The Patch

by John McPhee

  Hackl: “It is an indication of the vast disparity of wealth in this country that golfers in some places can hit seven-dollar balls into woods and thickets and not even bother to look for them.”

  There is less to it than that. Golfers have egos in the surgeon range. They hit a drive, miss the fairway, and go looking for the ball thirty yards past where it landed. When their next drive goes into timber and sounds like a woodpecker in the trees, there is no way to know the vector of the carom, so they drop another ball and play on. It must be said, in their defense, that various pressures concatenate and force them to keep moving, no matter the cost in golf balls. The foursome behind is impatient. A major issue is how long it takes to play. It is infra dig to cause “undue delay.” In the Rules of Golf, there’s a five-minute time limit on looking for lost balls. The rule may be unknown to some golfers and by others ignored, but five minutes or less is what most golfers give to finding lost balls. The rest are mine.

  * * *

  YOU GET OFF YOUR BIKE, pick up a ball, and sometimes are able to identify the species it hit. Pine pitch makes a clear impression. Tulip poplars tend to smear. An oak or hickory leaves a signature writ small and simple. A maple does not leave maple syrup. At your kitchen sink, you can tell how long a ball sat on the ground by the length of time required to take the ground off the ball.

  With felt-tip pens and indelible ink, golfers decorate balls to individualize them beyond the markings of the manufacturer. If more than one player is using a Callaway 3 HX HOT BITE or a Pinnacle 4 GOLD FX LONG—or, far more commonly, there’s a coincidence of Titleists—you need your own pine tree. Some golfers’ graffiti are so elaborate that they resemble spiderwebs festooned with Christmas ornaments. Golfers also draw straight, longitudinal lines that serve as gunsights in putting. It is possible to mark a ball with a ballpoint pen, but some golfers actually believe that the weight of ballpoint ink, altering the pattern of flight, will affect the precision of their shots. It is tempting to say that the prevalence of this belief is in direct proportion to handicap.

  In the frenzy of marketing, golf balls are sold in such complex variety that golf’s pro shops are not far behind fishing’s fly shops, where line weights and rod weights and tip flex and reel seats are sold in so many forms for so many different capabilities and so many different situations that people’s basements are forested with tackle. And, as with fishing equipment, the spectrum of subtlety in golf balls includes price. The difference is not among manufacturers but within the product lines of manufacturers. You can buy a dozen Titleist DT SoLos for less than twenty dollars. I know a golfer who has spoken as follows about looking for a wayward ball: “If you don’t find yours but find another of the same quality, you’re even. If you find a ball that’s not up to your standards, you leave it there for a lower class of golfer.” How he happened to get into the woods in the first place was not a topic he addressed. He reminded me of a pirate in the Guayas River near Guayaquil. With six other pirates, he came off a needle boat and over the stern of a Lykes Brothers merchant ship. They were armed mainly with knives. One of them held a hacksaw blade at a sailor’s throat while others tied him to a king post. A pirate pointed at the sailor’s watch and said, “Give me.” The sailor handed over the watch. The pirate looked at it and gave it back.

  There’s more to decode on a lost ball than someone’s subjective hieroglyph. One Easter Sunday in Princeton, I picked up a Titleist Pro V1x that was so far off the nearest fairway it was almost in the street. On one side of the ball, a logo in very small red block letters said “CORNELL UNIVERSITY.” I went home and looked up the schedule of the Princeton golf team. On Good Friday and Black Saturday, fourteen schools had competed in the Princeton Invitational Tournament. As that ball suggested, the order of finish was 1 Rutgers, 2 Yale, 3 Penn, 4 Columbia, 5 St. Bonaventure, 6 St. John’s, 7 Princeton, 8 Harvard, 9 Towson, 10 Connecticut and George Mason (tied), 12 St. Joseph’s, 13 Rider, and 14 Cornell.

  The course, called Springdale, is on land owned by Princeton University and leased to a private club. It has been there since 1902, and in the heraldry on its lost balls you can see who plays there now.

  Titleist 2 NXT Extreme Ivy Funds

  Titleist 2 Pro V1 392 CHUBB

  Titleist 3 Pro V1 392 Morgan Stanley Funds

  Titleist 4 DT 90 The Pasadena Group of Mutual Funds

  Titleist 1 DT SoLo CREDIT SUISSE/FIRST BOSTON

  Titleist 2 Bowne Financial

  Titleist 3 Pro V1 392 STATE FARM

  Titleist 4 AIG AMERICAN GENERAL

  Titleist 3 NXT-Tour ASSURANT

  Titleist 3 Pro V1x BOLI (Bank-Owned Life Insurance)

  Titleist 4 Pro V1 MFS INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT

  Top-Flite 1 XL 3000 Super Long MAXIMUM INVESTMENTS

  Top-Flite 1 XL 2000 Extra Long New Jersey Lottery

  That modest sample was gathered in a wooded batture on the slice side of one par-4 hole—off the course and out of bounds. Recently, I was on a ride with Griff Witte, of The Washington Post, who was in Princeton to teach a course in the same writing program I teach in, and we spotted eighteen essentially new golf balls in that same copse, all within ten feet of the curb. There is something Einsteinian about that patch of woods, as if the Institute for Advanced Study, which is across the street, is experimentally affecting the trajectories of tee shots and approach shots, bending light.

  Of course, the golfers who play there are not all wealth manipulators.

  Callaway 3 HX DIABLO TOUR New York City Physicians Golfing Association logo with the rod of Asclepius and two irons

  Pinnacle 1 Extreme XOMED Surgical Products, green and blue

  Titleist 2 VELOCITY Urologic Consultants

  Nike 3 SUPER FAR with escutcheon of CHIEF, Burlington County Chiefs of Police Association

  Titleist 4 Pro V1x 332 AJGA (American Junior Golf Association)

  Nike 1 ONEGOLD IJGT (International Junior Golf Tour)

  Titleist 4 EMERSON Climate Technologies

  Titleist 1 384 DT 90 CALGON Carbon Corporation

  two Titleists Stone & Webster engineering

  three Nike DISTANCE, each with the logo of Golf Magazine (three editors, all errant? or one editor who hit three awful shots?)

  And whoever the golfers may be, they seem to be jet-set cosmopolitan.

  Pinnacle 1 Power Core MAUNA LANI

  Titleist 4 NXT MAUNA KEA

  Titleist GSE, orange-and-green logo, HONG KONG

  Medalist 1 Acushnet THE ROLLS OF MONMOUTH, the logo a human hand holding a scroll within a swirling green “R” that more or less resembles a golf swing. Internet: “The Rolls of Monmouth Golf Club, with its championship 6,733 yard golf course, is set in superb countryside with spectacular views of the Welsh hills. It is one of the most outstanding golf courses, not just in Wales, but in the whole of the UK.”

  That is a far cry from what was lying around this course during the Second World War. I was a caddie here, spending a lot of time looking for balls hit away by lumber dealers and local doctors. Rubber had gone to war, and after Pearl Harbor golf balls manufactured before the war became ever more scarce with the passage of time. Hunting them was not just part of work and play; it was a treasure hunt, off the charts above Easter eggs and into fraternity with the Eustace diamonds. The pro and the greenkeeper colluded in collecting them and selling them to the golfers, so in combing the woods in one’s own interest there was adrenalizing stealth and insubordination. No potential threat was ever going to stop me if I came upon a golf ball lost and abandoned, and apparently nothing ever will.

  There was something we called a war ball. It was made with a synthetic that shared few, if any, characteristics with latex. It shared many characteristics with granite gneiss. When you hit it hard and square, the nerve ends in your arms were outraged and the ball moved forward a short distance. My father used war balls. They didn’t cost him much, because he hit them straight, didn’t lose them, and would never have dreamed of throwing them away. He was a medi
cal doctor but he wore kilts in variety shows when he impersonated Harry Lauder. Four years after the war ended, he was playing a Kro-Flite that may not have been a war ball but looked as if it had been through a war. I was thinking of that ball when I wrote a poem about him to accompany a present I was giving him for Christmas—precisely what present, I don’t remember, possibly a tee. The poem was more than thirty lines long and included these four:

  He took up golf

  And learned with tears,

  And used one ball

  For fifteen years.

  On an August Wednesday in the late forties, he teed up that Kro-Flite and drove it down the twelfth at Springdale, a par 4 at 413 yards. I don’t know what club he used for his second shot—probably a brassie, as the longest-distance fairway wood was known then, because a couple of hundred yards was a mile by Kro-Flite. The ball took off, avoided the woodlot that bordered the twelfth on the right, sailed past a footbridge that crossed a stream, landed on the apron, rolled onto the green, and went straight into the hole. An eagle achieved that way is a more exalted feat than a par-3 hole in one. I am looking at that Kro-Flite as I write this. Beige with age, it sits on a tee set in cedar. Preserving that ball must have created great conflict in my father, whose middle name was Roemer but might as well have been Thrift.

  * * *

  THE TWENTIETH CENTURY was the age of the wound golf ball. An all but endless thin rubber band was wound around a solid core and wound around and around and around, until the growing sphere was large enough to be surrounded in turn by a vulcanized cover. Some manufacturers tried steel bearings as cores. Others advertised the aerodynamic mysteries of balls with liquid centers. How a rubber band can be wrapped around a liquid seems a fair question to ask. You freeze the liquid center and let it melt inside the finished ball. There was an even fairer question: What is the liquid in the liquid center? This kept whole law firms feverish in defense of intellectual property, no matter that the supersecret ingredients were water, salt, and corn syrup, even honey.

  Covers were not as tough as they are now, not nearly as protective of the ball or the ego, and the ubiquitous signature of the bad golfer was a “smile,” where a ball had been cut into by a mis-hit iron. If you peeled back the cover with your penknife and then went on whittling into the rubber band, ends popped up like frizzy hair. If you whittled into a war ball, what you found inside was rock solid. Oddly, that is what golf balls look like today after you split them with a table saw. Core, mantle, crust—they are models of the very planet they are filling up at a rate worldwide approaching a billion a year.

  The wound-ball era began in 1898 and ended in 2000, when Titleist introduced the Pro V1, with its solid core. This was no war ball. The synthetic polybutadiene, first polymerized in czarist Russia, had undergone a series of catalytic refinements—titanium to nickel to cobalt to neodymium—that had led to more durable flexibilities in tires and extra distance in golf balls. A generation of solid-core balls was introduced in the nineteen-seventies, but players didn’t use them. The balls travelled farther but were less controllable. It was a matter of spin, and relative softness. The Spalding Top-Flite felt so hard it was called Rock-Flite.

  In the first three years of the twenty-first century, average driving distances on the P.G.A. Tour went up thirteen yards. The distance was in the solid core but the control and comfort were bestowed by a new urethane cover that felt soft like a wound ball and gave players the spin they were looking for. In a display of contemporary golf balls sliced open hemispherically, we are back to geophysics. The TaylorMade Penta TP consists of five concentric spheres like old Gaia herself—crust, upper mantle, asthenosphere, lower mantle, core. There are four-piece balls and three-piece balls, not to mention the core-and-cover two-piece ball. Country-club golfers are attracted to differences that, in bogey golf, make no difference. There is even a one-piece golf ball, on which the dimples are extremities of the core. Sporting-goods empires have not been built on the one-piece ball. Some golfers, carrying technology into their own kitchens, have thought that if you heat up a golf ball it goes farther. And there is some truth in the proposition. One guy heated up his ball in his microwave. As he took it out, it blew off two of his fingers.

  Golf balls are so well made now that they are said to last five hundred years, although it is not clear who would know that. Environmentalists have expressed concern about the amount of zinc in lost golf balls and what will happen when it escapes, to which golfdom responds that there is less zinc in a million golf balls than in five bottles of mouthwash. Today, as during the Second World War, there is negotiability in used golf balls. Organized companies under contract to country clubs collect them and sell them to discount stores. At TPC Sawgrass, near Jacksonville, the seventeenth green spends a lot of time on television, because it is essentially an island, connected to the rest of the course by only a narrow causeway. Year in, year out, golfers, on average, hit two hundred and seventy-four balls a day into the water around that green.

  I used to give the balls I found to my shad-and-pickerel-fishing companion George Hackl—Member Hackl of St. Andrews, et cetera, who long had a single-digit handicap. In New Hampshire, snowbound, he has a barnlike basement in which he putts, chips, and even drives golf balls. On the Internet, I once bought green yard goods patterned with white golf balls and colorful tees, and my wife, Yolanda Whitman, fashioned sleeves from it which would each hold a couple of dozen balls for presentation to Hackl. But Hackl is rich and does not merit such largesse—not in Yolanda’s opinion, anyway—and she brought down the hammer. No more sleeves. No more golf balls for Hackl. So I turned for help to The First Tee.

  This is a national organization, headquartered in Florida, that has taught golf to millions of children, primarily in inner cities, since it was founded in 1997. The nearest chapter to my home in Princeton is The First Tee of Greater Trenton, which operates even in winter, in the Y on Pennington Avenue. Not long ago, a similar program called Swing 2 Tee was set up by Pat Lindsay-Harvey and Carol Sinkler, using the “SNAG (Start New At Golf) equipment, instruction, and assessment system.” I give balls to them, too, usually six or seven dozen at a time, but there was one memorable day a couple of years ago when the number greatly exceeded that. I had informed Hackl that he had become golfer non grata, and suggested to him that he turn over to me some of the golf balls I had given him, and any others he could spare. On his next trip to New Jersey, he brought me two hundred and seven golf balls. On the same day, Bryce Chase—a liability lawyer, golfer, and lacrosse coach who is one of my routine biking companions—inventoried his garage and turned over to me eight hundred and thirteen balls. Not a few of them were still in their original cardboard cartons—brand new, but not Bryce’s brand. They are given to him by well-wishers who apparently don’t know that Bryce is like a pirate on a merchant ship spurning a sailor’s watch. Thanks to Bryce Chase and George Hackl, my single day’s haul for Swing 2 Tee and The First Tee of Greater Trenton was one thousand and twenty golf balls.

  * * *

  ON ONE EDGE OF PRINCETON, close to Province Line Road, is TPC Jasna Polana, a championship golf course designed by Gary Player. The clubhouse was once the zillion-dollar home of Seward Johnson, a Johnson & Johnson Johnson, whose young Polish widow, when it came to that, preferred southern Europe to western Princeton and effected the conversion of her estate—with its Flemish tapestries, its marble mantels, its bronze casements, its flying travertine staircase, its orchid house—to golf. Numerous memberships at Jasna Polana are corporate. Avis is a member. Citibank. Deutsche Bank. Barclays. BlackRock Funds. Brown Brothers Harriman. Bristol-Myers Squibb. Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

  It happens that a hiking-and-birding trail, some of it paved, runs down a stream called Stony Brook, crosses the water on a footbridge, and continues beside Jasna Polana for two or three hundred yards before intersecting U.S. 206, the road to Trenton. This is not on one of my biking routes, but on solo rides I have been there, and returned there, inspired by cu
riosity and a longing for variety and, not least, the observation that in the thickets and copses and wild thorny roses on the inside of Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence are golf balls—Big Bank golf balls, Big Pharma golf balls, C-level golf balls (C.E.O., C.O.O., C.F.O. golf balls), lying there abandoned forever by people who are snorkeling in Caneel Bay. I couldn’t help noticing that the apertures among the chain links were slightly wider than two inches. This—no less than any lake, stream, or marsh—was a situation for the Orange Trapper.

  Extended full length, it bends slightly from its own weight, and quivers, wandlike, which amplifies the degree of difficulty if you have inserted it through a chain-link fence and are trying to settle the orange head around a golf ball inside a bramble of wild rose. In Sherwood Forest, R. Hood had an easier time of it. You are holding the grip with one hand, against the fence, and the head is trying to settle on the ball, nine feet into Jasna Polana. On the third or fourth try, the lowering band surrounds the ball. You raise the head, the ball rolls free. You do it all again, and raise the head. The ball rolls free. You do it all again. The flipper clicks into place. The ball is rising through the roses. Inch by inch, you bring the nine feet back through the fence, ready to try again if the flipper fails. With nearly nine feet of shaft now bobbing behind you, the trapped ball has arrived at the chain link. You pull it through, inside its orange band, as if you had experience as an obstetrician. You flip the ball into your hand—a Pro V1x with the logo of ICBA Securities (Independent Community Bankers of America). You move a few feet up the fence and go after another ball.

  I was working that fence near 206 one day, where Jasna Polana has a service gate. Preoccupied by the delicacy of Trapper placement, I was slow to notice a middle-aged, heavyset greenkeeper hurrying on foot toward the gate. He was past the age of running but he was chugging flat out, and this was no place for me. I withdrew the Orange Trapper, collapsed its telescoping shaft, put it into a saddlebag with the day’s harvest, jumped onto my bicycle, and headed back upstream, upwoods, and away from 206 at a speed so blazing that I probably could not duplicate it if I were to try to now, but that was years ago, when I was eighty.