A Davidpalooza

Your third favorite golf blogger, David Owen, has been en fuego recently, and I've left his vast body of work unlinked (and if he's better than your third favorite, I'm going to pout and double your subscription price).  Talk about an unsustainable state of affairs...

Unbroken - By the weather, that is, or, more accurately that was, as this item is a full two weeks old.

We called every golf course we could think of, and discovered that Stanley and

New uses for a leaf blower.

Goodwin, in Hartford, were both closed, but that Fairchild Wheeler, in Fairfield, was not only open but “with greens.” The Wheel is just an hour from Tunxis, so that’s where we went. Tim showed up as we were pulling out, but he decided to be a good husband by returning home and giving his wife holiday-related opportunities to be angry at him. When the rest of us arrived at the Wheel, a maintenance guy with a leaf blower was removing snow from a putting surface:

It's typical David, but mostly notable for the solicitation of Jagermeister to be the official hooch of the Sunday Morning Group.

TV Viewing, Improved -  It takes David some time to get to the gist of this piece, a not at all uncommon phenomenon, with a short dissertation on reality shows and weddings.  

John and I consented, out of loyalty to her and her old roommate, whom both of us know, but we worried that sitting through an entire TLC show might permanently harm us in some way. Luckily, we were able to protect ourselves, by viewing the episode through long cardboard tubes from two used-up rolls of Christmas wrapping paper:

This isn't one of David's best efforts, but bad David is still better than most (especially in January).   As an added bonus, he includes a picture of his adorable thirteen-month old granddaughter doing her impression of David's golf mates.

Golf Gear, Improved - David prides himself for being an unpaid shill for various manufacturers of golf gear, and in this installment he goes even further afield than usual:

Shelley entered an MBA program when he got out of the Marines, and in 2010, as a class

project, he founded an online company called SGT KNOTS. “I bought five spools of parachute cord, and I tried to think of everything I could possibly make from it, to put it out there and see what would sell,” he said. “I was really only trying to teach myself about e-commerce, but about three days after I launched SGT KNOTS a catalog company that supplies police departments all over the country contacted me and said they wanted to start buying parachute-cord survival bracelets, 500, 1,000 at a time. So there I was, in my basement, sitting on my couch, making these things as fast as I could for three weeks straight.”

 That's Mike Shelley, a former Marines special operations guy, and apparently parachute cord, or more technically nylon kernmantle rope, known popularly as 550 cord, is duct tape for warriors.  Who knew?

In any event, David recommends it for zipper pulls and identifies a can't-miss product extension for Sgt. Knots:

I can think of other golf applications -- like, how about a cord to attach your putter headcover to your golf bag, so that you don’t have to keep retrieving it from the lost-and-found? (A Marine would call that a "dummy cord." Good name.)

Winter Golf - In this post, which to those on the East Coast will seem like a lifetime ago,

David gloats about some late season warm weather playing opportunities.  Alas, as the bride keeps reminding me, he's likely not gloating any more as the permafrost has descended.  But it's worth a look if only for the impassioned plea for a Clicgear corporate sponsorship.

Continuing the winter golf meme, David revisits the "Y" word with this:

You might think that wearing two pairs of gloves would reduce your so-called “touch,”

David's True Linkswear Chukkas

especially on the greens, but if it does anything it probably has the opposite effect. Debbie Crews, who is the sports-psychology consultant for the women’s golf team at Arizona State University and the chair of the World Scientific Conference of Golf, sometimes tells golfers with the yips to try putting (in her lab) with ski gloves on. They usually putt so much better that it’s amazing,” she told me, “because they can’t manipulate.” I wrote about Crews and her research last year, in an article about the yips for The New Yorker. You can read it here.

Ski gloves I have....but if ski gloves are good, wouldn't ski mittens be better?

That link in the excerpt is to David's scholarly treatise on the subject that shall not be named from the New Yorker.  I blogged it here back in June, but that was before the magazine made its archives available online.  It's well worth a read, and best to do that in the heart of winter when the risk of contagion is minimized...

David's Sunday Morning Group made it onto the golf course on New Year's Day, and he shares several of the rules issues that arose:

Addison was wearing shorts, so, in accordance with our winter rules, he got to be a 2 instead of a 0. But his socks were so tall that they functioned almost like pants, and to keep them from sliding down to his ankles he was holding them up with the rubber bands from two bunches of asparagus -- which provided exactly the right amount of tension, he said. At some point, I guess, the Committee will have to rule on maximum sock height, as well as on artificial support.

David also helpfully provides this video of a rare 86-stroke penalty for repeatedly grounding a club inside a hazard:

Give it a look, if only for the Putter Dart guy's headwear.

Wrapping up the winter golf theme, David posts a reader's report of a winter round at famed Ballybunion:

This winter, there was also a temporary green on the 18th. It made the hole disappointingly shorter and easier -- although in my case I plugged my approach shot in

the face of the huge “Sahara” bunker and had to play backward, into the same bunker, just to have a shot out.

One of the things that make Irish winter golf extra dramatic is the long shadows. Ballybunion is roughly 60 degrees north latitude, and when the sun at its southernmost position the highest it ever gets is about 7 degrees above the horizon.

Love the photo from the iconic 11th tee... But Ireland is no place for a sensible human being in winter.  

Travel, Improved - Last up from David is this item with some eccentric travel tips:

In the photo below, you see a week’s worth of golf-trip gear -- all of which will fit into

an eBags TLS Mother Lode Mini 21” Wheeled Duffel, which in turn will fit into the overhead compartment of an airplane. Upper left: medium orange Packing Cube containing a tee shirt (for sleeping) and a pair of lightweight fleece pants (for in-room apres-golf lounging). Lower left: my eBags Pack-it-Flat Toiletry Kit, which is actually not a Packing Cube but is fully Packing Cube-compatible. Center: two large festive Packing Cubes containing shirts, pants, and a sweater. Upper right: large orange Packing Cube containing underwear, socks, handkerchiefs. Lower right: two empty large gray Packing Cubes, for laundry. If I’m traveling with a rainsuit, I’ll put it in one of the gray Packing Cubes and stuff that into my golf-bag travel cover. And if I know I’m going to need a sports coat somewhere I fold it inside out and put it in a Packing Cube of its own. That keeps it from getting wrinkled, even if the other stuff in the suitcase squeezes it flat.

More of that unpaid shilldom I was speaking of... but he closes with this unexplained and rather curious photo:

I'm thinking those towels should get a room....