The poet of golf

CEDAR RAPIDS -- Memorial Day weekend. It means honoring veterans. It means a day off work, hot dogs. It means golf. It's Saturday at St. Andrews Golf Club, and Mike Hall, 65, of Hiawatha, is talking to his golf ball.

"Stay in the air, stay in the air, c'mon!" he says.

The ball, caught in a gust of wind, disobeys.

Plop. Sand trap.

"Nope," he sighs.

For Hall, the director of golf at the course, the day started at 4:30 a.m. He mowed the greens. He issued orders to some of his 23 employees. He inspected for flooding, fungus and nearly invisible insects that feast on the roots of grass.

It's enough stress to plain take the fun out of things.

"Believe me, sometimes I don't sleep at night," Hall says.

Perhaps it's because of these 103 acres that Hall never seems to completely relax as he plays. As he walks toward the sand trap, he looks up at the cloudy skies, the trees swaying in the wind, and grimaces because of the business it will cost him.

"This is like a $2,000 bad day," Hall says. "You're like a farmer out here. You're a slave to the weather."

But there's joy, too. Joy in the great outdoors. Joy in cracking wise with the other players between holes. Joy in looking for that one pure strike between club and ball.

"I guarantee you there's not one player who has played for a long time who hasn't thought about quitting," Hall says.

"There's always that one shot that brings you back."

As he says this, he winds back and swings at the ball lying in the sand. It catches the lip of the green, spins in the air for a second, and then lands in the sandy water next to his feet.

"That is not the shot that will bring me back," he says.

It has been this passion for golf that has kept Hall at it for more than 30 years. He has won Iowa PGA events. He has seen the trees he planted when he helped build nine holes at St. Andrews grow from saplings into mighty obstacles. He has lost a job and been through two marriages -- all ruined, he says, because he spent too much time working on the golf course.

His passion is also what draws fellow players to St. Andrews.

"I love Mike. He's the reason I come here," says Glenn McClintic, 48, of Cedar Rapids, a member of the foursome playing that day. "He's a poet of golf."

Hall, who is engaged to his high school sweetheart, Jean Pasker, 66, of Hiawatha, anthologizes the events of each year at the golf club in a poem he reads at the annual Christmas party. His fiancee understands his reverence for the game, he says, often joking that she'd never see him if they did not live so close to the course.

"She's the most beautiful 66-year-old woman in the world," he says.

Finally, mercifully, Hall chips the ball out of the sand trap and putts it into the hole.

"It just goes to show that you can't miss them all," Hall says, smiling.

- By Stephen Schmidt, The Gazette