By Jim BrightersGolf Editor
Philadelphia, PA (Sports Network) -

Here are some rantings from the world of professional golf.

GOLF OUTING FUN

Some of my favorite columns I've written have not even been about professional golf. A few years back, I wrote a piece about my first time out for the season and last year, I told the tale of my playing in a golf outing. In 2006, we get the best of both worlds as my first time out this year was at a golf outing and now I shall write about it.
We're playing at the Gary Tinneny Memorial Golf Outing, run by the Northwest Veterans Group. It's a really great group of guys and this is a tough ticket to get. It's so crowded that we play in fivesomes with two groups per hole. It's great to show that much support as this outing benefits a scholarship to St. Joseph's University. It also makes the pace of play rival an arthritic turtle.

Let's meet the fivesome. Myself, Matt (owns a local bar which becomes important shortly), his cousin Pete (a school teacher who has called out of work the same Monday in May for five consecutive years), Jay (our 'A' player according to Pete), and Jimmy (hurting from a hangover as he tells me on the way he got drunk twice the day before.)

We open on the ninth hole and by the time we reach the ninth fairway, Matt has called his bar and convinced the cook to deliver a case of beer to the course. Three holes later, Jimmy and myself are transferring a cooler through a hole in the fence into our golf cart.

In the meantime, we birdied two holes in a row during that time frame and I didn't think we'd be two-under at any point in the round. Quickly we've formed a strategy where I putt first and Pete picked up on my read to birdie 10, then I rolled in a 15-footer at No. 11.

We're cruising along, not threatening bogey and even look strong for a birdie at the 16th. Unfortunately, the first four of us missed on our putts from six feet and yours truly walked after his before it violently lipped out of the hole. Jay, our 'A' player, is last to go and in the middle of his backswing, Matt decided it would be the best time to start a cell-phone conversation. He yelled the word 'yo' so loudly that people in Camden were looking over at him.

The wait for 17 was over 30 minutes, but it's okay because the two groups behind us are friends. It's a par-three and it's longish and with an audience I hit one straight up in the air. We make another par, but birdie 18. It nearly came with a price as our friend in the group behind hit a bomb that flew under our cart. We left them a message that we didn't appreciate it as Jay stuck the ball on top of an empty bottle.

Empty bottles were starting to become the norm. Not from me. I have a theory about drinking and golfing. I don't do the latter well enough that I could overcome losing my faculties from drinking. The remaining members of the group are going through them pretty quickly and it leads to the single funniest moment in golf history.

After an odd encounter with a homeless person, a debate on politics and Pete accusing Matt's brother of looking like Michael Stipe from R.E.M., we make a mess of the par-three fourth. Our best ball might either be short and right of the green with some tree trouble or left of the putting surface on a rocky path.

Remember we have fivesomes so Jay, Matt and Pete are splitting a cart. Pete is riding on the back of the cart going to the fourth green and falls off. It wouldn't have been as funny if he'd have fallen right to the ground, but Pete held on to the cart and was being dragged. Then he tried to run along with the cart and he looked like a cartoon character. We're uncontrollably laughing and in the process, make our first bogey.
We parred out the rest of the way and on the eighth hole, our last, I get introduced to a Gary Tinneny tournament tradition. A keg stand. You get held up and chug beer. I do that because with only one hole, I figure why not?

We head back to a nearby Veteran's Lodge with beer, food, darts, pool and shuffleboard. What's especially touching is that the quickest way to silence a crowd of drunk guys is to start talking about what the day is really about. They talk about the scholarship and even commemorate 20 young men who died in Vietnam. It's interesting to see the reactions of these men from something so powerful, especially for someone as young as me, who did not live that era.

Kind of puts the day in perspective, although it was quite a day.

Walls of the Vet Resound With Glory

Posted April 7, 2003

A couple of days prior to The Vet being imploded Mike DiMuzio invited us to into the stadium to photograph THE WALL that is referred to in Westcott's Book.

Here's an interesting story about something related to Veterans Stadium that will be missed once the Philadelphia Phillies move to their new stadium. Maybe 25 years ago, ballplayers would hang out in the grounds crew's lounge after games, eating and drinking and talking baseball. Why not get them to sign the wall? The tradition was started by Gary Tinneny, a former groundskeeper, and the wall still stands. It once was painted eggshell white, but yellowed over time. The groundskeepers have long since stopped using it as a lounge. The room is now a storage area: rakes and shovels hang on the walls, covering the signatures of legends like Don Drysdale, Mickey Lolich, Bill Giles, and Willie Stargell. There's talk of moving the wall to the new stadium; let's hope it happens.

(Thanks to Mike McCulloh for the article submission.)

By MIKE SIELSKI phillyBurbs.com

As Veterans Stadium’s closing approached, more than 2½ years after her brother’s murder, Donna Persico had a thought. She didn’t know what the Phillies would do or had done with the groundskeepers’ wall. If there was a chance she could get her hands on Gary’s block, the hunk of the wall that he had signed, she could use it as his grave marker.



That was it, though: What were the Phillies going to do with the wall? With all those autographs decorating it, imagine its value on eBay, for example, or at a memorabilia show. Would they put it up somewhere in the new stadium, Citizens Bank Park? This was no easy question. Besides, as Mike DiMuzio points out, the wall was stained from 33 years worth of mud and crud and spit. “It didn’t look good,” he says, and if the Phillies had tried to clean it, they might have washed away some of the signatures.

So, what did the Phillies do with the wall? According to Westcott, nothing. They managed to cut it into large blocks and remove it before the stadium was imploded, but apparently, members of the Phillies’ organization say, it couldn’t be preserved.

“The wall came down and was going to be relocated at the new ballpark,” Westcott says. “Either the wall had deteriorated, or they never found a spot for it — depending on who’s telling the story.”

Frog — who left the Phillies in 2004 and has since filed a lawsuit against them, claiming he was the victim of age discrimination during his final months on the job — is incredulous that the tradition he and his friend began didn’t survive. Gary would have made sure that wall got over to the new park, Frog insists, if he would have had to do it himself.

At C.J. & Eck’s, they still talk about Gary from time to time, especially when Dave Morris and Billy Keenan come by. “To have all that on one wall,” Keenan says, “where you could say, ‘There’s so-and-so,’ and know that they all sat in this mop closet and had beers with this …”

He pauses.
“… goofball, and for that reason and for posterity reasons, it should have been saved.”
Somehow, it wasn’t. And so there’s no hint of the wall at Citizens Bank Park, open almost three full Phillies seasons now. And Gary Tinneny’s body lies in an unmarked grave, buried in the same cemetery plot as his father. Now that she knows the wall is gone, Donna says, she will have to purchase a marker for her brother.

Ballpark's opening bittersweet for one
PHILADELPHIA - He was staring out into the splendor of Citizens Bank Park, watching the Phillies take batting practice yesterday morning, standing on the new grass he is charged with caring for, and still Mark Carfagno couldn't help but let out a sad little sigh.
"I'm going to miss that other place," he said. "I was there for a long time."
For 32 years, Carfagno tended to the hard green carpet at Veterans Stadium, just an 18-year-old kid from Most Blessed Sacrament parish in southwest Philadelphia when the Phillies hired him in 1971 as a groundskeeper for what was then their new stadium. He was perhaps the only person here yesterday who saw Citizens Bank Park's opening as bittersweet - as a tough transition from the place that was so much a part of his past.
All around Carfagno, the scene was strange and sweet, the 41,889 fans rarely staying in their seats long enough to see the Phillies lose to the Cleveland Indians, 6-5, or to catch the spectacular view of the city skyline over center field.
Instead, they walked from section to section to take everything in - to sit underneath the giant scoreboard and lights standard in left center. To wander around the concourse to the open-air level in center field, leaning against a railing and seeming so close to the action on the field. To position themselves in the short porches in left and right in the hope that Jim Thome or Pat Burrell would crack a fastball into the bleachers, which each slugger did.
Really, there's no comparison between the Phillies' old stadium and their new one. There's no comparison at all. The Bank is a baseball stadium, fit for that sport alone, with enough character and comfort already to rank among the majors' best venues. The sightlines; the restaurants, Harry the K's and McFadden's; the natural grass field - the Bank combines the old and the new of baseball in a way the cold, dingy, football-first Vet never did or could.
But it's always so hard to let go when you've practically lived somewhere so long, when you turn your head on your way into work and see several heaping mounds of gray dirt where the place of your past once rose above you. As a boy, Carfagno had hocked copies of the Evening Bulletin outside Connie Mack Stadium, a prelude to his grounds crew duties at the Vet, which was the only full-time job he had ever known until yesterday.
He kept calling it "the other place," as if he couldn't bring himself say those two simple words, The Vet, as if they would hurt too much to hear. It was almost home to him, after all, and the players he met and admired were almost family.

They all knew him by his nickname, "Frog" - Mike Schmidt and Pete Rose and Richie Allen and Tony Taylor, each one gladly stopping in the Vet's tunnels to shake hands and offer gifts of autographed baseballs and bats to the short, slight man with the Roman nose and the eyeglasses and the deeply set cheeks.
"I should have had a lot more [memorabilia]," he said, "but those were the only people that meant anything to me."
On March 21, he stood near Broad and Pattison and watched the Vet crumble, a pair of photographs in his back pocket. One was of Pete Cera, the longtime equipment manager at the Vet, the man who became Carfagno's surrogate father after his parents' deaths. The other was of Gary Tinneny, another groundskeeper, who started the tradition of having ballplayers sign the wall in the grounds crew's office when they hung out there after games. Willie Stargell, Steve Carlton, Lou Brock - they and so many others had scribbled their names there.
The wall was removed before the Vet's demolition. It survives as a pile of stone blocks, each 16 square feet, stored at a warehouse at 20th and Oregon.
Pete and Gary died several years ago.
"I really miss them," Frog said.
He arrived at 8 in the morning yesterday, to join his coworkers in rolling the tarpaulin off the moist grass and making sure the field was ready for play. Come 5:30 p.m., more than an hour after the game had ended, he was still working, smoothing the rich brown dirt along the right-field line with a rake.
He stared at the field, and as pretty and cozy and clean as Citizens Bank Park is, Frog was still thinking of the other place, the one that was like his home.
"I spent a long time there," he said. "Thirty-two years is a long time. ...
"But this is nice."
It is. It is a beautiful park, a new beginning for the Phillies and their fans, a stadium that will surely be a special spot on a summer night. Mark Carfagno is 50 now, and he grew up with the Vet like so many around here did, grew up inside it like no else did, and maybe someday soon he'll bring himself to say what he couldn't yesterday:
This is his place now, too.
This is home.