VERONA – What do you get when you mix four golf writers with a course hosting a PGA Tour event? You get five over par, that’s what.

Turning Stone Resort Championship Turning Stone Resort, Verona, NY - Sep 7, 2009 by John Pictures from media day prior to the PGA tournament. View Album Play slideshow

 
Since we were first, we got a tour of the clubhouse and the man in charge, “Fee,” was happy to show us Tiger’s locker when he played the Notah Begay III Foundation Challenge in August. His name plate was still on the locker.
 
“Fee” is Fiore DeCosty, a retired school teacher at Rome Free Academy. If you need anything, he’s your man. Fee is a very pleasant man who would give you the shirt of his back, it seemed like. He told us a story of how he gave the world’s number one player a stick of gum and some photographer documenting the day snapped the picture. Fee didn’t know and when he was presented with a print later, he was nervous. Rules are you cannot ask for autographs or pose for pictures and he wanted us to know he had nothing to do with it. But the photos are aplenty now. Copies were made for his grandchildren. Good for you, Fee.

Fee’s son, Derek DeCosty, played hockey at RPI from 1987-89 with Joe Juno. He also spent a year playing hockey in Australia. Now, Derek is a contractor in Key West, Florida. Fee was also the 5th grade teacher of the Atunyote Superintendent Matt Falvo.

After the round, Fee made my shoes look like new.  Thanks for everything, Fee.
ON THE COURSE

We began our shotgun round at the 7th hole, and Bob Weiner hit a beauty of a drive to get us started. Pete Dougherty knocked it on the green and we three putted. Bogey off the bat. Oh well. We would get a couple more bogeys in the first five holes, which shows why we cover this game rather than play it well.

Our only birdie came at the par-5 12th hole (539-yards for the pros, 494-yards for us). It’s a fantastic hole that doglegs right around a pond.  It’s one that Tiger was on in three during the NB3 Foundation Skins Game in August.
We were on in three, too. I’m not sure who’s drive it was – probably Bob’s, Pete’s or Frank’s. My drive found the bunker between the fairway and the water.  But my second shot was a bullet three-wood that I couldn’t have striped any better. I love that fairway 3-wood. Pete kept up his good play by putting his wedge in the middle of the green, but the pin was up front. My third was a wedge from about 80-yards and it stopped about three-feet from the pin.  I wish I could have been as accurate and as helpful on the rest of the holes. The guys were very nice to let me tap in the birdie putt and we had turned it around. High-fives and fist-bumps all around.

We gave it right back at the 13th. Sigh. One thing we noticed was the fairways were pristine, the greens were too, but tricky. The tee boxes looked like many of the greens we putt on. The toughest part of the course would be the rough, for us and for the pros.

“It’s really the only way to challenge the players because the fairways are pretty forgiving. It’s the only way to penalize the guys for missing,” said Superintendent Matt Falvo. He gets some help from Luke, the goose dog, who does as his title indicates, keeps the geese away.

“You should see him when he sees those birds,” Falvo said. The course closed to the public on September 14th, two weeks before the pros begin arriving. The PGA Tour comes in and tells them when to stop mowing the rough. In 2008, it got up to four and a half inches.
 
A week before, Falvo and his team do the detail work, weeding flower beds and bunkers. During tournament week, they will arrive at 4:00AM and not leave until 10:00PM.

“Not a whole lot of sleep that week,” Falvo said. “Maybe the week after.”
THE 18TH WITH PETE AND R.T.

As we got to 18, we were joined by Peter Toth of West Sand Lake and a member at Burden Lake Country Club.
The 49-year old is a 20-handicap player who works in insurance in Latham. He uses a cart to play golf – all the time.
 
Toth came to the tee box at 18 with R.T., Robert Todd, the Director of Golf Services at Turning Stone. The plan was for those two to play against our foursome. Two against four. Ha. No chance, right? For us!
In 1995, Pete fell off a ladder at his home and suffered a T12 spinal cord injury, which left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair. He and his wife Sue had young girls at the time. At 35, he says he offered his wife a divorce.
“I was devastated and I’m sure she was,” Toth said. “This was more than we bargained for but she was fine with it and, knock on wood, we’ve been together 26 years.”
 
He thought for sure golf was over but it wasn’t either. Pete was at Turning Stone to test drive a SoloRider golf cart. (www.solorider.com)

It’s a golf cart fit to carry his clubs in front so he can reach out and choose the one he wants. The seat has a seatbelt and swivels so he can turn and swing while seated.

He’s got a similar model called Golf Express at Burden Lake which costs in the neighborhood of $6,000. At Turning Stone, he was asked to demo the SoloRider. It comes fully-loaded at a cost of $12,000 and is available for the public to use when they play here.

“Seniors can just extend their careers by playing,” Toth said.
 
Pete says he has used one at Disney World and the Spa course at Saratoga State Park has one.

“You can just drive up right to where your ball is because you can drive it on the greens, you can drive it in sand traps, drive it on the tees,” Toth said. “I haven’t found a way to go in the water yet.”
 
The only help Pete needs is for someone to tee up the ball. After that, he’s on his own. His drive, and R.T.’s, at the long par-5 (603-yards for the pros, 549-yards for us) were better than most of ours (mine).
It was amazing to watch him play this hole.  Pete knocked his third shot into the greenside bunker. He drove up to, and into, the sand trap. He released his seat, rolled right and hit his sand wedge as good as any sand shot I’ve seen…thump, up and on the green.
 
Then he drove up on the green, spun and with a significantly curved putter, was able to stroke the ball to the hole.  Our forecaddie raked the bunker for him but the tires left only a little groove.
 
“I’m like any golf nut out there,” Pete said. “They said, ‘hey, you want to come out, you want to play for free and you want to play where?’” More on Pete further down.
18th GREEN, PART TWO

Ah, the wonders of course knowledge. Our foursome was on the back fringe of the par-5 18th and thought, “great, we can putt!” It beats two balls that were in front, off the green, but closer to the hole, we thought.
 
From where we were, you couldn’t go right at it. We had to aim 30-feet to the right and have it STOP just so it could catch the slope down to the cup.  But it didn’t stop and each one of the four putts rolled off the front. That’s where our other shots we passed up on had been.

For fun, I walked over and placed a ball at the spot I thought I should stop it and it rolled and rolled and rolled right off the front. We took a six.
FORECADDIE MIKE

Mentioned before was our forecaddie, Mike Williams, provided by Turning Stone for all the media day foursomes. I had never played with a forecaddie before and now want to always. They can find my drives and give me yardage while I grumble on my own and not worry about the next shot.

After our round, Williams, 31, was headed to hometown of Buffalo to visit his parents and friends for a few days. He was also looking forward to some wings at his family’s place, Mamozer’s, in Hamburg, NY.

Williams now works for Caddie Masters, Inc. and travels around. He had been an assistant pro at Wanakah CC on the shore of Lake Erie and worked at Crag Burn CC in Buffalo. One of his recent gigs was the Pro-Am at The Barclays in NJ. He is headed back to Naples, Florida for the winter and a private course called Calusa Pines. Mike bailed us out more than once and we were thankful.
OVERALL IMPRESSIONS

It’s a great course and I’m glad I got to play it to “review it.” I would not have been able to afford it, although I know a number of Capital Area guys have gotten on the links and will again. If you can, it’s something you should do.  In a scramble, you should never be over par but this was a PGA Tour course and we are golf writers. The best impression I left with was Pete Toth’s love of life and this game.
MORE WITH PETE

Pete Toth, who turns 50 in November, says his daughter Katie has “tunnel vision” when it comes to dad’s injury
She looked at RIT and the University of Buffalo before deciding on Western New England College and its 2,500 student enrollment. She is majoring in Biomedical Engineering and is a peer advisor for the freshman class.

“I think her objective is to cure me, at least that’s what she tells me,” Pete said. He says both Katie, 19, and Jamie, 21, a customer service representative at Wal-Mart, are more in tune with everything and he’s happy considering they were five and seven at the time of his accident.
 
Toth’s accident came in September 1995. He went back to work in January 1996 and was driving in February. He has hand controls for his car but found it difficult to collapse the chair, take it apart and store it. Then he got a conversion van but it got just nine miles to the gallon. His new one has a lift with a remote ramp that comes down.

“You can shoot out and shoot in and then close it up with a button,” Toth said. Since he’s been in the cart, he has TWO holes-in-one! The first came a Burden Lake’s third hole from 100-yards. The second came at Burden Lake’s ninth (160 yards), during match play in the club championship. As he remembers, the pin was back left. Pete was down five holes and his opponent knocked his shot to six feet.

“I hit the front (of the green), it runs up and the guy I’m playing with says ‘I want a drink,’” recalls Toth. Then he claps once. “(It) hits the pin and drops in.”

“He was stunned for a couple holes,” Toth said with a broad smile. But he still lost the match. If you’re ever out at Burden Lake, there’s a separate cart barn for Toth’s cart that his friend Bill Madsen, who works for the Troy Housing Authority, built.
 
“They’ve accepted me out there,” Pete said.

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