Foltz’s Folly
Jerry Foltz stole a car once. Maybe more than once, but I can only vouch for one.
You all know Jerry. Until his recent departure, he was a Golf Channel mainstay since forever. He made his bones as an announcer on what is now the Korn Ferry Tour. As a player, he won on that tour after an exceptional college career at the University of Arizona, where he was All-Conference in 1984. He’s been on the ground as an announcer for some of the biggest events in the game, including the Solheim Cup, the Olympic Games, and many more. In my view, Jerry Foltz is the best walking announcer in golf.
So: the stolen car. It wasn’t a car, exactly. It was a Cadillac Escalade. I know this because I was in the car — sorry, Escalade — at the time.
The assigned driver of said Escalade was a friendly Bahamian named Don. This was the second time that Don picked us up at Lynden Pindling International Airport in Nassau.
In May of 2013, when I did play-by-play on Golf Channel for the Pure Silk Bahamas LPGA Classic for the first time, several members of the crew shared a ride from the airport to the Atlantis resort in a van driven by Don. Although it’s only a 7-mile trek, the ride was harrowing. The islands of the Bahamas had been soaked with over a foot of rain in less than 24 hours. It was a hundred-year-storm that flooded entire neighborhoods and pushed water up against storefront windows in downtown Nassau. Don carefully navigated us to Paradise Island, where Atlantis is located. We would later discover that schools in the Bahamian capitol were closed the following day. It was practically a state of emergency.
Regarding that 2013 tournament — half of the golf course at the Ocean Club was flooded. Under high winds and dramatic tides, the ocean overtook the rock sea walls on the eastern tip of Paradise Island, rendering much of the course a brackish pond. At one point, the television crew thought that the event might be cancelled and we’d go home early; as it turned out, the grounds crew at the Ocean Club was able to salvage 12 holes, which were played three times for a grand total of 36 holes, which allowed the first annual PureSilk Bahamas LPGA Classic to go down in the books as an official event -- but only after 45 million gallons of rainwater were pumped back into the ocean. Ilhee Lee recorded her first career LPGA victory, a four-shot win over Irene Cho.
This time, however, in 2014, the weather was postcard-perfect. Sunny, 75 degrees, light chop in the air and on the seas. No problem. We disembarked from the MD-80 at about 3pm, sailed through customs -- the airport was pretty much empty -- and found Don outside the terminal. It took us a while, but Jerry and I eventually recognized Don as the same driver who had floated our van through Nassau eight months previous.
I got the impression that Don was happy to see us. We were probably much more interesting than most of his regular passengers. We chatted amiably for a few minutes as Don waited for another Golf Channel crew member who was scheduled on a later flight. A few minutes dragged into too many minutes, and Don, conscious of his schedule, decided to exit the Escalade to go find the missing passenger.
Before he left Jerry and me, he jokingly suggested that if we got bored, we should take the Escalade for a spin.
If you ever get the chance to meet Jerry Foltz, you will understand what I mean when I say that Don made a colossal mistake.
By the time Jerry brought the Escalade back to Arrivals after a few aggressive laps around the airport, Don was jogging purposefully at us, an expression of panic and amusement on his face. I have no doubt that he had spent his last five minutes trying to compose a story for his employer as to how he had not only lost the Escalade, but also the Golf Channel announcers contained therein. Luckily, Jerry never takes the joke too far. Don drove us to the hotel without further incident. He would later say that this was one of his favorite moments on the job.
And that’s how Jerry and I got from the airport to the hotel for my first Golf Channel event of 2014.
