Last week I regaled you, Dear Reader, with my wondrous excitement at receipt of a book-gift from a customer, Dick Verinder. It was his press’s reissue in 2015 of Bernard Darwin’s The Riviera Golf Courses.
In 1913, Darwin and his golfing entourage were playing then with “baffing spoons” and “niblicks,” with “mashies” and “brassies.” By 1927, he was lamenting a “most mournful” trend in golf as those colorfully named clubs were being replaced with numbered clubs. In “Mournful Numbers,” Darwin wrote “A polite gentleman has sent me an account of a series of iron clubs which are presently to be exhibited.
There are six of them, all irons, and they will cover between them the whole wide field of iron play. In each case, I am told, the blade will be of the same shape, and each club will differ from its fellows only in loft and weight, and, of course, in length of shaft; nothing is said about the not unimportant matter of lie.
A particular feature of this band of iron brothers is that each head will bear a number, so that as far as the caddie is concerned, they will be fool-proof. You will merely ask for a number and you will get it.” He dubbed his named clubs “part friend, part mistress.” Had Romance died, too?
My first set of golf-clubs were Mickey Wright specials, given to me at age 10 by my grandmother. Mary Kathryn "Mickey" Wright won 82 times on the L.P.G.A. Tour and 13 majors—more than Arnold Palmer in both cases. She had a waaaaaaaay better golf-swing, too, and became my first golf hero.
Then came Nancy Lopez. Then Dottie Pepper. Gorgeous swing. Powerful trunk and legs. Bull-doggish player. Tough as Julie Inkster. Brilliant junior player. Winner of two major titles and 17 L.P.G.A. titles. Stellar career at C.B.S. as a golf broadcaster on-course and post-round as an interviewer. She has seen Scottie Scheffler’s high-numbered (golf) balls.
Johnny Miller remains the King “in the tower,” and Brandel Chamblee is the best golf-swing analyst, but for on-course coverage, Dottie is my Queen. She remains beloved. “Dot-tie . . . Pep-per.” “Dot-tie . . . Pep-per.” “Dot-tie . . . Pep-per.”
Thus did Ryder Cup fans serenade her on-course as commentator. Not everyone enjoyed her hot-mic take regarding the “choking, freaking dogs” in 2007, the American women who were beginning to lose the Solheim Cup, but I did.
In 2024, she won the prestigious Old Tom Morris award for distinguished service to golf. Mr. Darwin penned the Introduction to Enid Wilson’s A Gallery of Women Golfers in 1961, his last such. In it he resuscitated the golfing chops of Miss E. Wilson and Joyce Wethered, Glenna Collett and Babe Didrickson (later Zaharias). He thought Miss Virginia Van Wie had the most beautiful woman golfer’s swing. Would that Mr. Darwin had seen Dottie Pepper play so as to extol her virtues, too. Dottie could smoke a spoon, too, I mean, a 5-wood, straight into the late afternoon sun up and onto the two-tiered 18th green.
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