Devil at the Driving Range

Late last winter, I found myself with three hours to kill every Tuesday afternoon. The original plan was for me to bide time in coffee shops while my daughter practiced French horn in her middle school honors orchestra. But that changed on my first drive through Linwood, New Jersey, when a faded sign with the words “Golf Hospital” caught my eye. I needed the work: My brother had booked us an April tee time at Pebble Beach. With my handicap hovering at 20 and a real concern about launching a dozen balls into the Pacific, I was thankful for this opportunity for urgent care.

The day of her second rehearsal, I came prepared. The street sign, “Tilton Road/Golf Range/Pro Shop,” appeared to be circa 1975, the black text weathered from years of the wind, rain and sun you get when you’re less than 5 miles from the Atlantic. I passed another sign, reading “Golf Range/Open 7-Days/Dawn-Dusk,” before pulling up to a small building and a neon “Open” sign befitting a dive bar. Old signs never die at Ronnie’s Golf Hospital & Pro Shop; new ones are simply placed alongside them. And so I was greeted by a parade of banners affixed to a chain-link fence installed along the perimeter of the parking area to protect an aging putt-putt course. The day being gray and damp with temps in the high 30s, my car was the second of only two in the lot.

Another sign promised the “Largest Selection/Used Golf Clubs/South Jersey.” The only sign I saw on the property that was not set in all caps read, “Visit Our Golf Shop.” Inside, the shop was homey and crammed with bins of old clubs. The bathroom, stocked with a robust supply of mouthwashes and other toiletries, gave the appearance that someone might actually live there.

I bought tokens for the ball-dispensing machine from a jolly, dark-bearded young fellow. “Be sure to put the bucket under the machine or you’ll have to pick up the balls,” he said with a smile. The rubber mats on the range faced west into the setting sun, which backlit a hodgepodge of targets made from plywood and two-by-fours and fence posts placed alongside others constructed with steel trash cans and retired flags. If you wanted to make a driving-range horror movie, this would be the place. I could picture teens hiding behind the targets while a maniac in a Bubba Watson mask fired shots at them.

I found my favorite one immediately: a painted piece of plywood some 60 yards away that looked about 7 feet high by 4 feet wide, emblazoned with a red devil in a blue shirt bearing his initials, J.D. (Jersey Devil). He was finishing a backswing and either smiling or grimacing at the result, holding the finish on a driver that appeared to have bats on it. The sign’s edges were ragged from being pounded with probably decades of range balls. The painting might have earned a participation ribbon in a third-grade art show in 1983.

I took aim. A few landed close, but the loft of my wedge wasn’t going to give me the satisfaction of a direct hit that I suddenly craved. I had to nail this sumbitch. It dawned on me that this was the perfect time to improve my low punch shots, which I need to escape from the trees that line fairways I regularly miss. It also occurred to me that I would need to keep the ball low in the Pebble Beach wind.

I grabbed 5-iron and set my phone up in case this was an Instagram moment. On the third shot of my fourth video, I pelted J.D. with a body blow. It felt good. I was aiming for his testicles, but I’m always happy with a golf shot anywhere close to my intended target.

There’s something beautiful about divey driving ranges, about hitting 75 balls in an hour or less. And I’m not above admitting it feels good watching others flail along beside me. At Ronnie’s, I saw a player with a shiny red-and-black Callaway carry bag just like mine, the first new bag I’ve had in 30 years. I thought, He must be good. I paused to watch, preparing to take mental notes on his motion, and he proceeded to shank three wormburners in a row, hissing “Fucking shit!” as each one dribbled sideways onto the brown turf.

On my other side, a man in his 70s swung at balls like he was trying to kill snakes, a line I’ve happily stolen from a Carl Hiaasen novel. On another visit, I saw four fellows in their late teens or early 20s arrive in muscle cars they jammed into the parking spaces. They got out, bowed up and started taking haymaker swings, crushing the balls they didn’t whiff or shank to the back fence.

I see similar hackers at my home practice facility, the double-decker Camden County Driving Range on the Cooper River, situated right on heavily trafficked Highway 130 in Pennsauken, 5 miles from Philadelphia. It’s a good setup, with four islands as targets in the dammed river, filled with water you’d drink only if someone held a gun to your head. The young men who gather the floating balls from the water, encircled with yellow plastic booms more commonly seen in oil spills, look like oyster fishermen with the unhappy faces of chain-gang laborers. On the other side of the water is Harleigh Cemetery, where Walt Whitman lies in the tomb he spent more than $4,000 on for himself and his family in the late 1800s.

Imagination is more important than swing mechanics when you are at a government-managed driving range that has the ambience of a truck stop. Before my trip west, I took my wedge and pictured the 55-gallon steel drum anchored in the water 105 yards away as No. 7 at Pebble Beach, spraying the battered balls that this place sells at $10 per bucket—13 cents a ball—into the brown water.

The days ticked by. While dreaming of our tee times at Pebble, Spyglass Hill and Spanish Bay, I began to fear I hadn’t practiced nearly enough. Life gets in the way of golf. I couldn’t get to the Golf Hospital for regular Tuesday checkups. I crammed as the trip approached, practicing three of the four days before I flew out. I was hitting it solidly—but in every direction. I was still reeling from a rough round in Georgia three weeks earlier. As I boarded the plane, my inner voice coached me to have low expectations and enjoy the scenery. I assumed there was no way I’d break 100. This led to self-doubt, and I wondered if I was wasting too much time and money on this game. There are just too many goddamned devils to deal with in the real world to worry about the ones on the golf course.

But golf has a way of reeling you back in. I played better than I expected, shooting 96 on Spanish Bay from the whites with two birdies, including a 30-footer up the hill on No. 17, a gorgeous hole known as Whale Watch. I rolled in another long birdie putt on a par 3 at Spyglass, where I carded a 99. Then, finally, the big one. We decided to play the next-to-longest gold tees at Pebble, and I stumbled out of the gate. But I made par on Nos. 4 and 5 and the iconic short seventh, which in my head will forever be known as the Oil Drum Hole. But a 30-minute delay teeing off on No. 8 caused my game to disintegrate, and the ravines and cliffs began to attract my balls like the devil himself was summoning them from down below. I went on to butcher nine consecutive holes, which led to a pact with myself to stick with tennis when I got home. But on the par-3 17th, I hit a nice chip and barely missed a par putt. Hope.

We were the final group on the tee sheet. As darkness fell over the Pacific, I hit a safe drive on No. 18 and moved the ball along with a conservative second shot—the low punch I had practiced on the Jersey Devil. I now sat in the fairway, 172 yards from the center of the green. As I strained to see the pin, suddenly the course marshal appeared and turned his cart’s headlights on my ball. I clubbed up to make sure I got it through the thickening coastal air. I unleashed a 3-iron as sweet and straight as I ever hit that flew toward the flag. But it was too good, and it bounced across the green into thick rough beyond the fringe. With par in my sights and darkness descending, I chipped the ball delicately and got it to roll downhill to the front-pin placement and stop about 6 feet from the cup. With encouragement and a good line from my brother’s caddie, I rolled it in firmly for a par—the best finishing-hole score in our foursome, an outcome no one in their right mind would have predicted.

My playing partners, our two caddies and the marshal all erupted with cheers. I felt for a fleeting moment what it must be like to win the tournament that Bing Crosby founded—a feeling almost as good as hitting the Jersey Devil squarely in his scrotum. •