The post The secret to Bernhard Langer’s success boils down to 3 little words appeared first on Golf.

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Bamberger Briefly is sponsored by Charles Schwab, host of the Charles Schwab Championship Cup, being played this week at the Phoenix Country Club.

***

Last year, I had the good fortune to play in the senior pro-am event at Pebble Beach, the Pure Championship. (One of the best events in golf.) Sunday night, after the grand finale, I drove north from the Monterey Peninsula to SFO and took an overnight flight home to Philadelphia. Bernhard Langer was in the San Francisco airport that night, too, flying a redeye JetBlue to West Palm Beach. There he was, Bernhard Langer, midnight coming and blazer on, every hair in place, one wee carry bag on his shoulder. The old pro. 

You have to think that Bernhard Langer is one of the richest professional golfers of all-time, at least in the non-celebrity division, right up there with Jim Furyk and Jay Haas. (Long careers, one marriage, modest spending habits.) Another golfer with Langer’s Hall-of-Fame stature might have NetJetted his way home, flying out of the nearby Monterey Peninsula airport. Not our hero.

I asked him the other day if he ever paid to “fly private.” (Such a pretentious phrase.) “I have a few times but very seldom,” Langer said. “It’s too expensive.”

You can imagine B. Franklin and B. Langer comparing notes. Waste not, want not, indeed.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say, here at the top, that I consider Bernhard Langer one of the most amazing people in golf. The fact that he won last year’s Charles Schwab Cup Championship, at age 67, is astounding. This week, he’s at it again, defending the title at the Phoenix Country Club. Except now he’s . . . 68! (March of time is funny that way.) He’s not expecting to win. He’s not expecting to finish DFL (and, by the way, you will never hear Langer use a profane word). He has no expectation, for anything, except to do this: try his best. That’s his whole thing, his life philosophy in three words, the secret to his success.

Yep, that’s it. I know because I asked and that’s what he said. At least, that’s the guts of it. There are some other things. Good genes and healthy living, for starters. (The role of faith in his life rides herd over all of this. At Augusta, at the Tuesday-night Champions Dinner, he typically sits with Larry Mize and Zach Johnson in the Amen Corner of the table.) But try-your-best is Langer’s starting line and finishing line. Langer is not preaching this as an approach to life that works for all. His gaze is inward. He’s not dictating anything to anybody, he’s not pontificating about anything. He’s saying that’s what works for him.

Langer doesn’t do warm-and-fuzzy. There’s no torrent of words from him, as there is with, say, Phil Mickelson or Lee Trevino or Gary Player. A while back, by maître d’ whim, I found myself seated next to Langer at dinner at a hotel restaurant, the tables close together. He was alone, as was I. We exchanged nods as I sat down and that was it. I can take a hint. I left him in peace.

I have had some interesting and memorable experiences with Langer, here and there and over the years. Once I was interviewing him in his backyard, in a gated golf community in Boca Raton, in South Florida. Suddenly, a drenching afternoon rain shower moved in. We were maybe 25 feet from the back door. We could have easily made a dash for it. Langer called his wife on a cellphone and said, “Vikki, Michael and I are in the gazebo. Could you please come out with an umbrella.”

I once attended a PGA Tour Bible Study meeting with him. He wasn’t there searching for improved so-help-me-God scores. (Some, you could tell, were.) He was searching, period. Later, and in depth but still with no torrent of words, he told me about his rebirth, as a Christian, in Hilton Head, several days after his win in the 1985 Masters.

I once wrote a laudatory story about him for Sports Illustrated. When I saw him later, I could tell something about it did not sit right with him. “The story was good,” Langer said, in his typical and direct way. “But it had the word Nazi in it. It is painful for me to look at that word.” Langer’s father, a remarkable unremarkable man — a bricklayer who could fix anything and grow anything — came of age in Germany’s darkest hour.

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Langer has often said that his second Masters win, in 1993, meant far more to him than the first, in 1985, because he did it on Easter, as a Christian, and by four shots. He was the best player in the field that week, by a lot. “Nobody could say I won because somebody else screwed up,” Langer said. In 1985, Curtis Strange had a three-shot lead on Masters Sunday but hit second shots in the water hazards on the two back-nine par-5s. 

If you missed Strange’s white-hot run through the 1980s, you missed some of the most compelling, intense golf ever played. Langer came of golf age in the same era. Curtis and Seve, Woosie, Sandy Lyle, Faldo, Watson, Jerry Pate, Lee Trevino and Hubert Green and Jack Nicklaus still very much at it, every major was a thrill ride. Langer had nine top-10 finishes in majors in the 1980s, five more in the ‘90s — and six more in this century. His bed at home is a humanoid charging station. Sam Snead, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Hale Irwin, Tom Watson, Bernhard Langer: For greatness over time — let’s say at least into a player’s mid-60s — there’s your Big Six. Mickelson could still make it a septette, if he can turn things around here. Langer never wanted anything more than golf, not in his professional life.

Interesting and memorable, cont’d:

Langer, seemingly apropos of nothing, once said to me, “Are you coming to the Father-Son this year?” (When reading Bernhard quotes, please insert his inflection and accent. Makes the reading experience richer.) The Father-Son, aka the PNC Championship, in Orlando in December. Bernhard knew, and the press and public did not, that Tiger Woods would be playing in the PNC for the first time, with his son Charlie. I got myself there. That was in 2020 when Charlie was only 11, the youngest contestant ever in that event. Last year, Langer and his son, Jason, defeated Tiger and Charlie in the first hole of a playoff when Langer made an 18-foot eagle putt. A moment later, as I read Tiger’s lips via the NBC telecast, Tiger said to Langer, “Bernhard? You’re the best. You’re the best, dude. Awesome.” 

“I cannot remember exactly what he said but it was something like that,” Langer told me the other day, after flying from West Palm to Phoenix for this Schwab finale. (Commercial, of course. “The flight was two hours late,” Langer said. “You are sitting there in the airport wondering if you are ever going to get to your destination.”) Bernhard does not play guessing games, on lip-read quotes or anything else. His stock-in-trade is precise, confirmed information. Facts. Facts!

In the summer of ’81, my buddy Brad Klein caddied for Langer at the World Series of Golf, at Firestone, in Akron, Ohio. (Brad spoke German.) He thoughtfully converted his yardage book into a meterage book, as Langer used the metric system. Brad took 10 percent off each number, so a 200-yard shot became 180 meters. In other words, he was multiplying each yardage number by .90. Langer got him straight: Use .91, which turned a 200-yard shot into 182 meters. Langer is still using meters. (Also, an AOL email address. Works just fine!) That World Series event was Langer’s first tournament on U.S. soil. He finished T6. It was the start of a beautiful relationship. Langer has played in 327 PGA Tour events and 375 PGA Tour Champions events. He has now spent far more of his life in Florida than he has in Germany. He has played and won around the world. Wiki has him down for 126 wins globally.

I sent him the other day (via AOL email) a collection of photos, under the heading Bernhard Through the Years. By phone, we looked at them together.

Here he is in the late 1970s, with bushy white-blond hair and luxurious matching mustache. “I didn’t lose a bet or anything, I just thought I’d try a mustache,” Langer said, providing a caption almost a half-century later.

Here he is in 1985 after winning the Masters, at the trophy presentation ceremony, in red pants and a red shirt, the low amateur, Sam Randolph, seated beside him. Randolph was then the U.S. Amateur champion. He had a T18 finish at the ’85 Masters. The next year he turned pro. That ’85 Masters was Randolph’s first of the 11 majors in which he played. It was by far his best finish. “We don’t know what tomorrow will bring,” Langer said. “Golf is more fickle than life.”

Here he is at the ’93 Masters, the 2024 Schwab Cup Championship, the ’91 Ryder Cup, when he missed a six-foot par putt that would have meant that Europe had retained the Cup. You could see the pain running through his arms, his neck, his face.

“Did you ever, even for a moment, worry that night that you might never get over that miss?” I asked Langer the other day.

“I didn’t,” Langer said. “Because I knew I had tried my best.”

He won the next week on the European Tour, in Germany.

The first time I saw Langer up close was at Hilton Head in 1985, the week after his Masters win. I was caddying for George Archer there and after his early Sunday-afternoon finish I went out and joined the crowd watching Langer try to win in consecutive weeks. His caddie was an Englishman, Peter Coleman. His yardage book used meters. His manner was decidedly unexcitable. He was in control. He won. Everybody in golf admired how he went about his business. Forty years later, nothing has changed. The man is 68 and defending his title at the Charles Schwab Cup.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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The post These college golfers met as teammates. They became soul mates appeared first on Golf.

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Bamberger Briefly is sponsored by Charles Schwab, host of the annual Charles Schwab Women’s Collegiate Invitational.

***

In 2019, Steph Curry, noted golf nut, NBA star and philanthropist, announced that he was making a major financial commitment to the creation of Division I men’s and women’s golf teams at Howard University, the academically elite and historically Black school in Washington, D.C. Major, and on-going. ESPN ran this bit of unlikely news at its bottom-of-the-screen scroll through the day. Innumerable people took notice.

Sam Puryear, a well-traveled golf executive and coach (East Lake, Stanford, Michigan State), was among them. Early in 2020 he was named as the director of both the men’s and women’s teams at Howard. The obstacles were formidable. The pandemic had disrupted the world. Howard had no established golf culture. He needed players with serious academic and golf credentials. But Puryear had two things going for him. He likes a challenge. And anything Steph Curry does commands attention.

Unbeknownst to Puryear, three teenage girls in three different states were drawn to the announcement pretty much as he was. All three girls were serious golfers and serious students. They met at Howard in August 2021 at freshman orientation, at the start of the first year that Howard had two full golf teams with full schedules. They’ve been a threesome ever since. In May, the three women — Makenna Rodriguez, from South Florida; Jada Richardson, from suburban Atlanta; and Kendall Jackson, from greater Houston — graduated from Howard together.

This week, they’re scattered. Kendall, as an amateur with plans to turn pro, is playing in an Epson Tour event near Hartford. Jada, who will matriculate at Howard’s law school next month, is attending a massive international gathering of her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta. And Makenna is preparing a paper she is presenting at the University of Pittsburgh, entitled “Comparative Analysis of Bonding Materials for Conductive Stability in Micro-Invasive Neural Arrays.” She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in a related field. A medical degree could follow. As Tiger likes to say, it’s a process.

Makenna and Jada are break-80 golfers. Kendall can break 70 on any given day. They all giggle with joy when they recount a team trip to St. Andrews. There is seldom a day when each does not know what the other two are doing. (The wonders of the group text.) They know each other’s eating habits. (All three are fussy eaters.) They know each other’s families and family histories. (Makenna’s father is an Ashkenazi Jew — that is, of European descent — who lived in Venezuela before moving to South Florida.) They all know how Coach Puryear feels about intra-team dating: “I completely discourage it,” he said in an interview. But the three ladies will tell you: Even Coach P., a man with a considerable presence, cannot stop young romance dead in its tracks.

Kendall played in the U.S. Women’s Amateur last year. On Monday, she played in the qualifier for this year’s Amateur. Jada and Makenna knew about her first-hole bogey almost as soon it happened. (The wonders of the Golf Genius app and its real-time scorekeeping.) She missed by a bunch. She was up before dawn on Tuesday, flying from Houston to Hartford for the Epson event.

Puryear sees a Nobel Prize in Makenna’s life-in-science future. He sees years of LPGA golf in Kendall’s. And a career as a powerhouse attorney in Jada’s. All three women talked about the inspiration they take from Steph Curry, as an athlete and humanitarian, and from Kamala Harris, a 1986 Howard graduate who made her concession speech last year at the university. Howard University, named for a Union general in the Civil War, has been widely known and respected since its founding in 1867. But to have a presidential candidate and an NBA legend associated with the school has meant that the three young women, and their coach, don’t have to tell the story of the school over and again anymore. As Washington has Georgetown and American and Catholic on its college roster, it has Howard, too. The Bisons.

Earlier this year, at the Lady Bison Invitational, Kendall had a second-place finish. She took second in the National Collegiate Women’s Championship as well. She was pleased and disappointed, too. She had two sets of shoulders to lean on.

“We’re always there for the other,” Jada said. “I really think we always will be, for the rest of our lives.”

For some years, there has been a plan for Howard golf to make a popular public course in D.C., Langston Golf Course, named for a former dean of the Howard University Law School, the Bisons’ home course. But Langston is in the throes of an evolving renovation project, and Puryear has established relationships with four private courses near the university. His golfers skip from one course to the next to practice and play on any given day. “We need to practice on fast greens,” he said. Fast greens, practice tees with short-game areas, courses where you can get in late-day, nine-hole practice rounds in less than two hours. He is competing for golfers with low handicaps and high GPAs with other college schools that often have a university course. The arrangements he has made with these private clubs are a lifeline for him.

But what Puryear has come to find out, when recruiting female high school golfers of color, is that Howard sells itself. That’s the bigger truth — and the biggest one. The student body is about 70 percent female, and about 70 percent Black. All over the country, but particularly in California and Texas, Puryear is finding Black girls from country-club families that are shooting 78 or better that want that kind of environment for their college experience.

Their high school lives are often very different from that. They know that post-college life is likely to look very different. But to come to Howard, as a golfer and a student, and to be on a campus where you expect to see other Black women, is a welcome thing. Puryear often finds himself recruiting girls that cite Howard as their first choice. In the summer of ’21, he signed up a girl from Georgia, a girl from Florida, a girl from Texas that way.

“What I heard was, ‘I want to be the best version of me I can be, I want to make a difference, I want to change the world,’” Puryear said.

Over the course of four years, those three girls — Jada Richardson, Makenna Rodriguez and Kendall Jackson — turned into teammates and soulmates. They turned into three members, among 3,200 others, in Howard University’s class of ’25.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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The post What will Phil Mickelson do next? The old question has taken on new urgency appeared first on Golf.

The post What will Phil Mickelson do next? The old question has taken on new urgency appeared first on Golf.

Once, Phil Mickelson seemed to be a lock to someday become an honorary starter at the Masters (circa 2040) and, much more immediately, a Ryder Cup captain. Now, it’s harder to say.

Mickelson is at a crossroads. He can continue down the path he is on, aligning himself with an upstart golf league financed by the Saudi ruling class, about which nothing has been said publicly.

That’s not easy to do, when you’ve called the mouth that seeks to feed you “scary mother****ers.” And when you don’t know if the league is even going to be up and running.

Or Mickelson could drop his link to Greg Norman’s LIV Golf Investments and its Saudi backers and the world golf tour it envisions, and try to resume his big life on the PGA Tour, the Champions tour (where it’s hard to have a big life) and as a living legend of the game. It was only nine months ago that Mickelson became the oldest golfer to win a major championship!

But retreating is not Mickelson’s style, his legal entanglements with LIV Golf are possibly far more involved than we could know, and he has already scorched the earth — the majors, the PGA Tour, corporate America — where he plied his trade for so long, and so effectively.

His mouth and his ambition, to say nothing of his talent and his work ethic, got him to where he was in May, when he won the PGA at Kiawah, in coastal South Carolina, and was swarmed by fans as he marched to the 18th green.

His mouth and his ambition got him to where he is right now. Mickelson, who can be loaded with charm, who has all the best words, who has been engaging with fans and reporters and golf’s corporate sponsors for decades, is a restless personality. In the history of golf, you can’t think of another person like him. It’s not really that surprising to see him in the spot he is in.

And if anybody has the skillset to turn this around, it’s Mickelson.

Time is not on his side. Next month, he would surely want to play in the Players Championship. In April the Masters. In May the PGA.

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Golf already has one global superstar who leads an essentially isolated, quiet private life: Tiger Woods. Mickelson has always been the anti-Woods. But right now, Woods — with his temperate, well-considered remarks about his allegiance to the world that made him — looks like golf’s elder statesman. Those comments came in December, at a tournament Woods hosts in the Bahamas, and last week at Riviera, at the Genesis Invitational, another Tiger Woods production.

Mickelson has been down this road before, sort of, most notably after the 2014 Ryder Cup, when the Americans lost in Scotland and Mickelson excoriated his captain, Tom Watson. But that whole thing was narrow, compared to this.

Could Mickelson be eased out of his position as the tournament host of the American Express, the early-season PGA Tour event in the California desert? He could.

Will Mickelson ever become what he deserves to be, a revered elder statesman in the game? It’s really up to him.

The comments he made in November to Alan Shipnuck, who is writing a biography of Mickelson due out in May, had the advantage of being true. A true expression of what Mickelson feels. They exploded because the man who accused the PGA Tour of “obnoxious greed” revealed his own insatiable appetite. That appetite isn’t going anywhere. It’s a central part of his character. He’s not capable of taking a child’s portion.

Do you think it’s an ordinary person who has been able to achieve what he has achieved in his life? For 30 years, he has been one of the best players in golf history. There has never been a career like his, with the possible exception of Sam Snead’s.

He has not hurt anybody here, except himself. There is no crime. But he misread the landscape and now he’s like the guy at the bottom of the pit in one of the ads Mickelson did for Workday in the last year or two.

“Hello down there,” Mickelson says to the guy at the bottom of a sandpit. “You need help?”

Yeah, the guy says.

“Call Workday,” Mickelson says.

That wasn’t going to work for the guy in the pit, and Workday isn’t going to help Mickelson here. He’s on his own, naked to the golf world.

But Mickelson can do what golfers do. Be inventive, even with all the many restraints the game puts on you. Figure something out. Mickelson has been doing that all his life.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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The post Does Sweetens Cove live up to the hype? GOLF senior writer Michael Bamberger investigates appeared first on Golf.

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Ed. note: This is Part III of Michael Bamberger’s three-part ode to nine-hole golf. You can read Part I here and Part II here.

***

If you know three fun facts about Sweetens Cove Golf Club, the course’s funky golf-this-way road sign is likely one of them.
    
Say you get to the nine-hole course in rural Tennessee as most people do, as a motorist and via I-24. You got your Rand McNally out? OK: now run your finger along Highway 72, aka North Cedar Avenue, heading south. You’re looking to make a sharp right on Sweetens Cove Road, named for a cove, not a golf course. And there it is: an “iconic” (not really but maybe by 2062) blue sign with white lettering:

SEQUATCHIE
VALLEY GOLF & CC

But you can barely read it, because of the 20 reflective hardware-store mailbox letters stuck on it:

SWEETENS COVE
GOLF
CLUB

The sign has been cited before. It’ll be cited again. It gets you in the mood.
 
And it’s fitting. Sweetens Cove is a golf course that is bathing in its make-do spirit. You know how Dyersville, Iowa, has a ballfield? South Pittsburg, Tenn., has a golf course. All together now: if you build it, they will come.

So you make that sharp right-hand turn on to Sweetens Cove Road, past another sign, this one posted by Star Pawn and Gun, and up and down a heaving road for two miles until you get to the golf course.

I arrived late on a recent and beautiful Wednesday afternoon. Yep, January, in Jethro-was-here rural Tennessee, and it was a perfect day for golf. No wind, high skies, mid-50s. I hadn’t played in maybe 10 days and was getting itchy. I had just read a book about the course, The Secret Home of Golf by Jim Hartsell, a Sweetens Cove regular. I had seen the golf-porn snaps. My heart was racing.
    
The course was closed.
    
The course had been closed all year, because of flooding and freezing temperatures. But now the tarps were finally off the course’s vast greens. (Technically there are nine of them but in practice you could say there are 18.) But still the course was closed.
    
The greens (MiniVerde Ultra-Dwarf Bermuda) were green. The fairways (Tifway 419 Bermuda) were the color of Army-surplus khakis. The itty-bitty pro shop was empty, save the fella manning it.
    
Nope.
     
Not today.
     
Probably tomorrow.
     
Get on the website and reserve your spot.
    
Hundred bucks, all day — if you’re walking.
    
By the way, they call that itty-bitty pro shop The Shed. If you know three fun facts about Sweetens Cove, that’s probably one of them.
    
The next day was the day. That Thursday. Opening Day, 2022, Sweetens Cove Golf Club, South Pittsburg, Tenn.
    
The first guys off all got shots of Sweetens Cove, a Tennessee whiskey, before heading out. I arrived long after that. (I’d rather be on a golf course at sunset than sunrise.) The day was dank. The fairways were soft. The greens were smooth and excellent.

Greens are to a golf course what eyes are to a portrait.
    
Some will say they are too much. Well, some would say the greens at the National Golf Links and the Old Course are too much, too. The Cove greens are excellent. There are vast sections of the greens where you could not put a pin — but you can roll your ball over this acreage, and watch it swoop and swerve. I think I saw them, in the dead of winter, likely about as fast as they get. They were country-club fast, if that. And that’s what they should be.
    
Greenkeepers have a word: pinnable. It’s an adjective, describing the sections of a green where you can cut a hole. It’s one of the most important words in golf, and one of the most underappreciated. The Sweetens Cove greens are loaded with pinnable sections. Each green has two flagsticks. On one green, one flagstick could be 100 yards from the other.
    
I played 36 holes, by myself and in about six hours, not including my lunch break, on the hood of my car. (No food service at Sweetens Cove, although they do tell you that if you order a Domino’s pie on the eighth tee, it’ll arrive by the time you hole out on nine.) I almost never waited and I played through only one group. I was never bored.

None of my four loops was like the other. I mixed-and-matched on every hole. Different tees, playing to different holes. I felt like I never played the same hole twice.

It’s an easy-walking course on a good-sized piece of land. The holes, all nine of them, are good. Good, solid, fun, I-still-got-my-ball golf holes. You’re hemmed in by mountains and farms. This is RFD golf. On the fourth green you can hear the 18-wheelers on I-24 roar on by.

Off the tee, driver in hand seven times from the back tees, the fairways are wide, but you can’t go to sleep. A lonely tree. A yawning bunker. A still cove. The approach shots, the same.

Some of the pin positions were comically difficult, but I never felt like there wasn’t a path to the bottom of the hole. I never had a moment of despair. I didn’t, but you could play all day with one ball, if you keep it out of the gunch and out of the ponds. Every hole, pretty much, has a gnarly area. Aim elsewhere.

What makes Sweetens Cove, more than anything, is its vibe. It’s refined pasture golf, if those words can coexist. It brings to mind for me two of my favorite courses: the old-timey Aiken Golf Club course, in Aiken, S.C., and Auchnafree, on the River Almond, near St. Davids, in the Scottish Highlands. Aiken is a public course. As for Auchnafree, good luck.

Sweetens Cove shouldn’t exist. I can’t think of another nine-hole public course in a rural area that is not connected to a school or a business or a resort.

By the time I marched back to the eighth tee for the fourth time, my shoes were caked in sand and dirt and the light was fading. I wasn’t worried about finishing. Nine is a par-3, and you can always play a par-3 in the dark. On the eighth tee, I could see the roof of The Shed. It was glowing, like a lighthouse for itty-bitty UFOs, or golfers trying to play home.

I did play nine by the light of the moon and made a 4 with three putts, none of them poor ones.

In the parking lot, men (I didn’t see any women then) were changing back into their Thursday-night civilian clothes in the beams of their headlights. The roof of The Shed, I could now see, was a series of stringed lights, packed tightly. The air was cool and getting cooler. A superb day of golf. My first 36-hole day of the new year. (Note to self: play more golf. It seems to make you happy.)

On my way back to I-24, I stopped at a gas station and then at the liquor store next to it. For any sentences here that you had to read twice, please direct your complaints not to me but the distillers at the Sweetens Cove Spirits Company. If you know three fun facts about Sweetens Cove, you probably know that the course owners — the humorist Peyton Manning among them — started a spirits company, too.

The one group I played through was a foursome, three men and a woman, from Alabama. They invited me through on the third hole. I went to a forward tee. I hit a solid drive, right down the sprinkler line. From there I cooked a hybrid past a tree in the middle of the fairway to about 20 feet from the left pin.

One of the boys trailing me let out a yell. I couldn’t duplicate the sound if I tried, but this is what it sounded like to me: ThatwhatImtalkinabout.
 
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@golf.com.

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The post The secret to Ping’s club-making success? Keeping the business in the family appeared first on Golf.

The post The secret to Ping’s club-making success? Keeping the business in the family appeared first on Golf.

It was amusing, when John A. Solheim, the chairman and CEO of Ping, made a casual Godfather reference in a recent interview. Solheim is not a student of the movie trilogy. He’s 75, an engineer by training, serious and quiet and not exactly immersed in pop culture, despite his new interest in skateboarding. (This year, at both the Solheim Cup and the Junior Solheim Cup, he gave each player and captain a skateboard he designed.) Solheim, presumably, has never settled a business problem by way of a poisoned cannoli, as Connie Corleone does in Godfather III. Still, when Solheim said he was in a “Godfather-type position,” it was a knowing nod.

Like the fictional Michael Corleone, Solheim runs a company founded by his European-born father. (Karsten Solheim was born in Norway in 1911 and died in Phoenix in 2000.) The Corleones — Vito, followed by Michael and finally Michael’s nephew Vincent — face a range of complicated succession issues, financial and emotional, as the Solheims have in real life.

But there the broad similarities end. The Corleone family business was gambling and extortion. The family was based in New York and operated out of an opulent suburban mansion. The Solheims make golf clubs in a series of nondescript, sunbaked buildings off I-17 in Phoenix, the worldwide headquarters of Karsten Manufacturing (a telling name). As the don in the third generation, Vincent turned out to be a hothead, a renegade — and a disaster. John Karsten Solheim, anointed by his father, John A., as his successor, is steeped in the practices that made Ping Ping.

John K. has been the Ping president for five years already. In due course, he’ll assume his father’s titles (chairman and CEO) and responsibilities. He’s been training for the job all his life, really. He’s 47.

“It’s the third generation that loses a business, generally,” John K. Solheim said recently. He’s a businessman and an engineer, and he has a light touch. “If you get to the fourth generation, you have a legacy business.” The Ford Motor Company, for example.

In Succession, the HBO show about a media mogul and his heirs, there’s a reference to investing with a long-term view — 1,000 years. One summer, when the younger John Solheim was in college, he was his grandfather’s gofer. He saw first-hand that Karsten didn’t have a 1,000-year horizon. “He had a mindset of work on today, that today’s problems are big enough, and don’t punt things down the road,” Solheim said. “Deal with today’s problems today.”

Listening to the father and son, in separate interviews, describe the company’s past, present and future, it’s easy to reach this bold conclusion: The company’s next 30 years will look largely like its last 30. Club design rooted in engineering. Marketing campaigns that make the L.L.Bean catalog look flashy. Black as the go-to paint for drivers, fairway woods and hybrids. Bubba Watson showing up at the Masters each April wearing a Ping hat, carrying a Ping bag and playing Ping clubs.

“I never met Karsten — I wish I did — but for me John Solheim is like a father figure,” Bubba said recently. That is, John A. Solheim, the youngest of Karsten’s three sons. For a while, Bubba had a gift for getting himself in trouble with his mouth, sometimes with hot mics, sometimes with players, once with his own caddie. John A., in his mild-mannered way, got in Bubba’s face. “He came up to me at a tournament and said, ‘We can’t act this way. Forget golf, forget my company. As people, we can’t act this way.’” The paternalistic chairman.

Bubba got his first half set of Pings — left-handed, stamped with odd numbers — as a Christmas gift from his parents when he was eight. Bubba’s mother and father, living on the Florida panhandle, were not steeped in golf. But there was a local pro, Hiram Cook, who played Ping because he was lefty and the local Ping rep went out of his way to supply Cook with clubs for his own use. Bubba’s parents took their cues from Hiram Cook. The Ping reps took their cues from Karsten Solheim. Karsten’s marketing method was elementary: Take care of your base. That is, on-the-ground club pros and everyday golfers who know that the value of a golf club ultimately comes down to a single thing, which is (of course) its performance.

“We don’t blow it out the door with our marketing campaigns,” John K. said recently. “We let our equipment do the talking.” Bubba is likely the loudest and boldest person associated with Ping. He’s a de facto Ping marketing executive.

“I called John K. and said, ‘Y’all want me. I want you. Let’s not argue anymore. How about a lifetime deal?’” Bubba said recently. “John was in the first year as the president. He said, ‘I gotta talk to my dad about this one.’”

Son talked to father. Eventually, Bubba, who is 42, got his contract for life. You can be sure there are no crazy numbers in it. Ping doesn’t do crazy. It’s really two contracts in one: one covering Bubba’s remaining years as an active player, the other for when he’s sitting on the porch rocker. But without John K.’s endorsement of it, the deal never would have happened. The father and son lean on one another. They’re partners.

That’s not a given, not in any multigenerational family business. John A., the older living Solheim, said he was determined to learn from his father, in good times and in more challenging times too.

“The transition between Dad and I was not easy,” John A. said. “Dad would not discuss anything that had to do with him being gone. He didn’t want things to change. We were moving to new things, and he was hanging on. I understand what he was doing and why, but I didn’t want my son to go through that. I’ve been letting him run.”

John K. thought he was ready to start running Ping a decade ago. His father had another idea: Go to Japan, where Ping had been struggling. When John K. arrived with his family — his wife and their four kids — Ping had 1 percent of the market share, he said. They stayed for close to four years. By last year, that number was 17 percent. The breakthrough, as Solheim explained it, was understanding the Japanese golfer.

“The American golfer picks up a club in a shop and waggles it,” he said. “The Japanese golfer picks up a club and brings it right to his face.” So John K. started paying more attention to the finish on Ping’s clubs, their ferrules, how they were wrapped. Cosmetics! Karsten might not have approved. But you can’t get to performance if you can’t get a golfer to try your club.

There are guitars on the wall of John K.’s office and a Whoop health-monitoring strap around his upper arm. The junior Solheim is a triathlete and musician. One of the highlights for him at this year’s Solheim Cup was a Gwen Stefani concert, sponsored by Ping. (He didn’t meet her and didn’t try. That’s so Solheim.) John A. says his son has his father’s ear, that he can hear the many different and telling sounds that come when a golf ball and a clubface meet. Those insights can make or break a club.

The Ping name comes from the pinging sound Karsten’s first design, the 1A putter, made with its hollow midsection. John A. would stuff a small piece of rubber tire in the putter’s cavity to deaden the sound. Fathers and sons.

As a family company gets older and larger and more established, and the family behind it becomes older and larger and more established, conflict arises. A boss makes hard decisions. People, often blood relatives, can get hurt or offended. The attitude has to be, the senior Solheim says, that “taking care of the business also takes care of the family.” When he becomes the boss, John K. Solheim, the third Solheim chairman, may discover that for himself. Or not.

He remembers driving his grandfather in a golf cart on the Karsten Manufacturing campus on the rare times Karsten permitted it and “holding on for dear life” the rest of the time. You can see it: Karsten behind the wheel, his little white goatee blowing in the hot wind, knowing there is not enough time in the day to get everything done. The grandson watching and learning.

Maybe the Solheims do do crazy, just a little, and in their own inimitable way.

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The question, posed to the Tour Confidential panelists on Sunday night was this: In this season ‘o thanks, what golfy thing are we grateful for?

Your correspondent needed three words: Playable left rough.

Since then, the phone has been ringing off the hook. Actually, that’s not true, in part because phones don’t have ringers anymore and they don’t get placed on hooks. But you get the idea.

What I meant is this: I can hit a cut driver. I can stand on the right side of the tee box, aim slightly left, hit it hard (for me) with almost no release and the ball will (should) wind up in the fairway or someplace in the left rough from which you can play a second shot.

A recent discussion about this broad subject — the good miss — with the novelist-golf bum Joseph O’Neill led to a thesis-in-progress with this modest working title: How to Shoot Under 14 Over.

You know — 85 or better on par-72 course.

Instruction

And you are playing a par-72 course. Right?

For the sake of argument, a good course for you — for me, for any of us — has these rough distances on your bespoke scorecard.

Four holes that you can reach readily with your tee shot. Those are your par-3s.

Four holes, and only four holes, where your two solid shots will get you close to the green. Those are known as par-5s.

Ten holes — broadly, broadly speaking here — that you can reach with a driver and some sort of take-a-divot iron. Those are known as par-4s.

Courses are loaded with tee markers these days. Forget about your USGA-sanctioned round. On each of the 18 holes, play from a tee that can be played per the recipes above.

If your average drive is 210 yards and your average 7-iron is 120, your 10 par-4 holes should be in the 330 range. As variety is life’s spice, let’s say 300 to 350. Oh, and your 7-iron might be a hybrid of some sort.

Instruction

Welcome to Dustin Johnson’s world. He’s hitting 8-irons into par-4s all day long. Why should he have all the fun?

By the way, he has a caddie. You don’t. Leave the headcovers in the car. They’re slowing you down. Golf should be played briskly.

On par-3s and par-5s, apply the same par-4 logic.

BTW II, as you are creating your own version of this great game:

*Make all your putts.

*Write down triple if you make a triple or worse. Pick up as needed.

*If you lose a ball, drop it where it should be and add a shot.

*If you hit it OB, drop it where it went out and add a shot.

Instruction

*Play a match.

If all that adds up to 85 or better — those rules, those tees — there’s your happy ending. Collect the kindling, light the fire, gather the family. The little ones will be enthralled as you regale them with your blow-by-blow reenactment. 

OK, now let’s get into the specifics. You know that whole swing-your-swing thing? It’s good. Playable left rough is, too. Find your own playable left rough.

Your tee-shot line should be one where your miss will be OK. An OK miss is one where you can advance the ball somewhere near the green, maybe even on it.

Which gets to the new “metric” that Joe O’Neill (Netherland) and I have developed: GIR+1.

If you want to shoot in the mid-80s or better, you have to hit some greens in regulation and you have to two-putt. That requires some golf skill. Not a great deal.

If you are playing each hole at the appropriate distance, and you have a soupcon of golfing ability, you should be able to hit four greens in regulation. Five might be asking too much, but then again, not really.

Let’s say you play those four holes one over par. Four GIRs. Good on you!

Now you need to play the remaining 14 holes in 13 over or better. You’re going to make a mandatory. (A triple or worse.) You’re going to make a legit double. It’s golf. (The wind comes up. The lake yawns.) And that’s where the +1 part of the GIR+1 comes in.

GIR+1: Your ball is within 15 feet of the hole in two shots on a par-3, in three shots on a par-4 and four shots on a par-5. If you can do that 18 times, you will break 85, and 15 or 16 might be enough.

Yes, there is the game-within-the game. But how hard is it to two-putt from 15 feet?

(Don’t answer that!)

You might even make one putt per round that’s more than 10 feet long.

Regarding putting: Don’t try to hole the putt. Just try to make a good read and a good stroke. As a smart friend says, You want that ball breaking toward the hole.

None of this sounds hard, does it?

Here’s the point; here’s the upshot. If you have 15 or 16 or 17 or 18 GIR+1s over your round, you should be able to shoot the mid-80s or better.

Anybody who shoots in the mid-80s is not a duffer.

You don’t have to do anything that special. You do have to be able to chip capably (with a putter as often as possible). You have to be able to pitch the ball (move it forward and take a swing and use the bounce). And you have to be able to get out in one shot from a bunker (have some speed through the ball).

Hogan said, “The average golfer is entirely capable of building a repeating swing and breaking 80.”

Of course, for every golfer who is above average there is another who is below average. This is for us. You know, 83 is pretty darn respectable, too.

And then there are the old Scots, in the carpark, wanting to know how it went for you as they fold their trolleys up.

Howdyageton?

They don’t mean your score, and certainly not your path to the first tee. They mean how was your day — and how was your match?

Even going to the last!

Well, how fun is that, no matter what happened on the home hole?

To one and all, whether you are near or far: Happy Thanksgiving.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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Rory Sabbatini, the native South African golfer who lives in South Florida, is home for the holidays. He’s done for the year. He’s 45. He’s been a professional golfer for more than half his life. He’s never had a year like this one.

Sabbatini left one tournament with a shiny piece of metal attached to a ribbon. That is, his silver medal for his second-place finish in the Olympic golf tournament in Japan, where he represented Slovakia, his wife’s homeland.

The famously fast-swinging, fast-playing golfer left another golf tournament — last week’s RSM Classic in Sea Island, Ga. — with four shiny stickers on the face of his fairway wood.

That silver medal made Sabbatini a golfing legend in the short history of golf in Slovakia.

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That foursome of shiny stickers made Sabbatini another cautionary tale in the long history of odd PGA Tour rules debacles. Those four shiny stickers rendered one of his clubs, a fairway wood, as non-conforming and that led to him being DQed.

“I had these four little stickers on the club, three on the toe, one on the heel,” Sabbatini said in a phone interview on Monday. He used the club on the first hole. “One of my playing partners said, ‘Are you allowed to have those stickers on the club?’”

Sabbatini was playing with the veteran Colombian golfer Camilo Villegas and Doc Redman, the former Clemson golfer and the winner of the 2017 U.S. Amateur. Sabbatini declined to say which player brought up the issue with him.

“I said, ‘I don’t know, I’ll check when we get in,’” Sabbatini said.

The stickers, Sabbatini said, are something he and his instructor, Rick Smith, have been using in conjunction with Foresight Sports, a motion-detecting tracking system.

Sabbatini had been using the system in a pretournament practice session to get more information about precisely where his clubhead was at different points in his swing. He didn’t know the stickers had to come off before tournament play began.

Sabbatini said he did not believe he had ever played in an event with the stickers on his clubs before the Sea Island tournament.

“So we get in and I ask [Tour rules official] John Mutch if there’s a problem with the stickers, and he said he thought there was but he would check with the USGA to be sure,” Sabbatini said. “I never signed my card. And then he says, ‘Listen, there’s no way around it. It’s a non-conforming club.’ I could see he felt bad about it, but a rule is a rule.”

And the penalty was the penalty: disqualification.

“I asked, ‘What’s the difference between these little stickers, which do nothing, and lead tape?’” Sabbatini said, describing his conversation with Mutch.

Mutch said that lead tape, used to add weight to a distinct part of the club, becomes an integral part of the club’s design.

You cannot, by the way, add lead tape to your clubhead during a round. Golf’s rule book attempts to cover everything. It doesn’t, but that is the goal.

The stickers, by the logic of the rules, are an example of something that could fundamentally change the playing characteristic of a conforming club. That these particular stickers, in the Sabbatini case, didn’t does not matter. Others could. Golf needs each rule to cover as many situations as possible and eliminate ambiguity and judgment calls when it can. 

Sabbatini had violated a rule of golf. There is, per the Rules of Golf, no two-shots-per-infraction penalty, not in this situation, not anymore. Just this one harsh sentence from on high.

“I think it’s a pretty asinine rule, but it’s my own fault — I should have known,” Sabbatini said. “I wasn’t annoyed. I was highly disappointed. I had shot 68 and it was as if it never happened.”

What an end to his playing year. Still, what a year. Sabbatini was the oldest athlete to represent Slovakia at the Olympics this year. One teammate won a gold in women’s shooting, one won a silver in individual men’s canoeing and four won bronze medals in men’s team canoeing. There’s a lot of wilderness in landlocked Slovakia. Also, about two dozen golf courses.

Sabbatini’s silver medal is in his home in Boca Rotan, over his bar. At some point, it will be displayed in the pro shop at the Broken Sound Club, his home course in Boca, where the PGA Tour Champions has an annual stop.

“Winning the medal hasn’t changed my life,” Sabbatini said. Although he and his wife, Martina Stofanikova, did fly straight to Slovakia after the Olympics, where he got a reception the likes of which no Slovakian golfer before him ever did. That is, he got a reception, period. The first sentence of his Wikipedia entry now reads, “Rory Mario Trevor Sabbatini (born 2 April 1976) is a South African-Slovak professional golfer.”

Sabbatini said that as he winds down his playing career — “there’s been an awful lot of wear-and-tear to my body” — he would like to devote more time to trying to grow the game in Slovakia. He is clearly fond of his adopted motherland, which he described as a combination of rural upstate New York and mountainous Washington State.

Sabbatini has had a long, successful career loaded with interesting moments, some but not all of his own creation. At the 2007 Masters, he, Retief Goosen and Tiger Woods finished in a three-way tie for second, two shots behind Zach Johnson. Few golfers have played in as many as the same tournaments as Woods, or have shared as many RV lots near tournament sites with John Daly and Davis Love.

Sabbatini and Woods have never been anything like chums. What they share most is the trauma of ailing bodies. They both have a medical, and professional, relationship with Centinel Spine for their different and complex medical needs.

News

Sabbatini said that his pain, before a surgical procedure performed by a Centinel Spine medical team, was so intense he was “eating Vicodin like they were Skittles.” He said his pain gave him an insight into the kind of pain Woods has endured in his career. He recalled the pressure of never knowing, one day to the next, if he’d be able to play. He recalled a tournament in Las Vegas where, after contending through 54 holes, he was unable to play the fourth round, because his body had “locked up.”

He said he looked at the single swing Woods posted Sunday night and deemed it “very impressive.” Only a fool, Sabbatini said, would bet against a Woods comeback. “It’s super-human, what he’s accomplished,” Sabbatini said. “What he’s done is what folklore is made of.” 

But Sabbatini, in his own cheeky way, has contributed to the lore of the game, too, sometimes without doing a thing.

In March, in the third round at the Players, Jordan Spieth hit a wild tee shot that ricocheted off a tree before nearly hitting a player in the group ahead. A boom mic picked up Spieth’s commentary: “Is that Sabbatini? Oh, God. I couldn’t pick a worse person to hit into.” Spieth knew what he was talking about. Nobody would call Sabbatini mellow.

At the 2005 Booz Allen Classic outside Washington, D.C., Sabbatini had grown frustrated with the glacial playing pace of his fellow player, Ben Crane. On 17, Sabbatini simply completed a hole and moved to the 18th tee before Crane had even reached the 17th green. It was most unusual. Later, by statement, Sabbatini apologized for his breach of etiquette. He said that he and Crane would soon play a practice round together.

Fast-forward a dozen years, to 2017. Crane was playing in the first round of the Albertsons Boise Open, a Web.com event, when he received an eight-shot penalty, in keeping with the rules as they were written at the time. He described what happened, via Twitter. Here’s the text of it, in full:

“Had a new ‘that’s golf’ moment today. Was penalized 8 shots for having tiny stickers on two clubs (help launch monitors collect data).”

Sabbatini must have missed that tweet. But now he knows what Crane knows: Those stickers can get you.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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The post What Tiger Woods’ 3-second swing video reveals about Tiger Woods appeared first on Golf.

Tiger Woods posted footage of a single swing on Sunday, a three-second clip, and golf came to a standstill. Your first and human response had to be relief. The February car crash that could have killed him didn’t.

In terms of broad interest to golf’s masses, it wasn’t even a fair fight. Woods’s mini-doc v. Jin Young Ko’s win in Florida? Or Collin Morikawa’s win in Dubai? Or even Rory McIlroy and his desecrated golf shirt? Woods wins, every which way to Sunday.

It was great to see, Woods healthy enough to make that swing, to create (presumably) that perfect-rectangle patch of divot.

The clip’s two-word headline — Making progress — was telling. Golf, as Woods plays it, starts on the range, just as it did for Jack Nicklaus, for Greg Norman, for Arnold Palmer, for Ben Hogan. The batter gets another pitch. The quarterback gets another snap. The golfer has just that one chance, the ball at his feet. As Woods has said many times, if you can’t do it on the range, you can’t do it in a tournament. Making progress. As a working title, there’s the ultimate golf movie.

When Charlie Woods played so well at the Father-Son event last December, Woods said he was not surprised. He had seen his son make all those swings and all those shots at home.

Making progress, Woods’s Sunday release, was a savvy piece of marketing. Tiger’s life, more than any person I can think of — with the possible exception of Michael Jackson — has unfolded in front of cameras. Those cameras have enriched him almost beyond measure and cost him, too. Regardless, he’s addicted to them.

Ko and Morikawa and McIlroy had no chance because Woods — aided by his late father, by Phil Knight, by his many sponsors, past and present — has been doing this for 30 years. The selling of Tiger Woods. All those wins, all those Buick spots, all those post-round interviews. Nobody’s going to catch up to him, ever.

News

The clip from the Medalist range prepares us for a press conference he’ll likely have next week in the Bahamas, at his tournament there, the Hero World Challenge. TMZ won’t get a press credential there. In other words, it’s a good and safe way for Woods to begin his return to public life, following the devastating single-vehicle car crash he had in February. He hasn’t said a word about it. He likely never will. What’s the upside?

In mid-February, he will likely be at his tournament, the Genesis Open, at Riviera, in Los Angeles. Another step back. How the crash happened, what was his mental state then, what is his mental state now — Woods will not be sharing any of that, and, of course, he’s under no obligation to. You can say that his interior life must be a minefield, but he’s the one who has to navigate it, while millions of people hang on his every public move.

It’s impossible not to feel for the man. He didn’t ask to go on The Mike Douglas Show.

In April, Woods will likely make a trip to Augusta, even if it’s only to get Hideki’s Japanese treats at the Champions Dinner on Tuesday night. Yet another step in his return to his public life. By then, he hopes, we will have all moved on.

Even if he wanted to take his cues from Greta Garbo and Ben Hogan, and turn his back from his adoring public, it would be almost impossible to do. He’s only 45. There are too many people depending on him.

News

Plus, playing golf is what he likes to do. It’s the thing he has done unlike anybody ever has. He used to say, “If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.” He hasn’t said that in a long time, because, in a newer phrase for him, “Father Time is undefeated.” But if golf is the thing that you love, and the thing that you do well, and the thing that validates you, you can find new ways to challenge yourself.

You could try to become the first golfer to win the three senior majors — the U.S. Senior Open, the Senior British Open and the Senior PGA Championship — in a single year, for instance.

Imagine what Woods could do for the PGA Tour Champions, a tour that Arnold Palmer and friends essentially invented.

With the possible exception of Ben Crenshaw, I can’t think of another Hall of Fame golfer who has such a powerful affinity for golf history, who knows so much about what Arnold did and how he did it. Ditto for Jack Nicklaus, for Lee Trevino, for Ben Hogan, for Sam Snead.

Let’s say other competing tours, world tours that threaten the hegemony of the PGA Tour, actually materialize. Any such tour will need name players. The single-greatest weapon at Jay Monahan’s disposal, in terms of trying to squash these other tours, is Tiger Woods his own self, and Tiger’s sense of history.

Imagine that you’re Morikawa or Jordan Spieth or Bryson DeChambeau or even Phil Mickelson, and somebody is offering you a guaranteed $50 million to sign on the dotted line. And now you have Tiger Woods on the line and he’s talking to you about how Bob Goalby and Doug Ford and Jack Nicklaus created this modern PGA Tour in the first place, the tour that you grew up on, the tour that fueled your dreams.

Who are we to cut bait from all that?

Tiger knows that his 82 PGA Tour titles is a way greater accomplishment than Sam Snead’s. He must. But he would never say that publicly. He’s too loyal to golf, to the game that made him, in hard times and good ones, who he is.

He’s not walking away from any of that. If that three-second clip showed us anything, it showed us that.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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The post 3 touching surprises from the golf year that stirred our collective soul appeared first on Golf.

The preamble is a staple of modern times. We have teasers for trailers and pregame shows for pregame shows. All that anticipation — it’s numbing. The hype machine compels us to watch while the PR division manages our expectations.

Breaking: DJ’s scheduled 2 p.m. media availability has been postponed. Details pending. 

But we have not, thankfully, completely lost our capacity for surprise, to be left thunderstruck. As we say a long goodbye to ‘21, we remember a few of our favorite things. Here we have two scenes from the year, and one insight for the ages, you could not see coming, instances when golf used her odd magic to stir our collective soul.

One of the moments came on a warm Sunday in April, in Augusta, when Hideki Matsuyama was trying to win the Masters, and thereby become the first player from Japan to do so. Augusta National took from him. (His second shot on 15, over the green and into the pond.) But the old gal gave him more. (His tee shot on 13, sailing wildly right until it bounced off a pine and back into play.) After Hideki tapped in on 18 for a one-shot victory, his caddie, Shota Hayafuji, dutifully put the flagstick back. 

And then, without any fanfare, Shota removed his green cap with his right hand and looked down the 18th hole. With his caddie towel and some other things still in his left, he bowed. It was so simple, beautiful and unexpected. East had met West, as never before.

Then, in late September, we saw Rory McIlroy in a new way. This was at Whistling Straits, on the last day of the Ryder Cup, with the Europeans far behind a better American team. McIlroy, transplanted Irishman (he lives in South Florida), was representing his continent. He batted first in the Sunday lineup, placed there by his captain, Padraig Harrington or Ireland. McIlroy did his job. He won his match.

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But then, in two post-round TV interviews, his internal life seemed to pour out of him. “It’s by far the best experience in golf and I hope the boys and girls watching this today will aspire to play in this event, or the Solheim Cup, because there’s nothing better than being a part of a team, especially with the bond that we have in Europe,” McIlroy said in the first interview, his eyes welling. “I’ve never cried or gotten emotional over what I’ve done as an individual — I couldn’t give a sh-t,” he said in the second. Who saw any of that coming?

The words were moving, but you sensed there had to be more going on, under the hood, maybe more than even Rory could know, thoughts and feelings from a place so deep he couldn’t reach there himself. You can turn your life inside-out, in the name of golf. There are costs. But the game is some teacher.

Which sets the stage for this valedictory from the great Kathy Whitworth of Dallas, where she lives with her memories, her partner, their dogs. In January, Miss Whitworth was asked to sum up what she has learned in her 80-plus years. She considered the question and said, “We can all be honest with ourselves. We can accept who we are. But we can change the things we think need changing.”

The legend then paused briefly before offering this gift for the ages. It came out of nowhere:

“You should like yourself.”

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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The superior restaurant announces itself when you walk through the door. Fried garlic from an open-air kitchen. (L’Angelo, corner Porter and Rosewood, South Philadelphia.) Red wine being poured at a nearby table. (Piatti, Avenida de la Playa, La Jolla Shores, Calif.) Chocolate mousse passing by on a corked tray. (Lion’s Rock, E. 77th Street, NYC, permanently closed.) And so, in different ways, it is with your better pro shops.

I entered the pro shop at the Langston Golf Course, off busy Benning Road, not far from RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., with no expectations. (Expectations are so 1999.) It’s one of the best.

Langston, if you don’t know, has been a longtime home for Black golfers in the District, going back to times far more defined by color lines than these are. Lee Elder, already a Tour legend, was its teaching pro and manager for years. The work-in-progress Howard University golf team, funded by Steph Curry, will make Langston its home course. Beau Welling, the golf-course architect who works with Tiger Woods, is on the docket to renovate the course, owned by the National Park Service and managed by a new group called the National Links Trust.

Langston’s future is so bright it will need shades. The pro shop I walked into on a recent Saturday was a time capsule.

There were no clubs for sale. The food service, for now, was limited, a nod to these strange times. 

What bowled me over were the powerful, knowing and proud nods to the Black golf experience in this country. A photo of a crouching Tiger Woods, lining up a putt under the brim of his black Nike hat, at the height of his smoldering intensity. A painting that depicted Charlie Sifford, Calvin Peete, Jim Thorpe, Lee Elder, Jim Dent and Tiger. A plaque and a portrait of John Mercer Langston, a 19th-century American educator, politician and lawyer and the great uncle of the poet Langston Hughes. Maybe you read “Dreams” in high school:

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

I can’t imagine Earl Woods, with his towering intellect, not knowing the work of Langston Hughes, or the history of John Mercer Langston, or the contributions of city courses to the game. He took up the game at the Dyker Beach course, in Brooklyn, at the tail end of the Vietnam War. The military experience and the Black golf experience weave like the figure-8 weave the Harlem Globetrotters executed so brilliantly. No Dyker Beach G.C., no 15 Grand Slam titles attached to the Woods name. That’s my take, anyway.

(And, while we’re at it: Happy belated Veterans Day, to any veterans who have found their way here. Thank you for — for far more than any of us can say. Almost every major club manufacturer offers discounts to active military members.)

What bowled me over in the Langston pro shop were the two Black men — Ben Foster and Ernie Andrews — who happened to be behind the counter that afternoon. They are the Penn and Teller of Langston. Not in the magic sense, but in the talking sense. Mr. Andrews is as quiet as Mr. Foster is loquacious. Ernie Andrews is a legendary teacher — at Langston. You want to learn a proper grip? Ernie’s your man. You want to model rhythm? Ernie’s your man. And if you get him started, about golf and Langston and all the rest, he can go deep. On the range, he will teach you a swing that you can make and that will not hurt you. How’s that for a starting point!

Here’s another starting point. “The driving range, that’s our first priority,” Welling told me the other day. A college golf team (Howard, in this case) needs a range where they can get work done, in the dawn’s early light and all through the day.

A PSA for the Nat’l Links Trust: the group is raising money to renovate three historic courses in the District: Langston (Welling), East Potomac (Tom Doak presiding) and Rock Creek (Gil Hanse presiding). This is all pro bono work, all the way around.

You can get a caddie at Langston, by the way. Not now, but in season. There’s about a dozen local kids caddying there, and the Western Golf Association, keepers of the Evans Scholars Foundation, pay the caddie fees. You tip if you wish. Lee Elder’s old friend, a legendary caddie named Richard “Jelly” Hansberry, is a sort of mentor to the program. “These kids are starting to get it,” he told me.

In other words, the value in showing up, the joy of cash money, the pleasures of the game, the lessons that come with hanging with cranky old golfers.

Ben Foster is tall and slender and styling. He was wearing maroon plaid pants that only he, Rickie Fowler and the late Cal Peete could pull off, a fuchsia windbreaker, a purple baseball cap. He’s a retired publishing salesperson (among other business pursuits) who is active in a program called Golf My Future, devoted to introducing the game to people in hard-to-reach corners. The man is loaded with personality. Golf shops used to be packed with people like that, behind the counter, before golf went corporate.

You want a gray Langston Golf Course hat? Ben would rather see you in a blue one. Give him a minute.

Features

Nope, brother — out of blue. But you know what? That gray one will be perfect on you.

I’m all over the lot here. I realize that, and you haven’t even stepped on the golf course, which opened for play about 100 years ago. We’re going to save that for another time. For now, it’s definitely a playable, pleasant course. Welling made the point that he and his people are not going for Harding Park here — turning a nice public course into a course where you could hold a Presidents Cup. Good call. Welling will tell you what every smart golf person will tell you: Golf needs courses where you can walk, find your ball, play in a reasonable amount of time and for a reasonable price.

Foster took me out to his car, an old black Audi, big as whale and in perfect condition with a golf shop in its trunk. But he didn’t have the thing he was looking for, the new Langston Golf Course scorecard.

“I’ll mail you one!” he said.

He mailed me two.

I was bowled over. Again.

First off, every hole is named for an iconic Black golfer. The first is John Shippen. The 7th is Ann Gregory. The 14th is Pete Brown. When I met Brown he was on his last legs and living with his wife in a house in Augusta, Ga., owned by Jim Dent. You know who the 18th is named for.

The card is gorgeous. The back tees are called Royal, for the historic men’s golf club at Langston. The forward tees are called Wake-Robin, for the historic women’s golf club at Langston. On the bottom left is a dotted line where you attest — attest! — to your score. The ink is black and red and the paper-stock has not a bit of wax in it, heavy enough to easily absorb pencil marks. A good scorecard pencil has 2B lead in it. In other words, on the soft side.

Why would anyone want to keep score on a phone?

I saw the card and called Colin Sheehan, the Yale golf coach. He’s an expert on scorecards. Turns out, he designed this new Langston card. God love him.

About the card:

It’s modeled after the old National Golf Links of America scorecard;

It was printed on a 120-year-old press at Dexterity Press in New Haven;

The eggshell paper is 110-pound stock from Mohawk Paper in Cohoes, N.Y.;

The typeface is Garamond.

It’s not meant to be the everyday scorecard. It’s a special occasion scorecard. Here’s to your first sub-100 score!

Welling will oversee the removal of tons (literally) of invasive plants and then the course will have beautiful views of the river, the Anacostia. Select tree removal will allow grass to grow in the places a golf course needs it most — like on the greens. When the work is done, Langston should drain better than ever before.

Coach Sheehan made a good point: The earliest golf was urban. St. Andrews was on the edge of town. People walked to it. You didn’t need a horse or a bike or a car. There was lightness on the edge of town, in the air, in the sky, a green rug underneath. City golf.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@golf.com.

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