Hitting The Long Clubs
This is a golf story that’s also not a golf story. I was lucky enough to be able to play golf very frequently this summer. Like at least three days a week on the practice range, and about once a week on a county course with my father. It was the best form of work [...]
Teaching Kids To Play
There’s a disturbing trend of parents pushing their kids into sports thinking far too long term. Elementary schoolers toting half-sized golf bags around the driving range are the next Tiger Woods. Pop Warner football players are Heisman material as soon as the other 8-year olds have trouble catching them on long runs. Little Leaguers who [...]
Back to Basics
After a few years of complete and utter futility on the golf course, I decided it was time to take a few lessons and figure out what was wrong. The symptoms are strange and possibly inconsistent – I’m hitting my driver 150 yards long but 75 yards right, I can’t hit a 5-iron further than [...]
Stan Mikita Hates My Golf Game
I had the pleasure of playing in the NHL Charity Golf Event in July 2003, in a foursome with (at that time) Stanley Cup Champion and New Jersey Devil Scott Gomez. That shot is from the Medina Country Club, after we had once again dug divots in the fairway deep enough to hide a golf [...]
Organic vs Inorganic Growth
The Hockey News has a great video interview with Mike Cammalleri, newest Canadien and likely linemate of Gionta and Gomez. He addresses his performance in Calgary as a function of having Iginla on his line, what life will be like on the under-six-foot line, and how the Canadiens will find their identity. The Habs are [...]
Nerd Defined
You know you’re a nerd when: You use epsilon in a sentence (and not in the Paul Erdos “kids are epsilons” malaproprism). Your golf game is much more runge-kutta than gutta-percha, not that it makes any difference. Your kids don’t have tantrums, they go non-linear. You have more than one t-shirt with an equation on [...]
Head Inversion for Duffers
Welcome to the newest arena for rants and raves: golf. It’s only appropriate in that it was one of my typically horrendous golf adventures that led to the “snowman” nickname (after carding a series of 8s and picking up my ball, often before even hitting the green). But I like the game; it’s challenging; it [...]
Living New Jersey Jokes
Know me and know that I bristle at Jersey jokes. It’s not just that I went to the same high school system as Bruce Springsteen, or that I spent endless summers “down the shore” or even that I witnessed the pseudo-rebirth of Atlantic City. I’m a Jersey guy and proud of it. Sometimes, though, we [...]