Lancaster Golf, Jun 11-13, 1999 Dave Tutelman The annual mid-Pennsylvania gathering of "the clan" (friends of Coops) was a week later than usual; this time it was the SECOND weekend in June. Why? A few theories: - Thor wanted to be in the gallery at The Memorial the first weekend in June. - Elizabethtown College no longer wanted RSG-ers cluttering their tournament (and taking home their trophies). Originally, the date was determined to coincide with the annual ETown Alumni Weekend Tournament. Which brings us to... - Julie Cooper is out of law school now, and is lawyering instead of being the ETown Alumni Coordinator. So much for our invitation! Probably just as well. The last time we played Hershey South, they made Thor and Fred ride. That's a capital offense, and Thor promised dismal weather if we ever played there again. :-) This year, we played two courses, both of which have been on the venue in the past: - Dauphin Highlands Friday and Sunday. It's a glorious, very hilly and difficult course, and one of my very favorite courses. But you're not going to play two rounds a day there; too much physical exertion. Anyway Friday and Sunday were one-round days, and Dauphin is five minutes from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, for the convenience of those who traveled. - Pilgrim's Oak, for two rounds on Saturday. It's way south of Lancaster and a million miles from interstates, so mid-weekend makes sense. It's almost as hilly as Dauphin, and even harder. (Coops refers to Dauphin as "Pilgrim Lite". I disagree; there's nothing "lite" about Dauphin. But if you match up the best holes in each of par-3, par-4, and par-5, I agree that Pilgrim comes out on top. More later. Rather than going at it chronologically, I'm just going to stream my conciousness (from an outline, of course :-). First, the great rounds: - First and foremost was Thor's all-time best round of 76 on Sunday. More about that later; I was a witness, and it was really impressive. - Lee Hou also had his best ever on Sunday, an 87. He also came within a fractional inch of an ace on Saturday. I was in the group behind. The ranger drove up to us excitedly and said, "You know the group ahead? One of their guys put it so close to the cup, they're still waiting for it to drop." - Bill Sponseller shot a 76 Friday, with 14 pars, and won pretty much all the skins in his group. - I had some personal bests of my own, including my best scores at both courses, and hitting 11 of 14 fairways on Sunday. We played from the blues all weekend. At both courses, it seemed to give a good total distance: 6716 yards at Dauphin and 6107 at Pilgrims. At least that was the reasoning. Flies in the ointment: - We usually play the 6400 yard tees. That would have been the blacks at Pilgrim and the whites at Dauphin. - The blues at Dauphin (especially on Friday) were placed indistinguishably from the blacks. We were really playing 7000 yards. - Someone (What, me?!? Couldn't be!) had said OK to playing the whites Friday, then said OK to playing the blues. Bill didn't let me forget that the whole weekend, especially when he was taking heat for shooting his great round "from the pitch'n'putt tees". (Bill, 14 pars at Dauphin is a wonderful result from ANY tees. And the whites are 70.5/120, certainly a good test.) But it's SO much fun to tweak Bill, because he responds so WELL to it. (More later -- I keep saying that.) On the first day, the group gathered starting early, had lunch, and practiced at the range and the green. When the starter called for "Cooper's first group", someone noticed that Cooper himself wasn't here yet. Fred Stluka observed, "That's OK. He's never here till the absolute last minute, but he's never actually LATE." True to form, Coops arrived in time to shake hands with the second group before they teed off, and take two practice putts before his own tee time. I was staying in the Coopers' guest room, and for the rest of the weekend had the responsibility of getting Coops to the courses on time. Each day, Coops was there a good half hour before tee time (early enough to hit a few and putt a few), and a good half hour after my comfort level. Good compromise. Fred referred to it as the "Cooper-Tutelman Effect". I played the Saturday morning round with Mark and Chris Georg. Both are playing much better than I remembered. Chris hits the ball huge distances with any club at all, and Mark has built himself a new driver that he's really popping. I always hate to take the tee after Chris. (Learned that last trip, but it's still true.) Invariably, he has hit a boomer about 300 yards and in the fairway, and I've seen it. Now I have ALL the wrong swing thoughts in my head. Well, actually they're the RIGHT swing thoughts, except that my 57-year-old body can't execute them, but has to try. Talk about a recipe for disaster... I played the first day with Fred and Howard Solodky. Howard has a nice, smooth, unhurried swing, and gets a lot out of it. But he wants MORE! About halfway through the round, he borrowed one of my new irons that I had been raving about. He tried one shot with it; the ball stopped 8 feet below the hole -- with a 5-iron from 175. Well, he didn't want to draw any conclusions from a possible fluke, so he used my 6-iron from 170 downhill on the next hole. This time, he hit the pin. On the next hole, the 4-iron faded a bit, but hole-high. As soon as we got back to the parking lot, he was on his cell phone to Golfsmith to order the same heads. I had gotten them on a closeout, and none were left. For the rest of the weekend, the standing joke was that I should keep an eye on my clubs while Howard was around. Ah, the eighteenth hole at Pilgrim's Oak. That would be a good finishing hole for any tournament, even the pros. A par-5 with water everywhere. A pull off the tee is in deep woods (don't even look for it), a hook is in the creek, and a long slice is OB. The second shot has to avoid a pond left, and the green is behind a 120-yard pond. There is mounding all around the playing surface; good for spectators but bad for wayward shots. The green is shallow; a little long is in a collection area (not a hard up-and-down), but a lot long is a steep downhill pitch from deep rough on the mound-front. Hit it too hot, it'll end up in the pond. - Bill put one on top of the mound to the left, high enough for a flat (if very grassy) lie. Managed a par from there. Tough stuff! - I finished, and was watching as Fred's group finished. Fred pulled his ball out of the hole and announced, "Birdie!" I couldn't let that rest, and told him I saw him pull his I-don't-know-which shot out of the pond. He responded that the group had agreed that it was a par-8, so he did indeed have a birdie. The fifteenth green has no business on a course as good as Pilgrim's. It is a two-tier green, with a whole 6-8 feet between the tiers. In the morning round Bill's approach hit in the upslope and rolled back to the bottom tier. (The flag was on the top.) His first putt made it up the hill -- almost -- then rolled all the way down and off the green. His second putt was off the back; he wasn't going to roll down again. I don't remember if he was in the hole after four putts or just stopped, but he walked away muttering about a lob wedge being the only way to deal with that green. When I landed on the lower tier in the afternoon round, I remembered his comment. Out came the lob wedge, for an unorthodox two-"putt". Bill was right! Julie Cooper joined us for dinner at Bube's in Mount Joy. She enjoyed the spirited discussions of the after-golf crowd, including: - Our imposing on Julie for an expert legal opinion. Hey, she's an attorney now. But no, we couldn't convince her there was any way that posting on RSG makes one a "public figure", thus raising the threshold for a libel suit. - Bill and Lee's recounting of their early-morning epic. Seems they had picked their hotel for its short golf course. (Nothing like getting up to play 9 holes at 5AM, before 36 holes at Pilgrim's starting at 7:45.) I don't remember all the details, but Bill would up not playing at all (something like, "Where do you think you're going?" "Where the hell does it look like I'm going?" And it went downhill from there.) Lee ended up playing the short course alone. Postscript to the Bill/Lee epic: Sunday morning, Bill told us that his hotel bill included a large number for "greens fee". He looked at it and said, "No, you're not going to do that to me." Desk clerk: "Do what to you?" "Get me pissed off this early in the morning. I DID NOT play golf. My roommate played golf, and he left me a receipt for his fee, and ......" Why do I get the feeling Bill won't stay at the Willow Creek again? Sunday morning was a team event: The Homeboys vs the Distant Stars, total strokes straight up. The Distant Stars won, basically by Thor's best-ever round. And that was one impressive round! Thor was making par after par. He had a great recovery from a drive into the hazard on five, to get his par anyway. When he got to nine, he was just a little over par. He decided to ignore the advice about the pond on the right ("don't use driver!"), and wound up wet -- and bogeying. After that, he settled down and played great golf. After he went par-birdie on 10 and 11, Bill said, "OK the next is a par-5; that's your eagle hole." Then he looked at the yardage and revised it to, "Well, birdie anyway." Thor had to scramble a bit, but knocked his third shot stiff from fairway wood range, and did make the birdie putt. On the next hole, an impressive up-and-down from the rough with not much green to work with. Two holes later, he got a sandy par. It was really fun to watch. Let me end the writeup the way I ended the weekend. As I was about to leave on my drive home, Coops asked me to stay a few minutes so he could tell a story about me. Coops and I had shared a cart for the afternoon round the day before, but a lot was happening that I didn't know about. We were paired with a couple of younger guys not from the RSG group. They were hitting big drives, and one of them (Steve) had some game. Coops and I, OTOH, had played our "real golf" in the morning, and were now playing "cart golf" (or, as Coops called it, "whimsical golf"). We were not playing very well, and not especially minding it. Being on this beautiful course hitting a golf ball was enough for us this lovely afternoon. After the fifteenth hole -- which, for the umpteenth hole in a row, we had not played very well -- Coops said to me, "OK, enough whimsy. Let's see if we can just shoot solid bogeys on the way in." WHAT I DIDN'T KNOW was that Coops had just made a bet with the young bucks in the other cart. Now, I'm not much of a competitor; I prefer playing against my own previous scores. Coops, however, enjoys golf a lot more when something is riding on it. Knowing that, Coops' bet was cart against cart for the drinks afterwards. He even got a stroke a hole. (He told me later that they were pretty quick to take him up on it.) And, oh yeah, "I'm not even telling my partner." He suspected, probably correctly, that I'd be upset by the bet. So he just suggested to me that we try to see if we could bogey in; with 20-20 hindsight and a stroke a hole, Steve and Tim would have to par in to match us. Well, his words settled me down, and I finished par-bogey-par, which was plenty good enough. Steve, in the other cart, seemed to come completely unglued. Of course, I had no idea why, but he was suddenly making decisions that were doomed from the moment he selected the club. Example: 115 yards downwind = 9-iron. On the next hole, 135 yards INTO the same wind = 9-iron. They can't both be right! In fact, he was over the green and in the woods for a double bogey on the first, and well short on the second. And he finished by trying to hit the eighteenth green with his second shot, from 250 yards out. (Check out the description above for this hole.) He did a "Tin Cup" bit, drowning a couple of balls and taking about a ten. When I shook hands with them on the 18th green, they seemed a little less than cordial and in a hurry to leave. I was surprised, but had no idea why until Coops told me on Sunday about the bet. They thought they had been hustled, and maybe they had been. But the orange juice we were drinking was really sweet, as we sat on the mounds and watched the other RSG groups play in. Great weekend! Thanks, Coops.