What the hell are you talking Sissy Juice..That stuff is great for you..Don't you listen to your Dr?

 

Obviouly you don't

 

Who ya askin?????????

 

You Frank, only you cause you know what golf is all about. hehehehe

 

If I hit one of my world famous shots. Depending on which way I aim, I can hit one of three courses.

 

Ooooops,,,, Now you don't have to give away your secrets.

 

If It's one thing I don't have, Is secrets. Now CRS, yeah!!!!!!!

 

Golf Story....



A man, while playing on the front nine of a complicated golf course,
became confused as to where he was on the course.
Looking around, he saw a lady playing ahead of him. He walked up to
her, explained his confusion and asked her if she knew what hole he
was playing.
She replied, "I'm on the 7th hole, and you are a hole behind me, so
you must be on the 6th hole." He thanked her and went back to his
golf. On the back nine the same thing happened; and he approached her
again with the same request.
She said, "I'm on the 14th hole, you are a hole behind me, so you
must be on the 13th hole." Once again he thanked her and returned to his
play.
He finished his round and went to the clubhouse where he saw the same
lady sitting at the end of the bar. He asked the bartender if he knew the
lady.

The bartender said that she was a sales lady and played the course often.

He approached her and said, "Let me buy you a drink in appreciation
for your help. I understand that you are in the sales profession. I'm
in sales, also. "What do you sell?"

She replied, "If I tell you, you'll laugh."

"No, I won't", he responded.

"Well, if you must know," she answered, "I work for Tampax."

With that, he laughed so hard he almost lost his breath while his
sides ached and his face turned bright red.

She said, "See I knew you would laugh."

"That's not what I'm laughing at," he replied. "I'm a salesman for
Preparation H... so I'm still a hole behind you."

 

I do listen to my Dr. When there could be a Buzz to have..

 

that was funny lol

 

Alpine, N.J.

When Steven Claisse took over as president of the high-end Montammy Golf Club here last October, the economy was tanking fast. Given the club's location seven miles from upper Manhattan via the George Washington Bridge, he expected Montammy to be especially hard hurt by the devastation of New York's financial industry, from which many members earned their living.

"The worst-case scenario we looked at was the loss of 70 golf memberships out of the 258 we had in September," said Mr. Claisse, who lives near the club but commutes daily to his job as a perfume executive in Yonkers, N.Y. But when the club reopened in March, it fared better than that, losing only about 40 golfers. (It also has about 140 nongolf members.) Still, the loss of so many golf members hurt, because each was typically spending $22,000 to $30,000 a year at the club, including monthly dues, food and beverages, and assorted other golf and entertainment fees. Their departure (or conversion to nongolf status) represented a revenue loss approaching $1 million on a budget of around $8 million.

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James Swiatlowski
The fifth green at Montammy Golf Club in Alpine, N.J.
Anticipating this, plus the possible loss of a further $500,000 or more from the drying-up of private functions and corporate outings at the club, Mr. Claisse and his 14 fellow board members began taking a hard, line-by-line look at the budget last fall and discussing what Montammy could do to change the way its operated in 2009 without sacrificing its luxury amenities and service.

Seven months later, the operating plan that resulted has kept the club ever-so-slightly ahead of the game and the members, Mr. Claisse believes, relatively happy despite occasional card-room grumbling. Their dues this year increased by only 3.4%, compared with what Mr. Claisse estimates would have been a rise of 10% to 15% if the board had not been so aggressive. "It's been a very painful experience, but probably no different than what is happening at a lot of other clubs around the country," he said.

Montammy, like most private clubs, has been dealing with change since before the current recession began. The proliferation of high-end public and daily-fee courses that started in the 1990s coincided with a dramatic shift in the way many golf- and country-club members use their clubs. Even avid golfers nowadays have less time available to play, and members of the rising generations are far less likely than their predecessors to make clubs the center of their social lives.

But in some ways the challenges facing New York City-area clubs are more intense than elsewhere, and thus more instructive to examine. For one thing, many are unhealthily dependent on the faltering financial services industry. For another, they tend to be expensive, and thus have farther to fall. According to a recent survey of more than 100 area clubs by the Metropolitan Golf Association, the average initiation fee in 2008 was $51,500, which is more than twice the national average. The average sum lavished on golf-course maintenance was $1.3 million, also much higher than normal.

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Montammy Golf Club
Montammy Golf Club's dining room.
Several of Montammy's neighbor clubs, saddled with debt loads from recent course renovations and clubhouse expansions, are in far worse shape than it is. Just this week, Ridgeway Country Club, across the Hudson River in White Plains, N.Y., began exploring the possibility of selling itself, since it's short 60 members. "Other clubs are smarter than this club," Ridgeway's president, Henry Shyer, told the local Journal News newspaper. "They built a stronger base five or six years ago." Reached Friday, he declined to elaborate.

Keeping membership pipelines full is always the best defense, said Jay Mottola, executive director of the MGA and a board member of the National Club Association. "If a club is oozing members, all the nip-and-tucking in the world is not going to keep it strong," he said. To attract new members, Montammy, like many of its peers, has significantly reduced initiation fees and allows payments over several years. It has also instituted a one-year trial membership requiring only a small deposit, with no future obligations if the member decides against joining permanently. A new wrinkle some clubs are trying, Mr. Mottola said, is initiation-free legacy memberships, available even if one's parents are no longer members, or even alive.

Until new members arrive, however, cost-cutting is indispensable and can actually be a long-term benefit when it forces clubs to look creatively at their operations. The key to success, Mr. Mottola said, is communicating openly about the situation with members and staff.

The first decision about the 2009 budget that Mr. Claisse and his board made was not to compromise the golf course. "Golf is the main reason people belong here, as nice as everything else is. The course is what we are judged by," said Mike Burke, the director of golf. By eliminating four of 16 grounds-crew positions, increasing overtime and multitasking for the rest, curtailing certain nonessential touches like dragging the fairways to get rid of early-morning dew and purging contingency funds from the budget, the greens department shaved $200,000 from its $1.5 million in operating costs -- all without hampering conditions, Mr. Burke said.

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HTML | Text-only versionOverall, by year's end, the club expects to have trimmed about $900,000 from the budget, mostly through staff layoffs (labor typically accounts for half of a private club's costs) and managing overtime. But it also made some surgical cuts in services, such as delaying opening day to March 18 from Feb. 1 and doing away with the regular, sparsely attended Friday-night dinners. Mr. Claisse, who formerly headed the board's dining-room food-and-beverage subcommittee, is particularly proud of the strides the club made in reducing food costs to around 40% of sales from 70%, largely by smarter menu planning and craftier "sequencing" of purchases. A restructured energy contract neutralized the costs of refurbishing the sports bar with flat-panel TVs. Such are the practical minutiae of club management.

"Short of the air we breathe, everything here is paid for by the members," Mr. Claisse said one night recently, over a Glenlivet in the club's dining room. "But it gets tricky when you start to take things away, because of members' expectations. The goal is to protect the club's financial integrity and longevity, but you have to manage things as seamlessly as possible, to avoid the perception that people are receiving less value for what they're paying. It's very hard to balance."

Nothing better illustrates the difficulty of achieving that balance than the matter of on-course refreshment. Montammy spends about $20,000 a year to stock ice chests around the golf course with private-label bottled water. To an accountant, cutting the bottled water looks like low-hanging fruit, but not to members. "It's an upscale perk that members really like," Mr. Claisse said, so the water remains.

But speaking of fruit, the club was also spending in excess of $50,000 a year to provide fresh, cut-up fruit for golfers making the nine-hole turn, a Montammy tradition. Since much of the fruit went to waste, Mr. Claisse suggested offering fruit cups instead and asking members to pay for them. The reaction? "You'd have thought I'd recommended killing somebody," he said. So a compromise was reached. The fruit continues to be free, but whole fruit only, not cut. Such is club life in the Great Recession.