Characters in Golf

[Richie3Jack]

I was thinking of a couple of guys that I grew up playing golf with. One of whom is friended with me on Facebook, the other I have no idea where he's at. Last I heard he was living in Maine and doesn't even play golf.

Kevin probably had about as much raw talent as you would ever find in a golfer. He had the unique ability to get really 'on' with a part of the game and stay that way for weeks, if not months at a time. When he was on, he could be as good of a driver of the ball or as good of a putter or as good of a wedge player as you'll see. I remember one summer he was downright phenomenal with the wedges. Get a wedge in his hand that summer and he wasn't going to be outside of 10 feet and more likely inside of 5-feet. Pretty amazing for a kid in high school.

The problem with Kevin was his mechanics were usually awful. To compound matters, I never saw somebody who could have extremely drastic different swing mechanics on a day-to-day basis. It wasn't uncommon for my friends and I to see him swinging more upright that Eamonn Darcy on the backswing one day, then tell him he is wayyyy upright and he needs to flatten his backswing. Then the next day he's swing Doug Sanders-ish flat.

This is no exagerration. His swing mechanics genuinely would change that much over a day.

That was IMO, the problem. He really never believed that he was that flat or that upright or whatever he was doing on that particular day. We also didn't have video to show him. So he would almost always start shrugging off swing tips and then couldn't figure out why his game was so inconsistent.

In his senior year in High School, he finally listened to me and a friend...granted we didn't have a ton of knowledge on the swing...but he developed a pretty nice looking golf swing. And he absolutely killed the ball. He'd hit 14-16 GIR a round and drive his 2-iron as far as most of his peers hit their driver. But eventually he started to get into old swing habits and didn't want to listen anymore.

Very supersitious as well. I remember a few times when he started striking the ball well with a sweatshirt on and he would keep the sweatshirt on for the entire round, even when it was 85*.

Another 'character' was my friend Dan. He actually wasn't a character, but his game certainly was a bit amazing. He went to the finals of the NY State Am one year.

Here's the thing I always think about Dan, who presumably isn't playing golf anymore. He had 6 hole in ones in a little over a 2 week span.

That's right, SIX hole in ones in about a 2 week span.

And I witnessed 5 of them. The one I missed was in a HS golf match and I was on the hole ahead of his group.

I'm sure he wants to tell that story, but nobody probably would believe him so he keeps it to himself.

But, that was Dan.

He really wasn't great at anything, he just wasn't bad at anything. He wasn't even mediocre. Probably so-so distance wise, but total driving, iron game, sand game, putting...all solid.

I knew Dan when he started the game at the age of 9 years old. And I've never...not ONCE...seen him hit a shank. In fact, I don't recall more than a handful of times he hit a slice of any kind. As he got older he would occasionally fight a hook. But when he was on, he was just too tough to beat.







3JACK

[Richie3Jack]

I've been asked before who is the most talented golfer I've ever played with. I've played with Jason Gore, Tom Scherrer and even Wayne Levi...former PGA Tour player of the year. Each are impressive golfers in their own right, but as far as pure talent goes, I'd have to go with my friend Grant.

Sadly, I'm not even sure if he is alive anymore. And that gives an indication of the person he is/was.

The first time I met Grant is a funny story. My buddy Rob who lived across town wanted me to play in a scramble with two other mutual friends. On the day of the tournament, one of our friends dropped out as he got called into work. So we see this guy (Grant) who is hanging around the clubhouse and we asked him if he could join us.

We didn't even know who he was. The funny thing is that this was 1991 and Grant dressed really well, nice shirt, nice pants, nice shoes....if it were 1971.

So are hopes were not high for this guy we found hanging around the clubhouse, although the pro said that he had heard that Grant had game. But, it was better playing a 4-man scramble than being forced to play a 3-man scramble against 4-man teams.

We did a shotgun and started on the 9th hole. A 340 yard par-4 which would usually leave about 80 yards in (remember, this was '91 in the day of metal woods/persimmon and balata golf balls). And while it was a short and wide open hole, usually you were very happy to come away with par because the green was ridiculously tough. In fact, for tounaments they instituted a 'no 4-putt' rule because it was easy to 4-putt or even 5-putt.

As we get to the tee we are all taking our practice swings and warming up while Grant never takes a practice swing, just lights up a cigarette and shoots the shit with us for a bit. I tee off first. My buddy Rob tees off second. Then Grant gets up there, no practice swing, fiddles with his grip for a second and then.....SWOOOOSH.

It sound like the G-force going off and we see the ball take off like a rocket, land just short of the green and roll up to about 10-feet. Rob always likes to tell the story that after that drive we looked at each other in amazement and he thought to himself 'CA CHING!'

And we did cash in that day. We won by like 7 shots or something ridiculous like that and Grant probably would've shot 65 on his own ball.

Grant hit a 4-iron on one hole 240 yards. Again, in the days of the balata ball.

Knowing what I know now about the swing, Grant probably had those dramatic lag angles that guys like Hogan and Sergio had, quite a good deal of flexibility and great legs to drive off of.

He could legitimately hit his 55* SW 140-150 yards and not even swing hard doing so. And he was accurate...at least that day and a few other times I golfed with him. His putting stroke was very Arnold Palmer-ish and probably his biggest weakness, but when he was putting well, he would start draining everything.

But his big attraction was his ballstriking. I've seen Tiger Woods hit balls on the range for one hour, up close. And I have yet to have played with a golfer that makes that distinct sound of hitting it flush and hitting it hard on such a consistent basis. I've seen golfers make the sound. Hell, I can make the sound. But Grant could do it on just about every shot.

I got to talking to Grant and he was a nice and cordial guy. But I wondered where the hell he came from. He told me that he knew a few of my friends that were older than me and said he played junior golf with those guys. He also told me he had quit the game for 10 years and just got back into it.

Coming back from the tourney I talked to my buddies and was elated to tell them about this guy that was unbelievable. Most of them didn't have kind words for Grant and I found out he had a big drug problem, robbed people and cheated in golf.

I finally got a hole of a friend who played jr. golf with Grant and raved about his ability and actually liked him. He told me that Grant's parents were basically hippies/gypsies and growing up he would stay in Northern NY for the summer and part of the fall and then his parents would go down to Florida and not even enroll him in school in FLA. He would just play golf all day and eventually he became friends with Andy Bean when Bean was out on the PGA Tour and he would play with Bean all of the time. Then come spring his parents would move back up north and he would enroll back into school just so he could play HS golf. My buddy also told me that Grant's parents got him high when he was 11 years old. Thus, the drug problem and stealing from people. My buddy John told me that Grant was a great guy, but when he gets on the drugs it's another issue.

Furthermore, John told me that Grant was a great darts player, great pool hustler and a great bowler. That was something coming from John because John was one of the best bowlers I've ever met, as he had several 300 games and 800 series and continues to do so. So if he raved about Grant's bowling, he had to be good.

Eventually an assitant pro at a course I played at wanted to take on big bad Grant. This assitant pro was a really good golfer, hit it deep and was from out of town, so he refused to believe Grant could be this good. Eventually the Assistant said he would give Grant 3 strokes. Grant refused. Then it came to 5 strokes. Grant refused. Eventually it got up to 10 strokes and Grant readily accepted. He also missed the course record by a stroke, 62, and embarrassed the Assistant pretty badly.

Eventually his drug issues got back to him again and he took a couple of years off. Then he came back and he still hit it a mile, but he was struggling with a snap hook. I saw him par a 370 yard par-4 after hitting his first one O.B. The hole did go downhill a bit, but it was just a ridiculously long drive to drive the green after that.

But eventually he got in trouble with the law again and I haven't heard from him since 1994. I think that's part of what fascinates me about Hogan and Snead and they were reported to make the 'sound' shot after shot. When you see somebody do that, like Grant did, it's such an incredible 'event', that you want to see it again.






3JACK

[gmbtempe]

Cool story Richie.....

The best player I have played with was my good buddies dad, Joe Martinez. Worst putter I have ever seen but man could he stripe the ball, only got to the mini tours because he had a full time job and family and that balky putter.

I remember the first time I played with him I was in 8th grade at Papago in Phx when you had to sleep out to get a time. He slept out and we teed off at 7am with another buddy of his. I was sooooo nervous, I was a complete hack at the time.

I will never forget the sound the shots made, this was about that same time, 1988 or so. The height that he hit his shots was just incredible. I don't think he made many putts that day but shot 67, just ate up the par 5's. He was 5' 8" and had hips like Hogan but a very upright swing like Nicklaus.

He still has a share of Greyhawk Talon course record with Phil Mickelson, though they never mention it when they used to say the record in tourney's. He got a cool plaque and framed scorecard from Greyhawk n the mail, 62!

Sadly he contracted lung cancer, though healthy as ox, and died just a year or so after retiring at 62.

[Richie3Jack]

That's sad to hear.

The best ballstriker I ever played more than once with (I played with Jason Gore and thought his ballstriking was very impressive, but I only played with him once) is my friend Dave.

Dave is about 12 years older than me and looks a bit like David Koresh meets Ty Webb. He is also a world class drinker and very well known for some of drinking stories. In fact, his grandfather owned a popular bar in town and that was the place that my mom and dad first met. Sadly, his uncle Fred once came home drunk in the middle of winter, slipped on some ice and cracked his head and knocked himself unconscious. He then froze to death.

I have 2 drunk Dave stories. Dave got a job working at the local prison and they had an outing for the prison guys at a course. This course was notoriously known for having old lady members who would sit in the clubhouse and play bridge all day, keep track of everybody that came to the course and what they did wrong and then complain to the pro about it. I mean, this was going on for 30 years and they would spend 6 hours a day, every day doing this.

With the prison employees, something was bound to happen. After drinking an ungodly amount of alcohol, the story has it that Dave decided to play the last hole buck naked. And I mean buck naked. And to top things off, he walks right into the clubhouse and takes a seat in the bar and continues to drink the next few hours buck naked before his wife finally picks him up.

The other story was something I was there for. In our area we had a thing called the '6 Man Team Tournament.' What this was is each course would pick their 6 best golfers and those golfers would compete as a team against other courses and their 6 best golfers. My course dominated every year as at one point we had every starter having played D-1 golf on scholarship and 3 guys having gone to the NY State Am finals (they play match play) and one of them reaching the quarterfinals of the US Am.

Dave didn't participate in the 6 man tournament that year due to work obligations. After the tournament we decided to go to a bar and celebrate the victory. As we get there, Dave is walking bye and we ask him to come in and celebrate with us. About an hour in he's slammed beer after beer and starts doing vodka. He eventually pulls his dick out and starts wacking it..in the middle of the bar, until one of the guys on the team says 'Dave, NOBODY WANTS TO SEE THAT!' and Dave says 'Oh, Okay' and puts it back in his pants and walks out of the bar and we didn't see him again that day.

And this guy could flat our stripe the ball. He was nowhere near as long as my friend Grant, but he was pretty deep and hit everything solid and pretty much everything with a push draw right down the middle and hit every club in his bag flush almost every time. Hitting 16 GIR was a breeze to him. Hitting every GIR was something he could do probably 1 out 4 or 1 out of 5 rounds. He was also about the fastest player I've ever seen. He and his buddy Tim would play 18 holes in a cart and finish in 80 minutes if nobody else was in the way. And Tim rarely broke 75, but Dave would rarely shoot over par.

His swing is something that Hank Haney would love, he took it a bit outside and then looped it perfectly inside every time. He also had a weird think in that his right thumb would be off the grip in his swing. You could noticeably see it at address. Perhaps he put it back on the grip in his swing, but it never looked like it to me.

Dave also got a scholarship to play at the U. of Miami which is a helluva feat from a guy from a small town in Northern NY who wasn't playing in AJGA events (I dont' think they even had them at the time).

One day I was at his house watching football and I went to grab some beers down in his cellar and I see a bunch of pics with him and Dan Marino together. I asked Dave about them and he said 'yeah, I'm good friends with Dan. Met him down in Miami, went to his wedding, too.' And he said it like it was no big deal.

Later I asked Dave's best friend Kevin about it and he told me the story. Apparently Dave came down to Miami and as a freshman was tearing it up immediately as he got down there. One day he got to paired with Marino and Dave shot 66 at Doral from the tournament tees. Marino thought that Dave was going to be the next great golfer. So Marino tells Dave to stop by a nightclub that he owns and tell the doorman your name and he'll let you in.

Dave calls Kevin and tells him that he met Dan Marino and tomorrow he's supposed to go to his club and he wanted Kevin to come with him since Dave was a bit nervous. Kevin immediately flies down and the next night they are in line waiting at the club, but hours go by and they are not being let in. Kevin starts thinking that Marino was an asshole because Dave wouldn't lie to him about this. Eventually Kevin tells Dave that he needs to ask for Marino and give his name, but Dave doesn't want to impose. Eventually Dave relents and does. The doorman walks away for a few minutes and Kevin and Dave start to leave and the doorman catches them and profusely apologizes and says that 'Mr. Marino is upstairs in one of the VIP rooms and wants to see you.'

They get up there and Marino has about 6 girls on each arm and Marino just raves about Dave and they had been friends ever since.

Unfortunately, Dave's coach at Miami wanted him to change his swing. One of those 'if you hit it that well with that loop in your swing and funny grip, imagine how you would hit it without those things in your swing.' This to a guy who is destroying the rest of your team as a freshman and just shot 66 at Doral from the tips.

So Dave eventually got a lesson from the new hot teaching pro, David Leadbetter. Within a week Dave couldn't stop shanking it. He then told Leadbetter off, which his team coach didn't like and they sent him to Ken Venturi and Dave just kept hitting more shanks. Eventually Dave told Venturi 'you may have won a US Open, but you can't teach for shit.' And eventually Dave flunked out of Miami and went back home.

But, he did go back to his old swing and old grip and striped the ball like it was nobody's business. Unfortunatley, he developed into the worst putter I've ever seen. Like a 75% chance of making a 3-footer type bad...and that's on a good day. As amazing as his ballstriking was, his distance control on his full swing shots was just as amazing. He was a great guy to have in a scramble if you had some decent putters on the team because you were always going to get a bunch of birdies inside 10 feet with him hitting the ball.

I still talk to Dave, he doesn't drink much anymore and he strikes the ball really well, but I think he's lost the advantage he once had because the modern oversized driver is easy for anybody to hit. But in the days of persimmon and metal he was about as good as it got when it came to ballstriking.






3JACK

[slice_oftheday]

Wow...

I really enjoyed these stories, both guys sound like one of a kind characters...

[jonnygrouville]

An Irish ex-pro mate, Mickey, from my home club used to be the 'next big thing' in European golf. Sadly, for a variety of reasons, he lost the plot and ended up in Africa.

Back in Europe and no longer a pro he was legendary. There is a cross-bunker on a par four at home that you can just about fly with a helping breeze, a Pro V1 and a titanium driver. When my dad used to play with Mickey every week twenty years ago, he would knock it over every time with an old Dunlop 65 and persimmon driver.

A big hook crept into his game and he then developed the yips. With every club in the bag. Could not hit it out of his shadow. He gave up.

He plays again now, but his swing is insane. For starters, he grips it with his left thumb wrapped around the club. Like holding a baseball bat. He kind of overlaps with his right hand which pushes his left thumb way up towards the top of his grip. But he'll then change his grip about three times a round.

To describe his swing as a loop is not doing it justice. The club waves around all over the place, shut one minute, massively open the next. While this is going on at the top, he moves his feet. Honest. He'll start standing open, shuffle them around a little during the takeaway and then even more during the elaborate looping procedures and finally find where to plant himself for the downswing. Has to be seen to be believed. A lesser talented human being would not be able to even make contact with the ball.

He can still strike it great though, but for some reason can not hit or even recognise a fade. If you're on the practice ground he'll call you over and say 'Watch these fades'. He will then hit half a dozen pure long irons, hardly disturbing the turf, all starting fractionally right and drawing three yards back to the pin. Then he'll stand back and say 'There you go. Fades.' 'Erm... sorry Mickey, those are all pure draws.' You will then get the stare of your life, be called '****ing ignorant' and probably something else very rude.

He is a huge student of the game and always has a new theory he will tell you about at huge length, making a quick half hour on the practice ground a full two hours including an in-depth lecture on Snead's leg-work, during which time you'll probably be called ignorant again about half a dozen times. Famous swing theories include 'swing it like a blindman', 'swing it like you're in porridge' and his own version of Dave Pelz approach that saw him carrying five wedges. He had three putters and two drivers in his bag at the time so didn't have room for many other clubs.

We videoed his swing once and showed it to him. His response was 'That's not my swing. You've been messing around with the ****ing computers. Where's my real ****ing swing?'

[Richie3Jack]

Grant really wasn't a character. Just a phenomenally talented person, a quiet guy but a good guy once you got to know him. Dave was actually rather quiet as well, but he was a true character. Nothing ever gets too big for him. My buddy Kevin was as big of a character as any of them. And he never drank or did drugs, not even cigarettes. He was just one of those guys that was naturally wired to be a riot to hang out with. I really wish I had their swings on camera, so now I know what to look out for.




3JACK

[Richie3Jack]

Another guy who was more of a 'legend' than a character was a guy named Bobby. I started remembering him a couple of months ago when I read the Gotham Golf Blog and it's interview with Lag Erickson and the discussion came to the difficulty of trying to make the PGA Tour back before the Ben Hogan Tour (now the Nationwide Tour) came into its inception.

Mainly because Bobby was a perfect example of a guy that probably would've spent a few years on the PGA Tour had there been a setup like they have today. Instead he played mini-tours and Canadian Tour events for years and struggled to make ends meet.

Bobby used to work 3 jobs and the first time I ever saw him he was working as a bartender at a favorite Italian restaurant in town. I probably was 12 or 13 years old at the time, but my dad told me that Bobby was the greatest player in town and he could hit it a mile. That surprised me some because Bobby was about 5'8" tall.

He tried a few more Canadian Tour events and then decided to just work back home and try to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. He finally decided to get his amateur status back which took two years. When he got that back, I was getting older and developing into a very good golfer myself, so I would get to play with him occasionally and I watched him a ton because he could flat out play. Problem was that he was still working 3 jobs, and at the most played once a week and hit balls for probably 30minutes to an hour a week. And he was still the best player at our club.

We used to play these 6-man team tourneys that I talked about in a previous post and our club dominated them every year. It was great because they would alternate courses they would play and a lot of other teams would talk shit about how they were going to kill us and more often than not we usually wound up playing at their course and we would destroy them. It's pretty easy to see why as our main team consisted of guys who played on scholarship at U. of South Carolina (Bobby), U of Miami (Dave), East Carolina (my friend Jeff), Radford (my friend Danny) and John who played D-III golf, but became a better golfer once he graduated and made it to the NYS finals one year. And of course, myself who wound up playing at Coastal Carolina.

In fact, John and Danny were probably the only guys that could beat Bobby on a somewhat more than occasional basis, but at best about 20% of the time. Dave could beat Bobby if he putted decent, which was once in a blue moon.

In Bobby's first year back with Amateur status, he went to the quarterfinals of the US Am...while he was working 3 jobs and playing no more than once a week. He wound up beating Manny Zerman, who at the time was the #2 ranked amateur in the world. IIRC, he wound up losing to Justin Leonard.

One of my favorite 'Bobby moments' was the time my friend Mike and I were playing with him and Bobby hit a shot that is up side a small pine tree. He had no shot and I remember being interested in seeing this just because he never seemed to have difficulty EVER on the golf course. I figured he would punch out. Instead he gets up there, turns around his 7-iron and from about 135 yards, hits it left handed and fires it at the pin to about 15 feet. He then puts the club in his bag like it was nothing. Mike and I just looked at each other and I realized this guy was wayyyy out of my league.

A couple of other favorite 'Bobby moments':

- Our newpaper was cool in that the sports section loved writing about local sports and they would do big writeups on local golf. Unfortunately there was a guy named Ken, a good guy, that the paper just loved. Problem is that he wasn't even a top 10 player in the city, yet he would get accolades if he broke 75. But still a decent guy and I was good friends with his younger brother and got along with his dad quite well. That still meant that the rest of us would get irked by him because the paper would be all over him.

Bobby plays him in match play in the city championship, something like the quarterfinals. Bobby 3-putts the first hole..an easy hole for a bogey. I am positive that Bobby was thinking if Ken somehow won, he'd never hear the end of it. So Bobby's response was to birdie the next 9 straight holes. And, there's only 1 par-5 on the front side (and only 2 par-5's on the entire course). Yes, Bobby shot a 29 on the front side and 3-putted the first hole for bogey to do so.

- In the city championship finale, it's just like the US Am in that they play 36-hole match play. Unfortunately my good friend Jeff played him and this was a big moment for Jeff because this could be a watershed moment for Jeff. And Jeff played well enough to shoot -8 for 32 holes. Had he got to finish, he probably would've shot -10 for 36 holes. Bobby beat him 6&4.

As far as his game, I remember he used to take pretty big divots. I wouldn't say he was long, but he had a knack for being really long at the right time. My guess is he understood the concept of hitting up on the ball one way or another when it came to needing the big drive. One thing I learned a ton from Bobby is his distance control with irons. Bobby had a knack for always being at least pin high, unless he wanted to keep the ball below the cup. But he almost never went over the green either. I don't think he was a great iron player, but pretty good and exceptional with the distance control as we didn't have GPS or rangefinders back then.

Putting was probably Bobby's strong suit, even though I wouldn't say he was the greatest putter I ever saw by any means.

Last I knew Bobby still works a lot and plays about twice a month, which doesn't include winter months where he doesn't get to play at all and is still one of the best amateurs in the state of NY. He's probably close to being 50 years old right now, but I doubt he'll try for the Champions Tour as he just doesn't have the money for it. Jim Roy is from Syracuse and he made the Champions Tour this year and while Jim is a fine golfer, if Bobby had some money and that gave him time to practice, he'd smoke Jim 90% of the time.

As a guy Bobby was just one of the guys. When all of the craziness was going for the 6-man team tournaments, Bobby wasn't afraid to hang around, but he didn't act crazy either with a wife and kids. He was easy to get along with, has a great marriage and probably balances out golf, marriage, friends and work as well as anybody I've ever met.






3JACK

[jonnygrouville]

Nice.

One of my dad's favourite stories is when he got knocked out of the quarter finals of the Belgian amateur. He was only a youngster and this was the first time he had reached the last stages of an international amateur event. His opponent was this Italian guy who sauntered on to the tee, dressed immaculately, shook hands and then rifled one down the first without a practice swing. They walked down to their drives, Grouville senior in the fairway and his opponent's ball has hopped two yards into the rough. The Italian chap reaches over, drags his ball back to the fairway, picks it up and says 'Your hole, I don't want to get my new shoes dirty', birdies the next five holes and wins easily.

I got knocked out of the Brittany amateur one year by a big Gauloise puffing French guy that I later found out had won the British Amateur a few years back and had played in the Masters; two things he had the class not to mention during our match! Great swing though and never played with a better putter; every single putt had a chance.

[Richie3Jack]

I just found out that Bobby is 48 years old. I don't think he'll try to Champions Tour though because he has 2 kids and the youngest being 13 years old.




3JACK