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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In the first week of 2003, I had lunch at the Russian Tea Room, which had gone bankrupt and closed its doors forever in the middle of 2002. Among the still hovering samovars, I ate takein pizza with tomatoes and fresh garlic. Rand Jerris, in the role of host, ate pizza with pepperoni. In low light over the red carpet, and in the rouge reflection from high walls of mirrors, we sat at a red banquette, in the ground-floor dining room, at 150 West Fifty-seventh Street, discussing golf.
The air was economically underheated, but not so much so that you could see your breath. Stained glass had been removed from a ceiling or two. Otherwise, nothing about the restaurant had yet been altered, and its festooned, Las Vegas decor remained as Russian as the Russian River. Everywhere in its six stories the place was eerie, dustless, immaculate, embalmed--spiffily glowing even in the dark. Its football-size "Faberge-inspired"eggs--blown on an island in the Lagoon of Venice by the incomparable Tagliapietra--still dangled from the branches of a golden tree. Dozens of golden bears still danced in the chandeliers; and the huge acrylic see-through bear that once had young sturgeons swimming in its stomach still stood fifteen feet high on its hind legs looking for its next fish. Jerris said that the acrylic bear was far too large for the elevator or the stairs, and would have to depart through dismantled facade, or, he added half seriously, be painted gold and stay put as a testimonial to Jack Nicklaus.
Jerris is the director of the Museum and Archives of the United States Golf Association, which has bought the Russian Tea Room, for sixteen million dollars, in bankruptcy court. The sale includes the eggs, the bears, the knives, the forks, the plates, the punch bowls, and the two-foot cutlasses that gave structural integrity to the Ivan Skavinsky kebab. The sale includes the Chagalls, the Picassos, the Kandinskys, the Kustodiev, the Surikov, the Golovin reproductions on the walls. The sale includes the marching army in the dioramic model of the Kremlin, over which the sun sets, the moon sets, and stars emerge. The United States Golf Association has a different kind of army, a different kind of gallery in mind. The U.S.G.A. is thinking of films and photographs and do-it-yourself designing of golf holes and clubs. It is thinking of computerized axial tomography that can cat-scan anybody's swing. It is reviewing its collection of forty thousand items of golf memorabilia stored or on display at U.S.G.A. headquarters, in Far Hills, New Jersey, because it has decided to move its museum to New York.
The Tea Room, close to Carnegie Hall, is twenty-five feet wide, and its six stories are floor-through--a seventy-yard pitch-and-run from Fifty-seventh Street to Fifty-sixth. The place has no interior bearing walls, and after its stack of six fully equipped kitchens have been carted away all floors will be open space from end to end. Jerris remarked that the general presentation there would not be chronological, as it is in the museum's Georgian mansion on eighty-six acres in Far Hills, where the first published reference to golf (Scottish Acts of Parliament, 1566) is among the introductory artifacts, while somewhere near the end is the pitching wedge used by Tiger Woods in winning by fifteen strokes the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach--the record low score in the national championship. Floor by floor, as you rise or descend in New York, you will move through thematic aspects of the game, ranging from the science underlying it to the passion it evokes. "Golf is essentially passion,"Jerris said, "which is something people not involved with the game cannot always understand."As envisioned by the U.S.G.A., a core concentration of audiovisual and interactive exhibits will attempt to delete the city sidewalks from arriving customers' minds, transposing them to jadeite fairways, and showing them or reminding them of (as Jerris spontaneously expressed it) "the aesthetic beauty, the power and strength of the game--the three-hundred-yard drive, the shot that rises into the sky and floats against the landscape, the forty-foot putt that sinks.”
Beyond question, the swing analyzer is high core. "Twenty cameras in an arc of a hundred and eighty degrees are filming simultaneously, contributing to a composite, slow-motion, three-dimensional image,"Jerris said. "Business people run in, run up to get their swing analyzed."They take home a DVD and study it superposed on Tiger's swing. The thirteen U.S.G.A. championship trophies stand nearby, the oldest being the Women's Amateur (1896), fully four feet tall and bossed with jewels. Original men's trophies have had a way of melting in fires. Champions can buy replicas of trophies they win, but the real things are on their way to the Russian Tea Room, like the 1-iron that Ben Hogan used in his miraculous return from a crushing highway injury to win the 1950 Open at Merion, and Bobby Jones's hickory-shafted gooseneck putter Calamity Jane, two of the three most hallowed golf clubs in the U.S.G.A.'s collection of six thousand.
On the seventy-second hole at Merion, Hogan--exhausted and still unsteady on his recuperating legs--hit such a storybook shot with the 1-iron that a number of touring professionals later gathered at the spot to see who could do the same. No one could do the same. None of them even hit the green. As Hogan and his caddy had moved on up the fairway after the shot, the unroped gallery closed in around them, and the 1-iron disappeared from Hogan's bag. Thirty-three years later, it turned up in an East Coast pro shop, and was tentatively identified after a dealer noticed that balls had been hit so consistently on the 1-iron's exact sweet spot--more than halfway back on the face of the club--that a half-inch dot had been etched in the metal. The club was mailed to Hogan in Texas, who confirmed its authenticity, and gave it to the U.S.G.A.
Bobby Jones won his Grand Slam with Calamity Jane, and so many additional tournaments that his bright medals--arranged in Far Hills in annual rows, as they will be on Fifty-seventh Street--resemble a winning card at Bingo.
When Apollo 14 went to the moon, in 1971, it carried a rock-and-soilsampling tool that had a barrel grip and a cylindrical...
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