“Well, do ya punk?”: If golf fairways could speak, oh the things we might hear

Arriving at the club for a round of golf, you meet your buddy in the parking lot, and as the two of you are headed for the clubhouse, he stops, pulls a black cigarillo out of his top shirt pocket, cups a lit match in both hands, and then affixes you with a squinty stare. He says, "You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya punk?"
If you are a golfer in Carmel, CA, you might just be at Tehama Golf Club, Clint Eastwood's Carmel bayside course designed by Jay Moorish. Getting a tee time is problematic since the club's membership is by invitation only, and should you choose the path of home ownership to achieve membership, lots start at $2.5 million.

To walk the fairways of the rich and/or famous, other choices abound. If you are of a certain age, you might recall the exploits of those who played Kino Springs Golf Course on the 5,280-acre Yerba Buena Ranch near Nogales AZ. A half century ago, the course was designed by Red Lawrence, the "Desert Fox, " and owned by actors Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons. It played host to such guests as Elizabeth Taylor and John Wayne; the "Duke" owned a bungalow on the course and played there regularly. Thoughts of Eastwood and Wayne recall the advice from 1965 PGA champ Dave Marr, "Never bet with anyone you meet on the first tee who has a deep suntan, a one-iron in his bag and squinty eyes."

If you like your martinis shaken, not stirred, you could try a round at The Stoke Park Club in Buckinghamshire, England where James Bond teed it up against Goldfinger and his lethal caddy Oddjob. Bond inventor and author Ian Fleming had a passion for golf. If not any old Brit will do as your partner for a round of golf on native soil, there's The Royal Household Golf Club. Sited on the grounds of Windsor Castle, it is veddy British and very, very private. For an early tee time, you had better know Queen Elizabeth II or her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh!

Should AOL founder Steve Case invite you to play 18 holes, get ready for a treat at Case’s own private Robin Nelson designed course in Puakea, Hawaii. The golf course was used as a setting in the movie Jurassic Park so beware of raptors if you chase your ball too far into the thicket surrounding the layout.

Enjoy rubbing elbows with the rich and famous in the world of politics and sports? Liberty National Golf Club, Jersey City, NJ, and Shadow Creek Golf Club in Las Vegas just might fill the bill. At Liberty National, the Cupp/Kite design that cost $250 million to build and will set you back a cool $500K for initiation fees, you might find yourself teeing off with the likes of Rudolph Giuliani, Phil Mickelson or Eli Manning with the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan skyline as a backdrop. The Tom Fazio designed Shadow Creek won’t charge you an initiation fee, especially if you are a high roller at one of Steve Wynn's casinos, but at $500, the green fees are rich enough. For some, the price may be reasonable for a chance to see the likes of Dubya Bush, Michael Jordan, or John Elway on an adjoining fairway. When he wasn’t otherwise engaged, the late Wilt Chamberlain walked the Shadow Creek fairways as well.

"Gentlemen, start your engines!" Motor racing and golf combine at Brickyard Crossing in Indianapolis. In 1929 it was called "The Speedway Golf Course" but took on the new name after a Pete Dye redesign in 1991. Most of the course plays adjacent to the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but holes 7 thru 10 play on the racecourse’s infield. Things get a little crowded on Memorial Day during the running of the Indianapolis 500.

You probably won’t see too many Jeep Cherokees in the parking lot of Cherokee Plantation in Yemassee SC. Annual dues compare with the cost of a Porsche, and joining fees equal a Bentley or two. What do you expect from a course whose designer, Donald Steel, is the only one permitted to tweak the Old Course at St. Andrews? Cherokee Plantation was once owned by RB Evens, president of American Motors and, yes, your Jeep Cherokee was named after the Plantation.

Golf is an international game, and if you would like to capture its worldwide nature in just one round, head for Portal, ND, and the Gateway Cities Golf Club. The clubhouse and first hole start in the U.S. and the remaining eight holes play north of the border in Canada. We trust they serve Molson at the 19th hole (actually the 10th at Gateway Cities).

First published June 2010 in Larry Gavrich's "Golf Community Reviews"

Lao and Order: A dozen bits of wisdom to put yin in your drive and yang in your putt

With apologies to Lao-tzu and his Tao Te Ching (the 2,500 year old Book of Wisdom)


Golf is beyond words and beyond understanding. Words may be used to speak of it, but they cannot contain it.

Golf and its many manifestations arise from the same source -- subtle wonder within mysterious darkness. This is the beginning of all handicaps.

When golfers find one course beautiful, another consequently becomes ugly. When one golfer is held up as good, another is judged deficient.

Golf is the hidden secret source of all life. Good men recognize that golf provides for them and, therefore, they esteem it. Bad men don't recognize this, but golf doesn't stop providing for them.
Similarly, golfers and non-golfers balance each other; difficult and easy lies define each other; long and short putts illustrate each other; high and low bunkers rest upon each other; swing and score meld into harmony; what is to come follows upon what has been...scratch golf!

The wise golfer sets an example by emptying the mind, opening the heart, relaxing ambitions, relinquishing desires, cultivating character and keeping head down. There is no greater calamity than hook, no greater curse than slice.

The weak putt overcomes the strong. The soft putt overcomes the hard. Everyone knows this, but none have the ability to practice it. Golf is a whirling emptiness; yet, when played, it cannot be exhausted but can result in a gimmee.

Know the universe as your self, and you can golf absolutely anywhere in comfort. Love the course as your self, and you'll be able to care for it properly. This is the way of golf: Do your work, replace your divots, then quietly step back. If you compete with no one, no one can compete with you.

The perfect swing is formless form, un-seeable image, elusive, evasive unimaginable mystery. Confront it, and you won't see "the shanks.” Follow it, and you can't find a bogey. Perceive its ancient subtle heart, and you become master of the game. Know what came before time, and the beginning of a hole in one is yours.

A caddy is subtle, intuitive, penetrating, profound. His depths are mysterious and unfathomable. The best one can do is describe his appearance: The caddy is alert as a person crossing a winter stream; as circumspect as a person with neighbors on all four sides; as respectful as a thoughtful guest...well, perhaps Steve Williams excepted.

The greatest virtue is to follow golf, and only golf. You might say, "But golf is illusive! Evasive! Mysterious! Dark! How can one follow that?" By following this: Out of silent subtle mystery emerge birdies. These birdies coalesce into eagles. Within each eagle is contained the seed and essence of life. Thus do all eagles emerge and expand out of darkness and emptiness.

Because its essence is real and evident in the origins of all things, the game of golf has survived since the beginning of time.

First published Sept. 2010 in Larry Gavrich's "Golf Community Reviews"Golf Community Reviews

Where did I put that decoder ring?

So the Republicans are back in control of the NCGA and almost immediately they began to speak in code. Perhaps the most egregious local example was an interview in the Jan.19-25 MountainXpress, "Front row seats, A new start for N.C.'s Grand Old Party"

Former Buncombe GOP chair Bill Keller's advice to the state GOP, after their 113 years in the legislative wilderness, would be to institute photo identification of NC voters as soon as possible. Apparently to insure against the "dead people" vote. Or as he so succinctly puts it, "You just get this feeling--how many dead people are voting?"

Now I would be the last person, dead or alive, to suggest that some deceased voters don't actually make it to the polls. Of course we have some voter fraud, but a bit of research shows that most "dead voters" are folks whose names have remained on the register after passing away. Rarely do they vote. One current study done in Connecticut found that statewide about 9000 names of deceased folks remained on the poll lists... only 300 of them actually voted! Hardly enough to change the will of the people. For that you would need to look at a December 2000 ruling by the Rehnquist court.

But I digress. As Mr. Keller, the good Republican that he is, surely knows the idea of photo ID at the polls is a staple Republican scheme that would make it difficult for, no... not dead people, but live minorities to vote. People of color, poor people, those without driver's licenses for example. I suppose it could eliminate some of the dead voters but I guarantee it would eliminate a lot more of, what Mr. Keller calls, the live "Big D" voters.

Surely after being out of power for over a century there must be more pressing issues that the GOP could attack first. Perhaps the $4.3 billion state structural shortfall predicted over the next 26 months by the Civitas Institute. Actually no, Keller goes on to suggest that the local GOP could best serve the cause by ensuring "...fair, accurate, reliable, safe elections." To achieve this he suggests that the GOP must find enough Republican workers for the polls and properly trained them. Presumably to identify and deter those "dead people". Where is that ring?

Should not people have the same protection as ducks?

While watching coverage of the Tucson tragedy and how the carnage might have been lessened by having laws in place controlling the size and types of magazines available to the public, thereby limiting the number of rounds that could be fired before the shooter would have to reload, led me to consider the irony of existing Federal Law that applies to every state.

It is illegal to hunt migratory birds-waterfowl, doves, etc. anywhere in this nation using a shotgun larger than 10 gauge and one that does not have its magazine permanently plugged to LIMIT it to no more than 3 shells, 2 in the magazine and one in the chamber. This dates to the early 20th century and was designed to stop "market hunters" and others from obliterating entire flocks with high-capacity magazines or large bore "punt" guns that could fire up to a pound of lead shot.

Indeed, we have laws in all 50 states that limit the number of migratory birds that can be killed by a hunter before having to RELOAD his weapon. As ironic as it seems, we do indeed attempt to protect the number of ducks a hunter can kill at any one time by the use of strict gun and ammunition laws while at the same time refusing to barely discuss, much less offer, the same protection to the citizens of this country.

The NRA spends millions and millions of dollars every year fighting to stop or limit laws that would offer humans the same protections that are afforded ducks. How stupid is this?

Much has been lost, much has survived, remembering downtown Asheville from the early 1980s

Arriving in Asheville in Sept.of 1981 to finally make it our home after many years of visiting from New Orleans we were once again struck by the skeletal like remains of downtown Asheville, a once vibrant city now barely connected to its illustrious past except for a mishmash of glorious but unkept 1920s architecture. Still, there were stirrings that would become great gasps of revitalization and reconstruction in the 90s. Asheville's downtown had two defining issues in the early 1980s. The first, according to the Chamber of Commerce, was that 65% of downtown Asheville's retail space was unused if not literally boarded up and the second was the refusal of voters to approve a bond referendum the city was hoping to pass that would have allowed an out of state developer to bulldoze a large swatch of downtown architecture into oblivion and develop a mall in its place. If that had happened much would have been lost, instead much has survived to become the Downtown Historic District, an Art Deco mecca.

Just down the street and recently separated from downtown in 1976 by the Great Wall of I-240 was the newly designated Montford Historic District(1980) a treasure trove of late 1800s and early 1900s houses, none of which had ever sold for more than 50 thousand dollars. The city's intrepid real estate agents shuddered at the thought of having to show property in an area of town that had a bad reputation, admittedly somewhat deserved, so they avoided it like the plague. This is where we were to spend the next year or so renovating a turn of the century home and trying to convince the powers that be to allow Asheville's first Bed and Breakfast, The Flint Street Inn, to open its doors to the visiting public.

In the early years of the Inn, guests would ask us sometimes diplomatically sometimes not, "Is this area on its way up or down?" The problems confronting us were mostly due to the fact that the city had no idea what a B&B was much less how to go about licensing it to do business. After much prodding and a major decision by the city Fire Chief who grew up in Montford it was decided to allow the Inn to be licensed as a "Tourist Home" the closest thing to a B&B that the city could identify.

Over the next decade this decision actually lead to the explosion of dozens of additional Bed & Breakfasts throughout Montford and other areas of the city. The Flint Street Inns being the first in 1982, followed closely by the Old Reynolds Mansion on Reynold's Mountain and CedarCrest on Biltmore Avenue and then many, many more.

For B&B guests and other visitors to Asheville what made up the downtown scene along Haywood Street in 1980s was a multitude of shoe stores, Jarred's French restaurant, O.Henry's a popular gay bar and Asheville institution still going strong down the street from its old location and Emoke B'racz's great bookstore and downtown gem, Malaprop's.

Welcome to Asheville of the early 80s a period when restaurant development in the downtown area would play an important role in bolstering the emergence of downtown as a place to dine, shop and enjoy. The beginning of the popular Bele Chere festival in 1979 and the passage of a referendum to allow mixed drinks the same year undoubtetly added to the stirrings of social activity in the downtown area.

Fine dining on Biltmore Ave...how about the The Hotdog King? Still to come the trio of restaurants that anchored the corner of Biltmore and College Streets, La Caterina Trattoria, Cafe on the Square and Bistro 1896. S&W was still a cafeteria, Stone Soup, one of Asheville's early popular eaterys, was still on Charlotte St. in the old Manor Inn but soon to move downtown and into Shandler's Pickle Barrel location, now home to Mellow Mushroom Pizza. The Market Place then on Market Street, where Vincenzo's now resides, was a fine choice in 1980 and still is at its Wall Street location where Mark Rosenstein, Asheville's uber chef did award winning cuisine before selling.

23 Page Restaurant, now defunct, on Page Ave was another excellent early choice. Another popular eating spot early in the 80s was Sonny Sparacino's Italian Bistro on Lexington Avenue, later taken over by the now defunct Vincent's Ear Music Bar. Three Brothers and The Mediterranean were early restaurants in the 1980s apparently having been at their present locations since the founding of Asheville in the late 1700's. Asheville was named Morristown until 1797 when the name was changed to honor Gov. Samuel Ashe.

Of all the early problems faced by innkeepers one of the most vexing was where to send guests to eat on holidays. Because the city closed down in those early years the only choices were basically the restaurants at the Inn on the Plaza, now the Renaissance, or the Grove Park Inn which was seasonally operated, closed from after Thanksgiving until spring so it was not an option in the winter.

Perhaps our most fondly remembered restaurant was the original Windmill European Grill, across from the Civic Center. Owned and operated by Vasil and Cynthia Hristov. It was Vasil the Bulgarian owner/chef who delighted his clientele with great ethnic food served with a side of cabaret. Cynthia tended the dining room while Vasil, with his ever present cup of red wine, manned the kitchen which was part and parcel of the dining space. He was known to startle otherwise charmed guests by occasionally bombarding them with fresh baked rolls airmailed across the room from the chef station.

Sometime in the 80s the Shastri family took over the location and it eventually morphed into another fine downtown dining experience, The Flying Frog, now in the Battery Park Hotel. Vijay Shastri the little boy who could be found in the kitchen helping his parents Cathy and Jay in the early years of the Flying Frog is now a fine chef and with his father still operates one of Asheville's premier restaurants.

In the early 80s most of the historic buildings lining Haywood St. still had the decorative pressed aluminium "modern" fronts attached to disguise the original turn of the century architecture. Who would have guessed that the building that was to later become Malaprop's second location had a balcony in it's early period as a downtown hotel. After opening in 1982 Malaprop's bookstore then a few doors north of its current spot was busy trying to convince the city fathers that serving food on the street was not a risk to the health and well being of its patrons. Interestingly enough the Grove Park Inn had for some time been serving food outdoors on its Sunset Terrace with no apparent loss of life. About 1984 the city finally relented and now outdoor dining is ubiquitous around downtown Asheville.

Another curious fact about Asheville in the early years of the 80s was the lack of street signs. There weren't any of the now easy to read green reflective signs. What was at each intersection was a small four sided concrete pylon painted white (think three foot tall versions of the Vance Monument) that had the street name stenciled in black lettering on each of its four flat surfaces, most of which had weathered into unreadability. Since most folks downtown were locals it didn't matter much except to the B&B owners like ourselves who were left giving directions based on counting streets until the next turn. That was not too difficult since there was no real traffic problems A really bad traffic jam of the early 80s meant finding yourself stuck behind 6 or 8 cars waiting for the light to change. No such thing as morning or 5 o'clock traffic yet.

Life was good...except when a water main burst under some downtown street flooding the immediate area and in the winter turning city streets into an ice rink. This was a regular occurance in the 80s because the city was making do with an infrastructure that dated from pre-depression days. Asheville had struggled to pay off its depression era debt well into the 1970s and in fact was one of the few American cities, if not the only one, to totally retire its financial obligations of that period. Spending for new infrastructure, water, roads and bridges, sewerage and storm runoff was very hard to fund due to the hair shirt mentality that remained in the psyche of the city fathers and voters.

In the early 80s the city's population was virtually the same as it had been at the beginning of the depression, about 40,000. The city leaders were of the mind that if the citizens of Asheville could survive on what the city had to offer in 1929 they could do it in 1980. Obviously this was not a good mindset to take into the period that was soon to be the beginning of Asheville's resurgence. But by fits and starts resurge it did and after the 1980s it became a rare occurance for a guest of the Inn to inquire if any part of Asheville was on the way up or on the way down.

First published MountainXpress 2008

Life in the Hood, shot houses, shotguns, insurance burns, sidewalk princesses and bookies in the basement

Operating a B&B in MONTFORD in the early '80s.

It wasn't until the new neighbor showed up on our front porch and announced that he was starting a fledging bookie operation in the basement of his place across the street and that he intended to run a quiet operation and hoped we would not be upset on days when folks came by to place a bet, that we realized we weren't living in Kansas, Toto.

Living in Montford in 1982 required a keen ability to adapt to life in an area that was just blocks from City Hall but might as well have been located in a parallel universe. The city had pretty much forgotten Montford since the 1960's and presently had not yet jogged its own memory of the 600 or so homes that made up Asheville's first residential neighborhood. Once the I-240 connector was finished in the mid '70s Montford was destined to be physically separated from the Asheville psyche for almost two decades.

The makeup of the neighborhood population in the '80s was predominately black, 60% or so. A number of older white families who had lived in Montford since the early 1900's, when Montford was predominately an all white neighborhood, still lived in family homes. A small but growing group of urban pioneers drawn by the beauty of the mountains and the lure of neglected but architecturally significant homes and mansions that could be bought for well under 50 thousand dollars were starting to have an impact in Montford. Some homes were had for as little as a few thousand dollars on the courthouse steps.

A number were lost to a rash of mysterious fires that broke out around the neighborhood, mostly in the winter. Some fires were caused by the many homeless people that were drawn to the dilapidated, unoccupied structures looking for warmth. Most were purposely set to destroy property that was no longer worth renovating. With owners not wanting to bear the cost of demolishing them, some once fine old homes met their demise as "insurance burns".

By the mid '80s Montford was dotted with dozens of empty lots being overgrown but still showing remnants of landscaping from an earlier, happier time. At that point it was virtually impossible to give a building lot away in Montford much less sell one. But by the late '90s most of these empty lots had new houses on them. These homes had to meet the Historic Resources Commission architectural guidelines, This meant that they could not look like modern intrusions. Consequently they were expensive to build and selling for close to half a million dollars on average. Easily 10 times as much as any previous house had ever sold for in Montford until the early '80s when the stately 1915 foursquare on Flint Street that was to became the first B&B in Montford and a few years later the stone mansion on Montford Ave. that was to become The Lion & The Rose B&B sold for around 60 thousand dollars each.

Living in Montford in the early '80s entailed co-existing with a melange of alternative businesses operating in the district, some legal many not. Shot houses and drug dealers flourished cheek by jowl with small inns and corner stores. Shot houses being private homes that were operating as erstaz bars selling shots of booze for two to four bits. Mostly to working class residents, addicts and the many sidewalk princesses that frequently plied their trade along the streets of Montford when Asheville's finest chased them away from lower Lexington Ave. These business folk, unlike the B&B owners, had chosen not to involve themselves in the bureaucratic intricacies of business licences, inspections and the like. In general everyone operated in a perpetual state of studiously ignoring each other since we not competing for clients.

This live and let live attitude prevailed for a few years until the drug dealing and gambling started turning openly raucous, ugly and was obviously fast becoming a threat to the legitimate businesses in the neighborhood. Although we had a generally open-minded clientele at the Inn, guest comments were indicating that something had to be done. A week long search for the offices of MEG(metropolitan enforcement group), the undercover drug division of the Asheville PD, whose location was meant to be unknown to the public, led us to an office in a commercial building downtown just off of I-240.

We knocked. Getting over the initial surprise of finding us in the doorway of their supposedly secret location and after hearing our plea for help the officers made a commitment to undertake a long term plan to better police the newly designated state and federal Historic District. Starting with undercover operations taking place around Montford and eventually, with prodding from other residents, a police substation was opened in the neighborhood.

Part of this plan involved the APD asking if they might place an officer with a camera on the Inn's front porch to record license plate numbers of the locals who stopped to place bets with our bookie neighbor across the street. As much as we were inclined to help and after much consideration, alas we said no. We decided that having an officer with a camera mixing with guests on the front porch while recording illegal activities across the street might not be the best approach to growing our business.

Nevertheless, we knew that a tipping point had been reached when one Sunday morning two black sedans pulled up in front of the bookie operation across the street and two bullet proof vest wearing DEA agents jumped out of each car, popped the trunks and in a very business like manner started chambering shells into a couple of 12 ga. shotguns. We had a front row seat on the porch of our B&B as they proceeded to storm into the building and a few moments later bundled three suspects into the two cars.

Although it took a few more years for prostitution and drugs to be swept from Montford's streets, it was the beginning of the end for most of the illegal activity in Montford. It took a while longer for the parade of pickup trucks to stop cruising the neighborhood on Friday paydays with their newly flush drivers looking to swap their hard earned cash for a wide variety of services being provided by the local working girls.

Also around this time the city was beginning to realize that it had a potential goldmine in the hundreds of under taxed historic district properties just blocks from a slowly awakening historic downtown. All they had to do was upgrade the neighborhood infrastructure, a legal activity that caused the property owners in Montford almost as much trouble as drugs and prostitution.

Asheville's version of the "big dig" started in various places about the neighborhood. Flint Street was typical with a wide and ever growing deeper ditch running down the middle of the street. The excavation was needed to place the storm drain catch basins in the deepest part then the sewer lines next. This required each house on the street to be disconnected from the old sewer line and reconnected to the new. During this connection period the mantra of the workmen in the ditch was..."please nobody flush". New water lines were run above the sewer lines for obvious sanitation purposes should a leak occur and then connected to each house with much less suspense than the previous sewer connections.

It was during this part of the digging, when mounds of dirt were piled up and running from one end of Flint Street to the other, that we discovered that the mountains of dirt held treasures from the neighborhood's 1890's to early 1900's past in the form of a single leather high top shoe in amazingly good condition and a few intact glass ink wells and a good bit of broken pottery.

Eventually the work was finished but not until a second dig to lay new natural gas lines caused another, albeit shorter disruption. Soon after we had newly paved streets and brand new concrete sidewalks that, although quite nice, had unfortunately replaced most of the original brick sidewalks. These fine old hand laid walkways had been constructed with local kiln fired bricks decorated with their distinctive bullseye and diamond designs and bordered by solid granite curbing, some of which can still be found in parts of Montford.

Another result of all this modernization was the inevitable increase in property taxes. Over the next two decades it was not unusual for properties similar to the Flint Street Inns to find their 1982 tax bill of $300 to have swollen to $6500 by 2003. Unfortunately this resulted in many older black and white families, long time residents of Montford, finding that they had to sell their homes because they could no longer afford the taxes. Unintended consequences of gentrification and ever rising property values that the city could not find in it's heart to mitigate by freezing taxes, early on, for older long time residents.

Still, Montford today is a lot like Montford of 30 years ago and not all that different in character from the original little 1893 community when it was incorporated as a 300 acre autonomous village just north of downtown 115 years ago. Almost all the original homes have survived into the 21st century. No mean feat in this era of tear-downs and bigger is better. If you walk the streets of Montford today you will find yourself thinking how lucky the city is to have preserved this vibrant slice of it's history.

First published MountainXpress 2008