COURSE REVIEWS

Of Slice and Men:
The Pocono Invitational

By Reid Champagne,
The Washington Golf Monthly

About half of the eventual group of 24 were gathered in front of my brother-in-law’s house early on a Saturday. Everything had been planned to the smallest detail: how much car space was needed for our clubs, how much for duffel bags, and how much for beer.

The duffels fit comfortably in the back of my Tercel, the clubs were stuffed into the backs of two station wagons, and a potential beer crisis was averted when two late arrivals showed up in two more pickups with empty beds. And with the non-drivers popping a couple of Bud Lights as a sort of a Prayer For the Fleet, and the ceremonial blown kiss to our wives (photographed in case hard evidence of such a demonstration would later be subpoenaed), the 5th annual Weekend Pocono Invitational was underway.

Now I can already sense some of you raising your eyebrows: a golf trip to the, uh, Poconos? (And I sense a few other eyebrows raised: three pickup trucks of beer gonna be enough for 24 guys for the next 2 ½ days?)

True, the Pocono Mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania do not come trippingly to mind when contemplating golf meccas to choose as a destination for a golf trip. In fact what tends to come to mind is Bill Murray in a pink tuxedo singing made up lyrics to the Star Wars Theme in a lounge in that hilarious SNL skit set at a fictional Pocono lodge.

Truth is there are some fairly challenging layouts in those Pennsylvania Dutch hills, and they tend not to be overcrowded the way other more traditional golfing destinations can be.

Our particular venue for the last three years is a place called Tamiment Resort, about 2-½ hours northwest of Philadelphia. Tamiment features an 18 hole championship course with widely generous rolling fairways, Augusta-like short rough, but greens with undulations and sweeps that take away everything the fairways and rough may have given you. But this is way too much technical course talk for this crew of two dozen, which for several mark their first and only golf outing of the year. (Those of you who had raised eyebrows earlier about three pickups of beer being enough will feel some vindication now.)

You could call us an eclectic collection of golfing buddies, but there’s a two-stroke penalty for anyone using words like “eclectic” anytime during this weekend. Suffice it to say we see each other for two days out of the year, hit more shanks, duffs, skulls, whiffs, and worm-burners than this course probably sees in a season, then depart never to get so much as a phone call from anyone until we meet again the following year.

In the intervening months, marriages, births, divorces, retirements, job severances, career changes, bankruptcies, and medical scares may have taken place in our lives. What has most clearly not taken place, however, is a single golf lesson or even simply a rented instructional video.

We’ve never kept track of the penalty shots incurred or the reasons why. But when you constantly see the foursomes ahead of you wandering around like a scene out of a George Romero flick, you can be assured most of the more penal Rules of Golf are being debated, applied, challenged, or simply swept under the carpet. (One of my playing partners chose to call a clear whiff a practice swing, and attempted to invoke the apocryphal “leaf rule” when his ball disappeared under a non-deciduous evergreen.)

Danger can lurk on every shot, not from the slope and rating of the course, but the slope and rating of our collective golf swings. One of our septuagenarian participants took one for the team on his shin, the result of a topped wormburner gone awry and sharply to the right. He later claimed it was the hardest thing he felt below his waist in about ten years.

Most of the rest of injuries were simply the result of unused muscles suddenly being overused. Fortunately most of those muscles had nothing to do with a proper golf swing, so when we did occasionally hit one right, it didn’t hurt.

Evenings after golf were spent reliving the round and wistfully wondering what might have become of a 107 if only a few more thirty footers had dropped. Our revelries were set amidst a dining room and lounge that were eerie throwbacks to another era. The expansive halls and cavernous ceilings of this old lodge had the slightly chilling look of the hotel where Jack Nicholson slowly went nuts in The Shining.

Or you could elicit a sense of horror other ways: simply kicking back and listening to interminable yarns about how par was made by shanking a wedge off a ski lift, or watching the eligibles in our group make passes at the wait staff, who did their best to ignore the more knucklescraping of overtures. Example:

ONE OF US: Are your legs tired?

FEMALE WAIT STAFF: No, why?

ONE OF US: Because you’ve been running through my mind all night.

It is all over too soon, though, not obviously soon enough for the wait staff, who were nowhere to be found at breakfast. The Monday round featured a “Ryder Cup” format with two twelve man teams split along roughly geographical lines (basically New Jersey versus the World). We were outfitted with team shirts and our captains are equipped with walkie-talkies (though evidently without instructions on how to operate them).

It was a spirited match that went down to the wire. A la the real Ryder Cup, we all gathered around the 18th green to await our teammates’ arrival. Of course that’s where all what was left of the beer was deposited, but still the illusion of team spirit was averred.

New Jersey hung on to win that inaugural Cup when a certain hacker who shall remain nameless failed to win even a half point in any of his matches. In fact, all this otherwise nameless *#@$% had to do was make one halfway decent swing and put his second shot anywhere on the green directly in front of him for, criminy sakes, while his erstwhile opponent played bumper pool in the woods to his right.

To make an excruciatingly long story short, I, er, this nameless player snap- hooked his iron into the woods almost 90 degrees to my, uh, his left thereby breathing life into his dead opponent who finally managed to escape the woods with a nifty play off an oak root, beech trunk, and restroom roof and onto the fringe of the green. I conceded my opponent’s seven, and proceeded to three putt from ten feet for an eight. Talk about spending money on moving day…

But that’s why they call it golf, I guess, at least until someone comes up with another name for what it is we do up there. By the time you read this, the 6th annual Pocono Invitational will have been played. Three full pickups will have departed up the Northeast Extension of the PA Turnpike, and three empty ones will have returned. Our wives or girlfriends won’t believe a word of how we missed them. And we will have forgotten almost everyone's name within the next two or three days. The more things change the more they stay the same.

Which is why we’ll all be back again next year.