in Taiwan, which faced the universal problem of dog owners not cleaning up after their pets.  “Owners who deposited dog waste into a special depository were made eligible for a lottery to win gold ingots,” Thaler wrote.  This “halved the fecal pollution.”

Thaler’s overall approach to governing is what he calls libertarian paternalism.   The libertarian part means people “should be free to do what they like.”    The theory underlying the paternalism part maintains that it’s OK for governments or companies to “try to influence people’s behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier and better.”

So that brings me to golf and the curse of slow play.  Recently I was playing in Portland on a public course while we were enjoying a rare stretch of spring weather in January.   We play golf because it’s (mostly) fun, and because it’s a chance to spend time with friends and enjoy the aesthetic contentment of a day in a park.   But when the pace of play collapses into a pattern of hit and wait, the joy of golf is quickly sapped.   And that’s what happened to us that wonderful January day.   There were three guys in front of us who were clueless, taking endless practice swings before dribbling their Top Flights down the fairway, and then upon finally reaching the green, conducting putting rituals elaborate enough to make Ben Crane antsy.

By the seventh hole, we were all grousing and distracted and decided to quit after nine.   What should have been a really pleasant day instead was a disappointment, and all because the group in front of us had no idea that keeping up a reasonable pace of play is a part of golf’s etiquette.

At the PGA Show this year, an initiative to staunch golf’s decline called Golf 2.0 was launched.  (Gene Yasuda wrote an excellent piece on Golf 2.0 in the January 27^th issue of Golfweek.)  Guided by research by Boston Consulting, Golf 2.0 is supposed to “retain core golfers, re-engage those who have left and create new players.”   Exactly how it’s going to do this is vague, but it seems to me that unless it addresses the underlying experience of golf—not just customer service in the pro shop, but how a typical round goes for the average golfer—Golf 2.0 is not likely to succeed.

A REMEDY FOR SLOW PLAY

Slow play is a deadly enemy of golf’s growth.   We already know that golf is a time eater, which is why the demographic is skewed toward older players.  But can we learn something from the approach of Levitt and Thaler and their colleagues that will help address the issue of slow play?   Are there other components of the golf experience that could be improved by providing incentives?

What if we put players on an actual clock when they started their rounds, and if they finished in four hours they could put their ticket into a lottery box for a weekly drawing for a free round.  An approach like this could help operators, too, because a faster pace of play means more rounds, and more rounds means more revenue.   Courses with a reputation for speedy play would attract more players, too.  Course operators are like produce dealers—their goods are perishable.  A tee-time not sold is permanently lost.

A CONTEST TO DISCOVER INCENTIVES FOR IMPROVING THE GOLF EXPERIENCE

What about taking care of the course?   Is there some way to encourage players to repair divots or ball-marks with incentives?  Could players take pictures with their smart phones of repaired ball marks to earn their way into a lottery?

In the spirit of incentives, let me start a contest here.   Send me your idea for an incentive that could improve the golf experience to me via email to john@johnstrawn.com.   I will discuss the suggestions in a future post and send the author of the one I like best a signed copy of “Driving the Green.”