I managed to get out for another early spring nine this past weekend, this time at Green Oaks in Ypsilanti. Green Oaks is an ideal course for this time of year because it drains so well. With the exception of one hole (the twelfth), it avoids the soggy spots that often afflict other area courses. Legend has it that the entire course is built on sand. The greens certainly must be. Ten minutes after a rain storm, they’re perfectly playable.

The mercury said that it was fifty degrees, but with the breezes, the wind chill had to be in the mid-30s. I was wearing a pair of winter golfing gloves, and my fingers still were cold. Still, the sun was out, the sky was (mostly) blue, and I reminded myself that I have played in much, much worse weather.

I was paired up with a local optometrist who also was walking. We both struggled; I had distance issues, and he had a nasty hook. The Doc never saw the right side of anything on the course. Of course, his right side was thirty yards past my middle.

I was a bit discouraged, but the Doc had the right attitude.

“Hey,” he said on several occasions. “It’s only March.”

And of course he was right. In Michigan, spring golf is a precarious thing, and it’s not often that weather and work/family schedules coincide. There have been years in which my first round was in April. As a High School girls golf coach, we’ve had seasons where there was a threat of snow at every match. There was one year when it was snowing on the day of state regionals in May.

I made good progress with my game yesterday. My ball striking was solid, and most of my shots were on line. I still was a club short—but that’s much better than the previous outing, where I was at least two short. My driving needs a lot of work, though. I keep popping them up, and my average was just over 200 yards. That’s not acceptable.

But hey. It’s only March.

I recently received in the mail Golf Life’s 2009 “Definitive Guide To the Golf Life” yearbook.

It left me depressed. From what I can gather from the articles in the magazine, living the “golf life” is going to require a substantial hike in my paltry teacher’s salary. Here’s just a small selection of the things Golfweek thinks I’m going to need:

* $80 polo shirts from a a variety of high tech and exotic fabrics

* $190 adidas sunglasses
* $33,000 Rolex Yacht Master II watch
* $2,000 Davidoff desktop humidor
* $7,000 Viking Outdoor Grill
* $14,000 700 square foot artificial putting green
* $40,000 indoor golf simulator
* $2,000 Klipsich Icon XF-48 speakers for your (presumably even more expensive) stereo system
* $350,000 Maybach 52 automobile
* fractional ownership in a corporate jet at some unspecified price

and

* a million dollar home on one of their recommended residential course

My version of the golf life is somewhat different. In The GolfBlogger’s world, it’s:

* $20 golf shirts from T.J Maxx. (Sometimes I even get lucky and find a big name brand. I have scored Nicklaus, Norman and Bobby Jones shirts, for example.)
* $20 sunglasses from REI
* a $15 plastic Timex.
* No humidor needed. Mrs. GolfBlogger wouldn’t allow smoking.
* $200 Weber propane grill
* $0.50 in gas to go to the local course’s practice putting green
* $10 copy of last year’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour computer game.
* $100 speakers to go with my 18 year old stereo system, which is hooked to my 17 year old 27 inch television.
* $25,000 Subaru Forester
* a plane trip once every three years to somewhere interesting. Last time I went to Torrey Pines to play.
* trips to courses where I can look at million dollar homes. I’ve recently played two of the recommended courses on Golf World’s list: Forest Dunes and Tullymore.

I suspect there are a lot more like me than there are of “them.”

My mailbox has in recent days been full of golf porn—catalogs from all the major retailers hawking the latest and greatest in clubs, balls and apparel. It’s the start Christmas gift giving season, and I fear it’ll only get worse.

The clubs on display in the photographs all are unnaturally shiny, and as beautiful as only Photoshop can make them. It’s disappointing to find how much more ordinary golf clubs look in a pro shop.

It reminds me of a lecture I attended while in journalism school. Given by a Playboy photographer, the lecture consisted of a series of “before and after” slides of Playboy bunnies along with descriptions on how the use of camera lenses, lighting and darkroom technique turned ordinary women into porn goddesses (it was the best lecture I ever attended). In a great many cases, the actual girl and the final photograph didn’t even look like the same person.

Golf catalogs are more than a bit like that. 

Catalog balls are whiter, irons sleeker, and drivers more aggressive looking than they are in person. Properly photographed, they use angles, highlights and reflections to inspire every golfer’s desire.

And the product descriptions! They’re the golf equivalent of male enhancement spam emails. Each one is guaranteed to make you longer, straighter, higher, faster and stronger. And happier.

Keep dreaming.

But of course, that’s what the catalogs and manufacturers are selling: hopes and dreams.

We hope that the latest irons really will let us hit the ball long and straight. We dream of balls with ten yards more carry and drivers with that tour preferred draw. A new game is, after all, just two thousand dollars away.

But I don’t need hope. And I don’t need new equipment. What I really need is the golf equivalent of a viagra pill—something to get my game going when I’ve lost it.

I lost four balls in nine holes today. Three of those disappeared in the middle of the fairway, presumably under one of the bazillions of leaves that were strewn in every direction.

It’s an unavoidable hazard on Michigan’s tree-lined golf courses. Even on the most well-tended courses, superintendents fight a losing battle. If they blow the leaves off first thing in the morning, more are back by noon. Wind gusts chase drifts of leaves out of the woods to settle in previously cleared territory.

So it occurs to me that—just as there are special guidelines for winter play—there also needs to be a set of rules for Autumn.

First among the autumn rules is that if your ball that disappears in the middle of a fairway, you may drop a replacement in a reasonable position with no penalty. Fairways were never meant to be penal.

If you’re a liberal sort, you also could agree in your foursome that a ball that rolls just off the fairway and can’t be found also may be replaced.

Second, if a ball comes to rest on top of a pile of leaves, you can pick it up, brush away the leaves and replace the ball on grass. That ruling applies both in the fairways, and in bunkers.

And finally, a golfer may improve his stance at any time. Slippery leaves are a golf injury waiting to happen.

In fact, now that golf is a worldwide sport, I think it’s time for any number of sensible rules exceptions. I’m certain that desert courses don’t have a leaf problem, but surely they have issues that the Scottish founders never envisioned on their links. The same holds for tropical courses, Outback courses, prairie courses, swamp courses, and so on.

And since I’m committing sacrilege, I’ll also suggest that municipal courses need a different set of rules from private and high end courses. Some of the munis in my area are so beat up by the end of the summer that even the biggest rules sticker uses the “one turnover” rule to get their balls out of inch deep divots. It’s not improving your lie; it’s leveling the playing field.

As I was stepping into a bunker at my favorite local course, tour-designed sand wedge in hand, it occurred to me that I had the wrong instrument for the job. Not that I needed a pitching wedge or a nine-iron. The sand wedge indeed was the right club. It’s the “tour-designed” part that had me thinking.

The aggregate material that occupies the bunkers at my local track in no way bears any resemblance to the sand that I’ve seen at tour stops like Oakland Hills, Warwick Hills, or the TPC Dearborn. Their sand is soft, and smooth and fluffy. Mine is chunky, irregular and hard (see photo above). When I try to splash the ball out, I’m just as likely to hit hard clay bottom as anything.

What some aspiring club company needs to do is to create a line that’s “public course”, not “tour”, inspired. These clubs need to be designed for the kind of conditions that your average golfer plays.

The tee boxes at my local course are by this time of year pitted with the divots of tens of thousands of poorly struck drivers. It doesn’t matter for the clubs, since you’re teeing it up, but finding an even, stable spot for the feet is challenging.

The fairways are grown in, but the ground beneath is hard. If you try to take one of those tour divots, your club will bounce back up and hit you in the shins. At the very least, they’ll give you a bad case of golfers’ elbow from the repeated shocks. The rough consists mostly of weeds (although they’re well-mown weeds) and the ground is even harder.

I have to give the grounds keepers credit for the greens. They’re wonderfully maintained. But they’re not nearly as fast as private clubs I’ve played, and those are not as fast as tour stops.

The sand traps? Well, that’s a story in and of itself.

What all of this adds up to is that I—and other public course golfers—need equipment that is “six pack”, not “tour” inspired. The equipment companies need to stop asking the Tour guys for help and start haunting the clubhouses at local municipals.

I need shoes that are designed to keep my feet stable when I have to plant them on the edge of a deep divot because there’s no other flat spot. I want well-padded insoles, because I’m not walking on a tour level carpet. And while they’re at it, shoe makers should make models with bigger toe boxes. We don’t get custom fitted like the tour guys, so most of us need a little more give. Keen brand shoes are a good model.

I need irons that won’t take a tour divot. I need nine- and eleven- woods because they’re the most practical thing for hitting off harder ground. In fact, every line of fairway clubs should include seven, nine and eleven woods as a matter of course.

I need a putter specifically designed for distance control on slower greens. The focus should be on designs that get lag putts close.

And I need a sand wedge designed for three quarters of an inch of aggregate, with an underlying layer of concrete-hard clay.

The course was backed up last night, and while I was waiting on the third hole, I was joined by another single—a young man in a cart named Rich.

I invited him to play along with me, but he hesitated. “I’m not very good,” he said. “I’m just learning.”

“That’s o.k.,” I said. “I’ve been playing a long time, and I’m still learning, too.”

After a couple of holes, both of which I parred, Rich said “You’re really good.”

From his expression and tone, it was apparent that he thought I was stringing him along, pretending to be learning when I was in fact an accomplished player (although my double on the next hole would dispel that notion).

I meant it, though. I’m always learning, and except in competitive rounds, I’m always practicing. When playing casual rounds, I’ll often take a shot I know I shouldn’t just to see if I can learn something. I’ve also been known to deliberately hit a ball into trouble just to see if I can get out. My handicap balloons as a result, but a low handicap isn’t my goal. I want to learn everything I can about the game.

I’m always learning. And so is everyone else who takes golf seriously. I’m absolutely certain that Tiger would say that he still is in the learning process. Ditto Phil, and Padraig and Vijay and everyone else on the Tour.

That it can never be mastered is one of the most intriguing things about golf. My other hobby is painting toy soldiers, and in that, I have by and large mastered the art. There really isn’t anything left except the enjoyment of researching and painting the diversity of costumes and uniforms over the ages.

In a strange way, I don’t really think that I would ever really WANT to master the game of golf. Constantly blasting drives down the middle and tapping in for birdie would be fun for a while, but in the end I think I’d lose interest.

So I continue to learn. And am happier for it.

Here in Ann Arbor, the return of the Goodyear blimps is a sure sign that college football is returning, and with it cooler weather and the waning weeks of the golf season.

We saw the Goodyear blimp today. One was gliding over the club where—rather than playing—I spent the afternoon poolside, watching the boys swim. It was too cool today for Dad to hit the water, but boys somehow seem immune. They spent hours in water that would have turned me into a popsicle. I didn’t mind, however, because I managed to get a great deal of reading done, working through the newspaper, finishing Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, and starting another fantasy novel called The Name of the Wind.

While I often will play golf until the snow flies, and enjoy fall as much as any season, the end of each summer comes with some sadness. Fall means a return to work and reducing my playing time to quick nines after school. And with the seemingly endless (and pointless, but state mandated) after school teacher’s meetings and in-services, I never get out as often as I might like.

So my last two weeks of summer will be filled with the usual gorging on golf. I’ll play five days a week, rain or shine until I can’t bear to pick up the clubs again.

And then I’ll play a some more.