Fore! Play (9 page)

One of my favorite products at the show is “GOLF—the essence of the game” cologne, “crisp and clean with a sophistication
associated with low handicappers.” Maybe if I just wear this! Maybe it’s like aromatherapy. “You keep thinking golf long after
leaving the course” when you wear this fragrance made with “extract of fairway grass” clippings. It has “grassy overtones
… smells like the golf course.”

Will it actually take strokes off my game?

“Spray it on your balls and it might surprise you!” is the snappy retort.

Golf Cologne: -1 stroke

“To be competitive, you’ll need the modern tools of the trade,” says the guy in the next booth, when I tell him I’m taking
up the game. “It’s almost to where you can’t play without this little honey.” Little honey is the Bushnell Yardage Pro Rangefinder,
which looks like a pair of binoculars. You point it at the flag—or the beverage cart—and it gives you the distance. “Personally,”
I tell him, “I’d really rather not be reminded.” Not to mention I usually can’t see the damned flag for all the trees.

There are all sorts of divot repair tools, one of them gold. Why? “Status,” says the salesman. “Weird,” we reply. The little
gadgets would do me no good. Most of my divots require earthmoving equipment to replace.

There’s the Deluxe Golf Pro Swiss Army knife, which could come in handy when you hit into the very, very rough and need survival
tools and skills. This special model has the club groove cleaner, spike wrench, snap shackle, divot repair tool, cigar cutter,
Phillips head screwdriver, bottle cap lifter, can opener, toothpick, and tweezers. “Or,” I suggest, “if your game’s going
really badly, you could use the knife to slit your wrists.”

“Absolutely,” says the agreeable salesman.

There is one tool I really can use: JTD’s Search ‘N Rescue line of golf ball retrieval units, for recovering balls hit into
the water. There are one-, two-, and even four-ball retrievers—in case you’re playing in a really bad foursome or you’ve personally
hit four consecutive tries into the water. The salesman says his father started the business twenty years ago in the (presumably
wet) basement. What will he do for a living if someone invents a floating golf ball? “Still need to retrieve the little sucker,”
he smiles. He does have stiff competition, however, from the likes of the Mud Weasel, which can also retrieve four balls at
a time up to fifteen feet away using an anodized aluminum shaft that cannot rust or corrode.

We see a guy walking around with a car antenna he says is the Finders Keepers golf ball detector. He looks like a product
of the patients’ rights movement that emptied so many of our fine mental institutions. He puts a ball on the floor and when
he walks past it, the antenna points at the ball. Which is fine, except that when I walk past the ball holding the antenna,
it does not point at the ball. “You’re not doing it right,” he advises. Why hasn’t anyone ever come out with a Lo-Jack golf
ball?

And there is a global positioning system device for golfers called the inFOREmer 2000. Jesus, do some people get
that
far out in the rough? The handheld electronic appliance displays the hole you’re on, distance to the pin and hazards, distance
to the front and the back of the green, professional tips for playing the hole, a weather advisory, digital scoring, green
contours and undulations, the distance of each shot, and it retrieves messages and memos, as well as issuing 911 emergency
calls. The most appealing capability was the suggestion that it could possibly be used for calling in food and beverage orders.

Tools of the Trade: -3 strokes

Industro-Weld paste has a booth. “Why?” I ask. “So if you throw your clubs and the heads fall off you can glue ‘em back on?”

“Exactly.”

Club Repair Paste: -3 strokes (it could mean a couple hundred strokes if you had to play with your clubheads off)

You can lose your head and you can also lose the whole club. “Can’t play with lost clubs now, canya?” Nosir.

The salesman says ClubOut prevents club loss. It’s a bunch of tubes you place your clubs in and when you remove them a red
gizmo pops up to alert you that the club is out and probably still lying next to the green where you left it, stupid.

Can’t play with your clubs
stolen
either, now, canya? More than 800,000 golf clubs worth about $100 million were stolen last year—so maybe golfers are not
a nicer class of people after all, eh? Either that or the good folks at the Club Alert booth are trying to scare us. They
insert a transmitter into each club, which emits a light and sound alert when the club and bag are separated by more than
sixty feet.

It remains to be seen if this new product will become as thoroughly obnoxious and universally despised as car alarms, but
here in this last bastion of serenity, the golf course, it certainly has a decent chance.

Club Alarms: +1 stroke

There’s an almost infinite variety of training aids on display here, most of them really odd-looking contraptions you strap
to your body to remind you that you’re doing many things horribly wrong. Would that you could wear all these while you play!
You’d look like a B-movie Martian but you’d never make a mistake.

The Alignment Plus looks like a car antenna that you strap horizontally across your chest—undoubtedly causing immense pain
and suffering to women golfers—but: aligning feet and body; promoting “proper take-away” and shoulder turn; keeping you “parallel”
to your target; and improving your “alignment.”

There are golf training devices you strap to your legs, arms, and wrists. There’s the muscle memory Pivot-maker board you
strap to your feet like a snowboard; the Mad Jack Swing Machine training system, a huge tubular contraption that’s a “slice
breaker/swing builder” and may or may not fit in the house; and the Kneeknocker, which “uses the proven biofeedback technique”
to train you to keep the right knee flexed during the backswing. That is: If your knee straightens, the sensor beeps.

There are lots of items employing big rubber bands—aka “golf tension bands”—offering muscle building through resistance for
greater clubhead speed. And there is a Swingometer and the Excel-A-Rater to measure it.

And there’s a kinky bondage variety that appears to be borrowed from the S&M industry or from restraints used in the transport
of dangerous prisoners. One of these straps your arms together to restrict arm separation, another one straps your legs together
to inhibit lateral sway, and then there are, well, handcuffs that remind you to keep your hands together.

All this to turn you into the perfect golf machine.

Training Devices: -15 combined strokes

It is unclear to me if the Perfect Grip is a training device or something you can permanently attach to the top of your club
shaft. It is pro golfer Mark O’Meara’s grip, something that looks as though the golfer had gripped a wad of clay, then had
it molded in plastic. You just put your hands where his were and presumably play just like him.

Also, there is offered at the show a bronze sculpture of Moe (not Greg) Norman’s golf grip—his two hands gripping the top
of a golf club—for study and reflection and to beautify any home. We put our hands behind our backs and admired it. To a golfer,
a thing of beauty, one would guess, provided of course that Moe Norman is or was a golfer. We just don’t know.

Getting a Grip: -3 strokes

There is a disturbing amount of emphasis at the show on pain relief. Most of it focuses on physical pain, however, when clearly
what is needed is help with the emotional and psychological varieties.

The emphasis ranges from Advil, here to tout its sponsorship of the senior tour, to perhaps twenty booths offering copper
or magnetic wristbands that claim to cure arthritis and (most) other maladies.

“The Tour Power copper-magnetic wristbands provide copper to your body and allow more oxygen-rich blood to flow to your muscles,”
explains the pitchman. “Biomagnetism works in the human body through the circulatory system, the nervous system, and the endocrine
system to take strokes off your game.”

There are magnetic gloves and gel insoles, acupuncture insoles, ionized yin-yang bracelets that are “a Gift of God,” and whole
wearable electromagnetic fields by PulseGen.