Another Slice

I’m still working hard on Dave Pelz’s approach to mastering the short game.

I was out a few weeks ago with a friend.  I was on the 4th fairway– dead-center, 90 yards from the pin– and I started to explain Dave’s clock-face visualization: essentially, if you imagine the face of an alarm clock, the position of your hands in your backswing can be anywhere from 7:30 (for very short) to 9:00, to 10:30, to high noon (or midnight, depending on your optimism/pessimism quotient).

Anyway, after explaining to my friend that a 90-yard shot should probably be a 10:30 backswing with a gap wedge, I proceeded to airmail the green by a good 20 yards.

My friend, barely suppressing outright guffaws, suggested that maybe I should’ve set my alarm a little earlier.

Anyway, as the accompanying photo portrays, my progress is often slow going.

And uphill.

I’m lucky I enjoy this game so much.

…

Tags: Main Page by John
No Comments »

I’ve been doing a bit of casual research into how one might imaginatively cheat in match play.

All this for the plot of my novel-in-progress, Risa and the Dog, and the Aspen Two-Million Winner-Take-All.

I’ve been a little surprised at how few really good suggestions I’ve garnered, when I’ve asked around for help.

So here’s one, courtesy of the late Andre the Giant: just strangle the guy to death.

You might recall the P.G. Wodehouse golf stories.  In one of them, a bunch of Roaring 20′s gangsters are playing a friendly round (with their bodyguards following at a discreet distance), and they come upon a dead body on one of the greens.  (I think he’d been gunned down, mob-style.)

Anyway, the corpse is in somebody’s line, so the gangsters very calmly solve the problem by declaring the stiff casual water.  Hence: a free drop.

That won’t work in the book.  I can’t have people getting wiped out on the 12th fairway of the Aspen Municipal Golf Course.  We have pretty relaxed law enforcement, but we still frown upon outright murder.

So I’ll have to keep looking for ever-yet-more-novel ways to cheat.  If you have any ideas, please drop me a line.

…

Tags: Main Page by John
No Comments »

Just when I was about to drag the shag bag out of the basement and hie myself out to the course to start my self-promised season-long regimen of working on my short game, THIS HAPPENS!

And it’s supposed to snow all through the weekend.

So what else is new?

The picture on the right, by the way, was taken in a more-pleasant time.  I couldn’t even consider getting out there now.  I’ve got a fresh 12 inches on my driveway, with much more scheduled to come.

Last week I was concerned that I seemed to be re-directing the club from the top.  Everything seemed strong, but tending to go left.  I guess I won’t be worrying about that for the next week or so.

(Thank heavens I spent 8 hours yesterday doing initial springtime yard clean-up.  I probably won’t be seeing anything but snow for a while.)

… 

Tags: Main Page by John
No Comments »

Well, the Olympics are over, and they were even better than one might’ve hoped.

Croatia, which had my favorite flag, wound up with 2 silver medals (men’s alpine super combined and slalom) and 1 bronze (men’s 10K sprint biathlon).

Our nearest neighbor, as far as I can tell (his parents live 4 blocks away) Chris Klug, competing in his 4th Olympics, finished a strong 7th in the men’s alpine parallel GS snowboard competition.

The cool thing about the Olympics– and you should be able to say this about almost every athletic competition– is that everybody who competes is an absolute winner.  True champion.  I realize that people get disappointed when a given individual doesn’t succeed, but it’s the commitment and the dedication that set these athletes apart from the rest of us.

This week, locally, we’re hosting a World Cup Paralympics event, the last of the season heading into the championships in 2 weeks up in (!) Vancouver.

My 15-year-old was out at Buttermilk on Sunday, and he said, “They go really fast!”  These, also, are world-class athletes, not “handicapped” people you have to feel sorry for.  They motor.

…

Tags: Main Page by John
No Comments »

So they’ve had to cancel training for the men’s downhill at the Olympics.  Rain, sleet, etc.

Some friends went up there a few weeks ago– albeit for free– and were greeted with rain at the bottom, freezing high winds at the top.  And I thought to myself: Sounds like Stowe!

Anyway, back here in Colorado, we haven’t had an epic winter thus far.  (And I bought a new snowblower this past fall.  I should’ve saved my money.)  But at least it hasn’t rained.  You have no idea what rain can do to “dampen” the collective spirits in a ski resort.

Tomorrow morning I’ll probably have to console myself with a mere 6 inches of fresh snow on Aspen Mountain, or out at Snowmass.

I might even wind up, if I dip into the trees, looking a bit like the guy in the picture.  He looks like he could do with a hot chocolate.

Speaking of which, I was driving down my street the other day, and there was a guy walking down the street with his back to me, walking really stiffly.  And I mentioned to my wife, “This guy looks really cold.”

And we drove by, and it turned out to be a neighbor who’s a ski instructor, dressed in civvies.

And the reason he was walking so stiffly was because he’d had hernia surgery the day before.  And he said that he was planning to be back teaching in a few more days.

A Few More Days!  Imagine that!  I don’t know much about medicine, but that’s pretty incredible.  Years ago, I had a roommate who had hernia surgery, and he was laid up for months!  (Granted, his may have been more severe, and he wasn’t exactly a world-class athlete, but still…)

So whatever the mess our health-care system is in, at least sometimes they can actually heal you!

…

Tags: Main Page by John
No Comments »

Just in case you’ve never actually seen an X-Games monster halfpipe.

In this case, referred to as a “Superpipe,” here’s a photo taken from the bottom, looking up toward the start house.  Those little ant-like creatures in the middle are a competitor and a hand-held cameraman following her.  (The camerman is 22 feet below those folks you can see standing on the lip, to his left.) 

And as with any snow event, it’s a heckuva lot scarier in real life, whether you’re at the top looking down, on even standing up on the lips at either side.

Though I’ve always found this strange:  Ski slopes themselves always seem steeper and more difficult when you’re standing on them in the summer, when it’s just rocks and weeds, and looking down and imagining having to negotiate your way down.  Once there’s a nice blanket of snow, however big the moguls are, it seems a lot easier.  Strange. 

The X-Games organizers put on a new competition this year, at the tail end of Sunday night:  They selected 6 guys (skiers, not boarders) and had them just try to see who could get the highest (above the lip on either side).  No tricks, no style points, just height.  All they had to do was jump real high, then land clean– no hands, no butt slides.

The winner, Peter Olenick (from just down the road in Carbondale), posted a jump of 24 feet, 11 inches.  (And that’s not from the bottom, inside the pipe.  That’s from the lip, which is 22 feet above the bottom, inside.  And remember: It’s built on a ski run, so the whole thing’s tilted… down… severely.  Yikes.)

And did I mention that the surface is as hard as a skating rink?  So you have to be able to ride a flat ski on your way up, then grab an edge real quick when you land.  Obviously, you’re not going in there with standard recreational skis.

You’re not required to do this, when you come out to visit.

…

Tags: Main Page by John
No Comments »

Now that the Winter X-Games are over, it’s time for a much-needed rest.

That last run in the SuperPipe was a killer.  I don’t know how I let Peter Olenick beat me.

…

Tags: Main Page by John
No Comments »

I just added this to the beginning of Chapter One of Risa and the Dog…, so I thought I’d add it to the blog site, as well.  I use the picture, in the manuscript, as a way of visualizing the opening cartoon.

Anyway, this is the restored (c. 1984) interior of Aspen’s Wheeler Opera House.  The vintage fire curtain is a painting of the then-recently-completed Brooklyn Bridge.

Before the renovation, the place was a fire trap.  (Not that those of us who worked in it worried.  The precursor to the Aspen Writers’ Foundation had its offices on the top floor, and we never gave the safety issue a thought.  It was just a long trek up two floors’ worth of rather steep stairs)  A friend of mine who owned an insurance agency couldn’t even figure out how the city could get the building insured, for a while.  But now it’s revamped, and a fun place to go see a play, an opera, a movie, or whatever.

…

Tags: Main Page by John
No Comments »

Being a big Kurt Vonnegut appreciator (as opposed to just “fan”), I added a note in my “Suggested Reading” category, “Xtra Credit: Books You Might Enjoy (besides mine)”…

… about a new book of previously unpublished stories by Vonnegut.  (Presumably from the 1950′s and 60′s, though the artwork copyrights are all from the 1990′s and 2000′s.)

Now that I’ve read through them all, I have to admit that some of these stories (like much of Vonnegut’s later-years work) aren’t much fun.  I go so far as to recommend not reading the final story, “The Good Explainer.”

It almost seems like the stories in this volume become increasingly dark and un-fun as you read along.

But the first few are GREAT.  Vintage Vonnegut.  Hard to imagine why he didn’t like them enough to publish, when they were written.

One personal note:  When I was in college, I knew a girl who worked at the Sears store in Falmouth.  On Cape Cod.  And she explained to me once that Kurt Vonnegut used to buy all of his clothes there.  (From her personally, I think she meant to imply.)

I soon moved out here to Aspen, and we didn’t have a Sears any closer than Grand Junction, but we did have a JC Penney in Glenwood (40 miles away), so I decided that if the clothes at Sears were good enough for Kurt, the clothes at JC Penney should be good enough for me.

…  

Tags: Main Page by John
No Comments »

Did you ever notice how it always snows right before a ski event?  Not two weeks ahead of time, when you’re doing course prep work, but right before it?  When you specifically don’t want it to snow?

Well, we finally got some new snow over the weekend…

… and the X-Games start Thursday.

And it’s supposed to snow again Tuesday.

So now I’m getting calls to “volunteer” to help slip the courses, starting with practice on Tuesday.  Through the weekend, I presume.  (Though ESPN apparently pays you to help.  Which in itself is a pretty foreign concept.  Getting paid to help out at a ski event?  How corporate can you get?)

On the bright side, one of my kid’s friends left her bike in the yard this fall, and despite of repeated pleas to take it home, it’s still out there.  It made for the subject of my wife’s Christmas-card painting this year.

And now that we’re done with football– except for the Super Bowl, which I don’t count as real football– I’m starting to wonder when I’m gonna start clicking on the Golf Channel for brief, surreptitious fixes.  And I’ll be wondering how soon my son’s going to mention the possibility of driving down to Battlement Mesa for a quick round.  So far, we’re settled into a pretty good ski groove.  But that’ll have to end, someday.

…

Tags: Main Page by John
No Comments »