Throlf

In the mid seventies we were living in Dorado del Mar, Puerto Rico. Our home was in a community of approximately two hundred houses on the former property of the Dorado Hilton Hotel and Golf Club. It was a mixed community with about fifty percent of the homes owned by Puerto Rican families. Some of those houses were just weekend retreats for those living in San Juan, and the rest were owned or rented by stateside people. Most of us "gringos" were working at US owned construction and pharmaceutical firms. Life was good.

One of the things that made it so good was the close friendships we made with other members of our community. Being away from your lifelong friends and family members, seemed to make each of our new local friendships that much more important to us. Like us, many of the families had young children. Most of the families had only one person working, so there was a family life reminiscent of the 1950's with the community simulating an extended family. Weekends at the club pool and tennis courts were a nine to five events. There were hours of tennis doubles matches and we all shared responsibilities watching the children at the pool. It seemed everyone played golf at least one time each weekend. And by the way, we did all go to work Monday through Friday!

Now my friend John was somewhat unique for our Dorado del Mar community. John was a stay-at-home Dad. His wife was the plant manager at a Dorado pharmaceutical plant. John like many of us was a very competitive person in any sport he played. He also had a temper fuse that was about one millimeter long. It was always easy to push John's buttons and get him to let his temper ruin his game.

Late one afternoon, John frustrated with golf and tennis asks me if I want to play nine holes of throlf. I cannot remember how John came up with this, but it is not the game that you can now Google. The Google cited game is for little kids and seems much too reasonable to catch the fancy of two twenty-nine year old men [kids]. John quickly described the game to me. All we need is one golf ball each and a walk down to the beautiful tenth hole at the Dorado del Mar Golf Course. On the walk to the tee, John explained the throlf rules to me. Here they are as I remember them.

• You must only move the golf ball with your hands.
  
• You can take a running start to the tee markers or to where your last shot landed before you throw your ball.
  
• You can roll the golf ball on the green or you can lean over and drop the ball.
  

Three rules, that's not bad! Regular golf has a rules book that is 192 PDF pages. The cost of throlf is also attractive. My current golf clubs, balls, bag and shoes probably cost about $1,000. For throlf, John and I just reached into our golf bags and grabbed any used ball for our pending match. This game is sounding good. Off we go to the tee. John wins the toss for honors, runs up and heaves his tee throw about fifty yards. Fifty yards – I am thinking that fifty yard is nothing. Now I am on the tee. I run up toward the tee markers with my arm as far back behind me as I can keep it, golf ball gripped somewhere between my thumb, forefinger and middle finger. As I near the white painted coconuts the course uses as tee markers I let the golf ball fly. To my dismay, my ball bounces, rolls and ends up about two yard behind John's ball. At Dorado del Mar the tenth hole is an uphill par five with the green overlooking the ocean. Beautiful! Getting on the green in regulation was out of the question. We both adjusted our ball grips and throwing forms. We tried different flight angles. We most likely were throwing near one hundred yards by the middle of the round. At the end of the round, I know my arm was killing me and throws once again were getting shorter.

The best news was that I never missed a fairway. I did land in two green side traps and we improvised a rule that if you were in the trap, you could not run and throw, but needed to keep your feet still for the throlf shot. This is not a big penalty since we were already within a few yards the green. We did have one argument – it would not be a game with John without at least one controversy. Executing one of my short "putts," I dunked my ball into the hole and it popped out after hitting the bottom. We finally ruled it a made putt. This was the first and last time we tried this sport. Our arms hurt too much trying to throw such a light and small ball. It was a Bengay evening!

I have had thirty-two years to think about this round of throlf. I want you to consider some of these innovations:

• Bolf – this is played with the same rules of throlf but the bolfers have the option of using a fungo bat for shots from the tee or the fairway. Scores will be lower, but more rules will be needed. In bolf there will be balls out of bounds, lost and in hazards. Bolf rules could be much too complicated.
  
• Tolf – again this is played like bolf, but tolfers are using a tennis racket for tee and fairway shots. Putts could also be made using tennis rackets. I expect more control using the tennis racket rather than the fungo bat, but more rules than those used for throlf will be necessary.
  
• Crolf – a more genteel game. From tee to green a croquet mallet is used. I am afraid that water hazards and sand traps could make the game too difficult at times. A tea break after five holes will be a requirement.
  
• Polf – this is the lazy man's crolf. It requires an electric or gas polf cart and polo mallet. There is a big advantage to left handed strikers unless you can find a polf cart with left hand drive. Alcoholic beverages are absolutely forbidden on the polf course.
  
• Yolf – in the throlf adaptation, a large sling shot is used for all tee shots and optionally from the fairway. I am pushing this game since I have applied for patent for a graphite sling shot with a square groved leather ball flinger. I have registered the trademark 'Goliath' for this yolfing driver.
  

Béisbol!

In the mid 1970's, my job gave me the opportunity to transfer from upstate New York to Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. That might sound somewhat regular to us living in the "oughts," but for me and my family it was an adventure. Although a Bronx boy by birth, a college graduate and working for a large pharmaceutical company, my trip to visit our manufacturing plant in Barceloneta, PR and look for housing was the first time I had been in an airplane. That first trip was an eye opener for me. Palm trees and sugar cane for as far as I (eye) could see. Tropical beaches and staying at a resort hotel nestled between golf courses and the Caribbean Sea, there was nothing not to like.

The initial drive out to our company's manufacturing plant at Barceloneta, seemed endless, with sugar cane growing on both sides of the small highway. When we reached the main road, there were small stores and businesses and even some sleepy towns. The landscape changed as we neared the plant. The sugar cane fields were now replaced by pineapple fields, or at least that was what I was told. I had no idea how pineapples grew and always wondered how they fit them into the cans. But lo and behold, in the middle of acres and acres of pineapples was the Winthrop Laboratories pharmaceutical plant.

A couple of months later on New Year's Day, the family was on an Eastern Airline jet headed for Dorado, Puerto Rico about half way between San Juan and Barceloneta. We rented a home in a golf community just outside of Dorado, a small town with very few stores and maybe one traffic light. Our belongings including Christmas gifts for our young daughters were coming by sea. They arrived about two months later primarily due to a port strike that affected the entire island. We had a week for sightseeing. In Puerto Rico many businesses close the week before Christmas and do not reopen until after Three King's Day, January 6^th. We visited El Yunque, Fajardo and San Juan. Brilliant sun filled days. For our first two months we only experienced rain overnight. We were in paradise.

Living was easy, as long as you could accept you were not in New York or Delaware, but in Puerto Rico. The water was good and plentiful (not always the case in the Caribbean), electricity worked (most of the time), telephone service was good and with a short car ride, shopping was OK. At the plant, the management team in place before I arrived had transformed local pineapple field workers and stay-at home moms to be stellar chemical and pharmaceutical workers. Things were great except for one small faùx-pas. In those two months before we left New York, I do not know how many people we told, "You have to come down and visit us." They all did! It was hard to explain to them that I had a job and needed to go to work each day.

I have done it again. This post is titled béisbol and I have not mentioned it once. Winthrop Laboratories had a softball team in the Arecibo Industrial League. We actually built our home field on the edge of our property – we had pineapples cultivated both inside and outside our property line fences. Just beyond our right field fence there were rows and rows of pineapples. Each year the two divisions of the Arecibo Industrial League held a ceremonial all star game. The game was held under the lights in Arecibo and drew quite a crowd. I was the sole "gringo" on the field. I felt quite honored. Baseball (béisbol) is quite respected in Puerto Rico. It is almost as popular as soccer (fùtbol) and dominos.

All aspects of the game are played to their fullest. During this game we had a thirty minute delay due to the pondit just being the pondit. Playing shortstop with a runner on first base, I moved to my left to field a low line drive. Rather than simply catching the ball and recording the out, I let the ball hit my open glove, picked the ball up after it hit the ground, stepped on second base for a force out and threw to first for a double play. This seemed like a good idea to me. Immediately there was a gaggle of base runners, managers, coaches, umpires and I suspect several spectators milling around second base arguing and gesturing in very rapid and animated español about what had just taken place and citing nonexistent rule books as well as moral and ethical codes. Does Abner Doubleday or a supreme being permit someone to purposely drop a fly ball to their or the team's singular advantage. After twenty minutes, it was decided that one should not be allowed to purposely drop the ball. They then spent the next ten minutes debating whether the drop was on purpose or just happened. Finally there was a philosophical discussion on how to distinguish when a ball was simply missed or maliciously dropped. This was all for a game that had no bearing on anything. [By the way, I believe the decision was correct. A fielder cannot intentionally drop a ball to gain advantage.]

Béisbol was fun in Puerto Rico. Even the arguments were entertaining and civil. We spent three very good years in Dorado and learned lessons being away from "home" that stayed with us the rest of our lives.