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.

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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.

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So I’ve been spending a lot of time (actually, most of my time) working on the new book, RISA AND THE DOG…, and what reading I’m doing is basically research into ways you can cheat in a golf tournament.

So I was gonna write a blog post explaining what I’ve been doing, and went to Flickr.com to find a photo.

So I type in “golf cheat” and “cheat golf”, and all I find are cartoons and photos of Tiger Woods.  Aren’t we over that yet?

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Now that the Super Bowl is out of the way (as well as, locally, the Winter X-Games), I get a chance to withdraw from spectator sports for a while.  Til baseball’s spring training, at least.

Not being much of a fan of basketball or hockey (on TV), the only sports I’m likely to tune into are maybe the new Hank Haney series with Ray Romano.  Not that I’ll know when they’re on.  I’ll have to check with Number One Son, who’s always watching The Golf Channel.

The topic of TV sports reminded me of a conversation I once had with a neighbor, who used to actually compete at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, French Open, etc.  (In tennis… obviously.)

Anyway, since she retired from world-class tennis, she’s taken up golf with an equal passion and dedication.  And we were talking once, about something or other, and I happened to mention that I don’t watch golf on TV.  And she was not exactly aghast, but close.  She then said, “And I suppose you don’t watch tennis on TV, either?”

And I countered with something like, “What would happen if I happened to have a brother who was a professional bowler?  Should I expect you and everybody else we know to watch bowling?”

Spectator sports are fine, when all you want is to be a spectator.  (I definitely would’ve felt like that, if I’d lived in ancient Rome and you’d given me the choice of either participating in or simply watching gladiator fights.)

Bowling strikes me as definitely more fun to do, then to watch.  (Even if the beer was free.)  Likewise, golf.

That’s just my personal take.

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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.

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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.

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I know it’s only the end of January, but hope, as they say, “springs” eternal.  And “Spring” is just around the corner.  Somewhere.

And so this year I’ve got yet another exercise-related plan for improving my golf game.

Last year, all I heard was “core training.”  So I’ve set about doing more abdomen-related stuff, in hopes that all this “core values” talk really makes sense.

Intuitively, it seems reasonable.  I’ve found that I strike the ball better– and more consistently– when I’m aware of the mid-body resistance in both directions of the swing.  Like coiling and uncoiling a spring.

The hardest part, really, is keeping my balance in those 3-inch heels.

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