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Culture Shock

Experience This

By Ron Green Jr.

It was July 11, 1967, and I was walking into the Charlotte Coliseum — the original one with the silver dome that still hosts events on Independence Boulevard — with my mother, my brother and all of the pre-teen excitement that came with the promise of seeing The Monkees, live, in person, and in concert.

I knew The Monkees like they were my best friends. Mickey Dolenz. Michael Nesmith. Peter Tork. Davy Jones. (Full disclosure, my buddies and I didn’t like Davy that much because the girls thought he was heartbreakingly cute.)

The Monkees were a made-for-television quartet, patterned very loosely after The Beatles in as much as there were four of them and music was involved. They burned white-hot for a time, starred in a top-rated television show that gets credit, or blame, for spawning music videos years later, and they left us with “Daydream Believer” and “I’m A Believer” to put smiles on our faces even now.

What I didn’t know that July evening — the temperature had topped out at 87 degrees that day in the pre-global warming era — was that Jimi Hendrix was performing before our generation’s Fad Four.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience, all loud guitars and evolutionary rock music, was on stage after Lynne Randell, followed by The Sundowners and, as the late great guitarist would lament, immediately before the four guys everyone had come to see and hear. It was a curious cultural moment, a concert pairing as unlikely as anchovies and ice cream at the dinner table, and it only lasted for eight shows.

But we were walking into one of them.

This was the summer of love, and the distance between Charlotte and the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco in 1967 was greater than the 2,700 miles stretching between the two. The world was changing, more dramatically than any of us probably realized, but Charlotte was still a small Southern city, connected to the rest of the country by what we saw on television and heard on the radio.

That summer, at least in my comfortable world, it meant The Monkees.

As the son of a sportswriter, I was introduced early to what were then called press gates. That’s where sportswriters, television cameramen and other muckety-mucks with connections to the building’s manager could enter without mixing with the masses.

That meant walking halfway around the outside of the big round building, which also meant walking past the elephant doors, the giant entryway built to accommodate the annual visit from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus as well as the occasional load-in for concerts, usually country music shows featuring Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash or a new artist named Dolly Parton.

And Elvis. Always Elvis.

As we were heading to the press gate, our mother was telling us what to expect at our first real-life concert. Among her nuggets of wisdom was this: The Monkees are going to look different in person than they do on television.

Admittedly, this was long before anyone imagined HD television, but how different could they look? We were young, impressionable, and we figured anyone who could fry chicken as well as our mother did must know what she was talking about.

A moment after she told us about what television can do to a person’s appearance, a black limousine pulled up to the elephant doors as we were walking past. There they were, about to get out of the car, just a few feet away.

Out stepped Jimi Hendrix.

My 10-year-old mind tried to make sense of what and who I was seeing.

Mickey Dolenz really does look different, I thought. He has an Afro.

It wasn’t until an hour or so later that I realized why Mickey didn’t look like himself. While it may have caused me to doubt some things my mother said as I grew older, it’s a moment that still brings a little smile when I hear “Hey Joe” or “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone.”

And when Mickey and his mates took the stage that night — after Hendrix had stomped off with the echo of the guitar he tossed to the floor reverberating through the arena — they looked just like they did on television.

Had we been able to hear them over the screaming, they probably sounded the same, too.

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Snowblind

Go South, young man

By Jim Moriarty

When Golf World magazine, the publication birthed in Pinehurst in 1947 by Bob Harlow, had a vacancy in 1979, I was asked to leave my job as a sportswriter at the South Bend Tribune in northern Indiana to join the staff. In those days GW and its printing presses were housed in what is now one of Southern Pines’ municipal buildings along U.S. 1. Dick Taylor, the editor in chief, offered me the exalted position of the No. 3 person on a staff of, well, three. My official title was associate editor only because I don’t believe Dick thought it kind to use the term peon.

It was, however, a job that any self-respecting golf-obsessed journalist would have fallen all over themselves to get. And I took a cut in pay — which, by the way, was none too generous to begin with — to accept it. I did not, however, make this brilliant career move out of an unbridled love of golf. My wife, the War Department, our 3-year-old little girl, Jennifer, our cat, Tang, and I were driven out of South Bend by far more powerful forces — the Blizzard of ’78.

It began snowing on a Thursday. The Tribune was an afternoon paper, and I was doing the layout of the sports section that morning. I went in at 6 a.m., though to be honest this schedule often featured a phone call from the sports editor, Joe Doyle, who wanted to know where the hell I was. On that particular day, after discharging my office duties, I was set to travel with the Notre Dame hockey team to cover their Friday and Saturday night games against the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. This would never happen. You try explaining to some people in North Dakota that you couldn’t make it because it snowed.

Anyway, at roughly 10 a.m. I left the office and attempted to go home. It had already snowed 20 inches or so. In fact, it wouldn’t stop snowing until Sunday, piling up something in the neighborhood of 35 inches altogether with drifts much, much higher. Trust me, that’s a rough neighborhood.

It was clear that getting home was going to be a challenge. Our modest house on Fox Street was more or less in the middle of the city, and while I managed to slalom, slip and swerve to within roughly four blocks of home, that was as close as I was going to get.

Up North, there are unwritten rules covering these things. One is that you don’t, under any circumstances, abandon your car in the middle of the road. One sunny day, the snowplow will come, and snowplows don’t give a damn about your car. So, when I’d gone about as far as I could go, I backed up, turned the wheel hard left, stomped on the accelerator and lurched into someone’s front yard. I came back to dig it out five days later.

That evening on the local news — please explain to me how we could get three feet of snow and not lose electricity in South Bend, but if a squirrel walks across a power line on Indiana Avenue seven blocks of Southern Pines goes dark for two days — the local sheriff gave a Knute Rockne-esque pep talk. It went something like this: “Now listen everyone, we’re going to get the emergency routes cleared as fast as we can, but the side streets are going to take some time. My advice to you is, if you really need to go somewhere, start digging.”

And we did. The whole neighborhood. We dug an elaborate network of paths to each other’s houses. The snow was two Jennifers high on both sides. The shoveling brigade dug out the alley behind our row of houses — no plow was ever going back there — so people could get their cars out of their garages. The War Department’s sister had left her copper-colored Hornet parked next to our garage in the backyard while she was off to college. We didn’t see it again until April.

True to the sheriff’s word, the emergency routes were cleared with reasonable dispatch. People attached little orange flags on sticks (the kind you see on some bicycles) to their cars so they could see one another at intersections.

Nothing came down our street for seven days, and then it was a front-end loader. So, when Dick Taylor called, North Carolina seemed like a very good idea indeed. I could figure out all that pesky golf stuff later.

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Holiday Hotline

The Christmas letter that wasn’t

Dear Friends,

In the words of Michael Scott at Dunder Mifflin, over the lips and through the gums, look out stomach, here it comes! Well, it was quite a year. Hottest on record! Yay us! It got off to a great start when the War Department dropped her reckless endangerment charges. As I tried to explain to her at the time, it was only a suggestion. Live and learn.

As you may know, the Carolina Panthers did not win the Super Bowl. Aaaaagain. Turns out they’re worse than their record would indicate. Maybe they should take a page from the convention and visitors bureau in Kentucky that used an infrared laser to send an invitation into deep space attempting to attract extraterrestrials from planets in the TRAPPIST-1 solar system. They can’t do any worse than they do in the NFL draft or making trades. Am I right?

It was a leap year, of course, and that meant the War Department and I had the opportunity to enjoy an additional 24 hours in each other’s company. As it turned out, she was booked on Feb, 29, explaining that it’s not unusual for her to plan years ahead. That’s my girl!

Instead, I read that Finland is the happiest country in the whole wide world, a distinction it has held for seven straight years, which has got to be one of those records that can never be broken — like DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak or the Portuguese dog that lived to be 31 — and it wasn’t even in assisted living! So, you tell me, are the Finns sending out deep space laser messages, too? At least they don’t have a football team!

And it goes without saying that we all got fabulous news when McDonald’s announced its intention to sell Krispy Kreme doughnuts fresh daily. This revelation happened around the time cicada broods XIX and XII stuck their little heads out of the ground to rub wings together and party like it was 2024. The last time they did that fandango in the back yard was 221 years ago. Coincidence?

Of course, in June we had the U.S. Open right up the street. Bryson DeChambeau expressed no interest whatsoever in renting our doublewide for the week. Worse luck for him! On the plus side, Scottie Scheffler managed to get through the week without being hauled off in handcuffs. WWGD. What would Gomer do? Citizen’s arrest! Citizen’s arrest!

That’s about when we discovered that, in its latest update, the Oxford English Dictionary added (among other words and expressions) “Chekhov’s gun” to its lexicon. Chekhov, of course, was the Russian playwright who described the literary principle that says unnecessary elements should never be introduced into a story. If you have a gun in the play, someone needs to use it. Which brings me to Rory McIlroy. Ha-ha.

Right after the Open came the Olympics in France. Incroyable! Turns out Simone Biles is tiny. I’m talking Keebler cookie tiny. But that’s OK. As the great Dan Jenkins once said of a famous gymnast, “She can do everything my cat can do.”

I don’t know about you, but the Paris Olympics were a smash hit in our house, and I think it’s safe to say there are some things we can keep in mind for when we host the Open again in 2029. How about those opening ceremonies floating down the Seine? Think Drowning Creek. Am I wrong?

When it comes to mano a mano competition, however, the U.S. Open had nothing on Joey Chestnut, who had to forgo competing for Nathan’s Mustard Belt after he sold his soul to a rival food company. You know what Hunter S. Thompson said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” In a counter programing one-on-one match Chestnut downed 83 dogs — not the Portuguese kind, ha-ha — to beat his sworn rival, someone named Kobayashi, who I don’t think has had steady work since The Usual Suspects. Who is Keyser Soze?

It was an election year, and I decided not to run again. Those background checks! Who needs them?

The whole family was here for Thanksgiving, and the War Department made her traditional beef aspic. Lily, the almost 4-year-old, looked at me with those big, wide eyes and said, “Craps.” That’s what she calls me. “Meat Jell-O?” From the mouths of babes!

On to 2025!

Toodles,

The Maury Arties 

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Sticky Fingers

Confessions of a cookie dough thief

By Emilee Phillips

Around the holidays, my mother is known for baking her days away. Even with all of her kids grown and (mostly) gone she still churns out the sugary treats as if Bobby Flay were going to walk in at any moment to pass judgment on the selection.

Like most master chefs, she had specific dishware for specific things. Regular plates versus fancy plates, plastic cups versus glassware, and a collection of mixing bowls as stackable as Russian nesting dolls. There was one item, however, that came with spoonfuls of family chronicles — the granddaddy of them all — the cookie dough bowl.

When that heavy beige and blue ceramic bowl came out, we knew a spread of precisely shaped and elegantly frosted sugar cookies was on its way. But that wasn’t the best part. Oh, no. The best part was the dough.

All of us — and by us I mean her feral children — stuck our grubby fingers in that dough at least once a day, for as long as it sat in the fridge, before any of it ever landed on a cookie sheet. We weren’t afraid of salmonella, we were afraid of not seeing the bowl in time. It’s a good thing we didn’t have many guests during the holidays — it’s doubtful their constitutions would have been as hardy as ours.

My mother always wondered why her recipes never produced quite the cookie count she thought they should yield. We did our best to be discreet but eventually, my mom put two and two together and came up with three — children, that is. In the end we were betrayed by the aluminum foil that never seemed to go back as snugly as it went on and, of course, the fistful of finger divots.

Not that my brother and I were entirely innocent, but my sister, Megan, was the main culprit. And yes, that matters. The year Megan came home from college on Thanksgiving break is the year “the incident” happened. Whether or not it was on purpose has yet to be discovered.

It was late in the evening and Megan was loitering in the light of the fridge in search of a midnight snack. I can only imagine her delight when she saw the bowl. Not that I was on a cookie dough prowl myself — I have always been something of a night owl — but when I walked into the kitchen, my timing couldn’t have been better. I witnessed Megan popping a dough-laden finger into her mouth. Or so we both thought.

“Blech!” she exclaimed. Her head shook and her body shivered as she stuck out her tongue in disgust. I could see her mentally wrestling the urge to summon our mother at the top of her lungs to get to bottom of this vile pile. But of course, that would have given her up as the main cookie dough thief. Hoisted on her own petard, she couldn’t say a word.

Megan looked at me, confused. I calmly, and innocently, surveyed the scene. The cookie cutters weren’t out on the counter. Conspicuous by their absence, I knew what had happened. I reached past my sister and peeled back the foil. The bowl — not just any bowl but THE bowl — was full of potato salad.

It was as though our mother had defied the laws of nature that night. “It was even on the right shelf,” Megan whispered as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and trudged up to her room. I was just glad it wasn’t me.

The next morning at the breakfast table, Mom asked no one in particular, “So, how was the cookie dough?”

My sister lifted her gaze from her plate of pancakes with the look and sting of betrayal. To this day she swears I gave her up, but I think Mom saw the once smooth foil rumpled and decided to run with it, regardless of who the actual victim was. They exchanged a quick look full of mental gymnastics.

“That was cold,” said Megan, eyes narrowing. I was holding my breath waiting for Mom’s comeback — a lecture, or perhaps a revenge story.

Instead, the corners of her mouth turned upward as she stood to clear the breakfast plates. “Well, yeah,” she said on her way out of the room, “it was in the fridge.”

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CSI Veggies

There’s a fine for that

By Beth MacDonald

I’m usually the person others make an example of. So when I nervously moved to a very public apartment building in bucolic Pinehurst, I was anxious about all the rules I would accidentally break. If the complex had a yearbook, I’d surely be voted most likely to get fined.

Someone once told me to be less obvious about being awkward. “Don’t just throw it out there. Be more subtle,” they cautioned, as if opening my mouth didn’t give me away. I trip while standing still. I own being weird. I have tea towels that say “Don’t Trust Anyone Who Can Spell Gonorrhea On The First Try.” That’s gotta be a fine.

I adopted a sweet dog who is as clumsy as I am. It has already tried to clothesline me with the leash at least 6,475 times and pooped on the sidewalk. I wasn’t about to get fined for that so I found a new talent in scrubbing concrete. 

I learned that my precious large dog is afraid of tiny dogs. Very afraid. One evening a very small dog activated my dog’s Power Ranger mode. He took off, knocked me down, dragged me a few feet at the end of the leash (I mean, who’s leashed to who here?), and then disappeared. I got to my feet and proceeded to canvas the 745 witnesses. Which way did he go? Everyone pointed in a different direction. He had run straight home, jumped the patio fence, and was tapping his paw and wagging his tail impatiently waiting for me after my 30-minute search.

My lovely new complex (living, not psychological) has a putting green, dog park, pool, playground and courtyard. It also has a gardening spot. I didn’t know if it was a community gardening spot open to all or if it was specific to one or two tenants. I just knew that I passed it on my way to my concrete scrubbing job.

I do know I didn’t plant anything there. Much like a cornfield or cotton field one sees on a country road, I didn’t plant it, so I don’t pick it. I do have a few herbs on my patio. Legal herbs. I carefully planted them in little pots that say “Plant Coffin” and “Pray for Me.” Some people have a green thumb, I have the kiss of death. Often, it’s a quick end. Sometimes they linger, suffering a slow and painful demise after an overwatering torture ritual.

Today I passed the garden and there was a giant sign posted that said, “Food is not free, farmers tend to these gardens.” Apparently I am no longer the frontrunner in the neighborhood crime wave. Someone is going to pay a hefty fine for this, and it won’t be me. Yes! I decided to investigate, CSI Apartment-style.

By the looks of the hastily scrawled writing on the sign, the victim is very angry. Perhaps someone had absconded with a prize tomato destined for a promising caprese. You don’t just let something like that go. I even began to worry about the exposed basil on my patio. Was that in danger too? The sign is by the sidewalk. Was it a drive-by? A random act? I don’t think so. I think it was deliberate. I think it was an inside-the-courtyard job; this didn’t come from beyond the sidewalk. The perp knows what they’re doing. Have they been driven underground, maybe started smuggling their veggies out of Harris Teeter? Was this a hate crime? No. There aren’t any smashed tomatoes.

I know one thing: I need to find a hobby. I thought about writing something on the bottom of the sign:

Dog Walker Seeks Hobby

(Vegetable perp interested in socially constructive activities should contact woman conducting garden investigation for more details.)

Is that too obvious a trap?

I met the gardener in the natural course of my investigation. He is such a kind man! He didn’t deserve this. I also found out it was a pepper. He didn’t have a recent photo. The description was “green and shiny.” My basil might be safe.

It turns out this vegetable thievery is a recurring problem. Hooligans live among us. I have since started my own Neighborhood Garden Watch Program from my patio. I bought a pair of binoculars and some night vision goggles.

Between my dog fines and the CSI Garden crimes, I have gotten to know several neighbors. All of them are so kind. They have even forgiven me my tea towels.

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Have a Good Day

Even if you’re in the slow lane

BY JENNA BITER

I point out the windshield as it closes in fast and whirs past.

“Cement trucks are pretty cool,” I say to my husband, who’s in the passenger seat. The vehicle technically mixes and delivers concrete, but “concrete truck” just doesn’t sing.

“They are,” Drew replies with a grin. Five years into marriage, he’s accustomed to my childlike musings. He may even enjoy them, or pretend to, particularly on road trips that beg the universally hated question: How much longer?

I watch the fat barrel spin round and round as it recedes into the rearview mirror.

“Isn’t it amazing, though?” My eyebrows lift. “If I collected all the necessary ingredients — the sugar, the cream, the milk, some chocolate for sure, whatever — and throw them into the belly of a cement truck, do you think it would make ice cream?”

My eyebrows hit their ceiling. Drew, being the problem-solver he is, inverts my expression.

“What if they’re already doing it?” I blurt out before he can work through the physics, the mechanics, the logistics.

Maybe some of the trucks swirling around out there aren’t actually hauling concrete. Maybe they’re actually hauling ice cream, and it’s just that nobody knows, unless they’re among the very few people who do. The insiders. Maybe the whole operation is run by a do-gooding cabal of gelatieres with some well-intended but misbegotten plan for world softserve domination.

I snap out of Candyland and back into reality. Even if the trucks aren’t secretly transporting sweets, it’s incredible enough that they carry concrete. I remind myself that the invention of the cement truck, like the light bulb, air conditioning and so much else, is a testament to human ingenuity. We’ve come a long way since Richard Bodlaender of Breslau, Germany, patented the horse-drawn “mortar mixer” in 1904.

“It would need refrigeration,” Drew says, still half a conversation behind, spitballing the ice cream hypothetical.

Somewhere between that conversation and our destination, wherever it was, cement trucks morphed into a good omen. I can’t quite recall the exact moment this transformation occurred, and neither can Drew, but the chain of logic probably went something like this: Innovation is incredible; think of all the wondrous things that exist today; we hardly ever take notice; let’s start. From that day forward, for us, spotting a cement truck is like plucking a four-leaf clover.

“Cement truck,” I text my husband after an early-morning sighting. I send our catchphrase follow-up. “It’s going to be a good day.”

With all the construction in Moore County, we see at least one truck a day, which makes for a lot of good days.

“x2,” I hit send after seeing another.

Around here, the mixing trucks are usually white with red stripes, and they’re fairly slender for vehicles that have a gut. Others are matte gray, on the tubbier side, with electric teal writing. Most days they’re driving in the opposite direction, but sometimes we get stuck behind one. Even when they slow us down, it’s a happy day.

“x3,” Drew texts me back.

“It’s going to be a good day,” he writes, affi rming his membership in the club.

Every once in a while, maybe once or twice a month, we see a cement truck in action, its chute down, actively building the concrete jungle. That’s a great day, mostly because it’s rare, and there has to be a hierarchy with these types of things.

Some may disagree. They’ll say we’re witnessing the endless drone of modernity, and my country upbringing inclines me to agree, but cement truck I Spy is about choosing the glass half full.

“Another,” Drew sends.

I think our record is seven. And that’s a very good week.

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Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels. He is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his alma mater.

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Buckle Up

Welcome to the U.S. Open

By Eddie Pearce

The U.S. Open is different. You’re on a razor’s edge the whole time. You play in your club championship you’ve got a gallery of 80 or 100 people following you and it feels like 10,000. On Tour you learn to block the gallery out. But in the U.S. Open you can hear a fly because your radar is up. Every nerve is firing.

You think the U.S. Open is fun? Maybe if you’ve got a cold beer and a hot dog in your hands. Not if you’re a player. Remember the massacre at Winged Foot? I’ll never forget it. Hale Irwin won at seven over par. Seven. I shot 84-78 the last two days. I was brutalized and so was everybody else. It rained Sunday and I couldn’t play fast enough. It was miserable. It was just so draining. It was the pressure of the Open, for one, and then it was the condition of the golf course. You could never relax. Jack Nicklaus bogeyed the first four holes he played. Most miserable week of my life.

It starts on the tee box. You’re visualizing your tee shot but then here comes, in the back of your head: Don’t hit it right. Don’t hit it left. And the greens? I played in the Open at Oakmont in ’73. The putting green runs from the back of the 9th green to the clubhouse. You could flick a ball from the clubhouse steps and it would roll all the way down and through the 9th green. We never saw stuff like that. That was the year Johnny Miller shoots 63 on Sunday and the next year we get massacred at Winged Foot.

But, hey, not all my memories of the U.S. Open are nightmares. The best finish I had in a major was in the Open at Medinah in ’75 — a T14, good enough to get me into the Masters the next year. My best friend was a dentist in Orlando. He got married right before the Open started and he called me up and said, “I figured out where I’m going for my honeymoon. I’m coming to Chicago to follow you around in the Open.” He and his wife flew up and he followed me every hole for his honeymoon. Kept me relaxed. His wife never did like me.

You do all kinds of things to get ready to play in an Open. Hell, you’d carry a baseball bat instead of a 3-wood if you thought it would help. Before Oakmont I went to the Cobra factory. The Baffler had just come out. We tested it in San Diego by putting the ball in the crack of the sidewalk at the plant and hitting it over the freeway. It came right out of that lie and I said, “I need this for Oakmont.” I used it a lot, too.

The Masters isn’t anything like an Open. The Open Championship isn’t anything like an Open. You can’t get aggressive. They won’t allow you to do that. Golf’s always been 80 percent mental but it’s 95 percent mental in the U.S. Open. You’ve got to be physically strong and you’ve got to be mentally strong — and have no fear.

Pinehurst No. 2 is a great driving golf course but you’ve got to keep it in play. Where they can put those pins, you’ve got to have it off the short grass to be able to position your second shot. If you miss a fairway, then it’s luck. You get in a clump of that love grass, you’ve got a problem.

If you’re an American, the U.S. Open is the deal. You want to win your national championship. There’s no other tournament. I don’t care what you say. There’s no other tournament that even comes close to the pressure that you put on yourself. That’s golf. You answer to yourself and that’s the only person you answer to. Now you’re playing for the biggest deal in the world. It’s a tough enough game without all that stuff running in your head. In the game of golf, it’s the ultimate tough man competition.  PS

Long before he became part owner of Southern Pines Nissan Kia, Eddie Pearce — winner of the 1971 North and South Men’s Amateur on Pinehurst’s No. 2 course — was one of the most highly regarded amateur and young professional players of the 1970s. Between 1968 and 1979 Pearce played in eight U.S. Opens. 

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A Taste for Golf

Sometimes it just comes naturally

By Emilee Phillips

Golf and I go way back. My earliest memory of a golf ball was at my uncle’s wedding. It was held at a country club somewhere in Iowa. I assume it was flat and kind of cornfieldy. I was 4 and given the honor of being one of the flower girls.

During the rehearsal dinner, we were in one of the many swanky dining rooms in a confusing maze of swanky rooms that I’m still not sure were all dedicated exclusively to our party. Nonetheless, little ol’ me scouted out the place. After all, there were three flower girls, surely they didn’t need all of us.

Central to the decorating theme, there were golf balls on every table — but not just any golf balls. These were regulation-sized, pure white chocolate golf balls. There was one at each place setting in the room.

I’m not sure if someone suggested the idea, as kids do, or if I arrived at it all on my own, but I decided to lick one. Having once discovered the delectable goodness — of which there seemed to be an unlimited quantity — I made it my mission to taste as many as I could. 

Seeing teeth marks sunken into a golf ball may be something out of the fever dream of a high handicapper, but to my young eyes, the sight of my teeth carving a smooth path out of the dimpled outer shell was mesmerizing.

The trance was broken when my mother ripped a golf ball, a mere shell of its former self, out of my hand. By that point it was too late. I don’t know how many I had already bitten into, but I can tell you I know what it’s like to overindulge at the 19th hole. My “hangover” may have been sugar induced, but my head felt it all the same.

Looking out on the golf course the next day, I naturally associated feeling like garbage with the little white balls people seemed to take such delight in striking. Fists clenched, I said to myself, So that’s why they hit them so hard. And, yes, I still hate white chocolate.

My next run-in with a golf course wasn’t until high school, when I moved to Pinehurst. Like Starbucks in Manhattan, there seemed to be a golf course on every corner. 

While I still don’t know much about golf, I am learning. I know that there are 18 holes in a standard game of golf, and that the term “birdie” has nothing to do with fingers. Peak season in North Carolina is spring and fall, presumably because it’s not too hot or too humid. I’m also told that the tiny craters on a golf ball serve more than an aesthetic purpose and actually have aerodynamic properties to make the balls travel faster or farther, or whatever, through the air. 

I’m aware that being on a golf course is like being in a theater after the curtain has gone up. One should be mostly quiet and mostly respectful of those trying to focus on the task at hand. I’ll likely never understand what goes into a perfect swing. But I know it’s supposed to be repetitive, like eating every bit of chocolate in sight.  PS

Emilee Phillips is PineStraw’s director of social media and digital content.

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“I See Great Things in Baseball”

The boys of spring, summer and fall

The first time I saw Jim “Catfish” Hunter up close was during spring training in the late ’70s. The New York Yankees, who trained in Fort Lauderdale, were playing the Pittsburgh Pirates, who called Bradenton their winter home. We drove south all night and managed to get to Florida in time to see a game — we didn’t care which one, we were on vacation. I believe, though I can’t swear to it, that this was the year my wife, the War Department, who was educated at a fine Midwestern university famous for its engineers and astronauts, looked around the stands at the great number of people wearing black baseball caps with a gold ‘P’ on them and said, “This must be some kind of Purdue alumni society.” Of course, she hadn’t slept in 24 hours.

Anyway, we saw Hunter outside the ballpark. Like us, he was just arriving. Fueled by caffeine, we were wearing T-shirts and sunscreen. He was wearing a powder blue leisure suit and the easygoing demeanor of a man who would be spending the day lounging in the bullpen. Catfish was looking stylish — I said it was the ’70s, right? — but he had nothing on Willie Stargell, who was often seen driving around Bradenton in his Rolls-Royce.

For those who don’t remember Hunter, he won 224 games in his Hall of Fame pitching career for the A’s and the Yankees. He was an eight-time All Star and pitched for five World Series champions. Though it was Curt Flood who led the charge to overturn baseball’s reserve clause (it finally happened in 1975), Hunter became the game’s first million-dollar free agent when Charles O. Finley, owner of the A’s, failed to live up to the terms of Hunter’s contract. It was Finley who, after drafting the promising prospect from the bucolic eastern outposts of North Carolina, decided the young man with a bum foot needed a nickname. How he lit on Catfish, I have no idea. Hunter, weakened by diabetes and plagued by arm trouble, retired at the end of the ’79 season at the age of 33. He remains the last pitcher in Major League baseball to throw 30 complete games in a season. Twenty years after hanging ’em up, he died at age 53 of Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The next, and last, time I saw Hunter up close was when I was sent to his home in Hertford, North Carolina — where everyone knew him only as Jimmy — to take his photograph along with his son, Todd, and his brother, Peter. Todd was 14 years old and hitting .444 for the Pirates of Perquimans County High School. Peter was the team’s coach. He was also, incidentally, the brother involved in the hunting accident that cost Jim a toe and embedded buckshot in his right foot.

Jimmy was 39, plus or minus, the day I showed up to take his picture. His most recent appearance on the mound had been in a Perquimans alumni game, where he hung a curve ball that Todd pulled down the left field line for a double. The next batter homered. Catfish did have a knack for giving up the long ball.

While Peter and I waited for Jimmy to join us for the photo shoot — it was a working farm and he was on a tractor plowing the fields behind his house — Peter was throwing a little batting practice for Catfish’s youngest son, Paul, who was maybe 6 at the time. Make no mistake, athletic genes are real. Peter would throw the ball (a regulation baseball) underhand to Paul, who kept hitting frozen ropes right back through the box. Bam. Bam. Bam. When Jimmy finally arrived, he watched his son’s hitting exhibition for a few moments in silence, then looked at his brother and said, “Throw it overhand.” With that, he went inside to clean up.

After taking a couple of photos, one with Catfish and the two Pirates posed in front of a sign painted on the side of a barn that said “The Pride of Perquimans,” Jimmy invited the War Department (my assistant) and me into his house. The balusters supporting the railing going upstairs were made completely of baseball bats. More impressive was the silver replica of the World Series trophy on the table next to the stairs.

“Reggie Jackson had this made for me,” Jimmy said. It was by way of saying thanks. Mr. October telling a teammate that, if it wasn’t for him, they never would have gotten that far.

It may only be April, but fall is always in the air.  PS

Jim Moriarty is the Editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.