12/18/23
Newsletter #532
The Crack of Dawn
I’ve never been much for golf. As has been said, golf is a way to ruin a perfectly nice walk. Nevertheless, I have golfed any number of times. This is mostly due to the Becker side of my family being somewhat obsessed by the game, particularly my dear old dad.
My paternal grandparents, Jack and Julia, both golfed. Neither of them took it very seriously and tried to have a good time. It was fun to go golfing with them. Alas, that was not the case with their two sons, my dad, and my Uncle Carl, both of whom took the game far too seriously. Carl, who is naturally a very nice guy with a smart sense of humor, lost every positive aspect of himself on the golf course. He cursed, he bitched, he moaned, he wrapped clubs around trees and heaved them into water hazards.
My dad, who was a screwball to say the least, had to get himself into a strange, trance-like state, where he was unaware of the rest of us, as he tried to achieve some level of consistency with his swing, which he could rarely do. What my dad would do to get into this other-worldy place was to search for lost golf balls in the rough. If he was lucky, he’d get to use his telescopic, car antennae-like golf ball scooper and snatch a ball from way out in the muck and mire. The trunk of my dad’s car was literally filled with golf balls – hundreds of them – and he wouldn’t use any of them. He only used Titlist 3s, or some bullshit. My dad was one of those guys who was always practicing his putt and his swing in the house. In his office in the house, he had one of those putt-returner gizmos, and in his bedroom, he had a pathetic, three-foot-square hunk of astroturf with a hole, and a flag. If he was in the living room watching TV with the family, he’d eventually stand up, take the fireplace broom and practice is swing, always trying to shove his ass farther and farther out behind him. He actually read both Golf Magazine and Golfer Magazine every month. No matter what he did, including cheating (which I found out after he died), he wasn’t a good golfer.
I very rarely went with my dad, grandparents and uncle, but I did acquiesce occasionally. Other than getting to see my family, my sub-motivation was putting together a full set of golf clubs with wooden shafts, which I would find in the lost club section of the clubhouse, then purchase for nearly nothing – often a dollar or two a club. I started the collection when I was about fourteen, and I pretty quickly had a driver, two woods, three or four irons and a couple of putters, and a funky old bag, for about $25. With my old wooden shaft clubs, I felt like Ben Hogan. Actually, I felt like Glenn Ford portraying Ben Hogan in Follow the Sun (1951).
Between 1980 and 1986 we Detroit guys had offices in Ferndale, Michigan (which borders Detroit), where we made our early films. Our office building was located at Woodward Avenue (the main street of Detroit) and Nine Mile Road. One mile south was the yet-to-be-infamous Eight Mile Road (the border to Detroit). Three miles south, at Six Mile Road, is Palmer Park Golf Course (now disc golf). Once upon a time, Palmer Park was an extremely swanky part of Detroit. Even by the 1980s it was still a formerly swanky neighborhood, with some huge houses, all gone or going to hell. Also, Detroit and environs has no hills; the city is at sea level. So, Palmer Park Golf Course had a few faux hills, but nothing close to formidable.
Get this: Michigan Senator Thomas Witherell Palmer donated 140-acres for a city park in 1893, on the condition that “the virgin forest be preserved.” The senator died in 1913 and his heirs promptly built a housing development, a casino, and a golf course, which I’d posit is the exact opposite of a “virgin forest.”
One of the foremost parts of moviemaking — and why moviemaking is not a good subject for movies — is sitting around and waiting. The old expression is, “Hurry up and wait.” It was a warm summer in 1980 and Bruce suggested to me that we go golfing at Palmer Park. Sure, why not? Get out the old wood shaft clubs.
We were the only white people we ever saw there. The course was usually filled with middle-aged and older black men, attired in the wildest, most colorful and audacious golf outfits available. Many of these men had huge rolls of money and bet on every stroke. Neither Bruce nor I are particularly good golfers, we didn’t bet, plus we were plainly dressed white guys, so we were the squarest of squares on the course. We didn’t do it often, but generally a couple of times a summer. As a note, you always want to shoot your movies in the summer, and you never get to.
Namaste, motherfuckers.