My first time at Winged Foot: I had to take the bad with the great
In the nine months after I got married in 1983 I celebrated my first Christmas as a married man; moved into an apartment; found out my bride didn’t like bills sitting around longer than 24 hours; settled into a third year as a sports writer; took my first commercial airline flight and interviewed for an editor’s job at Golf Digest, nearly buying the farm driving home in a late-winter ice and wind storm from Chicago; said farewell to my hometown of Bloomington, Illinois, and moved 1,000 miles east to Connecticut; celebrated my wife obtaining a position in GD’s production department; played Winged Foot West; went on a business trip to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and had ribs at Dreamland…
Wait a second, I should slow down? What was that one? Let me write it more broadly: Played the West Course at Winged Foot Golf Club, Mamaroneck, New York. That would be historic Winged Foot, home to the Tillinghast-designed West and East courses, up to that moment the famous three-time U.S. Open site, ready to have a fourth in June 1984. The West was where Bobby Jones won in a playoff in 1929; Billy Casper won in 1959 with some of the best putting and most creative strategy imaginable, and of course, the Winged Foot of 1974 massacre fame, which Hale Irwin survived and Tom Watson fumbled. The place where a sixth U.S. Open, the 120th, will be played this week, and of the first five, just one winning score was below par.
My wife and I had crammed about as much as you’d want in nine months of marriage (no, there was no honeymoon baby). But Winged Foot? About a month into the job? Isn’t that too much too soon? I’d been hired to work on Golf Digest’s trade magazine, Golf Shop Operations, and by the end of 1985, I had moved over to the big book as Assistant Managing Editor.
But getting to play a course like Winged Foot wasn’t one of the job perks I recall talking about during interviews. Applying for GSO, the chat was more about what I knew of the golf shop business. But the Winged Foot invite likely came as I sat in my cramped three-person office and Jerry Tarde, a Winged Foot member and soon-to-be GD’s Editor-in-Chief, asking me if I wanted to play. Now, I have recently turned 61, and I still think of myself as some rough around the edges kid from the cornfields of Illinois, which is what I was in 1984. I knew my golf, having worked as a sports writer on The Daily Pantagraph, the same paper where Dave Kindred and Golf World’s Ron Coffman had apprenticed, but prior to Golf Digest, the grandest place I’d played golf was Cog Hill No. 4, the lauded “broad-shouldered” layout that required high approach shots that could hold the greens.
However, Cog Hill was not in Winged Foot’s league, but not many are. The history of American golf can be traced through Winged Foot. The separate golf shop from the main clubhouse, showing how pros were kept away from the members in the early 1900s. The classic Tillinghast features on two top 100 courses. The architectural wonder of the clubhouse with an immense two-story locker-room and side-room lounges. The legendary oversized shower heads that feel like you’re standing out in a warm rainstorm. The large-sized dining area and grillroom and hallways featuring historic items from its major championships, which trace the great champions of the game.
It was all there on Sunday, April 29, 1984. How do I know the date? I’ve kept a log of all my golf rounds since moving to Connecticut, so that’s 36 years’ worth. Besides, to apply the adage “you always remember the first time” to golf, I still retain several memories of the day. I recall playing with Jerry, senior editor Ross Goodner and GD Schools director Andy Nusbaum. (Pardon the interruption, but a moment of tribute for Ross and Andy, who have both passed away. Ross was that veteran staffer who you could go to as a young writer and gain as much knowledge as possible about the business. It’s a learning path that young staff members rarely take advantage of these days. Andy ably ran the Golf Digest Schools at a time when it was loaded with hall of fame talent: Toski, Flick, Love, Runyan, Lumpkin and many more, including guests Snead and Middlecoff.)
Winged Foot was just a 40-minute ride down the Merritt and Hutchinson parkways. We had lunch and I tried my best not to gawk at the large bar and grillroom walls with the club’s history of winners on numerous boards. I remember little details of our meal. We sat at the near wall to the entrance. Jerry had a transfusion, the first time I’d heard of the drink. His variety was grape juice with ginger ale, so I had to try that. I remember Andy did something simple with his oversized potato chips. Instead of crunching into them and having them break into a mess, he simply broke them with his index finger on the plate and ate the smaller pieces. I thought, Wow, how brilliant, how refined! I’m really going to learn key stuff here!
I had not played golf since leaving Illinois, but I had gone out and played nine holes at the Red Course at Fairchild-Wheeler in Fairfield the day before but shot a shocking 50. When you have a self-taught swing, all the bad habits surface when you are under pressure, and the pressure wasn’t much worse than playing Winged Foot West basically cold. I was feeling it the day before!
There is just one shot I recall vividly out of the 89 on my scorecard. The first hole is called Genesis, appropriate for anyone feeling they are blessed to play a round at Winged Foot. But the word emphasizes the initial hole of the day and that you’re about to embark on something spiritual. The hole is a dogleg left par 4 of average length; the infamous green is the main feature, Jack Nicklaus putting off it in the 1974 U.S. Open and four-putting. But putting was my forte and I was only worried about any of my bad swing habits settling in all day long. So I am trying to stay positive when it’s my turn to hit my “in the beginning” shot. I send the ball up and off to the right. It’s not a bad hit, but I watch it with dread because it’s sailing and sailing…onto the practice range to the right of the first hole. The range is still in use today; read Max Adler’s essay from the latest Golf Digest at https://www.golfdigest.com/story/Winged-Foot-US-Open-editors-letter.
Yeah, what a plunker. I hit my first tee shot at Winged Foot onto the practice range. Am I going to have to do the embarrassing thing of hunting for my ball among the practice balls? But this hole with the Biblical name inspires compassion. I was granted a lunch ball, a mulligan; Winged Foot was, after all, the place David Mulligan introduced the do-over shot on the first hole. This one I put in play.
I recall no other specific shots but the course routing and holes are etched in my memory, and the challenges and features they presented were elements I’d not experienced before and did not have the game to play well. It was fun to see that the awesome par-3 10th hole really was, as Ben Hogan said, “a 3-iron into someone’s bedroom” (some say he said “living room”) because your aiming point is a house on the edge of the course in line with the hole. I don’t mind fast greens, but I had no bite on my shots and had little experience hitting out of high-lipped bunkers. I finished off a mulligan-ball 89 and hoped my pathetic game wouldn’t forever keep me away from being invited again. Even though Shinnecock Hills would be the pick I would make if I “just had one course left to play,” Winged Foot West would be a close second. I did get to come back a few more times, and even birdied one hole—the 11th—but the last time I was there was November 2016 for a dinner.
Which brings us to this week. I recall that night in 2016, walking out of the club after dinner and stopping to look out at the 18th and 9th greens. It was a clear evening and the club’s outdoor spotlights lit the area well. I remember thinking to myself: Will this be the last time I see the magnificence of Winged Foot? With the 2020 U.S. Open this week, I had been given new hope. My wife and I had tickets for Friday’s second round. She had gone with me to the 1984 U.S. Open that Fuzzy Zoeller won. We were looking to bring our Winged Foot experience full circle and see an Open there 36 years after the first time. But the COVID pandemic has kept spectators off the course, and like many life moments it has affected, we will be forced to change plans and watch from our home.
As I watch players tee off No. 1, I’ll think about my right-to-right shot onto the practice range on my very first shot at Winged Foot in 1984 and wish I could have hit my “Sunday best” instead.