Doug’s World

Rambling on about golf equipment

This summer the blog seems to be turning into a golf blog. Go figure.

My mother-in-law Lynn asked about buying used clubs over on Megan’s blog today. She and Elton are thinking of trying golf, and I’m like a pusher on the street corner when it comes to this topic. I tell everyone they’ll probably love golf, and unlike most people who’ve played a lot, I like playing with beginners. There’s so much macho nonsense in current American golf culture, and with beginners they don’t know about all that and they’re just trying to have fun, which happens to be my goal too. To paraphrase something a surfer dude says in a South Park episode, “the goal of golf is to have fun, so if you’re not having fun then you’re doing something wrong.”

Anyway, after answering Lynn’s question I decided I should post a bit about my clubs. I didn’t just write this in the 5 minutes since I saw her question, by the way — I had started this post over the weekend but was so busy playing golf night and day (71 holes this weekend) that I didn’t get around to posting it.

My Clubs

I love my golf clubs. I’ve dropped in at several Golf megastores in the last couple of weeks and looked at what’s new in equipment, and there’s nothing I really want right now. Sure, if I won the lottery, I’d play around with the new Cleveland wedges (and all the competitors — there’s finally a lot of competition in cool wedges), or a Tayor Made R7 driver, or some Ping I5 irons like my brother Greg recently bought, but overall I’m satisfied with the clubs I have. They fit me and my game very well, and I know it’s possible for me to shoot in the 70s with them if I get my act together. And I feel some loyalty to them, especially my putter (which Greg gave me for my birthday in 1987), and my trusty 2-iron (which I’ve had for over 10 years).

I’ve told Megan I want to get new clubs when I get to a single-digit handicap, which isn’t going to happen this year for a couple of reasons. One, I started pretty late in the season, in July. And two, I’m trying to play as much as possible with Megan, so that she can improve and we can have fun together. That means playing lots of par-3 courses and executive-length courses, which is great practice but limits my opportunities to post the kinds of scores from tough courses that will be needed to drive my handicap down. So I’m hoping next year will be my single-digit handicap year, and this year I’m getting prepared.

There’s only one thing that I don’t like about my clubs: I have Taylor Made Firesole irons with the graphite “bubble” shaft, and they can’t be re-gripped with standard grips because the grip end of the shaft is a non-standard diameter. You have to use special Taylor Made grips for those shafts, which only come in a couple of options. So I have nice Winn grips that I like on everything else, and a different half-cord Taylor Made grip on the irons. It would be nice to have the same grips on everything, but that’s not really worth buying a whole new set of clubs to change.

Everyone has a different attitude about their equipment. Here are a few attitudes I have about mine. Your mileage may vary, and I offer this not as advice, since everyone’s swing is different and everyone’s goals are different, but just as an example of one guy’s approach to putting together a bag full of golf clubs.

Club Fitting

Clubs that fit are key, and most people don’t have clubs that actually fit them. I never had my clubs fitted for the first 15 years I played golf, and just getting that done immediately improved my ball-striking.

Fitting clubs, by the way, doesn’t just mean adjusting the length of the shaft. Frankly, that’s the less important aspect: more important is getting the lie angles correct. This is the angle between the leading edge of the clubface and the shaft, and the way to adjust it is by hitting shots off a hard solid surface with impact tape on the bottom of the club. You want to have the irons bent to make the scuff mark on the bottom perfectly centered — if it’s too far out toward the toe or heel, your mis-hits will fly a lot more off-line. With my clubs fitting my swing, my misses go a lot straighter, and let’s face it, most of us miss a lot of shots every time out.

In general, I have slight flatter lie angles on my irons than standard, and all my shafts are cut down about an inch. (I know, that combination sounds weird if you know club-fitting, but I’m weird, and these adjustments fit me great.) I’ve also cut nearly two inches off my putter because I like to hold it with my hands unusually low and the toe a bit up in the air (ala Isao Aoki), and I cut down my beloved 2-iron 1.5″ because my goal with it is hitting fairways, not eking out a few extra yards.

Two other aspects of club-fitting that I have an attitude about are shaft flex and grip size. I think most male golfers have much stiffer shafts and bigger grips than they really need (insert joke here), and since both of those things tend to increase a slice, lo and behold everyone struggles with slicing on their longer clubs. I did the same until I got into more flexible shafts (mine are simple graphite R flex on everything except the putter and Cleveland wedges) and stopped building up my grips (I use just one wrap of tape). Now I almost never slice anything, and can hit a high draw with any club in the bag.

Four Wedges (two sets of two)

I like to carry four wedges. I know that has become more popular in recent years, but I’ve been carrying at least three wedges since the early 90s. When I’m playing a lot, wedge play is my favorite part of the game and the thing I do best (just because I love to practice it so much). I carry the PW and SW that match my irons, and I also carry two Cleveland 588 wedges, a 60-degree and a 53-degree.

Yesterday was the first time my wedges have felt good this year. I shot 40 on the front nine without hitting a fairway (and only two greens in regulation), so that was a lot of scrambling. Frankly, I think I got a bit lucky — I haven’t practiced the wedges enough this season to expect those results every time out.

I don’t buy into Dave Pelz’s rigorously scientifice graduated-loft approach at all: mine are really two sets of two wedges. The PW/SW have the same Firesole perimeter-weighted heads and graphite shafts as my other irons, and I often hit them with full swings (about 110 and 80 yards, respectively). The Clevelands have steel shafts and much heavier forged heads, so I never swing them all-out. Instead, I use them for everything within about 50 yards, including bunker play and chip shots as well as various types of pitch shots.

Eschewing Numbers

You’ll notice I bash Dave Pelz quite a bit. It’s not really him, I just use him as a straw man for the scientific approach to golf, which I despise. In actual fact, I read Dave’s first book and learned a lot from it years ago, and I’ve been tempted to attend one of his short-game schools.

Megan pointed out recently that it’s strange I’m very mathematical in most things but on the golf course I avoid math and science as much as possible. I can’t explain it, but it’s true. To me, golf is a psychological and emotional problem to be solved, and not an engineering problem. When I hit a bad shot, I ponder what I was thinking about or feeling during the swing, but rarely give much thought to mechanical details any more. (And it shows: my swing is a lot uglier than it was 10 years ago, although I now find the sweet spot a lot more often.)

It drives me nuts when people are standing around debating whether they’re 150 or 160 yards out and things like that. The same players who hit, say, a 7-iron anywhere from 120 to 160 yards will stand over a shot and agonize over whether it’s 145 or 150 yards. Then they’ll hit a 7-iron long and say “I knew I should have hit an 8!” Geez. It’s embarrasing to be around that behavior, IMHO.

From 150, I might hit anything from 8-iron to 5-iron, and I wish courses and driving ranges didn’t have yardages marked at all. Look at the target, lock on to it, and let your body get the ball there: that’s how I like to play, all touchy-feely and slightly mystical. Hell, that’s how every golfer who ever lived played the game, until Jack Nicklaus came along in the 60s with his yardage books, he and his caddy always pacing off distances, and generally giving the golfing public even more crap to think about when they swing a golf club.

OK, I better calm down, this topic can get me all worked up. Bottom line, the only number I like to think about on the course is my score on the hole I’m currently playing. But if you like to think about numbers and you have fun doing so, that’s great — to each their own.

What’s in the Bag

Anyway, with all that said, here’s what’s in my bag these days. I also have the 3-wood and 3-iron to match these clubs, but I carry the 14 clubs listed below and will substitute either of those options occasionally if a specific course seems like a place I might need them. And I have a Bazooka Jmax hybrid, which is easy to hit but I’ve stopped swinging it because the swingweight is much heavier than my other clubs and I don’t want a variation like that in my equipment. Golf’s hard enough without those sorts of adjustments — anyone in the market for a barely-used left-handed hybrid?

Golf Balls

One final piece of equipment: the ball. I like soft balls that feel good around the green and spin a lot for chips and pitches. Like many things in golf, I’m against the general trend: balls are getting harder, and are designed to spin less (to minimize the slices most players hit), so there are fewer soft hi-spin balls to choose from than there were when I started the game.

My current favorites are the Titleist Pro V1’s — the originals, not the “improved” ones that spin less. Problem is, they’re pretty pricey at $40-50 per dozen, so I’ve been playing the Bridgestone E5s, which feel OK to me and are about half the cost. But when we played Tyee, I found a Pro V1 that I played a few holes with, and it reminded me how great they feel. I just found a place online (OnlyGolfballs.com) that has Pro V1s for $29/dozen, so I ordered a bunch.

The charm of Tyee

We played Tyee Valley Golf Course today. It has changed quite a bit from how I remember it in the 90s. It was always rough and ragged, but I felt its location at the south end of Sea-Tac airport, with 747s taking off overhead, was sort of charming. Of course, I grew up a couple miles away — I went to school in an area where many times a day teachers stopped talking to wait out the roar of a Boeing jet taking off from nearby Sea-Tac — so I may be biased.

But now Tyee is in bad shape. On its last legs, apparently: gutted, slashed and bleeding. They’ve started chipping away at the edges of the land in preparation for airport expansion, and the course has been modified to keep an 18-hole layout even though several holes or sections of holes have disappeared from what was already a small golf course.

Holes 12 and 13 — two of the best in the old days — are gone altogether, and a good chunk of the next two holes is missing as well. The former 18th is now the 8th and 9th, having been split into two holes including an uphill little afterthought of a par-3. The formerly fun par-5 14th is now a narrow little hole with a ridiculously tiny green on a lump, and right now it’s all a patchwork quilt of rectangular chunks of bentgrass sod. The 3rd, which was a fun short tight trouble-laden par-4, now has some type of brick building in the fairway at the landing zone, with a 50-foot wide path between the left side of it and OB, or a route around to the right that adds 100 yards to the hole and requires hitting your approach shot from in front of the 5th tee, which can be logistically challenging.

The grass is mostly dead, the ground mostly rock-hard and rock-infested, except where it’s rancid cesspools of standing dirty water. A deep ditch flanked by a large drainage pipe run across the course (requiring a long detour between the #5 fairway and its green), a huge hole surrounded by heavy equipment has replaced the first half of the 8th fairway, and a sign across the fence warns “CONTAMINATED SOIL.” Amidst all this new chaos, the longstanding charm of Tyee remains: 747s take off overhead, so close you can feel the whoosh and the roar of the engines shakes your teeth.

Here’s how bad the conditions were: I put a big dent in my 60-degree wedge today, caused by a buried rock I hit in the fairway. On the fairways or off (and how can you tell the difference any more?), there was so much trashed ground that it would be simpler to just mark the areas that are “Ground NOT Under Repair.”

As Megan said after a few holes, between 747s, “somebody should put this place out of its misery.”

But we had more fun as the day wore on, not least because it’s an incredible bargain. For $10 each (and $2.50 per Mike’s Lemonade), we golfed over six hours, including walking 27 holes and some chipping practice around the 7th green. Megan hit some great 6-irons, including one while we were playing #13 with three guys. (You see, the 13th and 16th are now the same hole, so since they were three holes ahead of us we all arrived at the 13/16 tee together and played it as a fivesome.)

There were plenty of motley characters on the course: the hipster, the Jerry Garcia look-alike, the guy with the two whiny chicks who talked loudly and rudely during Megan’s backswing, old guys playing alone, and beefy young guys with tattoos drinking and laughing. And, of course, us. Everyone was very friendly, which was a good thing because the messy crowded layout gives you plenty of chances to get to know the other paying customers.

So we’re averaging 26.5 holes per day this weekend. Did I mention we also practied putting and hit a big bucket of range balls at Maplewood earlier today? Nice to have Megan hooked, I’m riding this for all it’s worth.

Oh yeah, scores. Too tired to enter them in Golftrak, but let’s just say Megan had a rough day and I played with a vaguely familiar but nearly forgotten consistency, shooting 43-43-43 on three nines in a construction zone. I’ll bring the camera next time and get some photos for the archives, but it was fun to focus on the swing today. No shanks, a couple of snap-hooks, one slice, a lot of acceptable shots, and a few real schwings. The 2-iron was continuing its hot streak, and I hit one about 220 to plug into the soft turf at the front edge of the #8 green. Then I took a big swing with a wedge to gash open the turf behind the ball and pop it out, advancing it inches. It felt good to stab that dying course, I must say.

Carnation: the next Indian Valley?

We played twilight golf at Carnation Golf Course this evening. I had a pretty good round, my best so far this year (85, after 88 and 94 in my other full rounds). By “this year” I mean since July 9 when we got the clubs out of storage and started playing; hard to believe it’s been less than three weeks.

Megan struggled with the putter today. After hitting just 12 putts in her best-ever par-3 round earlier in the week, she took 52 putts in today’s round. She did manage to work out a bit of agression by hitting a goose with a 9-iron shot, though, which made a nice thumping sound.

One way we weren’t really prepared to play today was in the shoes department. Megan had on flip-flops, as you can see in the photos, and I was wearing my Fluevogs. Just think how much better we would have played with golf shoes!

We love the Carnation course. It’s a lot like dearly departed Indian Valley in Mundelein, IL: low-budget, simple, family-owned, short, tight, looks easier than it is, seldom crowded, priced right, and an easy-going attitude all around. I don’t know yet if we’ll ever have the group behind us pull up to the 2nd tee and yell “you dudes got any papers?”, as once happened at Indian Valley, but the wine Megan ordered at the turn filled a large beer cup. The green fees are a bargain, too, at $20 for twilight (we got in 26 holes). But most important of all is the un-crowded thing: I’ll drive an extra hour for a less-crowded golf course any time. The fact Carnation is just 20 minutes from the office makes it all the better.

Carnation is short, and looking at the yardages you’d think this should be a really easy course. But the hard ground, domed greens, and dead brown grass in many spots makes for brutal British Open-style conditions. On #2, I was inside 100 yards after my tee shot, hit a high wedge just short of the green, and it bounced and rolled through the green. I chipped back, thinking I hit it just a bit firm, but it rolled off the other side of the green. I chipped again short, predictably, then sunk a long putt for bogey.

There are a few tall trees in key spots, including two in the center of fairways on the par-4 10th and par-5 16th. On the 10th, I hit 2-iron left of the tree, but pushed it a little and stopped within a dozen feet of OB. On 16, I hit a really solid 2-iron straight at the tree with a bit of draw to curve around it, got a great bounce forward down the fairway, and wound up within 200 yards of the pin.

Doug: “2-iron 250 yards down the middle, how good is that?”
Megan: “So I guess that’s good?”

I proceeded to slice a 4-iron and chunk a wedge, which helped me regain some humility.

By the way, that’s not a typo on #15: it really was a par with a penalty and no putts. The trusty 2-iron off the tee, but a guy behind me was yelling at his girlfriend where to park the cart in my backswing, so I snap-hooked into the trees. When I got to my ball I discovered it had rolled a foot or so inside the driving range. Took a drop there, hit a 4-iron to 20 feet left of the green, then hit a great putt across all that dead grass, up a little slope, and trickled down across 10 feet of green into the hole. (Which doesn’t count as a “putt” because it was from off the green — I don’t make up the rules, I just follow them.)

There was a Friday evening summer tradition taking place while we were there: the Horse Races. About 20 guys, and a few women and kids and dogs, gathered at the first tee at 6:00 to play the front nine together as one huge group. They had a keg of beer with them on a golf cart, and after a few holes there was so much laughter and cheering and jeering coming from their group that you could hear it all over the course.

We’re going to start looking at houses in Carnation. Seriously.

Photos of Megan hitting on #2, Megan and the geese on on #4, and Doug sinking a 10-footer for birdie on #8:

Mount Rainier and Megan’s Blog

One of the things that made Seattle a cool place to grow up was the constant views of Mount Rainier. Whenever it wasn’t hidden behind clouds and rain, that is. And even on a nice sunny day, the very top of the mountain is often obscured by a small cloud perched there, sort of like this picture I took in May.

So yesterday I thought it was cool that it was the other way around: clouds obscuring most of the mountain, but a clear view of the summit.

Speaking of peeking out (nice transition, eh?), Megan has started a blog. I won’t try to label what she’s likely to post, except to boldly predict that she’ll not overlap or compete with any other existing blog. If you want to hear Megan’s latest written rant, there’s one place on all the internets to get it: Windowsill.

for the verbal rants, you just have to be around when she’s in the mood.

A Few Photos

There’s a new tourism campaign for Las Vegas, with billboards all over Seattle. They went up a few weeks ago, and each one is the same simple format: a big headline in quotes (”I had to unbutton my pants.”) and in fine print below, “X can be your alibi” (”Dining can be your alibi.”). Others are about threesomes and golf, etc.

I feel old for even wondering, but … if you have kids, do you explain these billboards?

I spent the day at TechReady, learning about Sharepoint and Infopath and ODF (great session by Gray) and other things. I went to Fitz’s Sharepoint session this afternoon, to watch him dance around little beta issues as only he can.

Now that I see the photos, the coffee must have been laced with acid or something.

OK, on a more serious note, here’s a great example of why I love the new VR18-200 lens. This photo of Mount Rainier, 60 miles away, in the twilight after the sun went down, was a handheld shot while sitting at a traffic light in my truck, engine idling. It’s not the world’s sharpest picture, but it’s the sharpest picture I’ve taken under those circumstances.

A little further down Rainier, I saw some cops with two young guys handcuffed in front of the bank in Columbia City. Didn’t take any pictures of that, though. Next time.

Mini’s Second Coming

OK, this is strange: Mini-Microsoft has decided to start a second blog. Is he bored with the fact nobody has figured out who he is yet? Is he an incurable risk-taker who will keep doubling the size of the target until somebody gets lucky?

Or is he just committed to entertaining the troops? The new blog covers some of his favorite comments that he has bounced from his other site, as he explained in the first post.

So far I’m resisting the temptation to add yet another RSS feed to the list. But it’s tempting. The guy can write, and occasionally he covers something a Microsoft employee would find interesting. Or so I’ve heard.

Dead-End Safety

NPR.ORG has an interesting segment entitled “The Cul-de-Sac Myth”.

Cul-de-sacs have fallen out of favor with urban planners in recent years, for several reasons. Not least among them: the now-proven-wrong feel-good safe-for-your-kids image cul-de-sacs have had since the mid-50s here in the United States.

These days, that image seems grimly ironic to people who actually look at safety statistics. William Lucy, for example, professor of environmental studies at the University of Virginia. He points out that cul-de-sac communities turn out to have some of the highest rates of traffic accidents involving young children.

“The actual research about injuries and deaths to small children under five is that the main cause of death is being backed over, not being driven over forward,” Lucy says. “And it would be expected that the main people doing the backing over would in fact be family members, usually the parents.”

We heard this while driving through the Rainier Valley on the way to work recently, and laughed at the image of a safety-first suburban Mom in her big protective SUV, backing out of her safe home in a cul-de-sac and running over her own kid.

I know, it’s wrong, but we laughed. It was a nice break from talking about the war in Iraq, a recurring morning-commute topic.

Keeping the Moms Happy

With this post, I’m caught up on the pictures I’ve told our Moms we’d be posting on the blog. It’s a busy week coming up, and I don’t have time to do thumbnails or any clever captions or navigational niceties, but the photos are here from the last few days …

Thursday, we went to a picnic at Wesley Homes, where my Mom works. Not that Mom has been there a long time, but she was working there during Woodstock. (Kids, ask your grandparents what that was.) Anyway, it was fun, and Kip and the crew served up a nice summer barbecue feast.

Then Friday we flew to Berkeley for the weekend, another whirlwind trip.

We went boating with Elton and Lynn on Saturday. We passed under the San Rafael bridge, past the island where Scott Peterson dumped his wife’s beheaded body on Christmas Eve, and over around Alcatraz, with great views of the Golden Gate bridge and the San Francisco skyline. It was extremely hot, and I over-hydrated early in the trip; vodka can be so refreshing, to a point. But we had a great time, and it’s fun to watch the way Elton is so at one with the boat, handling all the little details with the casualness of a man who has swapped the Bering Sea or North Atlantic for a sunny cruise around the Bay Area. Which he is, of course.

We saw Ween at the Greek Theatre on Saturday night. It’s a spectacular venue looking down over Berkeley to the bay, and it’s where Megan and Molly and Lynn all graduated from high school. No cameras allowed there, though.

Sunday we visited Louis, and I finally met Butchie and his wife Ollie (whom I was told used to be very quiet, but I had a hard time imagining her quiet :-)) and their kids Louis and Rachael. (I’ve included a few photos that Louis took below.) We went to Red Lobster with Barbara Ann and Sibyl, then hung out at Butchie’s house for a while and checked out his amazing barbecue trailer he has built. He makes some great barbecue sauces — check out ArnoldSauce.com. We brough home some samples. We’ll have to have a barbecue party this summer to let everyone check them out.

Then last night we went over to Grandma’s place for dinner. She has a nice-looking golf course in her community, which she can get us a tee time on. It has mature trees and big well-maintained greens and bunkers — we’ll be back to check it out as soon as we can. After dinner, Elton entertained Grandma with a joke whose punch line is “… but I’ve kissed a cock ‘er two!”

Wesley Homes picnic photos: image01 image02 image03 image04 image05 image06 image07 image08 image09 image10 image11 image12 image13 image14 image15 image16 image17 image18 image19 image20 image21 image22 image23 image24 image25 image26 image27 image28 image29

Berkeley trip photos: image01 image02 image03 image04 image05 image06 image07 image08 image09 image10 image11 image12 image13 image14 image15 image16 image17 image18 image19 image20 image21 image22 image23 image24 Louis-1 Louis-2 Louis-3

That’s it for now, Moms, enjoy the pictures and now it’s all work for a few days.

We’re Famous!

Well, not really. But we’re on the home page of Microsoft intranet today. They had a photo contest a while back, for pictures of Microsoft employees having fun, and I submitted a few shots. We go back from our weekend trip to Berkeley, and there it was today:

I also submitted a cute picture of Megan racing her bike across the I-90 floating bridge on the way to work. Stay tuned.

Jess & Scott: before and after

They seem to be enjoying the honeymoon. Well, they seemed to be enjoying the wedding, too.