Golf in the Geezerdom

Illustration: Christian Northeast

THE PRIME GOLF YEARS
It wasn't always like that. Growing up in Fort Worth -- the town that gave you Ben Hogan, the ice-cream drumstick and the washateria -- I played golf almost every day of my life from the age of 8 to the age of 30.

In the beginning I'd be taken at least once a week to play a round with an aunt, uncle or cousin on a real golf course, to Goat Hills, maybe, or Katy Lake, a tricky nine-hole public layout with sand greens, the course where Hogan started learning the game as a kid. But when I wasn't doing that, I'd play on the six-hole course I designed, built and maintained in the neighborhood where I was being raised by loving grandparents while my mom and dad spent several years trying to decide whether they liked marriage or divorce the best.

The course was laid out on the lawns of my grandparents' home, and on their yard next door, and across the street in my aunt and uncle's yard and on their side lawn and garden.

It was easy to obtain permission to design and build this course, seeing as how the entire neighborhood knew I was starring in the human family drama, "Only Child, Spoiled Rotten."

The greens were Bermuda, roughly five feet in circumference, carved out by a hand-pushed lawn mower, watered by garden hose, and closely cropped by scissors. The cups were Campbell's vegetable soup cans sunk into the ground, and the flagsticks were just that. Sticks. With discarded dishcloths attached and fluttering in the enchanting breezes of Fort Worth's south side of town.

The fifth and sixth holes were as tough as any 8-, 9- or 10-year-old ever went up against. They required a shot across the street, over to the fifth, back to the sixth. But it wasn't enough to have to negotiate the row of full-grown sycamores along the sidewalks and the telephone wires stretching above the treetops. There were Mrs. Rose's flower beds and Mrs. Tarlton's shrubs to worry about, and I can tell you that those ladies were not golf lovers, boy.

Hogan, Byron Nelson and Sam Snead played a good many three-man National Opens on this course, me hitting a ball for each one. Being brought up a huge fan of Ben and Byron -- the hometown heroes -- I have to confess that the time Snead captured one of my majors with an accidental chip-in on the last hole, I suffered a heartbreak that could only be compared with the day I found out that dogs were colorblind.

So much for junior golf. Well, junior golf back in the day when juniors had to be more creative than today's robots.

High school golf, college golf and the decade that followed all come back to me now as one big raucous, goofy gangsome. The years when you learned how to bet, and how not to get out-bet. Guys going for their rent, their gasoline money, their lungs, their kidneys. Winners telling jokes, losers thinking up get-even games.

Cod Yrac Ffocelddim.

That about sums up those times for me. That's Doc Cary Middlecoff spelled backward, and correctly pronounced "Cod E-rack Fockledim" by those in our elegant gangsome.

Moron Tom, one of our leading intellectuals, started it. He had a talent for pronouncing names backward, and he always wanted Cod Yrac Ffocelddim when we'd bet real whip-out on the weekly PGA Tour results.

I speak of a PGA Tour on which the events were known by such exotic names as the Los Angeles Open, the Western Open, the Motor City Open, the St. Petersburg Open -- you get the idea.

Not a Deutsche Bank Acupuncture Cell Phone Snickers Bar Invitational in the bunch.

When we weren't betting on the tour results, we might well be betting on what color shirt Weldon the Oath would be wearing when he showed up at the course later in the day.

Because Weldon the Oath quit the game in anger just about every time he played, you could bet on something else where he was concerned. You could bet on whether he'd show up at all. Weldon, No Weldon.

As for betting on the tour, I always wanted Matnab Neb Nagoh, Bantam Ben Hogan, but he rarely played back then -- the accident, you see -- so I was often left to choose between Dyoll Murgnam or Nek Irutnev while others would ride along with someone like Mas Daens, or those up-and-comers, Dlonra Remlap and Wod Dlawretsnif.

Yeah, it was silly, but you have to understand how bored we were.

Soon enough, we all tended to speak in the shorthand of Moron Tom, who spoke in a combination of rhymes and old West Texas sayings, be it on the golf course or in the greasy lunch room where we'd sit around after golf and play gin, poker, fan-tan, crazy eights, whatever. Anything to win or lose more for the day's efforts.

I can still hear Moron Tom in a poker game announcing a "cramped cottage" -- full house -- and laying down what he called "threckings and twoquins." Three kings and two queens.

Standing over a putt out on the course, he'd say, "Think I can't, Cary Grant?" Then if he sank it, he'd stride toward the cup, saying, "There he is in all his might, the big raccoon'll walk tonight."

QUITTING GOLF, PART 1
The first time I quit golf, it wasn't because of aches, pains, illness or surgery. It was because of New York City.

I quickly discovered that trying to go play golf while living in Manhattan was about as easy as trying to grab a taxi while standing out in front of Saks Fifth Avenue in the freezing rain on the last shopping day before Christmas.

It involved finding a place to rent a car, renting the car from someone who spoke in an unknown tongue, driving back to the apartment to collect the golf clubs, fighting traffic to get to Westchester, Long Island, Jersey, wherever you were going, getting lost two or three times, finally arriving at the country club, finding out that nobody at the club had been told to expect you, and then having some assistant manager follow you around and stare at you like you were there to steal the silverware.