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Ryder Cup is a distant memory Posted: Thursday October 03, 2002 5:28 PM
Sports Illustrated senior writer John Garrity was a 42-year-old 8-handicapper when he suddenly lost his swing. Since December 1989 he has been looking for it -- a modern-day Odysseus adrift on the troubled waters of swing theory. As Garrity travels the world reporting on golf, he visits as many driving ranges as he can, avoiding the dreaded "mats only" ranges that prevent him from teeing it up. Wednesday, Oct. 2 KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- How was the Ryder Cup? Everyone asks me. The barber taming my unruly mane at the Brookside Barber Shop. The man taking my order for replacement windows. The mailman, the gardener, the friendly voice telling me I've won a five-day Caribbean vacation. "The Ryder Cup was great," I reply. "Ask me about my hotel." With or without urging, I start my spiel -- a ritual denunciation of the Hotel Britannia in downtown Birmingham, England. Somehow, I explain, Ryder Cup Travel Services decided that Sports Illustrated wanted its writers housed in a glorified flophouse with an entrance in an alley on the wrong side of the motorway, a stone's throw from ... well, from the stone throwers. "Hallways so narrow that two people with luggage can't pass each other," I begin to enumerate. "Rock-hard mattresses, pillows as thin as Marriott mints, thrift-shop furniture, broken lamps, no clock, a kerosene-powered telephone system ..." The leg well of the combination dresser-desk was too small for my legs, forcing me to sit sideways on a wooden chair smuggled out of a reformatory. The promised air conditioning turned out to be a single awning window that could be cracked open an inch or two. "Will you be wanting to make calls?" the cheerful desk clerk asked at check in. "Then we'll need to preapprove a £200 charge on your credit card." He had it wrong, it turned out. The £200 was a cover charge for the live entertainment. I had no sooner put my head on the pillow last Tuesday afternoon, after an overnight journey from Minneapolis via Amsterdam, when someone began beating a bass drum under my third-floor window. Staggering across the room and throwing back the curtains, I found myself looking down on a one-man band. This fellow, one of an endless procession of street musicians hired to raise the level of cacophony on the cobblestoned pedestrian mall, was relentless. The bass drum was mounted on his back, along with a cymbal; he also had a guitar, a harmonica and a screechy voice. A few doors down, a newspaper vendor rose to the challenge, bellowing the latest about the disgraced Lord Archer (who apparently had violated the terms of his work-release program by attending elegant parties and treating his warders to lunch at fancy restaurants). Supporting the vendor's contrapuntal line were a roaring street-cleaning machine, a sidewalk vacuum and a garbage truck, which seemed to be toying with a dumpster filled with broken glass and vibraphone parts. "So, uh ... what did you think of Curtis saving his best players until the end, when it was too late for them to make a difference?" "What? Oh, bad idea, I guess. Did I tell you about the saxophone trio that woke me at 8 on Wednesday morning? Brilliant musicians, actually, but if I'd had a bubbling-hot cauldron of pitch to pour down upon them ..." But I was reserving that for the hotel staff. At bedtime on Thursday night, on the eve of the matches, I dialed 0 to leave a wakeup call. No one picked up. I hung up and redialed. Nothing. I let it ring for five minutes. Nothing. Slamming the receiver down, I threw on my clothes and rode the lift down to the lobby, where I found two desk clerks and a bellman bantering with each other. "I need to leave a wakeup call," I said. "Certainly, sir," one of them said. "What time?" I told him, and he disappeared into an office behind the front desk. In a tired voice, I said, "Don't you need to know my room number?" A minute or so later, he reappeared. "What was your room number, sir?" I told him. "And what time would you like to be wakened?" He looked at me expectantly. I mumbled an answer and headed back to the lift. I was still mumbling the next day, after walking a mile up a hill, through an office building, over a pedestrian bridge, down a subway and across a courtyard to the Birmingham Crowne Plaza Hotel, where the media shuttle stopped. "Isn't there anything you like about your hotel?" someone asked. "The water pressure is good," I said. I could go on and on. When I checked out on Saturday evening -- two days ahead of schedule -- a Jamaican steel band serenaded me from the shadow of a bank building. "They're good," I told my taxi driver as we pulled away, "but no better than the construction workers who woke me with their nail guns at 2 this morning." I'm sorry, did you ask about the Ryder Cup? It was great. Watch this space for another installment of Mats Only. To send John Garrity advice, share your experiences, or suggest a driving range, click here.
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