BostonSal

This is frustrating. I want to add something with every interesting subject because it's fun, and golf ball choice is a very interesting subject. Unfortunately, I somehow land on a ball and then play it until it goes out of production, never tryin anything else. This is not the kind of input for which we're looking, here.

The game isn't evolving nearly as fast recently as it has evolved over my lifetime. We can leave the flagstick in now but we don't have to. I like that. We can drop, take a two stroke penalty, and hit four instead of going all the way back to the tee when we knock one into the woods and can't find it. That's ok, I guess. You almost have to sell an organ to buy a dozen Pro V1s. [ I just priced a new set of clubs and bag on TGW for $3816.91---and went economical on the driver.] But that's small stuff. Look what happened over a longer period of time/ We've gone from balata to balata or surlyn to surlyn or urethane. [ Simultaneously from wound to wound or non-wound to entirely non-wound.] We've gone from forged carbon steel to cast stainless steel and now to multi-piece construction of irons. We've gone from persimmon or laminated maple to metal to metal / exotic fiber...and up to a whopping 460cc... with "woods" We've got hybrids. A Wilson Staff DynaPowered 5-iron had 32º loft in the 1950s and 1960s. A Wilson Staff D7 5-iron has 24.5º of loft now. That would cause notice if you just awakened from a long coma. The explosion of working class golf in 1he 1960s seems to have dissipated as the game gradually becomes more elitist again due to cost. I don't know if the game is better, worse, or essentially the same but peripherally different. I've missed steel spikes for a long time, though.

I don't think of them as "backups." I think of them as "alternatives." Even something as simple as weather could precipitate a club replacement on the same golf course from one day to another.

My "forty-four years" seems to still be the leader in the clubhouse!

There was a short, executive length public course in Middleton, Massachusetts that I loved to play at least once or twice a season, even though I belong to a club, simply because it was maintained at private club levels and was so pretty and so much fun to play. And I could walk it easily with a bag trolley. Then it closed. Bummer. Club members play at green fee courses all the time. If you invite friends to play and socialize at your own club, that's on your dime--their money is no good there-- so it gets expensive to do it often. If you meet at a nearby green fee course that's nice to play, you can do it more often. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Fair enough. It wouldn't be quite the same. It would be more like Arnie's 1-iron but much more forgiving than that.

This is a common local rule in after work twilight leagues. Many casual players adopt it on their own. At the very least, I think that it's worth considering.

Like everything else, golf sets have evolved, and from what I read on pages like these, 5-iron to gap wedge seems to be the most popular order for new irons today. I use a driving iron to complement my driver, and while I notice that long irons have become less popular, they've also become less butter-knife-like and have been made easier to hit. We simply use middle iron numbers on the long irons, now, but that's been established for a while and doesn't seem to create a problem.. Looking at specs, which is something that I enjoy doing, it occurs to me that driving irons, for those who like them, don't necessarily have to be "specialty" clubs anymore, just as they weren't in the Palmer / Nicklaus "1-iron" era. Lots of iron sets now begin with the 4-iron, usually as an optional add-on like the 1-iron used to be. Then later, the 2-iron. We're now up to the 4. If, however, one were to order the 4-iron just a tiny bit long, a tiny bit flat to compensate, and a tiny bit strong lofted, that would be an easy way to add a "set-matching" driving iron to the bag. Have any of our golf spies done this? I may try it if I ever buy another new set.

Thanks.

I don't believe Notre Dame has ever scheduled an FCS opponent. My favorite Notre Dame game was in 1993, I think. The Irish went to Tallahassee for the second last game of the season, knocked off Bobby Bowden's Seminoles to take over the #1 ranking, and then in their final game. Holtz lost to Boston College on a last second field goal. I've got that game on an old fashioned VHS tape somewhere.

Yup. Got a 58-04 and a 60-04. Can't remember the grind letter off the top of my head, but it's probably what you said..

I am, as you can plainly see, NOT from a right to work state. If I were, I wouldn't belong to a nice club in my retirement. I was an accountant at very large company where the hourly manufacturing workers union had an excellent union contract. I was on the organizing committee that brought the Union into the office for accountants, bookkeepers, secretaries, material management people, and other clerical personnel. I was the financial office's union rep and an elected executive board member of the new local. As such I did find a way to get away on business but my wife certainly knew about it--as an elected convention delegate--but I didn't run for delegate the one year we had our convention in Vegas. My wife was too familiar with Vegas and I thought better of it. [Miami was a good time, but it's not Vegas. And of course, my wife was familiar with Miami too. But we got lucky that year and avoided significant domestic disaster.] We occasionally traveled on other union business, but once we organized, the company never sent us away on company business trips anymore. If training for something new was required, they brought it to us. Anyway, the entire company crashed and burned on a global level but the represented workers left with a handsome severance agreement, our vested pensions, and full medical until it became supplemental medical when we became Medicare Eligible. These things are simply not available to many young people today. Your post reminded me of that sad fact.

Funny how one notices that over the decades!

In fairness, Tom, does my Welsh Terrier, representing me, look too dumb to think of that? Milady worked in the same office as I. Knew everything that went on. The fates had me by the short, curly ones.

Greg wants me to say "the hole" and that would be a correct answer, assuming insignificant break. But in many instances, "the wrong place" would also be a correct answer in as much as the ball will find an alternate destination point. The real question is, does the orientation of the dimples actually affect the roll or is the ball placement important only for alignment purposes to those who align by ball markings? They do print "Boston Sal" on my ball. I suppose I could use that as an alignment aid. But generally, I already do exactly what you do with a spike mark or an off-color blade of grass or whatever. Lining up "Boston Sal" straight at the spike mark might not be a bad idea.

I must be a complete idiot. Am I supposed to align my ball a special way? I put the ball down in front of my dime. I pick up my dime. I putt the ball. Usually, I putt the ball again. But I'm not stubborn. If you know something that I don't, I'm all ears.

I used to go to Vegas at least once a year--haven't gone for about ten years now-- but I never used to play because my wife was with me and she doesn't play. Not that it matters now, but where does one find a wife who lets one go to Vegas alone? That would clearly be a game changer in a lot of ways, no? Anyway, we stopped going because our age group isn't the catered to demographic anymore. We used to alternate. One washed up 1950s singer one night for her. One chorus of naked showgirls on another night for me. It worked out fine.

Right now I can go 47-53-58-SW, or if I 'm getting it out of sand with a regular wedge, I can go 47-52-56-60. Anyway, on the recommendation of a fellow MGS contributor whose user name I should have remembered but didn't, I saw some very interesting Cobra Snake Bite wedges on the TGW site. They have a 56º with only 7º bounce, hard to find and attractive to me. They don't offer customization on that particular model however. By the time I took it to our pro shop, had it reshafted, regripped, and bent to a flatter lie, I would have paid for it twice. And I'm a little gun shy from recent expenditures that went south. So I guess that I'm good for now.

What do you know? We actually completely a full round today! I played OK. OK is always good enough to bring me back. But I've got a bigger problem than that. Everybody was tired and wanted to go straight home afterward. The guys are getting too old to hang out and socialize. And we finish too early for them to throw down a few. Now to a real obsessive player, that wouldn't matter. They're out for the golf, period. For me, though, the hanging out at the club is almost half of it. We have some very nice green fee courses in the area if I only cared about playing. I didn't play at all last year because the social aspect of playing was shut down by covid. Well, anytime I don't feel like going straight home from now on, I may just stay and hang out by myself. You always run into somebody, and if you don't, there are interesting golf trade publications to read. [I don't know how explanations that I read years ago about why they stopped letting us wear real spikes, but whatever number it was, that's the number of them that I didn't believe.] For now, getting on line and complaining to you guys is serving as a substitute. Of course on weekends, when I don't play and spend time with the wife and dog, most of you guys are out playing!

I totally agree, RickyBobby, but they may be right for me. I only hit the 460cc driver on three wide open holes as I said. Maybe if I replaced it with a mini-driver, I could move up to five or six holes played with driver. Mini-driver will be longer than driving iron if I can keep it straight. Only ten clubs in my bag are coordinated as a set: long fairway wood.....high loft fairway wood.....5-PW......middle wedge......high loft / low bounce wedge. Just those ten. They must cover all of the fairway yardages of which I'm capable. Four clubs--driver, driving iron, specialty sand wedge, and putter are not a coordinated part of the set. They're specialty clubs that I could stick into any bag, together or separately. Specialty clubs are part of my mindset where others may eschew all of them save driver and putter.

TGW is showing something called the TaylorMade 300 Series Mini Driver, BUT they're not offering customization so this tells me that it's no longer a current model. I'm hitting a well broken in Ping G10, but only on three wide open holes, because I'm hitting it foul pole to foul pole.. On other than those wide open holes, I'm content to poke driving iron safely into play. I have an intuition--it's nothing more than that--that the 13.5º Mini Driver might be able to bring me up to five or even six driver-hitting holes. Our Pro Shop at the club is 90-95% out of the golf club selling business. I have no way of testing this so-called mini-driver. If I were to spring for it, it would have to be entirely on intuition and faith. I quite recently had my nads busted on a similar transaction so I'm more than a tad gun shy. For the sake of discussion, what mini-driver connoisseurs do we have at MGS? This a a pretty straight laced group for such an off-the-beaten-path concept, so this may not be a high percentage question to ask.

Poking around through archived threads, I have ascertained that revkev means Reverend Kevin. I think. I hope that we can enjoy discourse without your Boss setting this secular humanist on fire all of a sudden. I also ascertain, Rev, that you've got game. That's a contrast at least as noticeable as the first. The last remaining living member of my family's previous generation, my dad's baby brother, lives at the Villages. I can't visit him, however. Rhonda Santis has a bounty on my Massachusetts head. Apparently, exploits from my youth at awesome parties at the Fontainebleau have come to light. That was MY Florida. The Fontainebleau and the ponies at Hialeah. The golf wasn't bad, but I don't know how anybody putts Bermuda. Perhaps, Rev, you can give me some tips after the statutes of limitations kick in. Your posts are great. PS: May we please have Tom Brady back?

Second day in a row of stopping after nine. This feels like the Tuesday Night League of after-work golf back when we were afflicted with the necessity of working for a living, God forbid. Except it's early morning, not twilight. The guys are getting old, so I must be as well. Oh, well. Broke forty sinking a twenty footer on 18 [played the back this time]. Starting on the back is the only way I can occasionally break forty there. Not sure why, but I never play the second nine as well as as the first. Probably the attention span capability of an aging brain. We're riding. I'm not that tired. Anybody know a cure for this phenomenon? [Talking about playing as well on the second nine, not about aging. If you have a cure for the latter, now we're really talking about something.]

That's the Civilized Guy version of Regular Guy golf.

If you drive your ball deeply into the woods, the woods are without question a lateral hazard. They're to the side of you, right? Take a drop roughly twenty-five yards beyond where the ball may have gone in and play three from there. Playing two is pushing it. Sorry. If you accidentally blast your drive right down the middle and it lands in a divot, we all know that this was never intended to happen. Do NOT lift and place but casually push your ball out of the divot with your clubhead. We all know that grounding the clubhead in a bunker is a big no no. I have heard little discussion about using a tee, however, so that may be up to interpretation. If you're looking at a putt that you obviously can make, just pick up your ball. We're all tying to speed up play a little. And if your brand new cart bag has fourteen full-length dividers plus a dedicated putter well, who would question that this is permission from the golf gods to bag fifteen clubs? Regular Guy Golf. It surpassed the USGA / R&A version some time ago. We classy MGS types will have no part of it, though.