Charles Harff sits at table in the Farm Neck Golf Club Cafe dressed to the nines - the back nines. He’s wearing a Martha’s Vineyard Hospital 2004 golf tournament polo, white shorts and a pair of semi-dress loafers. Tan from day on the links, with gray hair and an air of congeniality, he’s soft-spoken and unassuming.
They say that the beginnings of the game of golf are lost in history - but it’s not quite that bad on Martha’s Vineyard. Golf, as known to modern man, began here in the early nineties. How the Island had struggled along, no one can say, but it has not been without golf for any appreciable time since, and probably never will again.
Combining history with tradition - and there is fully as much of the former as of the latter in this review - the priority of golf on Martha’s Vineyard seems to line up as follows:
Finn Simpkins has helped lead the high school golf tournament to the state tournament again this year. The senior is also an elite skier and looking ahead to a potential collegiate golf career.
The regional high school golf team took 10th place of 12 in the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletics Association state tournament Monday. The match was played at the Wyantenuck Country Club in Great Barrington. Senior cocaptain Matt Marchand had the lowest score for the Vineyard, shooting a 79 to finish 20th overall. Senior cocaptain Kat deBettencourt shot an 81 to finish 28th.
Why don’t more women play golf? According to the National Golf Foundation, the number of U.S. women playing golf declined from seven million in 2005 to 5.4 million in 2010 to 5.1 million in 2011. There are no figures from 2012 yet. According to a 2010 golf foundation survey, only 20 per cent of players in 2009 were women and girls from the age of six up, and they accounted for just 17 per cent of the rounds played. The foundation’s 2007 golf consumer profile reported that 60 per cent of women were embarrassed that they didn’t play better or know more about golf, and a majority were “intimidated by other players, by the staff or by the environment in general.”
While most of the regional high school’s sports teams have been busy contending with league play and thinking ahead toward their final games of the season, the golf team was quietly securing a place in the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletics Association tournament. The team’s season ended Wednesday with a 38-18 match play victory over Cape Cod Regional Tech, but they locked up a tournament spot last Thursday, defeating Falmouth for their 10th win. The golfers finish the regular season with an 11-9 record.
This could be you: Owner of a majestic summer island home with a sweeping vista of Edgartown Harbor, Nantucket Sound and Cape Poge gut; Steward of 18 acres of marsh, cliffs and wooded hills on Chappaquiddick’s North Neck area; and, not least, head of the Royal & Ancient Chappaquiddick Links, a nine-hole golf course cut from the land more than 100 years ago.
Never have a manicure before beginning a major carpentry project.
That’s the first of many lessons Chris Rasmussen learned last week while installing the foundation deck on her new home in Vineyard Haven made possible by Habitat for Humanity. Ms. Rasmussen’s enterprise is the fifth Habitat home to be built.
Few people know their way around the Island links like local wunderkind Tony Grillo. As President Obama settles into a vacation in West Tisbury that is almost certain to include a few rounds, Mr. Grillo leaves for Seattle to compete in the U.S. Amateur Championship. Before leaving, though, he spoke with the Gazette at his home course, Farm Neck, about what the duffer-in-chief can expect on Vineyard fairways.
