Golf Buddies

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.” 
Comic Foils
Wired for 220 volts in a 110-volt world, maybe KFAN’s Dan “Common Man” Cole needs a foil like Pat Foy golfing by his side thirty, forty, fifty days a year.

“If I’m a double-A personality, Foy’s probably a double-D,” says Cole of his  longtime pal Foy.

Irreverent on the air, highly caffeinated off it, Cole may be Twin Cities media’s most avid “and, yes, most shameless” advocate for the game of golf. He carries the self-anointed title of Ambassador of Minnesota Golf, a moniker bestowed on him during a trip with Foy to Palm Springs and it’s a name Cole embraces with tongue only partly in cheek.

Most of the people in Cole’s world have a moniker. It’s part of his radio-show shtick. Foy is the “World’s Greatest Irons Player” because, well, he’s a darn good irons player. Then there’s “Limo Guy,” who used to play a lot of golf with Cole and Foy, but not so much anymore because “he was bitter when [Cole] had kids,” Foy jokes.

Foy and Cole might have contrasting personalities, and Foy might play the comic foil for Cole much of the time, but the golfing buddies who knew each other growing up in Coon Rapids and have golfed together for almost fifteen years have bonds as well as differences.

Cole’s explanation: “We have similar games,” he says. “We have 5–6 handicaps—it could fluctuate to a 10–12. We both have the same sense of humor; we like to goof off when we’re playing, pretend that every putt means so much. We rarely play for money.

“I played with some guys from Keller on Saturdays and every guy says, ‘OK, what’s the game gonna be, nearies, greenies, this, that, and the other thing, which is OK. Sometimes I like playing for money, but for [Foy] and I, it’s the challenge of playing yourself and the fun of talking about how big this putt is and doing the old waving to an imaginary crowd thing.”

Foy abides Cole’s golf-course chatter, for there are benefits. Among the perks: frequent rounds at country clubs and rounds with well-known local players. Foy got to know local pro Dave Tentis through Cole, and eventually caddied for him in three PGA Championships.

“We’ve met a lot of people,” Cole says. “We go out there and have a good time and tease each other.”

Which is Foy’s entrée to offer a dig at the buddy with the radio gig. “Common,” he says, “does possess the one intangible ingredient that most of the elite local amateur players possess: that’s a two-hour-a-day job.”

Best Friends
On a summer day in 1978, two young women met each other for the first time on the grounds of White Bear Yacht Club, where they were paired together in a ladies day event. For the better part of the next three decades, Patty Barnacle and Diane Pfaffly have been inseparable.

From recreational rounds to invitationals to golf vacations—and then off the course through child care, school events, weddings, walking and bicycling together, and even Barnacle’s successful battle against breast cancer—the two have shared a bond that sisters would envy.

Pfaffly calls it “a full family” relationship. “Our kids are best friends,” she says. “They were toddlers when we met, and they became best friends. So we have gone from raising our kids together to a first marriage to homecoming dances to chaperoning together, a girls trip with the kids, every holiday together.”

“We’ve always gotten along,” Barnacle says, “and our personalities are a lot alike. We’ve always been with each other, through thick and thin.”

That doesn’t mean they walk in lockstep on the course. Barnacle, the more athletic of the two, serves on the Minnesota Women’s Golf Association board of directors and is a United States Golf Association rules official. She has two holes-in-one, one of them in a match against Pfaffly, who got two strokes on the hole and parred it to tie Barnacle. Pfaffly, on the other hand, golfs “for the social aspect,” she says. She chats up anyone within a short par-4 of her and has a propensity for telling jokes, occasionally of the off-color variety.

Geography has separated the two—Barnacle lives in Pine Springs, and Pfaffly has moved to Woodbury—yet the bond remains strong. “She’s always happy, upbeat,” Barnacle says of Pfaffly. “If we’re going through a crisis in our life, we get that out right away. We’ll cry on the first couple of holes, and we’ll talk about it and we’ll feel better, and it’s like, ‘Hey, we’re here to relax and have fun.’”