This is the 20th in a series of articles on things to do to feed your golf addiction in the golfing offseason:

Attend A Demo Day

While golf courses may have off seasons, golf retailers operate year-round. Thus, even when snow covers the ground, our local shops are in full swing, using every trick in the book to get golfers in the store and move merchandise. One such promotion is the “demo day.” At Miles of Golf, Carls Golfland, Golfsmith, King Par and other southeastern Michigan establishments, equipment reps for the major manufacturers schedule time at the heated or indoor tees to show their latest wares and offer a chance to try them out. The reps are excited to talk about the new gear, and range balls are free, so it’s a deal that can’t be beat.

Miles of Golf in Ann Arbor held two demo days this past weekend. On Saturday, I spent a couple of hours testing clubs from Cobra, Mizuno, Adams and Ping. I returned on Sunday for TaylorMade, Callaway and Nike. I learned a lot about the new year’s clubs, tried out most of them and came away with a good pile of notes for future posts. I didn’t actually buy anything, but Miles was offering some very good deals.

The Demo Days also were a chance to try out Miles of Golf’s “Trackman” system. Trackman is a driving range bay with a doppler radar installed. The system measures your swing as you practice and feeds you information on carry and roll, swing and ball speed, angle and spin rate. For me, the bottom line of the data was that I don’t hit it far enough, my launch angle is too steep and my spin rate too high. Other than that, I’m good to go.

Keep an eye out for demo days in your area. They’re a fun—and cheap—way to fed the golf addiction.

This the seventh in a series on things to do to feed your golf addiction in the golfing off season:

Watch A Golf Movie

If you can’t get out to play, watching a golf movie just might feed your golf addiction. Here’s a list of The GolfBlogger’s Favorites:

1. The Greatest Game Ever Played

A faithful adaptation of the book that plays well on the big screen. Its no wonder, the author, Mark Frost, once wrote the tv series Hill Street Blues. The casting is perfect and the story compelling. It’s the original David and Goliath sports story. There are a lot of subtle bits in this movie , though, that people who didn’t read the book will miss. For example, the book goes into a great deal on the class conflict between the professionals and the amateurs. If you didn’t read the book, you’ll miss the point that the professionals are always referred to by their first names—Harry Vardon—while the amateurs are referred to with a honorific—Mr. Ouimet.

2. Dead Solid Perfect

Based on the Dan Jenkins novel, this originally appeared on cable. It follows a struggling professional golfer—played by Randy Quaid—as he travels about on tour. Very funny.

3. Tin Cup

This Kevin Costner movie is like Bull Durham for golf. Costner plays a washed up driving range pro who decides to play in the US Open to win the heart of a girl. It’s most famous for the scene where he plunks ball after ball into a pond on the last hole of the Open. It’s a good romantic comedy.

Continued...

This is the sixth in a series of essays on things to do to feed your golf addiction in the off-season.

Practice Your Putting

Putting is one of the few golf activities that I can engage in year-round at GolfBlogger World Headquarters in Michigan. When the snow is falling, the wind blowing and the temperatures plummeting, I can still lay out a small putting course in my family and sun rooms and get some quality time in with the flat stick.

And that’s a good thing, because putting is fully half the game of golf. Two of the stokes on every par are set aside for putting, so on a par 72, 36 of those are for putts. The math here is simple. To score well, you need to putt well. Teaching pros have long insisted that the easiest way to improve your scores is to improve your short game. I’ll go one further. Simply work on improving your putting.

Fortunately, the putting stroke is the easiest thing in the game to master. Compared to a full swing (or, god forbid, one of those dreaded Dave Pelz three quarter clock swings), the putting stroke is simple, slow and controllable.When a ball goes offline on a drive, it’s often hard to tell which of a dozen things actually went wrong. When a ball falls short, rolls long or heads offline on a putt, the cause usually is obvious.

Given the central importance of putting, and the relative ease of fixing a bad stroke, I have always found it strange that players who regularly three jack on the greens will spend so much time focusing on the full swing . it does absolutely no good to get to the green in regulation if you’re going to three- or even four-putt once you get there.

So feed your golf addiction this winter by practicing your putting. Set up one of those mechanical ball return targets in a room with a short carpet and have at it with a couple of dozen putts a day. Concentrate at first on tempo and a smooth stroke. Work on distance control. You might even consider getting one of those putting plane systems that are designed to align your eyes, shoulders, clubface and path for a clean stroke.

Another fun thing to do is to head to the local well-stocked pro shop, such as the GolfSmith or Golf Galaxy and spend an hour or so putting around on their large professional greens. My conscience usually bothers me after a free session like this, so I buy a box of balls.

Read the rest of the series.

This is the fifth in a series of essays on things to do to feed your golf addiction in the off-season.

Look Up An Old Golf Buddy

The holidays are a great time to reconnect with family, friends, and ... old golf buddies. You can feed your golf addiction by bringing back the ghost of Rounds Past with a buddy you haven’t heard from in a while. Invite him (or her) for a few drinks at the local watering hole—or even better—patronize your favorite course’s clubhouse. Then spend the afternoon drinking, watching sports on the big screen tv, and eating bar food (my favorite are the fried mozzarella sticks.

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This is the fourth in a series of essays on things to feed your golf addiction in the off-season.

Play a Golf Video Game

If it’s too cold to get out on the course, playing a golf video game can be a pleasant afternoon’s diversion and a way to feed your addiction.

I experienced my first golf video game on an Apple II circa 1984. The screen was green and black, and the graphics primitive, but the mechanics not far off from many games today. There was a small bar at the bottom of the screen, and at the top a player’s eye view of the course. To swing, you hit the space bar, and watched a status meter race across the gauge. You hit the space bar again when it a mark at the far end, and a final time when it swept back to a mark on the near side. It was all about timing. If you hit the space bar before the status meter reached the top, your shot would be weak; hit it after the top mark, and you would overswing. Hitting the space bar before the bottom mark caused a slice; after, a hook. Once the ball was struck, the view shifted to an overhead showing where the shot flew.

Since that first game, I’ve owned and played dozens of others, including a hand-held lcd game, several PC based games, Playstation, Game Cube and Wii, on my cell phone and now on my BlackBerry. I’ve had games that featured Jack, Arnie, Vijay and ... ahem ... Woody.

For most of the games, the basic play mechanism has remained the same—timing the status meter. More recent games, however, have incorporated mouse movement into the control. I don’t like those as much.

The golf video game that’s been the most fun is the Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 Wii game. Like all Wii games, it features a motion sensing mechanism. You actually swing the controller like a club to make the ball go on the screen. It’s part simulation, part game. The game aspect involves earning “upgrades” such as better outfits, equipment and access to improved courses.

I like it, but frankly, I’m not very good. Thing One, the teenager, kicks my butt.

A close second was an Accolade Jack Nicklaus PC game that had a very neat course editor. I spent more time designing courses than playing them.

Another game that I really liked was Sid Meier’s SimGolf. In that one, you began with a plot of land and a pile of money and started constructing golf holes. Like all of the “Sim” games, it was all about management of assets, as you developed your backwater course into a fabulous golf resort. You could play on the course you developed, but game play was very simplistic.

Golf games are only going to get more realistic. There are a number on the market that use real clubs and sensors to detect the clubface positions. But those, I think, stray too far to the simulation side of the continuum to be considered a game.

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