A recent article in China Daily USA reports that only the rich play golf in China.   Chinese golf is certainly elitist, keeping with the Chinese tradition of preserving luxury goods for the emperor and his circle.  That’s part of golf’s attraction to young people, who flood the annual golf shows in Guangzhou and Beijing—they aspire to a lifestyle that includes playing golf.  Membership fees at Chinese golf clubs—and there are no daily fee courses in China, both for economic and cultural reasons— range from 100,000 to 1.7 million Yuan, or in US dollars, between $15,685 and $266,650.  And this in a country with an average per capita income of $4,400, compared to the US’s $46,860.

One avid Chinese golfer, described in the China Daily story as a Beijing businessman who plays golf every day and spends $15,640 annually to support his habit, called golf “green opium,” linking it to another famous addiction introduced to China by the West.   Britain’s opium smuggling from India led to the world’s first drug wars, the 19^th century Opium Wars.   American merchants were also complicit in this trade.   These original narcotraficantes’ ruthless disregard for the Chinese peoples’ well-being was equal to the contempt any Mexican or Colombian drug lord holds for the gringos.

The Original Chinese Golfer? The Ming Emperor Xuande, 15th Century.

Now China’s emperor is called the Premier, and he’s no longer born into the job.  The premier’s courtiers–the inner circle of the ruling Communist party–play golf.  There is a tight link in China, despite its official adherence to communism, between wealth, privilege and political power.   The government’s policies since 2004 have officially circumscribed golf’s development, in order to preserve farm land and water.   But this official moratorium by the State Council was ignored until the summer of 2011, when, as the China Daily article puts it, “11 Chinese ministries collectively ordered new checks on all golf courses to prevent illegal land use and seizure and to ensure no loss of farmland in China.”

Enforcing the moratorium has had a powerful effect on the group of western golf course architects, project managers, course operators and others who have a stake in China’s golf industry.   The collapse of the US real estate market had already vitiated the demand for their services at home.   China is without question the most powerful developing market in golf, and the uncertainty over its future is very worrisome to industry insiders, among whom I include myself.

1493 helped me understand how China’s golf scene fits into larger patterns of Chinese politics and history.   I’ve wondered why, if there really was a moratorium in place since 2004, our clients in the provinces tended to pay it little heed.   It’s partly because China is a culturally complex country, where conflicts between the capital and the provinces are historically endemic.  Local leaders in Fujian province, or in Yunnan or Sichuan or Guangdong, have always tried to trick the big boys in Beijing.

Two years ago I was riding from the city center of Chengdu toward a site where our client intended to develop a large real estate project with 36 holes of golf.   Chengdu is the capital and most important city in Sichuan province, a region admired throughout China for its natural beauty and cuisine.   Giant pandas are native to the bamboo forests along the mountain slopes in western Sichuan.

As we were driving south, I noticed a complex of buildings that looked sort of like the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing, but on an even grander scale.  There were a number of linked buildings nestled within elaborately landscaped grounds, but no evidence of any activity going on in any of them.   I asked our client what these buildings were, and got a wan, wry smile in reply.

Sichuan province, you’ll recall, had a terrible earthquake in the spring of 2008.    The epicenter was about 80 kilometers northwest of Chengdu, but the quake was felt as far away as Beijing.   Schools collapsed, and thousands of children were killed, which led to charges of corruption against the officials in charge of building the classrooms.  More than 70,000 people were killed and millions left homeless.   Premier Wen Jiabao came down from Beijing to assess the damage and assist in guiding the rescue operations.  And here’s where the new building complex comes back into the picture.

This was the new administrative headquarters for the party and the municipal government.  Designed by the French architect Paul Andreu, who also designed the new opera house in Beijing, the complex reportedly cost $180 million.  A new “Technology and Science Enterprising Center” was also part of the complex.  In the context of millions of people left homeless by the earthquake, coupled with intense public criticism over shoddy construction practices having contributed to the loss of life, the big cheeses from Beijing ordered the Sichuanese to get rid of these new buildings.    Local officials announced that they would sell them.   That’s why they were sitting empty a year later.   But according to a BBC report in the spring of this year, the buildings have not been sold.    As Charles Mann demonstrates in 1493, that’s a typical narrative in China.  Orders come down from Beijing, local officials announce their capitulation, and then nothing more happens.

“In the feud- and faction-ridden Ming court,” Mann writes, referring to the period between 1368 and 1644, when China first encountered western traders arriving by sea, “government policies were often accidental by-products of ministerial intrigues, enacted with little regard for their actual effects.”   Echoes of these Ming policies reverberate off the walls today in Zhongnanhai, the Beijing neighborhood where the present government is headquartered.

Mann writes about the wonderfully convoluted trade practices that evolved among Chinese and European merchants, for example, especially the relationship between Fujianese and Spanish traders through the port of Manila in the Philippines.   The emperors wanted a monopoly on trade, just as the current government preserves its monopoly on land.   But the policies prohibiting trade didn’t work for the emperors, and the current land policies have created a giant headache for the central government.

Throughout it all, the qualities that have made China preeminent in so many arenas, whatever the shifts in regimes or policies, shine through.   Our tendency to think of Chinese manufacturers producing products for the global economy as something unique to the post-Mao era is misplaced, as Mann makes clear.   The Chinese in the Philippines were restricted to a ghetto adjacent to Manila called the Parián.  “Parián artisans and merchants…”—most from Fujian province, Mann notes—“sold the Spaniards everything from roof tiles to marble statues of baby Jesus—‘much prettier articles than are made in Spain,’” noted a Spanish clergyman in Manila, “and sometimes so cheap that I am ashamed to mention it.”

Chinese tailors were also making “perfect knockoffs of the latest European styles.”   The Europeans then tried to abolish trade in finished goods, wanting only the cloth—rehearsing disputes that would echo in modern trade agreements.

Mann also describes how the introduction of American crops—particularly the sweet potato, maize, and tobacco—radically transformed the Chinese countryside.  Vast new regions of Sichuan, for example, which is described prior to the end of the 18^th century as a “big, empty place,” were settled.  Just as the potato facilitated a population boom in Ireland, with tragic consequences, the American crops introduced to China instigated a series of transformations that ruptured the Emperor’s control over the provinces.  Forests cleared to grow tobacco, even though the crop was officially prohibited, resulted in shortages of rice and inflated food prices.   Hungry people will fight to survive, and rebellions against imperial authority punctuate China’s history.   China’s current rulers obsess over food security.   There is a direct link between the government’s commitment to low food prices and its complicated attitude toward golf development.

Tulou in Fujian

There isn’t space to review all of Mann’s analysis here, but I recommend that anyone with an interest in China’s economy—and especially people in the golf business—pick up a copy of 1493.   Pay close attention to “Part Two: Pacific Journeys.”   Among the episodes of Chinese history recounted in 1493 is the tale of the Hakka people after the introduction of American crops to China.    The Hakka historically practiced slash and burn agriculture on hilly, marginal land in southern China, occupying parts of Jiangxi, Fujian, Guangdong, and Hainan Provinces.  They lived collectively in large, round, well-defended structures called tulou.   They quickly adopted tobacco as a cash crop, contributing to the crisis described above.  The environmental effects of the deforestation practices following the introduction of tobacco are still in evidence in southern China.

The new Mission Hills golf resort on Hainan Island is one of China’s grandest golf developments, following on the success of the original Mission Hills in Shenzhen.   There are ten new courses designed by Schmidt-Curley, along with villas, hotels and spa.   It’s a grand complex, the equal or better of any golf resort in the world.   And one of the architectural themes at Mission Hills Haikou is a tribute to the tulou.   Guests with a view from the upper floors of the hotel toward the south will see the rounded walls of a large faux-tulou.   Merging an ancient Chinese architectural style with the grandiose amenities of a modern golf resort, Mission Hills’ version of the tulou expresses a typically contemporary Chinese affection for the ancient and enduring leavened with the allure of foreign luxuries.

The Laurel and Hardy of American Politics

Too Big to Fail?

Piers Morgan asked the well-known political analyst Brooke Shields if she thought an overweight person could be elected president, given our well-known obsession with slender celebrities.  (To give Shields credit, she found the question sad and perplexing.)  The whole enquiry expresses a paradox in American culture: the fatter the people get, the skinnier we expect our idols to be.   This is a corollary of the curious belief among people earning fewer than fifty thousand dollars a year that they will somehow benefit from tax breaks for the rich.

Michael Kinsley of Bloomberg Views was viciously blunt about Christie’s chances: “Christie cannot be president: He is just too fat. Maybe, if he runs for president and we get to know him, we will overlook this awkward issue because we are so impressed with the way he stands up to teachers’ unions. But we shouldn’t overlook it–unless he goes on a diet and shows he can stick to it.”

But we’ve had fat presidents, some even elected to more than one term.  Grover Cleveland, although a New York resident when he was elected to his two non-consecutive terms as president, was a New Jersey native with a build similar to Christie’s.    Both William McKinley, whose term was brief because he was assassinated, and his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, were bulky men, although Roosevelt was also famously fit.

The fattest of them all, however, was William Howard Taft—also the only president to also serve on the Supreme Court.   Taft weighed well over 300 pounds when he was in the White House.   Taft was also our first presidential golfer, playing twice a week.  Roosevelt is said to have despised Taft’s golfing hobby, even though there were rumors that TR himself had a secret golfing habit.

President Taft's Pure Putting Stroke

Portland physician Jim Puterbaugh, whose brother is the well-known teaching pro from San Diego’s Aviara Golf Academy, Kip Puterbaugh, recently published an article about the health benefits of walking 18 holes, especially if you carry your clubs.  (He also denounces golf carts as health hazards.)   According to Puterbaugh’s research, as reported in Golf, Inc., if Christie were to walk two rounds a week, he would “easily meet the exercise recommended by the cardiovascular model.”

It Breaks to the Left

We have a slender president now, of course, who is also a golfer, although like Roosevelt, President Obama has tended to play his rounds under the radar.   His famously public golf summit with House Speaker John Boehner, VP Joe Biden and Ohio governor John Kasich during the battle over the debt ceiling had the political impact of a Justin Bieber concert, but at least it put golf on the front page for a day.

So maybe in his well-known spirit of political reconciliation and compromise, Obama should offer to introduce Christie to golf and get him walking on the links, a bipartisan approach to solving one small healthcare problem.   They might look like the second coming of Laurel and Hardy, but Obama and Christie together might also inspire a healthier approach to political dialogue.

Now, the reigning US Open champion owns a practice complex to rival Harrington’s.   And the link between these two great Irish golfers and their practice facilities is a Dublin company called Turfgrass Consultancy, which built and maintains these state-of-the-art practice grounds.

John Clarkin and Rory McIlroy on the Practice Ground That Helped Conquer Congressional

Harrington’s practice area was finished about eight years ago, though it’s been remodeled and added to since.   Harrington had a green built in imitation of the 13^th at Carnoustie, with a severe slope running off the back.  “The harder the shot, the happier Padraig is,” says John Clarkin, founder of Turfgrass Consultancy (“TC”) and the first Irish graduate of Penn State University’s Turfgrass Management Program.   Perhaps Harrington had a premonition, or perhaps playing thousands of shots around that practice green gave him a psychological edge, but whatever the reason it’s perhaps not surprising that Harrington’s breakthrough major championship came in the 2007 Open—at Carnoustie.

The main green at Harrington’s is used only for chipping and putting.  No full shot carrying the vicious spin imparted by a top professional’s swing ever gouges a lesion onto Harrington’s green.   It’s kept smooth and flawless, and can be maintained at Stimp speeds up to 14.  “When Padraig does hit a shot toward that green,” Clarkin notes, “he always lands it on the fringe.  Always.”

A fairway for practice with longer clubs complements the short game area.  Harrington can hone in his distance at precisely calibrated targets.  A teeing ground built at an angle across the edge of his house allows him to pound drives into an adjacent field.  Harrington has never nicked the house, Clarkin says, although a mortal golfer surely would.

McIlroy moved into his new house in August of 2009 and commissioned Turfgrass Consultancy to commence construction of his practice grounds in March of 2010.  They were ready for use by the time Rory returned from this year’s first major at Augusta National.   McIlroy already had a design in hand of his own making, Clarkin says, but Turfgrass Consultancy suggested additional features to Rory’s liking.  “The links bunker was added,” said Clarkin, referring to the deep bunker Rory can be seen hitting bunker shots from on a BBC report filmed there in June.  McIlroy wanted as tough a practice test as any championship golf can provide, which would have to include the pot bunker from the 17th at St. Andrews.   “While the Road Hole bunker is about six feet deep, that bunker is seven feet and you can’t really see where the ball ends up.  Rory would need his dad stand on the green and report to him back down in the bunker on where his shots were landing,” Clarkin joked.

Rory's Road Hole and Practice Pitch

Rory asked TC to build three “holes”: one provides a downhill shot from 170 yards; a second is a 120 yard shot from a flat lie; and the last 110 yards from an uphill lie.  The target greens for these holes are in addition to the main practice green, which was designed to allow TC to replicate conditions on championship courses from all around the world.  The grass on the green surfaces is a mix of creeping bentgrasses and poa annua reptans, a cultivar cousin of the poa annua annual bluegrass that is variously treated as a pesky weed or accepted with a sigh by greenkeepers in cool climates everywhere as part of the family of grasses growing on their greens. This is the same grass that can be found on the greens at Pebble Beach.

The collars and approaches on two of the greens are fescue, while the others have a mix of creeping bentgrass and ryegrass, enabling TC to prepare a practice ground “for every turf type imaginable—excepting Bermuda, of course.”

TC built Rory’s greens according to USGA specs and installed SubAir systems to make sure the greens remain dry and firm, given that  it does rain a bit in Northern Ireland. “The main green is about 650 square meters,” Clarkin says, which is an average green size on a tournament course.  “The other three greens range from 250 to 300 square meters.”

Greens can be fast without necessarily being firm, Clarkin says.   McIlroy wanted to practice on greens with the firmness of Augusta National’s famously taut putting surfaces, where the ball lands with a distinctive ring tone that distinguishes a firm green’s sound from the gushy plop a soft green makes.

In preparation for the US Open at Congressional,  TC had Rory’s greens “close to 12” on the Stimpmeter.   “And we can go to 14 or back down to 12 or 11 pretty quickly.”

“It may have cost him hundreds of thousands of pounds,” the BBC reported, “but McIlroy admits this unique golf range has given him an extra edge and shows his commitment to Northern Ireland as a base.”

“To have a practice facility at the back of my own house is incredible,” McIlroy said.  “It was done as an investment in my future.   Since I got it built I have won my first major, so it has paid for itself already.  It is a long-term commitment to Northern Ireland, I see myself always living here.  It would be a shame to leave it, you couldn’t do it anywhere else.”

In getting ready for the Opens, McIlroy told the BBC, “I can ring up the USGA or the R&A and say, ‘what speed are the greens going to be?’  And they’re going to say, ‘we’re going to try to get them at 10.5,’ so I can say to the guys, ‘I want them at 10.5 for the next two weeks,’ and I can prepare just like I was there, really.”

The key to maintaining consistent Stimp speeds, Clarkin says, does not depend on the height of the cut, but rather on a regimen of both cutting and rolling the greens on a frequent and regular basis.  “Whether they are rolling 11 or 14, we’re mowing at the same height, but to get them really fast we’re rolling often. Topdressing and using the Subair will help to increase speed, too”

TC has two full-time staff on site at McIlroy’s practice ground, and a full complement of equipment to maintain the greens, the fairways, the collars and rough and the bunkers.  The Road Hole bunker has sand from Portrush, McIlroy told the BBC film crew.   The other bunkers, Clarkin says, have either the type of sand the USGA typically wants in the bunkers on its championship courses—a firm sand with particle sizes that resist buried lies and drains well—or the local “rabbit” sand, a finer grained type often found on Irish links courses that is incredibly firm because its small particle sizes pack easily but can make hitting heavy explosion shots risky.

Clarkin, whose grandfather was Lord Mayor of Dublin, consults on new course projects and course preparation for championships around the world.  He was an agronomic advisor to the Robert Trent Jones II design team at Chambers Bay, the publicly-owned links course in Washington State which will host the US Open in 2015.   McIlroy calls Clarkin “The Gardener,” pleased with the work of the man whose company has helped McIlroy prepare for his ascent to the summit of the golfing world.

Many American touring professional golfers live in Texas and Florida and elsewhere in the Sun Belt, where tax laws are more attractive and there is the promise of year-round outdoor living.   But fewer varieties of grass can grow in warm climates, and the so-called “warm season grasses” have different playing characteristics from the fescues and bents and ryegrasses which flourish in cooler climates.   Bermuda greens are grainy, bermuda fairway lies are spongy and the rough can grow as bristly as a wire brush.   Practicing on warm weather grasses may be putting the players who live in the southern USA at a disadvantage.   Unlike McIlroy and Harrington (and Graeme McDowell and Darren Clarke), the Americans practice on turf quite unlike the surfaces they will be competing on in championships.

Despite its northern latitude, the climate of Ireland closely resembles that of the Pacific Northwest, where similar grass types flourish.  Oregon, in fact, has long been the center of the grass seed industry in the US, and the creeping bentgrasses and fescues on thousands of golf courses started as seed in a Willamette Valley farm field.  Belfast is at 54 degrees latitude, slightly north of Edmonton, Alberta.   But the moderating effect of the ocean currents off its coast provides Ireland with a relatively mild winter season compared to inland Canadian cities on the same latitude.

On a typical winter day in Ireland (although there’s never been a typical day in Ireland), the temperature will be in the 40s, much as it is that time of year in Portland, Oregon, which is just north of the 45^th parallel.  (For those of you who are geographically challenged, the distance from the 45th parallel to the 54th is around 550 miles.)    Belfast’s average rainfall is 34 inches—again, comparable to famously rainy Portland’s 35, but much less than Miami’s 55 inches or Houston’s 53.   But the mild persistent rains in Oregon and Ireland provide the green and embracing landscape that its residents love—and the perfect conditions for growing turf grass.  The players who winter in Ireland, choosing to be among their friends and family, may have a distinct advantage in preparing for the next season because they can practice on turf and greens exactly like what they will find on the championship courses in the US and Great Britain.

The Swinger

The roman à clef is a kind of literary push poll.  Joe Klein’s Primary Colors was a roman à clef, skewering an imaginary Bill Clinton on the campaign trail, while Robert Harris’ The Ghost, the basis for the film “The Ghostwriter,” was the literary evisceration of a fictional British Prime Minister addicted to deceit which was clearly based on Tony Blair.

If you don’t want to know what happens in the The Swinger, stop reading now.  I don’t know how to review this book without giving away the plot.

OK

We have in The Swinger a coded version of Tiger Woods’ life post-scandal, courtesy of two of Sports Illustrated’s finest golf writers, Michael Bamberger and Alan Shipnuck.   Naming the main character  “Herbert X. ‘Tree’ Tremont” signals to readers that their imaginations will not be taxed by trying to break The Swinger’s code. Tree is a mixed-race golfing prodigy with multiple majors won, an income north of one hundred million a year, and a gorgeous Italian wife named Belinda.  He has a taciturn caddy from overseas (a Scot, not a Kiwi), an arrogant lawyer as an agent, and sponsorship by an apparel company with an eccentrically exuberant boss.

We’re left to guess what the “X” stands for, but on my scorecard, an X means surrender.   No echoes of Malcolm X and his repudiation of slave names sound in the deliberately race-neutral sagas of either Tiger Woods or Tree Tremont, but a hint of Mandingo lurks in The Swinger’s description of Tree.

“Even from two hundred yards away, Tree Tremont was an unmistakable figure.  He was built like a martini glass, with powerful shoulders and a chest tapering to a thirty-inch waist, all of it accentuated by his tight European-cut clothing that Belinda hand-picked for him, as Tree liked to remind reporters…Tree’s stride radiated athleticism, confidence, superiority.   There was something virile about his presence, certainly for women but for men, too.”

The narrator gushing thus about Tree is Joshua Dutra, a Florida-based sportswriter.   The conceit of the novel is that Dutra gets hired by the Tremont brain trust to help guide Tree through the aftermath of a tabloid’s discovery that he is not the upstanding family man his PR machine has claimed, but rather a sex-addicted narcissist who lies to his wife as readily as he intimidates his rivals.

There is a Phil Mickelson character in The Swinger called “Will Martinsen.”   He is, no surprise, Tree’s biggest rival.    “Big Herb”—Herbert X. Tremont, Senior—stands in for Earl Woods.  Some golfers appear in the novel under their real names, echoing a favorite technique in the fiction of E. L. Doctorow— Zach Johnson, Jack Nicklaus, Corey Pavin and Luke Donald are among the famous players making cameo appearances as themselves.   This pumps up the verisimilitude while providing a virtuous counterpoint to Tree’s scandalous conduct.

The sportswriter/narrator’s first person account provides an insider’s view of Tree’s self-inflicted wounds and self-destructive fall.   Dutra even accompanies Tree to his stint in rehab for sex-addiction therapy.    Tree is also hooked on a variety of pain-killers and performance enhancers.   He is not a sympathetic guy, with his yachts and his sycophants and his lies.

Then something curious happens.  Tree and Dutra’s business relationship somehow segues into something resembling friendship, and Tree’s rehab succeeds.   His therapist is drawn with sympathy and grace, and an Oprah episode breaks out on a Jerry Springer stage.   The vinegar turns to syrup, and the narrative abandons anger and parody for the sweet prospect of redemption.

The Swinger is fun to read, even after it takes its earnest turn and stops dishing dirt.    As with all successful romans à clef, it keeps the reader on his toes, looking for plausible clues about what Bamberger and Shipnuck must really know that lies hidden behind the burlesque.    If pro golfers were readers, The Swinger would surely find a receptive audience among them.

But  as much as I enjoyed The Swinger, I found this counter-version of Tiger’s life—and especially one that ends with the Tree character turning into a nice guy, a kind of St Augustine of the links—as incomprehensible as the true story of Tiger Woods’ fall from grace.

JS

Michael Bamberger and Alan Shipnuck, The Swinger.  Simon and Shuster, July, 2011.  254 pp, $25.00.

As I wrote on Friday and Saturday, McIlroy’s composure after his Masters’ disaster, his courage in facing up to the questions about his performance, his insistence that he would learn from the collapse, presaged this performance for the ages.   Not only did he shoot four rounds in the 60s on a long, strong golf course, matching Lee Trevino’s 1968 performance at Oak Hill (with rounds of 69-68-69-69,Trevino was the first player in Open history to play all four regulation rounds in the 60s, tying the scoring record of 275), McIlroy’s total of 268 broke the previous scoring record by 4 shots.  That’s Usain Bolt-level record setting, a quantum leap in a sport whose records creep forward in tiny increments.

Rory’s win was as dominating as Tiger’s Pebble romp, but equally unexpected.  Rory is 22, and his game has no weaknesses.  His swing does not explode against his joints, but goes through a graceful arc with smooth precision.  He’s here to stay.  In retrospect, the final round at Augusta will look like a fluke, the outlier in a career that is sure to accumulate more majors.

The exuberance of the performance led to some hyperbole, as when Padraig Harrington suggested that Rory might win as many majors as Jack Nicklaus, a quest only Tiger has ever seemed fitted to pursue.  When asked about Harrington’s prediction in a press conference after the third round, Rory could only shake his head and tsk, “Paddy, Paddy….”   He has the Irish instinct for repartee and a genuine kindness to sharpen and sustain it.

Golf was lucky to have someone as dynamic as Woods come on the scene almost twenty years ago, but cursed in equal measure when the game’s greatest player disgraced himself and tarnished his sport with revelations of sexual escapades and an accompanying campaign of cover-up and deceit.   Now, with Rory, the game has once again summoned a champion for the ages, but one from whom a fall from grace seems unimaginable.

Ironically, Rory’s ascendency may give Tiger room to recover and re-emerge.  The game is in good shape now, with Rory and Jason Day and the other rising stars, so Tiger can stay in his lair and lick his wounds and think about his return while the golf world’s attention is focused elsewhere.

Rory McIlroy is the real deal.  Ireland is now the world’s top producer of golf champions on a per capita basis: good on ya!

Tim Boyle Tiptoes into the Frying Pan

Civic minded, generous and modest, Tim Boyle has always combined business acumen with civic responsibility.   I am happy to call Tim a friend.  So when I heard that he had bought a golf course, during the worst downturn in the golf business since the Great Depression, I had to ask him: “Tim—you’re a smart guy.  What in the world were you thinking?”

Tim, as I expected him to, laughed.  He originally was part of a small ownership group which acquired Gearhart after the previous owners went bust about a dozen years ago.  (The Boyles have a house nearby.)   A couple of the shareholders made unsuccessful attempts to run the restaurant side of the business, Tim said, before bailing out.  Tim recruited his friend Mike McMenamin of the McMenamins brewery, restaurant and hospitality chain, to take over, and  McMenamins continues to run the food and beverage at Gearhart.  “There’s nothing like a cold pint of Hammerhead Ale in the Pot Bunker room to top off your golfing experience,” Tim says, previewing the marketing theme for the new and improved Gearhart, coming your way soon.

Like a lot of golf course proprietors, the family which had run Gearhart Golf Links for many years went sideways when it got too ambitious.  The town of Gearhart is a prosperous seaside community, but Oregonians with money have a habit of keeping it in their pockets (or least not showing off and keeping their consumption inconspicuous), so no one in Gearhart had any interest at all in a fancy golf course designed to impress strangers.   This is not Donald Trump’s world.

After a fire burned down Gearhart’s modest clubhouse, the previous owners erected a fancy new one and spent a lot of money to renovate the course, which made the whole operation tougher and more expensive to run, which is pretty much the standard golf ownership formula for disaster.  Once a course starts losing money, it cuts costs by skimping on maintenance, which makes the course less attractive, which reduces demand, and thus the wheel of misfortune rolls on toward insolvency along the gloomy trajectory of failure.

The new improved clubhouse....where the troubles began.

“Over time,” Boyle said, “I bought some of the partners out and by last year owned about 40%.  In the fall of 2010 we decided to buy the rest.    Now it’s a family enterprise again.  My son, Joe, and my daughter, Molly, are my partners in our new family business.”

The younger Boyles are both excellent golfers, but Joe is a recent dad with limited free time, so his handicap is percolating upwards.   Molly played at the University of Washington—she’s a real stick.  Tim plays better, too, than he lets on; he’s a twelve handicap but broke 80 recently, he confessed, at Nanea Golf Club, the Big Island course in Hawaii that Oregon resident David Kidd designed for moguls Charles Schwab and George Roberts.  Boyle says Nanea is his favorite course, although another Kidd creation, Bandon Dunes, is a strong local contender.

Gearhart has a lot to recommend it, starting with its history.  It’s the oldest golf course in Oregon, and perhaps on the entire west coast.   It’s not really a links (it has tons of trees and it’s tight, two un-linkslike qualities,) but it is near the coast and its soils drain well.  Originally only three greens worth of  golf, Gearhart steadily accreted holes until it reached a full 18 sometime around WW I.    Chandler Egan, the great amateur champion who lived in Medford and during the Twenties designed Eastmoreland, Oswego Lake, Tualatin and Riverside in Boyle’s hometown (as well as laying out an extensive renovation for Waverley Country Club, where Boyle is a member), reportedly assisted in the design of the final 18 hole routing at Gearhart over the decade before his death in 1935.   Boyle said he’s going to see if there are any archives which might help establish the course’s provenance.

“We’re going to approach this in two phases,” Boyle says.  “First we want to get the course’s curb appeal restored.  We’ve already remodeled the restrooms.   We want to put the course on a solid financial footing.”

The  Boyles have hired Greenway Golf from California to put in place a plan to resurrect Gearhart, starting with improved operations.  The team is working with a well-known local consulting agronomist, Forrest Goodling, to improve turf quality.   Boyle wants Gearhart to attract players looking for a straightforward and tranquil place to play.

David Jacobsen of Portland’s well-known golfing family, himself a great amateur for many years and also a member at Waverley, is a good friend of Boyle’s and an advisor on Gearhart.   “David told me we should make Gearhart the place where you have your best round of the summer,” Tim says.

I have heard David espouse this view before, and it has always made sense to me.  The daily fee courses around Portland that are always full and crank out a maximum (if perhaps not optimal) number of rounds each year are the ones which allow medium and high handicappers to score well and not lose a lot of balls.  If a player gets really good, David says, he can head down to PGA West for some comeuppance.  But in the meanwhile, if golf hopes to attract new players and desist from discouraging its current devotees, it has to offer some opportunities for beginners and hackers to experience some success.   Boyle intends to put Jacobsen’s formula to the test.

The 18th at Gearhart Golf Links, Oregon

Phase 2 is still a bit formless, Tim says, and will depend on the pace and execution of Phase 1.  “Phase 1 is really just to make sure we’re not embarrassing ourselves.  Perhaps we’ll do some lodging somewhere down the road,” Boyle says.  “We’ll market around the history of the course.”

Given Boyle’s track record, I am sure he will achieve his goals for Gearhart, with help from Joe and Molly and the team of consultants they’ve brought aboard to assist them.  I’ve played Gearhart enough to know it can be fun and friendly and exactly the kind of golf course that can meet David Jacobsen’s low expectations.  And that’s not a slam, it’s a compliment.

You can’t build a great retail brand without having the kind of x-ray vision that can peer into the consumer’s heart.   When someone with the marketing acuity and wisdom of Tim Boyle lays down a bet on golf, no matter how modest, it’s a hopeful sign for the future of the industry.

For more on Gearhart from The A Position, see http://jeffwallach.com/golf/1378/gearhart-golf-links

Success in golf is measured on the curve—there is no absolute standard of achievement.    The best score wins in tournament golf (at least in stroke play), and scores are always a function of local conditions.  Occasionally, for example, the Open Championship is contested during a rare stretch of benign weather conditions on the Old Course at St. Andrews, which is famously toothless on a calm day. The scores then are low. But when the wind howls and the harr slides across the links the players shiver their way into scores in the high seventies and beyond.  (Over the last eight Opens played at St Andrews, the winning score ranged between -5 and -19.)

Boxing, on the other hand, is the most unmediated sport.  A boxing match explodes John Stuart Mills’ dictum on freedom’s boundary: your right to extent your arm stops at my nose.  In boxing, that constraint is abandoned, but under rules which in principle protect the fighters from permanent harm.

Golfers face a purely emotional risk when they’re competing, but that doesn’t mean the experience of faltering in a golf competition is without physical cost.  Discovering how to understand and control the adrenalin surges every players feels when championships are on the line is what finally distinguishes champion golfers from players who can hit it pure on the range but waver when it counts.  After K. J. Choi closed out The Players Championship last weekend with a solid tee shot and a two putt par in playoff with David Toms on the cruel 17^th at Sawgrass, he said “the swing I have now does not break down under pressure.”

What’s most enlightening about Dunn’s commentary on boxing is her insight into how crucial the same sort of emotional control that golf requires is to success in boxing.   It seems intuitively true that victory in boxing should arise from ferocity and rage.   Dunn says just the opposite is true.  “Good boxing requires such clear and rapid analytical thought,” Dunn writes, “that a cool head is mandatory.  Maybe the driving force is desire, what the fight folk call ‘being hungry.’  This hunger is a slippery beast with a million faces.”

Katherine Dunn Waiting for the Next Match

Because she possesses the great novelist’s genius for observing the telling detail, Dunn’s essays reveal what’s behind the appetite— the controlled fury—a boxer must bring into the ring to succeed.   She writes of “tenderness” in the gym—“a practical response,” she observes, “to wearing gloves.  Anyone with huge puffy mittens on his hands can’t blow his own nose or tie his own shoes, so those who are not gloved up help those who are.”

It’s the solitary quality of the boxer’s life in the ring which links him most closely to his brethren on the links.   Both classes of combatants depend on aides and servants to get them through their battles—“seconds” for the boxer, a caddy for the golfer.

A caddy is a kind of figurative cut-man, stanching his player’s wounds as he tries to recover from the tee shot he just blocked into the woods, or the putt drifting irretrievebly past the hole.  Golfers experience sudden death, as David Toms did on Sunday at the TPC; boxers get knocked out.

But at the end of the day, boxers and golfers are both on their own, their opportunities depending on the long hidden hours, sparing in the gym or on grinding on the range, beyond glamour or triumph.

Boxing has generated great nicknames—Sugar Ray and the Brown Bomber, Iron Mike and the Hitman.  Golfers—aside from Tiger, named in infancy, whose handle only incidentally reflects his personality—don’t have noms de guerre.    Perhaps they should:  Rory the Fury Sabbatini.  Ben the Tortoise Crane.   Paul “Glib” Goydos.

Geek Love

Katherine Dunn, One Ring Circus.  Dispatches from the World of Boxing.  Schaffer Press, Tucson, AZ.  Pb, $16.95.

The unlikely saga of Woodie Alan is the subject of “Big in China,” Paul’s modestly framed yet keenly observed and entertaining account of his life as an expat. An inquisitive traveler, Paul relied on the reportorial skills honed by his experience as a freelance writer to shape his response to his rather luxurious life abroad.

An authority on the two elements of American popular culture with the most marked influence on contemporary Chinese life, rock music and basketball, Paul was able to use his Guitar World network to find Chinese musicians to jam with, which led to the formation of the band and its improbable success. The band’s performances were a revelation to Paul, who had always seen himself as a listener and critic and a strictly amateur strummer, but who blossomed as a bandleader and singer in China.

Paul and his wife, Becky — Rebecca Blumenstein, who would win a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting from China in 2007 — lived with their three young children in an expat compound called Beijing Riviera. Becky stays in the background in “Big in China,” busy running the bureau, while Paul, as he had in New Jersey, minds the household and tends the kids.

In China the family enjoys a housekeeper and nanny, which frees Paul to continue writing and to take on a column for the Web version of the Journal. The columns form the scaffolding around which “Big in China” is built. But Paul didn’t isolate himself in the Westerners’ compound. He studied Mandarin, sampled the fabulous variety of cuisine available in Beijing, including the great banquet of street food, and even managed to pass the Chinese driver’s test — an accomplishment that will perhaps be best appreciated by readers of Peter Hessler’s last book, “Country Driving.” And he found his musical family.

The kids were a constant attraction in China. “A growing pack of curious onlookers followed us from our hotel to the restaurant,” Paul writes of a family holiday in Guiyang. “The entire waitstaff crowded around two-and-a-half-year-old Anna, wanting to hold her, kiss her and pose for pictures with her.” Their local guide explained that no one had “seen anyone who looks like Anna, except in pictures. They think she looks like an angel.”

Four-year-old Eli wanted to know why the Chinese were so fascinated with the three American children. “In China,” Paul started to explain, “people are only allowed to have one kid.”

“Eli’s eyes grew fearful; I understood that he was worried that we were going to have to get rid of him and Anna. ‘That’s only for Chinese people,’ I quickly added.”

By the end of their third year in China, Paul writes, the kids were settled in and not eager to return to the States. He worried about the dilemma of “third culture kids,” who “come from one culture, move with their parents to another, and end up feeling like they don’t quite belong to either.” Paul’s not raring to go home either, because he suspects he’ll never find a group of musicians as compatible and in sync as the ones he’s playing with in Woodie Alan.

Paul’s musical friendships provide him with an entree to a China few Westerners see: nights out in working-class bars run by Chinese gangsters, hidden in remnant neighborhoods, or the chance to eat home-cooked meals prepared by his bandmates’ mothers. He writes about what he learns from his fellow musicians with a sympathetic and generous ease. Paul knows and has written about most of the modern guitar wizards, but the musicians of Woodie Alan earn his affection and respect as real bluesmen.

By the time I finished reading “Big in China,” I really wanted to hear Woodie Alan’s music, and found it on the Web at woodiealan.com. Paul’s modesty about his singing voice is appropriate, but the band is solid and fun to listen to, and it is a tribute to Paul’s energy and enthusiasm for the music of his native land that Woodie Alan existed at all.

Alan Paul Rocking in China

Big in China seems to have struck a cord with readers in ways that more grandiose encounters with China by westerners have not.  Hollywood has acquired film rights, and for sure it’s a story with built-in cinematic appeal–cute kids, culture shock, powerful wife, creative husband, exotic settings–what’s not to like?  Ivan Reitman to direct–cool.

Alan Paul, Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, and Becoming a Star in Beijing. HarperCollins, 272 pages, $25.99.  For a video of a reading by Paul at the Asia Society, see: http://asiasociety.org/video/countries-history/alan-paul-big-china-complete

Would You Buy a Used Golf Ball from this Man?

“You know about golf courses,” he begins, so I know he’s about to tell me something he expects me to agree with.  “When was the last time you’ve seen or heard about an ‘obsolete’ course?”

What’s got him started this morning is a letter to the editor in the New York Times, prompted by an article by Bill Pennington in the May 9th issue, about the Polara golf ball, which “is designed to reduce slices and hooks by 75 percent or more….”—nirvana, Pennington notes, for the hacker who is indifferent to the USGA’s stringent rules about conforming equipment.   Pennington found plenty of golfers willing to admit that they would happily play the Polara if it would help them hit the ball straighter.

When the Polara first came on the market in the 1970s, the USGA tested it and found that the ball’s irregular dimple pattern really did correct hooks and slices.  The USGA “refused to approve the ball for tournament play,” according to Polara’s website, “ruling that it would ‘reduce the skill required to play golf’.”   Duh.

But of course the USGA has no right to prohibit Polara’s sale.   It could keep it out of competitions sanctioned by the USGA, but not prohibit its use among casual players who are not ideological disciples of approved and proper golf.  So thirty years later the forbidden Polara ball is still finding its way onto the course, a career desperado with a chip on its shoulder.

The correspondent to the Times who kick-started Lee’s morning rant took up a cause that’s percolated among golf purists looking for a way to arrest the pace of technological improvement in equipment for years: require a single conforming ball for tournament play.   Baseball and basketball have a conforming ball standard, the letter notes, as do most sports.  Nike and Adidas both make soccer balls, but Nike can’t claim its ball bends better.  Its performance characteristics are prescribed and immutable (except perhaps for durability.)

But that’s not what set Lee off.   Because the new clubs and balls which do conform still help players hit it longer and straighter, the letter asserted “that historic courses have been rendered obsolete.”

How many courses did I know of, Lee demanded, that “have been rendered obsolete?”

And of course there aren’t many which come to mind.   Merion was once thought of as undersized, but will host the 2013 US Open, playing to a par 70 at around 6,800 yards.  (Part of Merion’s problem was how to accommodate the large galleries who love to walk the Open courses,not simply its length.)

And length is far from the only defense a golf course can mount against low scores anyway.  Strategy—from exacting bunker placements to complex (and not necessarily simply fiendishly sloped) greens to treacherous rough—can force a more complex set of challenges into a golfer’s cranium than the expectation of an endless series of 300 yard drives ever could.

So the “technological ‘arms race’” the letter to the Times laments has, quite to the contrary, allowed more players to enjoy the game, even if it’s extremely unlikely that any of them will ever play at an elite level.  I’m using the best equipment I can lay my hands on, and Lee spent a significant portion of the largess the government doles out to him annually to get fitted with a whole bag full of game improving PINGS last year, and it’s still a moment for great celebration when either of us breaks 80 from the white tees on a run-of-the mill, no rough, few hazards, flat greens, state-of-the-art, no forced-carries golf course.

Obsolescence of courses today is less an issue in the golf industry than the disappearance altogether of a regrettably large number of courses that are just not economically viable.

Think about this: supposedly there are about 25 million golfers in the US.  This pretty much counts anyone who’s held a club in his or her hands over the last twelve months.  If you play one round a year you’re a “golfer.”  (That’s like saying if you have one drink you’re an alcoholic.)

But only about 4.5 million golfers carry handicaps—that is, take their hobby seriously enough to post scores and engineer their bets based on something more than deceit or desire.   That’s the number we should be trying to pump up, and not by making courses harder but by making the game more fun—even if it means constantly challenging the standards for conforming equipment, with Nike and Taylor Made and Titliest and PING and Callaway competing endlessly to make that magic wand that every golfer must have in his bag.

"This ain't a funeral, you know."

Anyone who’s witnessed Tour players discharging their obligatory pro-am duties with disdain, contempt for their hapless playing partners etched on their mugs, knows how rare Watson’s empathy is.  It’s almost as unlikely as a 59 year old golfer competing in a four-hole playoff for supremacy at the 138^th Open Championship.

Thirty-two years after having won his legendary final round “duel in the sun” with Jack Nicklaus in 1977 and lifting the Claret Jug, along the way breaking the Open scoring record by eight shots with a four-round total of 268, Watson was tied with Stewart Cink after four rounds at 278, on an Ailsa course lengthened and stiffened with the hope that it would withstand the power of the fit and athletic new generation of touring pros.  Watson survived the test with an astonishing display of ball-striking until the 18th on Sunday, when he hit two of the best shots on a final hole in Open history, only to have the rub of the green chase his perfectly struck 8-iron all the way across the green and into the rough.  A chip too far, and a difficult finishing putt led to a bogey… and the deflating playoff.  (“I made a lousy putt,” he said of 18, as always spurning any excuses.)

The ghost of majors past departed Watson’s body on his trek to the fifth tee to start the playoff.  “I don’t think Tom was tired,” Nicklaus said in sympathy after his friend’s disappointing finish. “But emotionally, he was spent.”   Still, the man left standing when the spirit of past glory departed handled his disappointment with the grace and modesty of a classic hero. “This ain’t a funeral, you know,” he observed,surveying the gloomy faces in the Open press center at Turnberry—the old admonition against cheering in the press box had been discarded as Watson advanced toward his improbable and ultimately elusive victory.

The swing that carried Watson to the edge of triumph at Turnberry closely resembled the one that won for him there in ’77.  Now he and Seitz have summarized Watson’s insights into his swing, and the golf swing in general, in a brilliantly conceived and executed new book, The Timeless Swing.  Not only does it explain the fundamentals—grip, setup, alignment and so on—it has a high-tech feature that allows Watson to elaborate on his explanations with short videos.  I thought the videos were a great addition.

The Timeless Swing uses a technology from Microsoft called TAG to take readers to the video add-ons.

A "TAG" code--Tom Watson may be Old School, but his instructional book is avant-guarde

You go to a website for a free mobile app, then aim your smart phone at these little icons scattered throughout the book that look like barcodes on acid, and that starts the download of a YouTube video.

Golf instructional books typically distribute their advice over two broad categories: the basics, which every beginning needs and accomplished players must never forget; and the advanced skills required to actually play the game, advice which covers scoring tips, how to “read” a course, how to make sensible choices, like taking your punishment when you’ve hit a bad shot and not compound your troubles by assaying an heroic recovery which would require you to execute the best shot you’ve ever hit.

How does a 12 handicap (full disclosure: index 12.8 at Ghost Creek at Pumpkin Ridge in Portland, my “home course”) critique a book about playing golf by one of the greatest players ever to push a tee in the ground?    I read the book first—slowly, because you need to let the expertise percolate into your consciousness—and then tried to make some adjustments in my mediocre swing on the practice range with Watson’s advice in mind before testing in on the course.

My version of the timeless swing may not endure through eternity, but for one bright shining afternoon, it worked great—mostly, I think, because the explanations in The Timeless Swing are extremely clear.  The writing is pure crystal, while the videos provide all of the illustration about what you should be doing that the imagination may not muster.    I worked on setting up with proper balance and spine angle, holding the club in the correct grip with appropriate pressure, and swinging in rhythm.   I didn’t spend a lot of time grinding to try to put these modifications in place—I just hit enough balls to feel as if I had made an adjustment I felt comfortable with, then off to the first tee at Heron Lakes’ Great Blue Course, a Portland muni designed by Robert Trent Jones II that is among America’s very best publicly-owned golf courses.

Much to my amazement, I played very well.  Sure, I hit some loose shots—I am a double-digit handicap, remember?—but I also hit some shots I will dream about.   I always promised that I would never write about playing golf, because I know it’s as boring to read about someone’s round as it is to listen to a blow-by-blow, but I am making an exception here because it illustrates the larger point of what I am discussing: how reading Tom Watson’s brilliant analysis of the golf swing, and watching videos showing how he puts his views into practice can help any golfer improve.

On the tenth hole at the Great Blue, I pulled my drive a bit and it landed in a fairway bunker  about 160 yards from the green.  There’s a mound in front of the bunker, so the shot was blind.  Greenside bunkers to the left eliminated a direct route to the pin.   I aimed to the open front of the green, imagined a slight draw, set up with a strong image of swinging easily so the arc of my swing would hit the ball slightly before the clubhead reached its nadir.   As the ball came off the club, I felt instantly contented.  A couple of quick steps to my left to see the line of flight and there it was, the ball taking exactly the trajectory I had imagined and running up onto the green, about 40 feet short of the hole.   I missed the putt but had a tap-in par.

Is this just a variation of the new putter placebo effect?  You know, when you buy a new putter and make everything you see for a round or two, before the default deficiencies in your swing re-assert themselves?  Certainly possible.

I prefer to believe, however, that it’s because Tom Watson knows what he’s talking about, and with the help of Nick Seitz is able to explain what he knows in simple, accessible, visually memorable detail.   (The book also has great photos by Dom Furore.)

I have never been a fan of instructional books of any kind.  (I’m not big on following directions generally.)  But The Timeless Swing is a gigantic exception to my skepticism about the whole notion of learning a physical skill by reading about it.   I think anyone who plays golf will benefit in some measure, big or small, from studying and digesting the wisdom of a great master, a true golfing sensei, Tom Watson.  Before you think about buying new clubs or investing in a new putter, stop by the bookstore first and do yourself a favor: buy a copy of The Timeless Swing.

If you want to get better, buy this book!

Tom Watson, with Nick Seitz, The Timeless Swing.  Atria Books, $29.99.    You can also buy the book from Watson’s website, which also offers additional free video playing tips.    http://www.tomwatson.com/