Sure Cures

There was the Great Dimple Race in golf balls. Companies kept coming out with balls with more and more dimples. It is the dimples that keep a ball aloft. Finally, in 1988, the Excalibur topped them all with 812 dimples, 300 and some more than anybody else had ever had. Except that all those dimples had to be very small to fit on the ball, and what you ended up with was a golf ball that was pretty much smooth and went nowhere. They marketed it anyway.

We tried the POLARA, the world's first and only self-correcting golf ball. "Hooks or slices seem to turn in midair and head right back toward the center of the fairway!" the ad said. The secret is the design, the Polara people claim. The dimples are shallower at the poles (thus, Polara) and deeper in the center, giving it a "gyroscopic" effect, they say. Unfortunately, the patented "gyroscopic" effect makes hitting the Polara like hitting a can of Del Monte green beans. Furthermore, not once did the Polara come to the aid of any of our slices, despite great pleading on our part.

Then the USGA's Bill Forbes, one of the people who regulate golf balls, told us we were crazy. He said almost all balls are about the same. He said the top 80 USGA-approved balls are all within eight yards of each other on a 280-yard drive. We returned to Chez Carnac.

"It's not the ball," we said.

"Too much right hand," said Carnac, wiping off a bit of spittle.

Right hand, eh? Now this was a toughie. We decided to delay no further. We took the problem right to the experts, PGA Tour pros.

Pros, as a rule, do not try many gadgets, mainly because they don't hook or slice or hit things fat. We have not yet attended a Masters where the second-place finisher comes in and says, "I don't know what happened. I couldn't get rid of this big banana slice I had going."

The closest we came to a pro's telling us a gadget story was Payne Stewart, who suffers, now and then, from a bad back. A man in Los Angeles approached him with a pair of underpants that had two pennies and a nickel sewn into the fly and a magnet that slid into a pouch in the back. The man explained that the current of electricity from the magnet drawing on the coins through his innards would relieve his back suffering. Stewart quit using the underpants after one week. His back felt no better, but he made seven cents on the deal.

One day before this year's Honda Classic, the USGA ruled that John Huston's Weight-Rite shoes were illegal. The shoes feature a wedge on the outside edge of each shoe to help force the golfer's weight into the right position for hitting a ball. Huston promptly went out and won the Honda in regular flat shoes and dang near won the Masters a month later, too. Maybe because his feet felt so much better. We tried on a pair of Weight-Rites and found that, though they worked as advertised, they could make you knock-kneed. We also ordered up the FOOT WEDGE, a simple, wedge-shaped piece of wood you're supposed to set your right foot on. "Made of durable maple," the ad said. This thing had to be somebody's Junior Achievement project.

We got a great gadget from David Leadbetter, the man who taught Brit Nick Faldo to come to the U.S. and steal all our trophies and money. It's called the SWING LINK (SI, July 2), and it has straps and Velcro that bind your upper arms to your chest so that you end up looking like the head pro at Walter Reed hospital. The idea is that you'll get more centrifugal power in your swing if your elbows don't fly away and you use your body to swing, not just your arms. No wonder Faldo is so good. This thing works wonders. You hit with it for about 20 minutes, and when you take it off, your muscles remember. Birdie.