What's Coming

 I hope to find adequate and adaptable software to restore redanman.com.  Alas my sarcastic site bunkerfetish.com is not any closer to ever seeing the light of day, but lovers of bunker appearance DO NOT GIVE UP HOPE! I do intend to put some updated nuggets here and if necessary, this will continue to take the place of the website.

COVID-19 has not been good to any of us, personally having it 4-5 times and withstanding another direct exposure very recently. Personally my old friend Arthur (Arthur-ritis - more commonly spelled Arthritis) courtesy of my gene pool has limited my morning golf to only the most desirable and desperate (Only a dozen rounds in 2022, but some spectacular ones) and the days of 36 are far and few ... they must almost certainly include transportation as well.

I have had a few good trips and have several in various stages of planning on the books although it looks like Australia will likely become a regret. I am combing the western USA again with great results have a long-awaited trip to Sand Hills on the books and have already broken the Nebraska duck.

For those that know me well, I never went to Sand Hills from Denver when it was new and required little more than a phone call. I didn't want to drive all that way and my trip a few years ago to the sublime Ballyneal did little to encourage me to get out past Sterling, CO. I remember my attorney who went anywhere for golf, as long as it was exclusive to play and/or expensive to join. Coming back from Sand Hills his opinion was "The most boring course I've ever played, all the holes looked the same." So this year, determined to make it all the way to Valentine, I loved my isolation-drive.  I was unable to tack Mullen on the trip as no spots were available with the friend I have most wanted to have show me his pride and joy - but it will be reality in May of 2023. 

Thanks to my first  (And one of the overall very first) internet golf date the inimitable Thomas Naccarato, I have been saddled with the "Coore & Crenshaw Hater" label.  This because I dared criticize their designs as anyone else's. I have always considered them one of the three most talented modern design firms in existence today, but they are #3 - so I guess that makes me a hater. I have met and talked to both the members of the duo, I have sought out and played Proctor and Axtel course design/build in NE, I have nearly joined not one but two C&C courses - one back and forth on the fence a mere five times (I do not take joint clubs lightly), I like courses to have more quirk, pain and less repetition - so much fuss to not be fussy. Again ...

The point being that I have played every possible C&C so far available (Meeting for a second time Gentle Ben at AGC) to me and enjoyed them but I have - since I didn't go out there early  - basically  saved Sand Hills for last to give a full circle presentation and I cannot wait. I thoroughly enjoyed Bayside, The Prairie Club and CapRock Ranch and driving the utter wilds of Nebraska to get to them. (WAY! more fun to drive rural NE than eastern CO)  Dismal was also unavailable so it's on next year's agenda if the greens re-grow. 

I must admit that I prefer to have towns and culture adjacent to where I play golf - such as Scotland and honest-to-God links rather than Bandon (GOLF as it was MEANT to BE) with just enough USA around it to make me wish for shepherd's pie and a Tennants. Silvies Ranch is another smoke, it is more than 150,000 acres brought to you by the Vet who created rent-a-pet and bought the ranch when he converted his marker. Silvies is the least-visited of the great American escapes by those self-labeled cognoscenti.

James, Bill and Mike

Recent wanderings include, but are not limited to mountain golf in two states, a renovated USGA regular, a second Philanthropic club in South Carolina  - multiple courses in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota with many miles covered courtesy of Delta and Hertz.

Bill and Arnie

Golf includes the Fazio and the inimitable Shark and their interpretations of a mountainous site but not newly departed Tom W's ridiculous bunkering, well no more than a tele-shot.

(You cannot photoshop this shit!)

Please stay tuned and encourage me, Cheers, 

-r-

Iron Shafts

Since I retired, I needed even more to fill my thirst for knowledge, I always had some interest in golf clubs and their components, but much of the information one has been getting has been on Drivers and to a lesser degree (Maybe the best modern club is the 3-wood, after all) other play clubs. Play Clubs as I like to call them is Driver, numbered "woods", and hybrids.

Iron shafts have changed dramatically, especially in the last five years.  If your irons are five years old or more, at least go to a demo day for your favorite clubmaker and try some shafts. The flex patterns in graphite are now being reproduced in steel and co-material shafts. I recently finally settled on a lightweight steel shaft.  I didn't do enough testing outdoors as well as on a machine indoors and picked a flex pattern which was almost polar to what I needed on one partial set of clubs I purchased last year. I in my testing had one of these co-material shafts (Aerotech) made and tested it in two of my own heads. I compared that, since it was so new to me to almost every other shaft I have ever played (KBS, TT, Rifle, Apex, etc.). I'm going to add information gradually and then re-publish this set of thoughts in serie.

One thing that was very exciting to extrapolate from is the MIYAZAKI series of shafts offered in Srixon Drivers.  There are four parts of the shaft that flex and in the best shafts flex rather differently from each other. On a 9 point scale  you rarely see over 7 (Just like you don't see Rifle 7.0, 6.5 is pretty stout), you will see shaft flexes like 3355, or 5566.  The flexes are for the butt, upper mid, lower mid and Tip stiffness. Soft Butt Tip Stiff is rather different from a Stiff Butt, Soft Tip - where the former will low launch and the latter high launch - usually with accompanying spin rates. These numbers can be varied in all four regions to give the best players virtually exactly what they are looking for.

Nippon Shafts eventually won for me with the Modus 3 105 g Stiff model, apparently the best mix of all worlds with a lighter weight to maximize clubhead and ball speed without the vagaries of any graphite in the shaft. In my experiments, along with polling some very good players with higher speeds that I can generate, I found that the co-materials didn't quite get there, although in the end my wife's UST Recoil irons shafts are really tasty stuff

A Call for the Bag-Carrier

#Shaming is not #Hating

Let's have more bag carriers.

Maybe 'Course Escorts" or "Ego-Strokers"

but don't call them caddies

Bandon Caddies re-stated:

"Our caddies are some of the most experienced in the industry. Our mission is to *enhance your experience* and we have found that our caddies *improve the flow of the game* for you and your friends when carrying two bags."

This is utter BS, it maybe helps the resort control pace of play, but carrying two bags is not caddying, it is Bag Carrying. 'Caddies' intrude enough on your experience DB, they cannot truly caddie, they herd you. What it does is devalue you the player. Bandon with such hubris calls themselves Golf as it was meant to be.

Caddies were always singles when I first started going there with just one kidney. A caddie is really only necessary until you get some idea about the course you are playing. True professional caddies carrying two doubles their pay and eases their output. I see stories on Team Titleist where people say "The caddie saved me 7-10 strokes?" What kind of a hack is that? That caddie is a Babysitter.

A caddie is not someone you hire for one day, it is someone you develop a relationship, a partnership with. You can have a caddie at your club that has a program. You can develop a deep relationship and I'm proud to say that teaching a young person to caddie is a treat. Only problem is those you train properly stand so far out from the rest of the bag carriers, that you start to notice that the caddie you want is unavailable.

Let's get the bag carriers to work.