Sitting around during the holidays one’s mind has time to wander…which may be the best thing about this time of year.
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So with all the categories blogged on this year including Best Drives, Best Small Hotels, and Best Trips there seems a need, at least to me, for a new subject.
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It’s New Year’s Day and a lunch this week hatched an idea for a new series…and that is The Most Underrated Things in Golf, be they a moment on a golf trip, a par 4, or a casual round with friends.
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This first post of 2008 will deal with one of the greats… The Long Lunch at the Club. The LLATC if not dead, is flat on it’s back with tubes sticking out of it’s nose. Once a staple in the lives of men, it has become as rare as the laminated 2-wood or the bad lie in the PGA Tour bunker.
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The LLATC died a slow and torturous death, usually at the hands of that most evil of institutions…”The Country Club Board.” There was a time when guys could sit with each other and have a drink or a burger, play a few hands of gin and be home for supper. Somehow this became not only morally reprehensible but very nearly unconstitutional…but let’s pick up this rant in a later post, now back to our regular programming.
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The perfect LLATC should have several, if not all, of the following characteristics. It should take place in the Men’s Grill (if you can find one), it should happen on a day that’s cold and miserable , it should happen during the holidays, and last but not least…be on a weekday.
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They haven’t lost the plot at The Country Club of The South on the north side of Atlanta…not only do they still have a Men’s Grill, but they back it up with the perpetual popping popcorn machine…just magic.
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My friend and client Dick Lyons, my friend and Big Pods Ed Butler, and I spent a few leisurely hours in the Grill…killed a few cheeseburgers and a couple of Buds…just enjoyed each others company talking about old times, new times, kids, and launch angles.
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The LLATC is no big deal…just one of the Most Underrated Things in Golf…what’s one of yours?
The Most Underrated Things In Golf
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Rick, you’re so right in singling out the LLATC. I was relatively young when my father died, but I think I can say with some certainty that if anyone believed in LLATC, he did. At least that’s one of the things I remember about the life I watched him live.
The men’s lounge at what was then Emerywood Country Club was a great and open room, hidden away by not only a private entrance but by a large bar, which separated it from all other other parts and rooms of the club. It was damned hard to see who might be in there … and that’s the way it was supposed to be, I’m sure.
There was a large (for that time) TV blaring the noon news and then one of the soap operas. (There wasn’t much else to watch. Remember: there were only three networks, there was no such thing as cable, etc. And no one was really watching anyway, unless there was a news bulletin of some kind: a Kennedy shot or a space launch or something.)
The half dozen to 10 club members who might be there each day – of which my father was almost always one – ordered from the menu, but it’s likely none of them ever even looked at it. The guy who served the lounge knew what food and – just as (if not more) important – what drink to serve them. There was lunch, and, as you said, a few frames or boxes of gin that might stretch into a few more into the afternoon.
As far as I could tell (I was too young to actually go into the men’s lounge), no one actually won or lost, and no one ever paid off. The score pad was just tucked away in a drawer to be brought out again the next day.
What’s lamentably missing now, I think, isn’t just the men’s lounge, though many have gone the way of so much that’s not “politically correct.” No, it’s not just that it doesn’t exist, though I agree every private club worth its Softspikes should have one.
What’s missing today even in the clubs that still have a men’s card room or private area, and what I’m a bit nostalgic for in reading your post on the topic, is the regularity, the familiarity, the deep and loyal friendships among the regulars who used to frequent the men’s lounge.
I’m sure it’s more a romantic than a realistic notion, but I’d like to have experienced what my dad and Howard and Pinky and Joe Brady seemingly experienced every weekday of their lives back in those days. They seemingly never said “Hi” or “Bye” to each other. They just knew they’d pick up tomorrow where they left off today.
And in that way maybe they didn’t like the weekends so much.
Rick:
The grilled cheese with bacon and tomato at the Bay Hill Club, giant lemonade optional.
I could eat 4 of them.
Tim Shea