The Wall Street Journal-20080112-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Sports -- Golf Journal- Brown Grass- Icy Air -- Heaven- For a hardy troupe of Bronx players- golf is a year-round pursuit
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Sports -- Golf Journal: Brown Grass, Icy Air -- Heaven; For a hardy troupe of Bronx players, golf is a year-round pursuit
The temperature surged briefly into the 60s this week in metropolitan New York, so like any right-thinking golfer I threw my clubs in the car and tried to find a game. I didn't, in the end, but my search turned up something even better: an informal golf club playing out of an Irish-American pub in the Bronx that in many ways has private clubs beat. There are no dues, no formal rules, no house- committee squabbles and no real estate -- but all the golf its members want and a longstanding camaraderie that the rest of us can only envy.
It was founded, if that's the right word for it, 28 years ago by Pete Watson, a bartender at the Piper's Kilt on 231st Street, as a kind of after-hours activity for himself, other bartenders from the neighborhood and assorted loyal patrons. "After hours" for them meant early Sunday morning -- very early, sometimes 5 a.m. early.
"We had an arrangement with the old pro at Van Cortlandt," said Mr. Watson, now 71, from behind the bar this week at the Piper's Kilt. Van Cortlandt, a New York City muni, is the oldest public course in the country (established in 1895) and only about a mile from the bar.
"I paid him a week in advance for however many spots I thought I'd need -- 20 or 24, usually. We tipped the cart guy to come out early, too." Most of the gang went straight to the course from the bar, sometimes with coolers of beer and sandwiches. Not infrequently it was still dark when the first balls flew.
"It ruined your Sunday totally, and the wives hated it," said Joe Gavin, 52, one of the early regulars, "but those days were great." After the round the crew returned, unofficially, to the Piper's Kilt for bagels and other consumables and usually stayed until after the bar opened again, officially, at noon.
About 15 years ago new management at Van Cortlandt made those super- early tee times unavailable, and the tenor of the group's golf activities changed -- at least a little. Most of the players take the golf a bit more seriously now (although only a handful consistently break 90), and the group's regular day is Monday -- year-round, weather permitting -- at a more sensible hour. Van Cortlandt is still ostensibly the home course, but the group usually travels, typically playing more than two dozen separate courses a year, mostly within an hour's carpool drive of the Bronx.
Mr. Watson still maintains the master sign-up sheet at the Piper's Kilt, but the chief organizer these days is Rick Duggan, a burly, 60- year-old retired narcotics lieutenant from the New York Police Department. It's practically a full-time job, albeit an unpaid one.
He spends a lot of his time working deals with golf courses the way he used to work the streets of the South Bronx. "I get to know the head guys at the courses, and I'm bringing them some good business, so maybe they do me a solid in return by being a little flexible on the rates," he explained. Since most of the regular players -- predominantly retired cops and firefighters, off-duty bartenders and people with irregular shifts -- are price-sensitive, he tries to lock in prices for golf and cart combined of $40 or less, and sometimes gets lunch thrown in.
In addition to his duties as director of golf, Mr. Duggan also serves as the de facto social chairman, drawing up the pairings for each outing to minimize discord. "Sometimes I swear it's like taking 20 kindergartners on a field trip," Mr. Duggan said. In addition, he usually organizes a couple of smaller outings each week, as demands warrants, and two major road trips a year. Last spring, for instance, the Piper's Kilt crowd combined with a similar-minded group that plays out of an Elks Lodge in Rockland County, N.Y., for a 50-person golf outing to the Maryland shore.
Luckily, there's no need for a food-and-drink committee, because the Piper's Kilt and another Irish-American pub in the neighborhood that rotates duty as the club's 19th hole are always well stocked. "Sign up and show up, that's all I have to worry about," one of the regulars told me last Monday, beer in hand, still going strong several hours after the group's round at a muni in Yonkers had ended.
What more can you want from a golf club?
"Once you get into golf, playing is all you want to do," said Dan O'Conner, another retired police lieutenant who grew up in the Bronx and, at 74, is one of the group's elders. "It's kept a lot of guys alive, I'll tell you that."
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