Free Fore! Play by Bill Giest Page A

handicappers.” Maybe if I just wear this! Maybe it’s like aromatherapy. “You keep thinking golf long after
     leaving the course” when you wear this fragrance made with “extract of fairway grass” clippings. It has “grassy overtones
     … smells like the golf course.”
    Will it actually take strokes off my game?
    “Spray it on your balls and it might surprise you!” is the snappy retort.
    Golf Cologne: -1 stroke

    “To be competitive, you’ll need the modern tools of the trade,” says the guy in the next booth, when I tell him I’m taking
     up the game. “It’s almost to where you can’t play without this little honey.” Little honey is the Bushnell Yardage Pro Rangefinder,
     which looks like a pair of binoculars. You point it at the flag—or the beverage cart—and it gives you the distance. “Personally,”
     I tell him, “I’d really rather not be reminded.” Not to mention I usually can’t see the damned flag for all the trees.
    There are all sorts of divot repair tools, one of them gold. Why? “Status,” says the salesman. “Weird,” we reply. The little
     gadgets would do me no good. Most of my divots require earthmoving equipment to replace.
    There’s the Deluxe Golf Pro Swiss Army knife, which could come in handy when you hit into the very, very rough and need survival
     tools and skills. This special model has the club groove cleaner, spike wrench, snap shackle, divot repair tool, cigar cutter,
     Phillips head screwdriver, bottle cap lifter, can opener, toothpick, and tweezers. “Or,” I suggest, “if your game’s going
     really badly, you could use the knife to slit your wrists.”
    “Absolutely,” says the agreeable salesman.
    There is one tool I really can use: JTD’s Search ‘N Rescue line of golf ball retrieval units, for recovering balls hit into
     the water. There are one-, two-, and even four-ball retrievers—in case you’re playing in a really bad foursome or you’ve personally
     hit four consecutive tries into the water. The salesman says his father started the business twenty years ago in the (presumably
     wet) basement. What will he do for a living if someone invents a floating golf ball? “Still need to retrieve the little sucker,”
     he smiles. He does have stiff competition, however, from the likes of the Mud Weasel, which can also retrieve four balls at
     a time up to fifteen feet away using an anodized aluminum shaft that cannot rust or corrode.
    We see a guy walking around with a car antenna he says is the Finders Keepers golf ball detector. He looks like a product
     of the patients’ rights movement that emptied so many of our fine mental institutions. He puts a ball on the floor and when
     he walks past it, the antenna points at the ball. Which is fine, except that when I walk past the ball holding the antenna,
     it does not point at the ball. “You’re not doing it right,” he advises. Why hasn’t anyone ever come out with a Lo-Jack golf
     ball?
    And there is a global positioning system device for golfers called the inFOREmer 2000. Jesus, do some people get
that
far out in the rough? The handheld electronic appliance displays the hole you’re on, distance to the pin and hazards, distance
     to the front and the back of the green, professional tips for playing the hole, a weather advisory, digital scoring, green
     contours and undulations, the distance of each shot, and it retrieves messages and memos, as well as issuing 911 emergency
     calls. The most appealing capability was the suggestion that it could possibly be used for calling in food and beverage orders.
    Tools of the Trade: -3 strokes

    Industro-Weld paste has a booth. “Why?” I ask. “So if you throw your clubs and the heads fall off you can glue ‘em back on?”
    “Exactly.”
    Club Repair Paste: -3 strokes (it could mean a couple hundred strokes if you had to play with your clubheads off)

    You can lose your head and you can also lose the whole club. “Can’t play with lost