Golf

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To a beginning golfer hitting a golf ball seems easy until they try it. Golf can be a sometimes frustrating, and time-consuming game to learn. My recommendation is that players practice patience by not hurrying to the golf course to learn how to play. Do your learning on the practice range where your mind will not be on scoring, but on learning.

Some things to know and practice: First, and most important search and ask around about a respected golf instructor in your area, and get them to give you information on their program prior to starting an instructional series. You don't want someone giving you advice who is not qualified, and can impart poor information that can create bad habits.

Secondly, You learn to play golf by feel, not mechanics alone. Too much detail is confusing. You cannot think your way through a golf swing. You feel your way!

Finally, short practice sessions regularly are better than one long period. Practice, and good repetition, will teach your muscles to learn to feel - creating your own internal dialog from within that you, and only you, can describe to yourself.

Ultimately, start out with a plan, and take your time because as the saying goes "You must learn to crawl before you can walk."

South Florida (Hollywood) Golf pictured. Double click picture for bigger image.

Golf Tip number two: Pre-Swing Fundamentals

Ben Hogan once observed that if you have proper fundamentals and a good pre-shot routine, once you’ve addressed the ball the shot is 90 percent over. This explanation captures the importance of developing and maintaining sound fundamentals.

An Overview

The least complicated method we’ve discovered to grip the club properly is to stand erect with your ankle joints under your shoulders, holding the club in front of you at a 45-degree angle with your trail hand (right hand for right-handed golfers). Place the club diagonally across the base of the fingers of your target hand (left hand for right-handers). Next, simply slide your trail hand down the shaft until the thumb of the target hand fits into the lifeline of the trail hand. At this point, the thumb of the target hand is covered with the thumb pad of the trail hand and the little finger of the trail hand rests on top of the first two fingers of the target hand. (Overlapping grip)

A proper stance helps you create and maintain balance in the golf swing. Stand up to the ball with your ankle joints under your shoulder joints and your weight evenly distributed between the heels and balls of the feet and between your left and right foot. Once you assume a proper stance, push your hips back and tilt forward from the bottom of your hips until your sternum points at the ball. Finally, tilt your torso until the trail shoulder (right shoulder for right-handed players), is lower than the target shoulder.

To align yourself properly, begin by standing behind the ball and visualizing a line drawn from the target to the ball. Then pick a spot six to 12 inches on this line from the ball as an intermediate target. Once you have done that, walk into position and place the clubface behind the ball, aiming at your intermediate target. Make sure that you keep your eyes on the target as you walk into position and assume your stance. Of all the fundamentals we will discuss in this chapter, the grip is first—simply because without a good grip the rest of the swing becomes an attempt to compensate for that central flaw.

The Keys to a Good Grip: A writer once asked Sam Snead what was the most common flaw he saw among the tens of thousands of amateurs he’s seen over his long career. He didn’t hesitate for a second.

“It’s the grip, no question,” Sam said. “Most folks, if they gripped a knife and fork as badly as they gripped a golf club, they’d starve to death. It’s a funny thing, but you hardly ever see a bad player with a good grip or a good player with a bad grip. Every now and then one or the other will come along, but they’re a rare as hen’s teeth.”

So what is a good grip? Simply put, it’s a grip that allows the hands to work together to produce the best combination of power and accuracy as well as allowing a skilled player to produce the greatest variety of shots.

Developing a proper grip is so important that when beginners go to a PGA Professional for instruction, it is the first fundamental that they will work on together. The reason is twofold: first, everything in the swing flows from the grip and; second, if a person has a poor grip they will invariably revert to it under pressure—even the best players. Witness this story from Byron Nelson.

“When Ben (Hogan) and I were caddies at Glen Garden Country Club, all the boys used to have driving contests while were waiting for our loops, and the short hitter had to go out and pick up everyone’s balls. Well, Ben was pretty small for his age, so he developed a real strong grip that would help him hook the ball. That worked fine for the caddie games, but when he turned pro he really struggled with a hook. He’d go along fine for a round or two and then that old hook would jump up and get him. He compared it to a rattlesnake jumping out and biting him. To his credit, he worked real hard and figured out how to fix his grip and make it more neutral, but it took him a long time to get where he could trust it. He’d get in the hunt on the last day and you could see those hands turning to the right and, of course, a hook would just kill him. Once he finally got to where he could trust his new grip, well then he became the Ben Hogan everyone remembers today.”

While the grip is clearly a crucial fundamental, it’s important to note here that what follows are general guidelines that will help develop a sound grip. The actual positioning of the hands that works best for you will be determined by your physical build, the size and strength of your hands, and other variables such as the shape of your swing. For that reason we strongly recommend working with your P.G.A, Professional to develop the grip that works best for your swing.

Subject: The question: Whose Who in 1923

Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.

The question: Just two+ generations ago, in 1923, who was:

1. President of the largest steel company?
2. President of the largest gas company?
3. President of the New York Stock Exchange?
4. Greatest wheat speculator?
5. President of the Bank of International Settlement?
6. Great Bear of Wall Street?

These men were considered some of the world's most successful of their day. Now, 80 years later, the history book asks us, if we know what ultimately became of them. The answer:

Source Wall Street Journal Golf Section

Don't keep your eye on the ball -- and other tips from researchers who have studied the sport

The royal and ancient game is being invaded by the folks with pocket protectors.

Throughout golf's long history, rigorous scientific testing of tools and techniques has been as rare as a three-putt by Ben Crenshaw. But that is changing, fast.

Researchers have started delving into some of the game's oldest questions: How do you straighten out a slice? Where should you be looking when you putt? How can you cure "the yips"? And they're coming up with answers that turn conventional wisdom on its head.

In short, the days when golf instructors could get away with the old family recipe for fixing your game have gone the way of feather-stuffed bull-hide balls.

"It's true that the older pros have always resisted science," says Bob Christina, dean emeritus of the School of Health and Human Performance at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "But those in their 40s and younger seem more willing to listen to the research, and even to change what they do because of it."

The investigative efforts are springing up all over the map. In 2000, Dallas-based ClubCorp Inc., which owns or operates 91 golf clubs or courses in the U.S., created a research institute that is now part of its Pinehurst Golf Academy.

Its mission: to conduct studies on teaching methods and practice techniques, weeding out snake-oil remedies from those that pass scientific tests -- and in the process become a top destination for golfers looking for help improving their game.

Other research into the game is coming out of universities, and the labs of equipment makers trying to create the hottest new piece of hardware. Indeed, this year's PGA Merchandise Show, held in Orlando in January, seemed to be doing double duty as a science fair.

Companies rolled out everything from a driver stuffed with "intelligent circuitry" (it collects data on your swing and uploads the information via wireless link to a computer for analysis) to the latest bentgrass (from Turf-Seed Inc., of Hubbard, Ore., it resists wear and salt). Meanwhile, launch monitors measuring your drive's launch angle, speed and spin -- and promising to get you an extra 25 yards or so on your tee shot -- are becoming ubiquitous in pro shops.

Here's a closer look at some of the most intriguing research in the field.

KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE BALL? Not necessarily.

Lesson books for beginners commonly advise looking fixedly at the ball while putting. But Jack Nicklaus expressed doubts at least as far back as 1974, in his book "Golf My Way," as did Tim Gallwey in his more recent bestseller "The Inner Game of Golf." (He advises watching the club head.) The difference of opinion has a simple cause: No one actually measured the position of golfers' eyes during putts and linked that to how they performed.

Scientists at Japan's Keio University have now filled the data gap. They recruited novice golfers who rarely if ever played, intermediate golfers (handicaps of two to 15) and experts (pros or amateurs with a handicap of zero), and had them perform 10 six-foot putts. An electronic recorder measured the players' eye positions 30 times a second.

According to Kiyoshi Naito, who led the study, beginners and intermediates started the putt by fixating on the ball, and during the downswing turned their heads and eyes toward the path they wanted the ball to take.

Experts did it differently. Both before and during the backswing, they fixed their eyes around the club head. If you think of the line you want the ball to follow, the experts had their eyes on the mirror image of that line, extending behind the ball. Then, during the downswing, the experts stabilized their line of sight at the place where the club head would be at the "time of address," or just before it struck the ball. Right before the actual impact, "they shifted their line of sight to a position about four centimeters [two inches] from the ball in the targeted direction," says Mr. Naito.

So, at the moment of impact, only beginners had their eye on the ball. The experts, in contrast, seemed to rely on a mental image of the ball, and used their peripheral vision to see both the club head and the ball -- without committing the putting no-no of moving their head.

While the beginners sank a woeful 29% of their putts, the experts sank almost all of them. That, say the scientists, largely reflects where the experts' eyes were. "If they did not fixate on the ball, golfers would be able to achieve higher accuracy," concluded the scientists, whose research was published in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills last August. But they acknowledge that other independent factors, such as experience, also play a role.

HOW TO PRACTICE

Prof. Christina of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, has one word for duffers who regularly go out to the driving range with a bucket of balls and hit driver after driver after driver. That word is...stop.

Or at least, pause.

Satisfying as it is to feel that you're really tagging it and getting into a groove by driving dozens of balls or sinking scores of putts without a break, new research by Prof. Christina shows that it's unlikely to help you much on an actual course.

"If you practice with periodic rests, you'll have more success than if you practice for hours on end in what's called 'massed practice,' " says Teresa Dail of North Carolina Agricultural & Technical University, Greensboro, who worked with Prof. Christina on the research effort.

The two scientists had groups of raw beginners practice 12-foot putts. Half the group practiced 60 putts a day on each of four days, while half hit 240 in a row in a single marathon session.

"We had a great learning curve," says Prof. Dail. "Everyone started out terrible and wound up OK." There was no difference between the two groups after one day of practice. But after seven and 28 days, the people who had spread their practice over four days were sinking more putts and getting their misses closer to the hole. In the scientists' scoring system, players got no points for sinking a putt and points equal to the distance the ball stopped from the hole when they missed. The group that spread out their practice averaged 37 points on their 60 12-foot putts, compared with 45 for the players who practiced without a break, the scientists reported last June in the journal Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport.

That fits with what scientists are learning about how movements become encoded in our brains. When we execute a particular series of muscle movements, nerve cells in our brain, known as neurons, fire off electrical impulses. If you practice a movement again and again, your brain releases chemicals that build up the connections between the neurons involved in the movement -- which increases the likelihood that they'll consistently fire in the right sequence and with the right timing. In other words, practice gets your brain accustomed to making the proper motions.

But, says Prof. Dail, "the brain requires a consolidation period" in order to strengthen those neural connections, which are known as synapses. It takes some time -- even overnight -- for the brain chemicals to alter the synapses in an enduring way.

"If you practice 50 putts in a row, you'll get pretty good and feel pretty good," she adds. "But that's misleading: If you do the same thing over and over without a break, your brain can't encode the sequence of movements as well as it can in distributed practice, where you have periodic rests."

Even better: vary the length of the putts you practice. "Loads of research," she says, "shows that's a more effective way to practice than doing the same putt over and over."

NEW SHADES OF GREEN

Fairways that play like greens?

The dense bentgrasses that have been showing up on greens since the late 1990s have improved putting quality so much, says Brad Coker, a senior vice president of ClubCorp, "that it's like hitting a ball across a pool table: It rolls perfectly."

Turf-Seed has bred many of the new varieties showing up on golf courses. "Our new bentgrasses stay perfectly erect," so that putts don't get slowed down or knocked off course by bent blades, says Turf-Seed President Bill Rose.

Now Turf-Seed is bringing pool-table perfection to fairways. Mr. Rose says the company is working on bluegrasses for fairways that can be routinely cut down to a half-inch, a height that would kill ordinary grass. "Pros don't like the ball down in the grass because when the grass gets between the club face and the ball, it can affect spin in a way you don't want," Mr. Rose says.

The company is also developing bentgrasses for fairways that can take being mowed down to three-eighths of an inch. A bad lie might become only a sentimental memory.

Of course, some traditionalists don't welcome all these changes, particularly when putting. "Some of the old-timers say that's no fun, that they want to be able to read the green," assessing the grain of the grass between ball and hole so they can plot their putt, Mr. Rose says.

GOING THE DISTANCE

When it comes to golf balls, the last half of the 1990s was all about distance. After Tiger Woods and his jaw-dropping long drives burst on the tour in 1996, other tour players began clamoring for distance balls rather than the control balls they'd long preferred. Weekend players followed along.

In response, equipment makers produced balls with hard cores to increase distance, plus soft, ultrathin covers that give the golfer better control over the ball in the short game.

So what's the next area of innovation for distance-hungry golfers? Dimples.

You can thank 19th-century duffers for the fact that a golf ball is not smooth. After they had swatted around their gutta-percha balls for a while, they noticed that those that had been scored and dimpled by repeated hits traveled farther off the tee. Exactly why wasn't clear until physicists had refined the science of fluid dynamics.

Now every golf-ball designer knows the Magnus effect like he knows his own handicap. The basic idea is that a blunt, 1.62-ounce sphere is not the sleekest design when it comes to flying through the air with the greatest of ease. Air rushing over a smooth ball in flight moves smoothly around the front half, over the top and under the bottom, in what's called laminar flow.

But as these dual airstreams come together at the back of the ball, they separate from the surface, creating a large wake. This region of low pressure (think vacuum cleaner) pulls backward on the ball and slows it down -- drag.

Enter dimples. By creating tiny pools of turbulence, dimples cause the airstream to remain attached to the ball. "The result is less pressure differential, less drag and greater distance," says Bob Thurman, director of research at Wilson Golf, which is part of Amer Group PLC's Wilson Sporting Goods Co. division.

In 1997, Callaway Golf Co. hired engineer Steve Ogg from Boeing Co., where he had designed airplane wings, to improve the golf ball's aerodynamics even more. The HX series he pioneered broke with the traditional dimple pattern in two ways. It reduced the flat spots between dimples and replaced them with...more dimples. The pits now covered 86% of the surface rather than the standard 75%.

The HX series also added raised, rounded ridges around the ball's "equator." "The flat areas weren't aerodynamically efficient," says Richard C. Helmstetter, Callaway's research-and-development ace (he created the Big Bertha driver, among other revolutionary clubs). "By covering more of the surface, we created a larger area of turbulence around the ball and decreased the low-pressure area at the back that causes drag."

The result is low drag at high speeds, off the tee, and high lift at low speeds, which kick in during flight. This stretches out the drive and lowers the angle of descent to provide more carry and roll.

The HX series also breaks the mold, dimple-wise, because instead of creating dimples by scooping out little hollows, the balls are paved with hexagons formed by six raised, rounded tubes. The interior of the hexagon is the dimple. "We discovered that these little tubes lying on the surface were way more efficient at creating turbulent air flow and therefore less drag," Mr. Helmstetter says.

For a ball it hopes to introduce later this year, Callaway, of Carlsbad, Calif., is adding six extra-deep dimples around the equator. "That creates even more turbulence at high speed, increasing lift and decreasing drag for greater distance," says Mr. Helmstetter.

The PhD (Pan Head Dimple) design on Wilson's new line of balls, which hit stores in January, takes a different route. The dimples are half as deep as standard dimples, and have an unusually steep dimple wall and flat bottom. The combination increases turbulence and reduces drag, creating a substantially higher (10% or so) trajectory, all else being equal, and hence greater lift and more carry.

As for the dueling dimple designs, says Wilson's Mr. Thurman, "When it comes to golf-ball aerodynamics, there is more than one way to skin a cat." Or to keep a ball airborne.

SLICES: FIXING THE SWING…

Prof. Christina had heard all the stories and knew all the lore about the best way to cure a slice, the most frequent of all golfer curses. He also knew that many teaching pros thought that science and golf went together about as well as a putter and a tee shot. But when the Pinehurst school and Golf Magazine asked him to conduct research to sort out effective drills from useless ones, he figured what the heck.

For his first test, in 2002, he and Pinehurst's director of golf, Eric Alpenfels, went in search of the best way to cure the most common slice, which (for a right-handed golfer) curves to the right in midair. The cause is undisputed. The golfer strikes the ball with an "open" club face -- meaning at an angle, not dead on -- and the path of the swing veers from out to in.

Hitting the ball square with the driver produces backspin around a perfectly horizontal axis of rotation, which generates lift and therefore gives you more distance. But an off-center strike causes the ball's axis of rotation to tilt downward from the perspective of the golfer. The effect is exactly like that of trying to turn a bicycle not by moving the handlebars but by tipping your weight down and to the right, explains Dick Rugge of the U.S. Golf Association. The side force that pushes the ball to the golfer's right is proportional to how fast the ball is spinning.

Prof. Christina asked 100 teaching pros for their favorite cures, and right away realized he was in the realm of folklore. "There were like 18 different drills being used," he says.

He and Mr. Alpenfels picked the nine most popular cures and randomly assigned them to 90 self-admitted slice-prone volunteers. Using a five-iron, each guinea pig hit about 100 shots, which were measured for launch angle, backspin, club-face angle and sidespin.

All of you duffers trying to fix your out-to-in swing by doggedly practicing the "right-foot-back drill" (swinging while your right foot is on its toes and 12 inches farther back from the ball than usual) or the "toe-up drill" (on both the backswing and the follow-through, stop the club at waist height and check that the toe end of the club head is pointing straight up) can stop now. Neither did much good.

Best of all was the "toe-in drill," in which you rotate your forearms during the downswing to close the club face and halt your swing just before impact, making sure the toe of the club head is leading the heel. This completely reversed sidespin, from an average of 450 revolutions per minute in the direction that leads to a slice to 92 rpm in the other direction. That, calculated Golf Magazine, would have changed an eight-yard slice into a two-yard "draw" -- a ball that curves off-target but not enough to do much damage.

Nearly as good was the "split-hands drill," where golfers leave a three-inch gap on the club shaft between the left thumb and right heelpad. That improves forearm rotation, again squaring the club face. Result: an average 953 rpm of slice sidespin was reduced to 537 rpm. A 15-yard slice would land only eight yards off-target.

"These were unexpected findings," says Prof. Christina. "The two most effective cures for a slice were ones we wouldn't have predicted, and others that we thought were up there didn't make it."

… AND FIXING THE BALL

If one of the more-talked-about products unveiled at the PGA Merchandise Show lives up to its billing, by later this year you may be able to get the good without the bad, rotationally speaking. The prototype NMDX ball, designed by NanoDynamics Inc., Buffalo, N.Y., uses nanostructures -- objects measuring a few billionths of a meter in size -- to minimize sidespin with little loss of backspin.

NanoDynamics is taking what we might call the figure-skater approach: Just as a spinning skater extends her arms -- moving more of her mass to the outside -- to slow her spin, the NMDX moves weight that had been in the center of the ball to the outside. (The U.S. Golf Association requires that regulation balls not exceed 1.62 ounces, so simply adding weight to the outside won't fly.)

"The trick is to move weight to the outside without changing the total weight of the ball," says materials scientist and NanoDynamics CEO Keith Blakely. The NMDX therefore has a hollow center, one inch across, encased in a titanium shell. By redistributing the weight so more is on the perimeter, you wind up with a higher resistance to side spinning, he says. (It also cuts down somewhat on beneficial backspin, but the net effect is a slim 1% loss in distance, says Glenn Spacht, chief technology officer at NanoDynamics.)

But you don't want all that metal to make the ball behave like a mini-cannonball -- that is, losing the elasticity that makes it rebound off the club head. So the titanium has to be engineered to give it both durability and springiness. NanoDynamics' solution: cooling the titanium in such a way as to get the grains that make up the metal down to nanometer length. This allows them to expand and contract much more easily.

Moving more weight to the periphery also has effects on the putting green. There, the ball's weight distribution makes it behave like a wide-track tire, breaking less on inclines and making it less prone to be nudged off-track by imperfections in the surface of the green.

Mr. Blakely says his goal is not to become "the next Titleist," but "to help engineers at major equipment companies understand what new materials like this can do" and perhaps license the nanostructure technology. He expects the NMDX to retail for $7 or $8.

In a new series of balls that reached stores in January, Wilson Golf is incorporating nanotechnology for a different effect. By infusing the rubber of the core in the Dx2, Px3 and Tx4 balls with nanosize particles of inorganic clays, Wilson gets a ball with greater strength, as the particles act like fibers in paper to strengthen the material. The result is "an extremely lively ball" that jumps off the tee, but is also "soft and resilient" for better control in the short game, says Wilson Golf's Mr. Thurman.

Three-packs of the Dx2, which emphasizes distance, retail for $27.99; the Px3 (control) go for $34.99, and the Tx4 (tour quality) for $37.99.

DEALING WITH THE YIPS

The good news is that Debbie Crews knows as much about yips as anyone on the planet. The bad news is, the more she learns, the more she thinks the only reliable cure for these involuntary spasms that cause shots (usually putts) to go off target is...a different putter. Probably one that the sport's governing bodies don't allow.

In 2000, Prof. Crews, a kinesiologist (expert on human movement) at Arizona State University, Tempe, fitted golfers with specially equipped helmets that record brain waves through an EEG, or electroencephalogram. She found that as experts get ready to swing, left-hemisphere activity -- associated with analyzing the shots and planning their mechanics -- quiets down. At that point, the right hemisphere, which is known for integrative and holistic thinking, takes over.

But in less-skilled players, or those who choke, the brain does not hand off activity to the right hemisphere. Their left brain keeps frantically thinking, OK, head down, feet planted.... It's trying to think the ball into the air or the hole. Sending information to the motor cortex right up until the moment of the swing can mean too much information to the muscles -- and shots that go awry.

Prof. Crews has had some success teaching golfers to shift their cerebral activity. She rigged a mock videogame that shows three rockets. Each rocket is controlled by a brain wave of a different frequency, which the players figure out by trial and error ("Think this way and the left rocket flies; think that way and the center rocket does"). So the golfers learn to generate different brain waves -- which might help them when approaching a putt.

But those yips. They've proved so resistant to treatment that Prof. Crews is thinking of recommending a technological fix. Consider two facts. First, the spasm that characterizes a yip tends to kick in a split-second -- about 200 milliseconds, to be precise -- before the putter meets the ball. Second, the eyes focus on the putter's shaft.

Her proposed solution: a putter whose base is set three inches ahead of the shaft, so it strikes the ball before the yip. "When you think you're going to hit the ball and succumb to a yip," Prof. Crews says, "you've actually already hit it, and it's long gone."

Some milestones that have shaped how golf is played

1848: First balls made of gutta-percha, a rubberlike gum from trees in Asia, replacing "featheries" -- leather stuffed with bird feathers

1891: Clubs with steel shafts instead of wood are first advertised, though they won't be accepted by rule-making bodies until the 1920s

1891: The first golf shoes, with separate spikes to screw in

1898: The modern, three-piece rubber ball is introduced

1914-15: The first use of large-scale earthmoving equipment in course construction, by Charles Blair Macdonald at the National Golf Links and Lido courses on New York's Long Island

1924: The modern wooden golf tee, with the peg shape, is patented and immediately mass marketed

1932: The sand wedge in its modern shape is popularized by Gene Sarazen and marketed widely

1953: The first mass-marketed electric golf carts, made by E-Z Go Corp. and sold through Sears Roebuck

1968: The first two-piece balls with an inner core of crosslinked rubber for resilience and an outer covering of Surlyn, to resist scratches and gouges

1969: Clubs with graphite composite shafts are developed

1993: The first shoes with soft spikes, made of rubber or soft plastic instead of metal

1995: Clubs with titanium shafts, from several manufacturers, send average drive distances soaring

1996: The first multilayer balls (covering, mantle, core) with a soft outer core, or mantle, for good spin and hence control around the green plus a hard outer covering for resilience

Sources: Rand Jerris, director of the U.S. Golf Association's museum and archives

This is an excerpt from The PGA Manual of Golf, by Rick Martino with Don Wade.

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"This is my favorite tip to cure a slice. Take an ordinary cardboard box -- it should be at least 12 inches high -- and place it approximately one foot in front of the spot where you would normally tee up a golf ball. Make sure it's on the target line. Now the drill is to take a normal swing (without a ball) and try to pierce the box with the toe of the club. The only way to pierce the box is to make the proper forearm rotation, which will either square the clubface at impact or even close the clubface slightly, producing a draw. When you've turned the cardboard box into a piece of Swiss cheese, you're on your way to fixing that slice."

BROAD CHANNEL GOLF NEWS - YOU CAN USE

Don't forget about the St. Virgilius tournament scheduled for Tuesday May 25, 2004	Thanks Donny & Helen
	The American Legion Golf Club meeting will be held on Tuesday March 23, 2004 at 7:30 P.M. at the Legion. Tell your Golf Buddy's
Message from Ray
Clean the clubs. Opening day is set for Tuesday 4-13-04 and for you Saturday players it's Saturday 4-17-04. Looking forward to another year of fun. Visit Ray's Shellbank Golf page	Get Personalized Golf Balls	The Ninth Annual Golf Tournament to benefit St. Virgilius School was held at Forest Park Golf Course on June 17, 2003. Raised $40k. See last year's write-up
	The trip to Hanah's is scheduled for Monday 5-17-04 through Thursday 5-20-04. More info to go to Rays site
This year my cousin Kenny will be giving lessons at the Inwood Country Club. He got his P.G.A. card last year and promise me he will teach me to be a better Golfer. When I get details I'll let you know.
	Send me you Pictures, stories, or anything related to GOLF that can be of interest to other members.