Golf Buddies

February 2007 Special Advertising Section

The ties that bind golfers, that make them golfing buddies, can be anything from a shared gift for gab to a penchant for lobbing good-natured barbs across the green. There’s no telling whom the fates will pair together in golf’s next twosome for life. All we know is that it’s the relationships that often make the game great.

Wise Guys
Golf is a difficult game to play with a club in one hand and a needle in the other, but Mark Ginther and Jim McMahon have been at it for almost four decades.

When the Cretin grads get together on the course, there is, as with almost any set of golfing buddies, a lot of needling. Ginther and two other members of their regular foursome, Jim Roepke and Tom Keena, often find their opening when McMahon hits a stray tee shot.

“After forty years, Mac still hasn’t found his ball,” Ginther says, “so we keep an eye on it. He’ll say ‘I went left.’ We’ll say, ‘No you didn’t, Mac. It’s right!’” (McMahon can’t argue the shortcoming other than to say, “I pay a little more attention now.”)

Most golfing buddies can sit at the nineteenth green and trade stories for hours, and so it is with Ginther and McMahon. There’s the foursome’s  quarter-century of “Checker Invitationals” (named for Roepke’s resemblance to Chubby Checker) that consist of bus trips to River Falls, Wisconsin, for a round of golf and multiple cocktails. There was the time a playing partner lost control of his golf cart driving down a steep hill and bailed out on Keena who was riding shotgun. Or the time the wiry guy bet the former baseball player he could out-throw him with a golf ball, over a gully, to the green on a 187-yard par-3. (The former was an ex-quarterback, and he won the bet.)

Ginther, a retired Ramsey County appraiser who lives in Minneapolis, and McMahon, a financial planner who lives in Edina, share a peculiar bond in that they once were married to sisters (they’ve since divorced and  Ginther has remarried). Their foursome usually meets once or twice a week, often at Highland National in St. Paul, not far from the old Cretin stomping grounds.

Golf is purely a recreational activity for them, a great way to get away from it all. “You know what’s nice?” Ginther says. “You get on the golf course, and as soon as you hit the parking lot, you forget about everything else. It’s always been that way.”

McMahon shares those sentiments. “With guys who have known each other a long time, you just revert right back to where you were. And then all the BS starts.”

Ask him what he thinks of Ginther’s game, though, and McMahon will seize the opportunity for some equal-opportunity needling: “As a golfer? He’s better than I am, but he comes up a little short on the drives.”

Golf Mates
Which comes first in a golfing relationship—the golf or the relationship?

With Penny Rogers and Peter Lanpher, it was the former. They met in 2001 on the grounds of the Lafayette Club in Minnetonka. She was playing golf; he was playing tennis. It soon became clear that if he planned to pursue a serious interest in her, more golf would be in order. Much more.

So Lanpher cut down on his tennis time and increased his time on the links. Although she wasn’t necessarily looking for a courtship with a serious golfer, Rogers says, “when golf is important in your life, it makes it that much more special when you find someone who finds golf is important in their life, too. Right away we enjoyed each other’s company playing.”

It was a twosome that clicked, largely because of their common ground. Each has a competitive streak, but not to a fault. They have similar handicaps—hers was a 22 when they met and is now a 12; his was an 18 and is now a 14. Most of all, they get along famously on the course and share a keen interest in the game.

They were married near Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego. They have golfed together in Hawaii and New Zealand. They watch televised golf together all the time, and they often fall asleep with the Golf Channel playing on TV. They even moved from Excelsior to Orono so they could be closer to Windsong Farm Golf Club in Maple Plain, where they often play team club events together, something of a rarity among husbands and wives.

“I get little jousts from some of our friends,” Lanpher says of golfing so often with his wife. “But then when they see her tee off and how far it goes,  they can see why. Penny is a great golfer and partner, that’s for sure.”