My golf turns 35 and a major winner’s signature gesture | Weekend 9

Welcome! Where are you, you ask. I’m calling this the Weekend 9. Think of it as a spot to warm up for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We’ll have thoughts. We’ll have tips. We’ll have tweets. But just nine in all, though sometimes maybe more and sometimes maybe less. As for who I am? The paragraphs below tell some of the story. I can be reached at nick.piastowski@golf.com.

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My golf game turns 35 on Sunday.

For my first round of the year, my brother-in-law and I are playing a muni in Hawaii, which on its website, has a reef, beach and water in the background, which is a very, very long way from a course in northern Illinois, where, in 1991, I played my first-ever round. My dad and I played with another father and son, and it was my dad’s first-ever golf, too. He was a butcher, and butcher’s days went like this: 12-hour day, eat, drink an obscene amount of Joe, smoke a pack of Marb reds, then bed; and no golf. It showed. Our combined score was 300, give or take.

We also committed a no-no on the first hole.

We rode in a cart, and the instruction was as follows: Drive it next to your ball, hit, drive again. And we did that.

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All the way until we parked atop the green.

That’s memory No. 1 — and lesson No. 1 — from 35 years of golf.

Here are eight more.

Memory No. 2: The random playing partners, plural. I’m bending my own rules here a bit and making this more than one, because I’m positive I could make a list just of nine people I’ve randomly been paired up with and not forgotten. Let’s see. There’s the two college-age dudes who, in the summer of ’93, saw me break 50 for nine holes for the first time, then offered to buy me a beer. There’s the Austrian man who my friend and I played with in Vegas who told us how he flew only private, smoked only Cuban cigars and knew where the real fun in Sin City was, and we’ll leave that at that. There’s the PGA Tour Champions player who shot an easy par round while his wife sat in the cart and read a book. And on and on. Honestly, this is one of my favorite parts of playing — the folks you meet. Except for …

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Memory No. 3: The farthest distance I ever holed out from was 175 yards, though what stroke it came on is open to debate. On hole 10 at Greenfield Park just outside of Milwaukee, I’d hit my tee shot into the trees to the right, moved it ever so slightly away from one, then rocketed it toward the bunker fronting the green, only for it to skip out and roll into the hole. Eagle! And eagles back then would get reported to the newspaper if your group vouched for it. My friend would. But the guy we were paired with? “I saw you take a drop there,” he said, “so no.”

Memory No. 4: I once got to the “zone.” Beforehand, I’d played four straight days on a friend’s trip, and I reached the point where I purposefully was swinging as hard as I could — and still found fairways and green. The 76 — with a penalty stroke that I did count that day — remains my lowest score. But I’ve never gotten back to the zone. In the years since, I’ve tried to duplicate the lead-up — and once tore a muscle in my lower back due to the combination of overuse and a lack of stretching.

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Memory No. 5: I almost got in a fight. I wrote about it here, but the short version goes like this: I hit a tee shot farther than I normally do, and the group in front of me was already hot. (The reason for the latter is understandable — a person in the group behind us had, accidentally, fired a shot from a fairway over directly into the group ahead of us. These things happen, though, at Van Cortlandt in the Bronx, where the congestion equals what you’d find crossing the GW.) Anyways, the almost-fight started after a person walked back to my tee shot — and hit it into the woods. I shouted. He shouted. We got closer. But that was about it. Stupid. Very, very stupid. (But all of it did lead to asking readers a few years back to message me similar-type blowups — and I still occasionally get emails about it today.)

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Memory No. 6: While playing in a high school match, my opponent once asked me if I played baseball, too. I said I did and I kept playing — and it took me a few holes to realize he didn’t care so much about my other hobbies as he did commenting on my swing. That stuck with me for the rest of the round — and for the next 30 years. Good one.

Memory No. 7: For just over six years now, I’ve worked at a golf website, and one of the questions I’ve gotten is how that’s helped my own game. It must, right? To start the answer, an editor here had warned me about what was to come: All of those tips and tricks that you read and write are going to be harder to escape from than U.S. Open rough. My scores show it. Last year, I shot another 76. And 110. That round, I’d just read something about the takeaway, and there you go.

Memory No. 8: Somewhere in a bird’s nest at Spring Lake Golf Course in Omaha, Neb., rests a wedding ring. Or at least that’s the theory. During a round there about a decade ago, my wife took off the ring, placed it in the cart, and we never saw it again. The clubhouse guy told us that that wasn’t the first time he’d heard of something like that happening.

Memory No. 9: Over the past couple of months, I’ve been re-reading a few of Dr. Bob Rotella’s books in advance of an upcoming story, and this line in “Golf Is Not A Game Of Perfect” has been sticking with me lately: No matter what happens with any shot you hit, accept it. Acceptance is the last step in a sound routine. I like that. I think of the golf balls that end up in divots and still playing. But I also wonder what it says about me that I can honestly say I’ve never hit a ball out of a divot, and I think you know why.

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Extra! Best memory? My nephew, Mason, being told he’s going to play college golf. Best course I’ve ever played? Considering everything a course has to offer, it’s Lawsonia Links. Most scenic course at sundown? Chambers Bay. Most scenic course in the fall? Green Mountain National in Vermont. Course I’ve played the most? I think it’s a tie between a pair of munis: Whitnall Park just outside of Milwaukee and Elmwood Park in Omaha. Most interesting course I’ve played? Augusta Wind in Nebraska. I was the only player on the course — on a Saturday.

Let’s see if we can find eight more items for the Weekend 9.

2. Have a memory to share too? Please email me at nick.piastowski@golf.com.

One takeaway from the week that was 

Instruction

3. In a couple of weeks, at the Players Championship, the thought is we’ll learn something more definite on the PGA Tour’s future schedule, and I’ve been thinking some about a Tiger Woods’ quote from last week at the Genesis Invitational. Woods, the head of the Tour’s new Future Competition Committee, said this about the work being done:

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“I think it’s trying to serve literally everyone, from the player side of it, from our media partners, from all of our title sponsors, from the local communities or even changing venues and going to bigger markets.”

It’ll be interesting to see if anyone is served best, though. To that end, one of the nation’s leading sports economists told me recently that changes shouldn’t necessarily be made for the golf fan, as they’re going to keep coming back regardless. It’s the non-fans where you grow, and non-fans have already decided they don’t necessarily care about the current product’s shape.

One takeaway for the weeks ahead 

4. This story here, written by Money in Sport, should tell you something about the direction of LIV Golf. It says that the league has recently received a $266.6 million capital injection.

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An instruction tip for your weekend 

5. I thought the video below was good. In it, Bryson DeChambeau was asked for his best tip for amateurs playing a practice round.