“Let’s go out to Dottie. Dottie, whadd’ya got?”, Part One
It was just a $17 book, a signed Ann Patchett novel, The Dutch House, a nice-looking book that had gone to its new custodian in Montgomery, Texas, Dick Verinder. Upon its arrival he wrote by e-mail in thanks and asked if I’d like a book in return. “Wow! That’s never happened. Okay, sure.” A week later I received a signed and numbered copy of The Riviera Golf Courses, a brilliant little tome that was reissued in 2015 by his own publishing company, the Dormy Press. And no, the “Dormy” of “The Dormy Press” didn’t extend from the French verb, “dormir,” “to go to sleep, unafraid, unworried,” that is, “to be sure of winning in match-play ‘cuz I’m two up after 17.”
I marveled at its fine binding and decorated red cloth-over-boards covers, at its hand-made paper and black-and-white photographic plates. The author, Bernard Darwin, was the grandson of Charles Darwin! Bernard Darwin is arguably the finest-ever golf writer but inarguably its most prolific. He and his entourage had toured by motor-car to play at golf courses along the French Riviera, at Costebelle and Hyeres; Cannes; The Nice Club at Cagnes; Valescure; Sospel; and Monte Carlo. As a four-times-over former greenskeeper myself, I lapped up his musings about greens that weren’t very green, about the stony fairway lies and the creeks that had to be traversed by ferry to get to the next tee.
Those were the days. 1913. Those were the days when “bogey” meant “par,” which is always a good score. Those were the days when “play club” meant the driver, when “brassie” was equivalent to today’s 3-wood (or 3-metal), when “spoons” launched as a 5-wood and a “baffing spoon” or “baffy” referred to other war-clubs. A gentleman’s bag then might have held “driving irons,” “mid-irons,” “mid-mashies,” “mashie-irons,” “mashies,” “spade-mashies,” “mashie-niblicks,” “pitching-niblicks,” “niblicks” and “jiggers.” I mean, we’re talkin’ Shivas Irons here, the golf pro-mystic made famous in Michael Murphy’s Golf in the Kingdom.
Those were the days when the plucky amateur Francis Ouimet could win the U.S. Open at Brookline, Massachusetts, with a 10-year-old boy-caddy, Eddie Lowery, on his bag. Here is Bernard Darwin writing of Ouimet's triumph over mud and rain and by five shots over the British juggernauts of Ted Ray and Harry Vardon: “The clearest picture that remains to me is of the youthful hero playing all those last crucial shots, just as if he had been playing an ordinary game. He did not hurry; he did not linger; there was a briskness and decisiveness about every moment, and whatever he may have felt, he did not betray it by as much as the movement of an eyelash. Yet he did not play as one in a dream, as people sometimes do at supreme crises; he was just entirely calm and entirely natural” (quoted in Robert Sidorski’s 1977 Harvard Crimson article about the ’77 U.S. Open).
But Dottie. What about Dottie?
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