I’ve made nine holes in one—I swear to God—but I’ve never come close to figuring out the game of golf. The only thing I remember from the couple of lessons I took from master teacher Jim McLean was him telling me, “You’re not good enough to shoot for pins”—flagsticks. “Just aim for the middle of the green.” Hurtful. But sound advice. Saved me from losing a lot of balls.
Anyway, golf supplied some much-needed sanity in my life during the Mad Men years. Well, not exactly sanity. Just a different kind of insanity.
Frank Nicolo was my partner for some ultra-crazy golf escapades. At least once a week, after work at the agency, we’d drive out to City Island and whack a hundred or so golf balls on a very dark, very cold golf range stuck in the middle of nowhere.
Just so you get the picture, I’m talking about smacking half-dead balls in the dead of winter—ten, twenty degrees, cold wind a-blowing, no heaters at this godforsaken range.
Our attitude was that if it was a winter day when we wouldn’t mind taking a long walk, the golf game was on. Here’s how desperate we were to play. One winter Saturday we drove to a crummy public course in South Jersey. It was so cold you couldn’t hammer a tee into the ground. The golf course was also overrun by geese. So we started teeing up our balls on a couple of frozen goose turds.
One other time, Nicolo and I played a round of golf on December 24.
This particular day before Christmas, it started snowing when we were on the third green. We kept playing and it kept getting more absurd.
The ball wouldn’t roll on the fairways. You couldn’t putt because the ball would gather snow and stop halfway to the hole.
So we quit after we finished nine holes. We were actually proud of ourselves for quitting. That might have been a first for us. As we were heading to the clubhouse, four die-hard New Yorkers came walking through the driving snow in the direction of the first tee. We overheard one guy say, “So, Marty, you think we’ll get in eighteen holes?”
Probably some ad guys, like us. Or maybe Mafia hitmen taking a little time off for Christmas.
Another time, Nicolo and I—plus our sports-journalist pal Johnny Keresty—played with another friend who was in his mid-seventies, a very good golfer named Charlie Malone from the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
We were playing one of the ten thousand or so courses around Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Frank, Keresty, and I hit half a dozen balls into the water on a fairly easy par-three hole. In our defense, we had just taken up the game.
Charlie Malone stepped up to his ball, waggled his club thrice, then looked over at us. “Tough hole, hey, boys?” He grinned and put his tee shot about five feet from the hole.
Yet another good reason to quit golf.
But to this day, I persist. The golf gods are diabolically clever. They know how to keep you coming back.
Much like the writing gods.