Dan's Papers - June 5, 2009

I played nine holes of golf last Tuesday morning at the Montauk Downs Golf Club. This club is one of the best kept secrets in the Hamptons. It was originally built as a private club in the 1960s. Its layout was designed by Robert Jones Jr., with his son, Robert Trent Jones, who at the time was about 23. It is now a public course, one of the 50 best in the country by all accounts, and it is a rigorous play.

I had been invited to play by Dennis Lynch, who is producing a documentary called King of the Hamptons that will preview at the American Heart Association's Heart of the Hamptons Gala at Hayground on June 20. I'm in the film, and when Dennis asked me to join two friends of his, one of whom would be carrying a mini-cam, I could hardly resist, even though the tee off time was at 8:15 a.m.

We played the first seven holes routinely. Dennis sometimes had the video camera filming and sometimes not. There was practically nobody on the course that morning, the Tuesday before Memorial Day, and we had fun and clowned around, which is something you can do on a golf course when nobody is around.

The eighth hole is a par 3. The green is downhill from the tee and just 165 yards away. Though it's guarded by sand traps, you can drop the ball onto the green if you are any good, which, unfortunately, none of us were.

I teed off first and didn't hit the ball square. It wound up short of the hole, but also short of the sand traps. I'd have a second shot over a sand trap. There was still a chance for a par.

Dennis went second. As he went to the tee, his friend Chris, whom Dennis has known since grammar school, came over to me with a clip on microphone and told me Dennis wanted to mike me for the last two holes. He handed it to me, and I put the wire under my shirt, but then had trouble with the clip, which I wanted to attach to my collar.

Chris helped though, but it interfered with my view of Dennis. Usually everyone watches the person who hits.

I did hear him hit, however. "It's off to the right," he said. "Damn."

"It's coming around," said the cameraman. "I think it's on the green."

"I hit it too far," Dennis said.

The other two hit and so we all trudged down the hill and onto the fairway. Chris was still talking about Dennis' shot.

"I don't see it up there," Chris said.

"I think it went over," Dennis said. Then he thought about it. "Could it be in the hole? Could I have had a hole in one?" He was now getting very excited, and he turned to the cameraman, who was still filming. "Keep filming," he said. Apparently the camera had been on since Dennis hit the shot. "If this is a hole in one, we've got to get this whole thing."

We continued walking. As we walked on, with Dennis getting more and more excited, it occurred to me that just before we teed off at the beginning of the match an hour and a half earlier, we had decided to play for money just to keep it interesting. They had turned to me. How much a hole? "Oh, I don't know. Ten bucks?" "Too little," somebody said. "Okay about 10,000 bucks," I said. "How about 10 bucks for a birdie, 1,000 bucks for a hole in one," Chris said.

"Five thousand," I said. I had never seen a hole in one. We all agreed to this.

Having reviewed this conversation and having remembered that it had all been filmed at the time, I decided it might be a good idea if I got to the green first, maybe just a step or two, to see whether the ball was in there. I didn't want any reaching into the hole and oh, there it is.

I peered in. No ball. But then, I saw tucked into the cup on the side closest to me so the lip was blocking it as I walked up was - you guessed it.

I was much too excited to take it out. But I could see what ball it was.

"What were you playing?" I asked.

"Titleist 4," Dennis said. It was a Titleist 4.

"Hole in one!" I shouted.

The four of us went wild. Dennis was screaming and yelling. Chris was high-fiving the cameraman. I looked out onto the rest of the golf course. There was nobody anywhere. "Hey everybody!" I shouted. "Come on over! Hole in one!"

This went on up there on the green for quite some time. We kept touching each other. Was this really happening? None of us had ever seen a hole in one, except Dennis, who said that 15 years ago he had gotten one in Scotland.

"Oh my God. Oh my God." I thought, there it would be on the scorecard, a one. One shot. A hole in one.

Finally, after all this, Dennis took the ball out of the hole and he held it up. Then he kissed it and so we went off for further whoops and shouts and carrying on. Finally, of course, we all calmed down. But we were still up there on the green. None of us wanted to leave this moment. I broke it.

"I'll go hit," I said, for as it happened I was the farthest away from the hole. I walked down to my ball on the other side of the sand trap and took out a wedge.

But I couldn't hit. I was simply too excited. And so I picked up the ball.

"I see no point in any of us hitting," I shouted. "Nothing beats a one. Dennis has done it." I walked up to the green and again embraced Dennis.

"I propose," I said, "that since I am leaving after nine holes we play 10. There is to be no score on this hole except for Dennis' one."

"And I further suggest that in the future, if the four of us ever again play this course together, we SKIP this eighth hole. We should never again play this eighth hole. Nothing should interfere with the memory of this moment." I paused. "It is stuck in time, FOREVER."

"Six, seven, nine, 10," shouted the cameraman.

"What about the money we agreed on?" Chris asked. "I don't remember. Five hundred for a hole in one?"

"It's right on the tape," I said. I was not very enthusiastic about this prospect, though. Was it THREE 5000s? Or do we divide it by three?

With that, we began the walk to the ninth tee. I wondered if we were even going to be able to calm down enough to play THAT.

Dennis spoke to me as we strolled along.

"I've been meaning to ask you something about Dan's Papers," he said. "You do all these hoaxes. Has anybody ever hoaxed you?"

I thought about it. The camera was still rolling.

"Once," I said. "A guy in Montauk who owned the Port Royale Motel on the beach showed me plans he had for the vacant lot next door. He was going to build an aquarium. He had plans for it. I ran it on the front page. He had made it up. The plans were for another aquarium somewhere. It was embarrassing. I got taken in."

"Well you just did again."

"That was not a hole in one," Dennis said.

"Sure it was a hole in one. I saw it. You have it on film."

"We dropped a ball in the cup when we passed the hole before."

"You mean this was a hoax?"

"That's what I'm telling you. We got you. We did all this together."

"It was a hole in one," I said.

"No it wasn't. We set you up."

"You know what? Let me tell you this. This hole in one, which I saw, is forevermore a hole in one right here!" I pointed to my head. "It's in there. A hole in one. You had a hole in one."

The other two had come over by this time. Of course, now I was being filmed close up.

"Let me tell you something," I said. "You asked about the paper. Here's how I run the paper. About 20 years ago, the Town of Southampton raised real estate taxes dramatically. It was such a raise that it was beyond the ability of the farmers to come up with it. There was a meeting at Town Hall about this, a pretty wild meeting. At that meeting, the wife of one of the farmers threw a plucked chicken at the town supervisor. Somebody told me this. I wrote about it. The day after it came out, at an editorial meeting the paper, Elaine Benson said read it and I was wrong. She had been at the meeting."

Everyone was listening very carefully.

"She said it had not been a plucked chicken. She'd had a stuffed duck on a wooden stand. She had walked it up to the dais and placed it in front of the town supervisor, and she told him that she wanted him to keep it there forever as a reminder of what this Town was all about.

"I wouldn't have it. I told her no, it was a plucked chicken, and she threw it. It was a better story as a plucked chicken. And that was the beginning of the Dan Rattiner Plucked Chicken School of Journalism."

We walked the rest of the way to the tee. The way it works in golf is that whoever had the best score on the previous hole gets to go first.

"You're up," I said to Dennis.

Dennis asked if I would write this story. I told him I would if he would put this video on Facebook or You-Tube as "Hoaxing Dan." As for the documentary, see the preview of King of the Hamptons at the Heart of the Hamptons Gala on June 20 at Hayground School in Bridgehampton. Watch for the full film at film festivals.