In 1966, when green fees were $20 a month, I learned to play golf at Black Lake, when it wasn’t “Blacklake,” which still irritates me. (So does “California Mens Colony.” Just how many mens are incarcerated there?)

The pro was Eddie Nowak, one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. I’ve written about him. Eddie’s World War II army career was spent in teaching golf to flag officers so that they could relax enough to plan invasions of France or the Philippines.

Ben Hogan once said that Nowak was the finest golf teacher in America. I’ve written about Hogan, too.

One summer, when I was about sixteen, I played almost every day with my AGHS friend Kent Pearson. Once we hitched a ride with a friend of Kent’s who had a convertible ’60 Corvette and we went zipping up the Mesa–us, our clubs and the ‘Vette. I think I sat on Kent’s lap, back when seat belts were a novelty, but the Corvette handled beautifully on the road up the Mesa and the clubheads clicked softly at the turns. Oh, my. What a car.

Another time, we put together enough money to rent an electric cart. I left the brake off on a hill, the cart began a ponderous and dignified descent down the hill, and we caught it three feet from the lake that straddled the old eighth hole.

That was a glorious summer. I would work all the rest of ’em, which is why I wasn’t at Woodstock in 1969. I was selling shoes with my friend Robert Garza at Kinney’s in the shopping center that now has the Rite-Aid and the Aldi. The Kinney’s is gone, a victim of advanced age.

Anyway, one day, he assistant pro introduced me to a revolution in irons, the Browning 440s, made by the same folks who brought you the Automatic Rifle. They were manufactured in Belgium and were “revolutionary” because of the tiny clubface.

Today, they’re as antiquated as a Brown Bess musket is when compared to an M4 carbine.

But when the assistant pro urged me to try a couple of Brownings out on the driving range. The golf balls seemed to leap off the clubface, leave little vapor trails in flight, and land crisply, since the driving range was aimed that way, in the southbound lanes of the 101.

I was entranced. And broke.

Ladies and gentlemen, fifty-five years later, I finally have a complete set of Browning 440s.

Even though I’m elderly golfer whose backswing, given the current state of my back, ventures no farther than the minute hand at 12:45, with my Browning 440s, I am Bill Murray in this scene from Lost in Translation.