Fore! Play (17 page)

My first set of readings are absolutely phenomenal, representing my finest hour in golf!

Distance: 288 yards!

Club speed: 92 miles per hour!

Ball speed: 162 miles per hour!

I love this machine.

These are great stats! But they are not
my
stats. Maybe the last guy’s. SwingCam is on the fritz. It read 288 yards, yet I had actually
seen
my drive hit just beyond the second “green” on the range, which is eighty-seven yards away. So, there seemed to be this two-hundred-yard
discrepancy. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten in my excitement to ask for a printout of those first stats to preserve in the family
Bible.

I hit my second drive and SwingCam came to its senses.

Distance: 97 yards.

Club speed: 17 miles per hour.

Ball speed: 98 miles per hour.

Now these … these would be my statistics. Although I chose not to believe those either, charging that this … this … cheap
vending machine … had lost all credibility.

I saved that drive in the SwingCam computer as my “Typical” swing, and another one, when the ball went a little farther, as
my “Best” swing. SwingCam stores two of your swings for review on your home computer or the Main Kiosk in the lobby. Instructions
say you may call up your swing on the screen and analyze it for Sway, Alignment, and Plane, as well as putting it on a split
screen and comparing it with that of a golf pro on the other side of the screen.

I put my credit card into the Main Kiosk and up pops an image of me swinging. I start to analyze the swing—“ugly” would be
a fair analysis of what I’m seeing—when I realize: It’s not me! His hair is the same color, his build’s the same, he’s bent
over so you can’t see his face, and he’s pretty bad. But those aren’t my shoes. That isn’t my shirt. He’s indoors somewhere.
This is the World Wide Web. Whoever this is may be practicing in his basement in Rangoon. It’s not me.

I ask a man walking by—a golf pro, or assistant pro, or perhaps the man who fills the candy machine—to assist me. He agrees
it’s Not Me. We go back to SwingCam and do it all over again, except this time he presses the unlabeled buttons, and with
greater success. Returning to the Main Kiosk, we do manage to call up Me swinging on the screen. It’s not a pretty thing to
watch. For some reason that Rangoon guy appears, too, right beside me. It looks like a bad vaudeville act.

“Maybe he’s the pro,” says the guy helping me. Then we watch him swing and realize that if he’s the pro I’m Nancy Lopez.

My helper presses a button that produces two lines down the screen, one on either side of my body, so we can analyze my Sway.
Now here is another place where this system breaks down. The SwingCam sign upstairs says “See Your Swing, Analyze Your Swing,
Download Your Swing—By Yourself!”

This is like someone inventing TumorCam, which for $9.95 gives you an X ray of your brain tumor that you can See, Download,
and Cure—Yourself!

For openers: What
is
this … Sway? Apparently, it is not good. Do I have it? Is it terminal? Or, do I need more … Sway? What if I’m suffering from
Sway Deficiency Anemia and don’t know it?

“I don’t think you have much Sway,” says my helper, who then adds that he’s “not really a golfer” himself.

“So, what do you recommend from the candy machine?” I ask.

“What?” he replies.

“Nothing,” I say.

He says he’s no expert, he’s just watched others try to use SwingCam, that’s all. He hits another button that draws a circle
around my head and we put our two heads together and come up with the conclusion that my head: (a) is too big, since the circle
won’t even go around it; and (b) probably moves too much and looks up too soon.

He hits the Alignment button and I appear to be out of alignment. I’m starting to feel like an ’84 Volare at a Sears Car Care
Diagnostic Center. The Plane button makes two red spears appear but to what end we aren’t at all sure.

So, without someone practiced telling me how to work SwingCam, and without a pro to analyze my problems and knowledgeably
utilize the tools of analysis, SwingCam is of little help to me the novice golfer.

How about just forgetting the damned technology and asking one of the sixteen pros here to watch me swing for ten minutes
and to recommend adjustments—or perhaps another sport here at the pier?

Another aspect of SwingCam is that you can download those two swings from your home computer and study them or even send them
to a pro for cyber-analysis. I do this. My swing is on the World Wide Web for all the world to see! How embarrassing. Given
the option, I’d have opted for a Web cam in my bathroom.

With my awful images on the screen I try to hire a golf pro to analyze my swing, but can’t seem to do it. I call the SwingCam
offices and they say they haven’t quite hired the pros yet. I say they probably can’t find one to take my case.

I pressed another button for the free golf lesson offered by the Internet Golf Academy. Here a student named Bill (Not Me)
had his swing analyzed amidst a flurry of critiques from a pro regarding his “overall ball flight pattern,” “shaft plane,”
“shoulder plane,” “power drains,” “arm collapse,” “impact position,” his bad 104 degree arm angle, and the need to “reroute”
his backspin. So much to think about! No kid could ever hit a baseball, sink a jump shot, kick a soccer ball with this much
crap running through his head. Are you absolutely sure this is a sport?

A month went by and I decided to see if SwingCam had any golf pros lined up yet. I put in my locator number to access my golf
swings on the computer and there on the screen was a handsome black man in a white shirt swinging a golf club. Again: Not
Me.

SwingCam, like everything else I tried, seemed unable to help with my golf game.

I
could
win today. I’m playing golf with my wife, Jody, and she’s never even
played
the game before.

Although we still haven’t decided to join yet, we’re golfing at Goat Hill, an ideal setting for us. It’s certainly one of
the least humiliating, a course that’s not all that challenging and, as mentioned, casual in the extreme. I’ve seen golfers
here in blue jean cutoffs and sleeveless black Metallica T-shirts, swigging beer while watching a partner putt with a cigarette
in his mouth. The guy was good, too.

On the way we stop at Grandpa (Jerry) Brennan’s Previously Owned Golf Ball Emporium across the street. Should we get colored
balls? They might be easier to find. But possibly embarrassing. We decide to buy in bulk, figuring we’ll need as many as we
can carry. The cheapest are five for a dollar. They come in sandwich bags, which could also be embarrassing. We buy twenty-five
balls and pray that’s enough.

It isn’t. I do believe I set my personal record for lost balls that day, more than a dozen surrendered to the lush growth
of this rainy summer. By hole 7, in fact, they were completely gone. On 8 I scoured the depths of my bag and came up with
a Dunkin’ Donuts logo ball, followed by a few XXXX-out balls, another ball that seemed to have three distinct sides, and finally
a ball that appeared to have been backed over by a car. On the final hole, Jody took her ball out of the cup and said “feel
this.” It was some sort of soft rubber, a Maxfli that felt as though it had been poached.

There never seems to be any waiting at Goat Hill, you just pay up at the bar—$36.99 for the two of us and the cart—and have
at it. Although some of these guys dressed to mow the lawn are surprisingly good golfers, the overall level of play here is
comforting to me. On the first tee a man is swinging very hard and wild, as if trying to bust a pinata. As if blindfolded,
he is missing.

The first concern here is that the golf cart parking area is twenty feet in
front
of (if somewhat lower than) the first tee. I miss them, this time, my opening drive slicing high to the right, clear over
the nets meant to protect the dirt road leading up to the club, and bouncing in front of an advancing pickup truck. I make
an adjustment, and hook my next shot into a stand of trees to the left. So, my first two swings result in two lost balls.

On her first hole ever, Jody is doing better than I, tenaciously hacking her way toward the green. At the first green there
is earthmoving equipment doing some heavy landscaping—
while
we play. And to think the pros object to camera clicks. And, alas, our putting game, once the strength of the Geist family
golf dynasty (owing to all the hours of mini-golf we’ve put in) has deserted us.

On hole 2, we did
not
hit Jerry Brennan’s golf ball stand or his house, which are just across the road from the fairway. That was sort of disappointing—although
I did hit the road. My friend Robert once hit a biker on the road with his drive from that second tee. Dropped him in his
tire tracks. Robert isn’t so good either. He plays in the morning at Goat Hill before the course opens so no one will see
him.

Jerry is out in his yard watching us, just as Jody takes a big swing at the ball, misses, and does a pirouette.

“Want me to play some ballet music?” he yells from across the road. Now I know why the PGA doesn’t hold tournaments here.
One reason why.

She’s having trouble making contact, hitting either over the ball or behind it. I am having no trouble hitting the ball, but
direction is a problem. But she does finally connect, and sends her ball slicing across the two-lane highway. Gamely, she
decides to play it as it lays. Traffic slows apprehensively at the sight of this crazed golfer preparing to hit a ball lying
in the rough a foot from the side of the road. (Later at the bar, a fellow duffer will helpfully suggest she carry orange
traffic cones in her golf bag to stop traffic.) She waits until the traffic passes in the far lane, holds up traffic in the
near lane by putting up her left hand, then swats the ball—nicely, I must say—back onto the fairway. I’m proud of her determination.
It reminded me of the woman who once hit a ball into a creek, chased it in a rowboat, and whacked it back upstream to take
a 166 on the hole.

On the third tee, I hooked one into a tree, a shot that ricocheted back by the ladies’ tee. Jody hit the steel mesh garbage
can positioned there. We were getting pretty good at hitting our bad shots close together, synchronized golf, which is convenient,
makes for speedy play, and like synchronized swimming, is beautiful to watch.

As we drive off in the cart, her clubs fall off the back. Neither of us has had any experience strapping golf bags to carts.
This is the place to learn. Later a golfer will give us back a 3-wood we didn’t pick up there at the accident scene. The club
was so old and beat-up I almost denied it was ours.

Next, Jody hits an exceptional shot almost in the hole, only to watch a little girl bound onto the green and retrieve it.
“Hey, you little shit,” we yell, and make her put it back. She is with her father, who probably brings her golfing to snatch
as many golf balls as she can. Who, but us, would yell at a cute little girl?

The next hole is odd. It’s one where you hit a tee shot straight up a steep hill and watch it roll back down, time after time.
The green is down at the bottom of the other side of the hill and you clang a big dinner bell to let players behind you know
when you’ve finished. The reason the course is called Goat Hill, one historian at the bar says, “is that you gotta be dumber
than goat shit to walk up and down these hills.”

Then come a couple of holes we’d both rather forget, and in fact have. I just remember the final hole on this 9-hole course,
because people sit on the clubhouse porch, right behind the last green, behind very heavy screens, and watch.

When my son Willie and I play here, after 8 holes, 60 strokes, and twenty-five lost balls, he begins a mock television broadcast
as we walk up the 9th fairway that’s worthy of a smarmy network broadcast of the Masters in Augusta: “Now, in the golden late-afternoon
sunlight these two champions make the historic walk up the august 9th fairway here at venerable Goat Hill, as Snead, Palmer,
and Nicklaus have done before them … the dry, brown fairways swirling with dust, the bittersweet vines strangling the life
out of the trees, the fawns frantically dodging mis-hit golf balls …”

The 9th green is elevated, like a ten-foot-high stage on which putters perform for the entertainment of those on the porch
just fifteen feet away. We always give them a good show. I chip nicely to the green and begin putting, and putting, and putting.
I’m feeling the pressure of the audience. My final three-foot putt stops short of the cup and I hit it again on my follow-through,
counting the whole thing as just one stroke.

“Where’s the scorecard?” I ask.

“Threw it out a long time ago,” Jody says.

“Good,” I say. “Make sure you always tear them up in little pieces like you do with credit card receipts. Don’t want something
like that lying around.”

Later we sit on that porch going over our games. I figure I had the one legitimate bogey, several near legitimate 6s, and
some higher scores I’d rather not mention. I figured my score was about an illegitimate 60 for 9 holes—legitimately probably
nearer 70. Not good, considering this is a thoroughly unchallenging course with almost no hazards. I’m not even sure who won.
We figure if we put all of our best shots together we would have maybe parred one hole. I think I was dehydrated though, my
electrolytes a little low.

Once when Willie and I finished here he said: “It was horrible, but I’m glad we did it.”

What an odd thing to say, but no more so than my response: “Me, too.” Golf can be really strange that way. It must be the
camaraderie and the togetherness, like if the two of us had just changed a flat tire together.

When Jody and I turned in our cart key, the bartender asked how we’d done and we admitted: not very well.

“But, I’ll bet you two had fun,” he laughs.

“No,” I mutter, “not really.” Not at all.