Chipping for Par...A Novice Golfer Starts From Scratch

I've taken up golf since I moved out here, and I'm becoming a bit of junky. I always knew the disease would grip me at some point, but I thought it would happen some time much later in my life, like when my age had a 4 or a 5 in front of it. Not so. Fate conspired to push me into Duffer-Hood much sooner than that.

The learning curve has been steep. Very steep. But I'm progressing faster than I thought. I went from hopelessly carving divots in an otherwise beautiful course and knocking almost ten balls per round into the woods, to the point where I'm bogeying*, or double-bogeying most holes, and playing a round with a single ball. This has all happened in less than a month, and probably a total of 90 to 100 holes of golf.

Several things conspired in my favor to push me into this fun and frustrating pastime. First, I happen to live on two golf courses, which charge only $12 to walk nine. Second, my cousin Seth donated me his old set of golf clubs this summer. Third, I work from home, so my commute is non-existent. Thus, when I finish work, I can be on the first tee in under five minutes. Try that in New York City!

So, to the envy of many of my friends who've played this game for years, I'm able to get out two to three times a week. At that rate, it's easy to work on specific aspects of the game and to measure my progress. I'm still inconsistent. I shoot a par one hole, and then completely unravel on the next. Sometimes it varies from shot to shot. I'll be in front of the green, chipping for birdie...only to send the ball over the green, into a trap, and spend the next five strokes getting it in the hole. Or, I'll totally duff my drive and my approach, and be in tears by the time I get on the green...and then miraculously sink a 30 foot putt (which, admittedly, is rare).

And that's the thing, I guess. At my level of play, the inconsistency is the most frustrating part of the game. If I were just ambiently bad, ALL the time, I'd be fine with that. But the way this game messes with you is by dangling that little, enticing carrot of "success" in front of your nose, only to whisk it away as soon as you grab for it. One step forward is followed by three steps back, always. As soon as you start thinking, "Okay. You can birdie this. Don't f*ck it up..." is the moment you are bound---by some evil compact with the Ever-Spiteful Gods of Golf---to blow the shot. The moment you start thinking too much---about your swing, about your score, about that cold draft beer at the 19th hole---is when you will surely unravel. But...should you think to little...you've created a sure recipe for disaster, and you will probably send your divot further than your ball.

That's why I try to keep a "mantra" in my head when I approach the ball. It is not easy. It requires a Zen-like simultaneous emptying and filling of the mind. Like staying atop a razor's edge, or trying to stare into space; the moment you actually realize you're doing it, you've lost it. A mantra kind of helps tune my mind, helps get me in the right frequency. No, I will not divulge mine, lest it lose its mystical powers.** Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But when it does, and I connect and send the ball exactly where I want it, I assure you in that moment there is no more satisfied a person on earth.

Ah, yes, this game is an enigma. Men and women better than I have found themselves mired in the sometimes hopeless, but always elusive and alluring pursuit that is golf. A wise man once said, "There is nothing new under the sun." And certainly, there is nothing new on the golf course. Think you're the first person in history to angrily hurl his golf club into the woods? Pah! Think no one else has ever knocked four consecutive drives into the tall trees? You're wrong. And you also won't be the first person to get delusions of granduer after one, beautiful shot...even if those delusions last only until you make the next, horrible one.

I don't know how long I'll be able to keep up this enviable pace. First of all, the weather is getting colder, and the Gold Course is closing in a week, leaving only the Silver. Second, there's the issue of darkness; after daylight savings time ends it'll be hard to squeeze in nine any time after 5:00pm. Third, and most unpredictably, I won't be living here forever. My wandering days are far from over, and though golf exists throughout the world, a golf bag makes a pretty cumbersome suitcase...

But for now, I'm enjoying myself. I just ordered a new (new to me, but used) set of Yonex V-Mass 350 irons, and today bought a new driver. I have yet to fully adapt to either the irons or the driver, but so far I like them. The irons have a flexible graphite shaft, with a titanium insert on the club face, but they are at different lengths than my old set, and I've only used them for nine somewhat frustrating holes. They swing well, I'm just not used to them. As for the driver, I haven't played with it yet, just practiced. Until now, I've been using irons off the tee. Somebody advised me it's better to do that when you're a total novice than to start out immediately blasting off the tee with a driver. Now, however, I'll be able to hit a genuine tee shot...as long as I don't send it into the woods, which I'm sure is going to be a problem.

But that's just technical talk. In golf, as in life, I'm taking it one day at a time, and finding some interesting parallels between the two. They are both fraught with challenge and difficulty; nothing comes easy. They both can sometimes seem like long periods of drudgery, punctuated by short moments of intense joy. Also, and perhaps most fundamentally, you never know how long either will last. You just keep walking up to the ball and hitting it away from you, just like you keep waking up every day and doing what you have to do; you know it'll end at some point, but meanwhile you have to take it one day, or one hole at a time. And whether you're up or you're down, you've got to just enjoy the walk...

*For the initiated, a bogey is a score of one stroke above par. A double-bogey is two strokes above par. Apparently, there is no such thing as a triple-bogey. Beyond three over par, you might as well forget about it.

**Obviously its "mystical powers" still aren't working too well. But I have faith in it. These things take time.

Practicing the "Hard Close" at the Treasure Lake Firehall Flea Market...or...Moving Merch, Park Slope Style

"A.B.C. Always, Be, Closing." --Alec Baldwin, Glengarry Glen Ross

Last Saturday my dad and I raided the basement and hauled some of our old, useless, or otherwise unnecessary stuff to the Treasure Lake Volunteer Fire Company's monthly garage sale. We rented a folding table for $10, set up our wares, waited for dollars to come rolling in, and the old junk to go rollling out.

The sale officially opened at 9:00am. Much to my chagrin, there was no Stock Exchange-like opening bell. Customers didn't come pouring in with wads of cash in their hands. Instead, they simply began to drift into the firehall in a slow, meandering trickle. Mostly grandmothers, mothers, and children, there were a few men amongst them, too.

Some of the customers who ambled through the lanes, the rows of tables, were somewhat aloof. They were careful not to establish too much eye contact, or start conversations, or to seem too interested in any one object, lest they fall victim to "the sales pitch," and face the uncomfortable feeling of saying "no." These were the tough cases; the "browsers." These were the regulars who come to the sale every month, and are just perhaps stopping by on their way to the grocery store, just out of curiousity. These, I could tell, were the folks who'd left their wallets in the car, locked in the glove compartment. Best to just say a brief "hello," and let them pass by.

Others, and these were in a distinct minority, quickly presented themselves as "live ones" by either stopping in front of our table, or actually picking up an object. These are almost gauranteed signals of interest, or at least a willingness to spend a little money.

We put no price tags on any of our merchandise. I don't believe in price tags. I believe in The Deal; the buyer and seller make a verbal agreement about what the object is worth. However, this process takes a little investigation, a little trial and error, in order to see what people are willing to pay, in general. We started out by committing the Cardinal Garage Sale Error of setting prices too high. My dad was quoting prices that were close to what he had actually paid for the particular items. My prices were also a bit too high. We were both operating with the goal of "making money." Wrong. I quickly dug back into my extensive garage/yard/stoop sale experience and realized that our whole approach was flawed. Prices had to be set with the goal of getting the person to walk away with the item; getting rid of it for a price that was something over $0.00. We had to remember, the primary goal was to Move Merch...

***

You see, my stoop selling technique was honed on the streets of Park Slope, Brooklyn. Eigth Ave. and Fifth St., to be exact. This is a part of Brooklyn where the stoop salesman has a lot of competition. It is a neighborhood composed mostly of brownstones with young middle- and upper-middle class families living in them. These are people with money, and kids. Therefore they buy a lot of stuff. When you live in a tiny apartment in New York, and you buy a lot stuff, you have to also get rid of a lot of stuff in order to make room for the new stuff. Also, the kids are outgrowing their stuff. This is a lot of stuff that needs to be gotten rid of.

As a consequence, the streets of Park Slope, the stoops of Park Slope, are almost cluttered with free merchandise. And not just broken old junk, either, I'm talking books, CDs, furniture, clothing, kitchen & hand tools, baby-related items, all very often in perfect condition. It's all sitting there for the taking. In the three years I lived in Park Slope, I collected enough books off the street to make a modest library. Some of these books I still own, others I've sold on the internet and made not-insignificant amounts of money. If you love to rummage free stuff, especially anything for a baby, go to Park Slope. Trust me.

With all of this quality free merchandise lying around, who needs to buy? That's the philosophy of most Park Slopers. Their homes are already getting choked-full with other stuff they've picked up off the street! Why would they need to shell out hard-earned money for these kinds of items?

Well, luckily, my particular corner of Park Slope had a lot of diverse foot traffic, all the time. It was a block from Prospect Park (Brooklyn's answer to Central Park, but much better), it was two blocks from an F-Train stop, it was right by Methodist Hospital, and it was parralell to the much busier 7th Ave., often considered the heart of Park Slope. Suffice it to say, a lot of folks, not just Slopers, passed by my stoop on any given day. It was prime real estate for a stoop sale.

In the three years I was there, my building-mates, my flat-mates, and I held at least a dozen stoop sales. I somehow participated in most of these, and I even conducted at least three myself. If you had some halfway decent merchandise, and you kept your prices reasonable, you could totally gut an apartment in a single day, no doubt about it. Refrigerator? Someone would drive by and claim it, return later with a van. Books? At $1 dollar a pop, they would fly off the stoop. Miscellaneous junk? If it caught your eye all those years ago, it'll catch somebody else's. The trick was to get the stuff out the door.

One famous sale of mine, which I'll remember all my life, was held on a hot, sunny summer saturday. I put out half my earthly belongings, just trying to lighten my load, and started hawking. Soon my flat-mates brought some of their stuff, and so did some neighbors from upstairs. They would put their wares out on the stoop, and let me work my magic. With some of the earnings we bought a case of Coors and got a little tuned up. With a good buzz going we even managed to sell more and faster. We were wizards that day, calling people to the stoop from across the street, almost forcing them to buy, giving them no excuse not to. We even threw in a free beer to someone to get them to walk off with a dehumidifier.

"You, hey! You wanna buy? We got good stuff here, come take a look! Come ahhhn, you!"

"You like that? It's $20. No? How about $2? Okay. Sold..."

"Hey kid, that's not free yah know. Tell your mom you can have it for free if she buys something. Oh hell. Just take it."

It was all about the Hard Close; do not let the person walk away without buying something. Always be closing. Be closing from the moment the person walks to the stoop. My friend Kevin Connelly came up with our motto that day, and it has stuck with me ever since. The motto was simple, "Move merch." Do whatever it takes to get the buyer to pull cash from their pocket and walk away with the item. No excuses.

And we did indeed move a lot of merch that day. Someone even offered to buy my pet turtles who were out with us enjoying the fun. But they weren't for sale. After while, I started running back into my apartment, bringing out arm-loads of stuff to sell.

"You like basketball? Wait here..." another $5, another item gone.

"No, no! Don't leave! I've got other books inside. Come inside and look! Everything must go GO GO!!"

It was a great episode in my life in New York, and in the end I made about $120 and took my friends out to dinner, blowing almost every cent of it. But that's life; here today, gone tomorrow. Money, jobs, friends, big events, or old junk around the house, they all come and they all go. Have fun with 'em while you can...

***

As far away as I was from Park Slope last saturday, the motto still worked. Move Merch. With this in mind, we began to make a few sales. An old ashtray, a picture frame, a Christmas wreath, we sold them all at rock-bottom prices, sometimes 1% of the original sticker price. But we moved merch.

We even saw a little bit of arbitrage taking place. One of the more wiley sellers at the firehall noticed we were selling a little wicker basket. Using my technique, I sold it to her for $5. Well, apparently this little wicker basket was some sort of collector's item. My dad knew it, and quickly saw that the lady put it up on her table for sale! I don't know how much she sold it for, but it was gone by the end of the day. And she must have sold it for more than $10 or it wouldn't have made sense.

In general, however, the public did not seem overly eager to part with their money. And the "hard close" didn't exactly work so much as it kind of scared people away. A considerable amount of merch was left on the table. Sometimes, no amount of closing will get someone to buy, and you've got to live with that. We ended up donating most of the stuff to Goodwill. Not before pocketing about $80, however. Not bad, even for a Park Slope stoop sale.

Aside from any mundane concerns about making money or moving merch, it was a fun chance to meet some people from around the neighborhood and swap a few stories. The highlight of the day was when a beautiful tan Boxer dog wandered into the firehall, apparently lost. She was healthy, clearly not a stray though she had wandered astray...heh. For about 30 minutes she was the talk of the sale. I even offered to adopt her if her owners didn't show up. But alas, they did, reclaiming their beloved pet and saving me from an immediate and ill-prepared pet ownership.

Overall, the experience was pretty similar to what I used to do in my old neigborhood; put out your wares, engage people, make quips, crack jokes, make the sale. It's not rocket science, and that's why you can do it from your stoop, or your yard, or the local firehall. It is a lot of fun though, especially if you like joking around with people, making a little money, and clearing out your basement. It's not going to change the world in any way, but it's enough to fill an otherwise lazy Saturday and a blog post. It's commerce at it's most rudimentary, and if you're open to it you can even learn a lot about people and their habits, about human psychology.

This knowledge will always come in handy. Because in this world someone's always selling, and someone's always buying, and you've got to be able to adapt if you want to move merch...

The Real Friday Night Lights...Pennsylvania High School Football

Two Fridays ago I went to check out the local high school, DuBois High, play a game against long-time rival Punxsutawney. Yes, you've heard of this town.*

Punxsutawney, or simply "Punxy" as it's called in these parts, is about 15 miles from DuBois, and is reached by way of a winding, two-lane highway through rolling hills and cornfields, making it a good 20 to 30 minute ride. The two towns have been rivals--at least in high school football--for years, but I'd heard that in the past five or 10 years the rivalry has tipped heavily in favor of DuBois. Some say this is because DuBois High has more students, about 1100 to Punxy's 800. Doesn't seem like that big of a difference, but who knows. I decided to find out for myself.

I went to the game partly in search of that excitement that surrounds central/western Pennsylvania High School Football, the kind of buzz and all-consuming small town attention that spawned books like Friday Night Lights (yes, it was a book first). This region has produced some of the all-time greatest football players like Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, Dan Marino, Joe Montana, and so on.

I also went partly as an attempt to be "part of the community," a concept which has never, EVER entered my mind before I tried to start a new life as a stranger in a small town. This kind of thing is important.

I also went as an anthropolical observer. You see, I hadn't been to a high school football game in ten years...since I was actually in high school. Even then I didn't go very much. I approached it as an assignment; get in, talk to the locals, assess the situation, report my findings.

So, after a full decade, I found myself shelling out $3 for a general admission ticket to a high school football game. The price may have gone up a dollar since I was 18. I splurged on a $1 program, and took some action on the $1 50/50 raffle, and as I lost myself in the streaming masses of fans and families behind the bleachers I realized...I had arrived.

There is a heightened level of excitement anywhere you have hundreds of teenagers in the same place. This is a phenomenon I'd totally forgotten about after living in a city where everyone seems to be aged 22 through 40. In this environment, however, the demographic was almost completely the opposite; everyone was either aged 0-18, or aged 40 and up. There were parents, grandparents, little brothers and sisters, and of course the hormone-crazed high schoolers all running around, playing grab-ass, painting their faces with the team colors, throwing water balloons, yelling, and generally acting like teenagers. Quite refreshing to watch, actually.

The DuBois mascot is the Beavers, and the Punxsutawney mascot is the Chucks (groundhog = woodchuck = chuck). If you ask me, it's the perfect Rodent v. Rodent matchup. I mean, Rat v. Mouse is a bit lopsided, so is Gopher v. Mole. Beaver v. Groundhog just seems so natural. Sadly for Punxy, every year the DuBois fans steal hundreds of those bright orange "Ground Chuck" stickers from the grocery store and stick them all over everything, mostly themselves, at the game. It's a cruel twist of Food Terminology and Mascot Fate. I suppose Punxy could counter-punch with "Skin the Beavers," or even "Trap the Beavers and create a continent-wide trading network dependent on a single, exhaustible resource and therefore insure the collapse of your hold on power, just like the French did in colonial North America," but there didn't seem to be a lot of that.

The scene was almost perfect; the families, the marching bands, the cheerleaders, the 50 cent hot-dogs, even the mascot "Chuck" waddling around on the sidelines...and of course the teenaged Gladiators battling it out under the lights.

Of course, yes, there was The Game. With all the activity around me, I almost forgot I'd gone to see a sporting event. I'd arrived back into that strange and somehow exciting place called "High School," and somehow, ten years later, I still felt that oddly thrilling feeling in my stomach. It was all familiar, and yet I was seeing it for the first time; like an alien gripped by Deja-Vu. That all of this revelry actually included a football game seemed to be a pleasant surprise.

The great thing about high school football is how close you can be to the game. You can literally watch from field-level, just yards or sometimes a few feet from the action. The "stadium" is one in name only. Fans either crowd into a huge bleacher, or circle around just outside the field, beyond the track that surrounds it. You can hear the players grunting, the pads crunching, you might even get beaned by a stray pass or kick if you don't watch out.

The play was not exactly impressive, as it often isn't at that level. DuBois dominated, but Punxy didn't have much of a team. There were a lot of pile-ups at the scrimmage line, a lot of three-and-outs, a lot of botched hand-offs and sacks. The only real yardage was made either when someone broke out on a run, or when there was an interception. DuBois seemed to have two kids who were the stand-out athletes, but Punxy didn't even seem to have one. Usually at that level there is one kid, the Man Among Boys, who by sheer gift of genetics seems to have the advantage and runs the show. That didn't seem to exist in this matchup.

One bright spot was when Punxy put in its sophomore back-up quarterback, Logan Weaver. Weighing in at 150lbs soaking wet, Weaver looked like a stick-figure as he lined up behind some of his somewhat-huskier brethren. However, this kid managed to rip-off three consecutive completions for about 70 yards, which was unfortunately followed by a turnover on downs. On the next series, he struck again with two quick completions, and then an INT. He may have played one more series, but he was soon back on the sidelines.

Otherwise, there wasn't a lot about the actual game to raise one's pulse. I left at the end of the 3rd quarter, after DuBois was up 28-0. The game finished-up 42-6.

So, I didn't uncover a hidden pool of hardscrabble football talent, tucked away in a remote nook of rural PA. But as I watched all of the proceedings, the commotion, energy, as I heard the jeers, the cheers, as I overheard conversations, I was plagued by one simple thought: the real drama in life happens in High School. Forget the so-called Real World.

So I thought about it. Has life EVER AGAIN been as exciting as it was when I was 15? When I had to sneak out of the house, when I had to be clandestine about everything? When all I wanted to do was find my own identity, but at the same time all I wanted was to be "cool"? When nothing made sense and I was pissed and nervous and confused as hell? When I had "crushes"?? I hate to say it but, except for my first few weeks of college, the answer is probably no.

There's nothing like doing things, feeling things, for the first time. Maybe the events meant less in the grand scheme, but they meant more because it was the first time of so many first times. That's reason enough to make sure you get some variety in your life. A change is as good as a vacation.

But I'm getting off The Point, whatever it was. This game was fun because I'd totally forgotten what innocent, good-spirited and clean FUN a high school football game could be. When I was in high school, I was either too self-conscious or too pre-occupied to enjoy them. But now, as man getting ready to wave goodbye to his 20s, I finally get it.

*(It's the home of the eponymous groundhog and the mystifying annual ceremony in which the little rodent is said to predict the end of winter or the coming of spring. It's a quiant little ville, much smaller than I'd imagined, especially given all the Hoop-Lah surrounding the Groundhog. As you might expect, there is a discernible "Groundhog Motif" throughout the town; there are human-sized, plastic statues of groundhogs in front of certain buildings. There is a restaurant called "Phil's" (Punxsutawney Phil is the name of the groundhog...sheesh), and various business have "groundhog" worked into their names. Otherwise, it's a pretty standard small PA town. )