In his quest to find a wife-mandated hobby to relieve work-borne stress, Ryan Cummings turned to an unlikely source.
For the past year, Cummings, 39, in his fourth season as superintendent at Elcona Country Club in Bristol, Indiana, has been spending many of his Sundays playing a game that has its roots in 15th century Scotland, and it's not golf."As many hours as we spend on the golf course, and trying to balance work and family life, my wife came to me on day three years ago and told me I needed to find a hobby," said Cummings, superintendent at Elcona Country Club in Bristol, Indiana. "One day about two years ago, a member on my greens committee came to me and said he need a fourth for ice curling. In the back of my head was my wife reinforcing that I needed a hobby."
His team competes in a league that meets in the Compton Family Ice Arena at the University of Notre Dame.
Cummings had no previous experience with curling, nor did he possess any real understanding of the rules. What he had was a desire to learn something new that would serve a dual role as a diversion from the many hours spent on the golf course.
"It's a release, absolutely," Cummings said. "It gets me off the reservation."
Cummings' curling exploits were among the many fun facts superintendents shared with the group during this year's Syngenta Business Institute in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Curling is first mentioned in Scottish history in the 1600s. Cummings doesn't begin to take it as seriously as those Scots did. He threw his first stone - which weighs 43 pounds - with no preparation or warm up. His team - which goes by the name Game of Stones - doesn't have uniforms and they never practice, and that's OK.His team last year consisted of one other inexperienced rookie and two members from his club. Despite the temptation, he never discusses the golf course with them while on the ice.
"I don't think about the golf course when ice curling; not one bit," Cummings said. "And that is odd, because our team is composed of two members at my club, so the temptation is there for them to ask me questions about the golf course. I tell them that this is ice curling, and if they don't mind, let's not talk about the golf course. They respect that."
Andrew Updegrove, superintendent at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, learned woodworking from his grandfather Rick Flack. Today, he has converted his garage into a workshop, and thanks to a tree-management plan at the club, has filled his 19th century home with handmade, rustic furniture."I looked on YouTube and Instagram to see what people were making, and taught myself how to do it," said Updegrove, 33. "I've made a dining table, a bed, coat racks, end tables and a coffee table.
"I'm probably driving my wife a little nuts with all the wood in the house."
All of his furniture is the byproduct of a Gil Hanse-led master plan that has included removing as many as 4,000 elm, walnut, beech and cedar trees.
"We have just about every kind of tree you can think of," Updegrove said.
Crafting handmade furniture also allows him to turn off work, even if just for a while.
"It allows me to unwind and get away," Updegrove said. "I can spend five hours out there in the garage, and it seems like 20 minutes."
He enjoys the process so much he is considering selling some of his work. And just how does his handiwork compare with store-bought furniture?
"My house was built in the 1800s and nothing is square or even," he said. "That's my work: Nothing is square or even, but it works. I go for the natural look of stuff. . . . It's a little more rustic, so it doesn't have to be square. It can be a little off."
Carlos Arraya of Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis, site of the 2018 PGA Championship, has taken an artistic approach to writing poetry since he was a teenager trying to find a way to cope with the loss of his maternal and paternal grandfathers within a short time of each other."It's hard to communicate how you feel as a teenager about those things," Arraya said. "As any teenager trying to find their way you feel lost, and i got lost in my poetry, and putting my emotions on paper and took away that anger that I might have expressed on a physical side."
A fan of Edgar Allan Poe, Arraya put down his pen while attending turf school at Indian River Community College in Fort Pierce, Florida, but picked it up again and began writing a detective novel after he earned his associate's degree and started working for John Cunningham, CGCS, at Black Diamond Ranch in Lecanto, Florida.
"My desire was not to look for the way something was written, but to look for the hidden message of the person who wrote it," he said. "What were they trying to communicate? What were their feelings? Poetry truly is an art, like a painting."
When he met his wife, Noemi, in 2012, he discovered a new genre.
"My writing turned from grief to love," he said. "I joke that she probably wishes now that she never read any of it."
Today, putting pen to paper provides Arraya, 39, with stress release he cannot get elsewhere.
"It allows me an outlet like people go to the gym or go swimming. I go to writing," he said. "In this business, we say we are on all the time, and this allows me to be off, and I'm onto something I'm enjoying, and I can think about something totally different than what's going on on the golf course."