Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2007
by John Y. Wehmueller | Staff Writer
Rockville resident Bruce Riddle and his nephew, U.S. Naval Commander Steven Labows, share a love of golf. When Labows arrived for a tour of duty in Iraq this August and became involved with building a driving range for servicemen and women, he sent periodic updates back to Riddle.
An empty plot of land next to Camp Victory — formerly one of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad-area palaces — gradually became the CSM Jonathan Langford Memorial Driving Range. A big problem: the 100-degree heat made it almost impossible to hold a club for very long.
‘‘My nephew called me and said what they really needed was golf gloves,” Riddle said.
That simple call snowballed into recent shipments of 600 gloves, over 150 clubs and 18 plastic hitting mats. Riddle tapped his business and golfing contacts, including agents for PGA Tour pros Vijay Singh and Ernie Els, to raise about $3,500 for the range.
‘‘I just took a passion for the thing,” Riddle said. ‘‘I just thought I could do something in some small way for these people. My buddies gave me encouragement, and it took on a life of its own. I’m proud to be able to help out in some small way.”
The funds raised by Riddle, a member at Lakewood Country Club in Rockville, went toward the gloves. Singh contributed the mats and 36 rubber tees. Els donated golf shirts to be given as prizes.
Through David Crawmer, Lakewood’s Director of Golf, Riddle also got in touch with Innovative Golf Equipment Services, LLC, a Bethesda-based business run by partners Marshall Schattner and Kevin Perry. Innovative Golf partners with 25 clubs in the Washington, D.C. area to facilitate trade-ins of used equipment.
That means Schattner and Perry have plenty of barely-used clubs at their disposal, and jumped at the chance to send some to Iraq.
‘‘David immediately thought of us when he heard that some of the large club manufacturers were saying no,” Schattner said. ‘‘But when we saw the pictures Steve sent, we couldn’t turn down the opportunity. Whether you endorse what’s going on in Iraq or not, there are golfers there. ... We’re golfers. If we were soldiers over there, this is exactly what we would be doing.”
By all accounts, the driving range has become popular with golfers and non-golfers alike. What originally began as a handful of devotees hitting balls into a weed-infested field (and trying to find them afterwards) has become a genuine driving range.
Army Sergeant Clinton Merritte and others had the land cleared and leveled. In a stretch of dirt roughly 200 yards long by 120 wide, they made circles of sandbags, in the middle of which they planted flags, to provide targets.
‘‘We went from 10 people hitting to over 400 a month,” Merritte wrote in an e-mail from Iraq. ‘‘It is used by the lowest enlisted to generals. It is used by avid golfers and beginners who had never hit a ball. ... This range takes you out of the war for the time that you are hitting.”
The range was the subject of a recent feature on the Golf Channel, and others have begun to spring up at other bases. Riddle said that before the additional mats expanded the range’s capacity to 30 hitters at a time, Labows reported two-hour waits to hit. There are even temporary lights to allow the range to stay open at night.
The driving range is a phenomenon half a world away, but a big part of its success began right here in Montgomery County.
‘‘The donations of gloves, mats and clubs have been instrumental,” Merritte said. ‘‘It has helped us to expand our range here and allowed more people to hit.”
‘‘They’ve got all they need now, but like anything else in life, stuff starts to wear out; we’ll try to keep pace with that,” Riddle said. ‘‘Our goal and mission was to try to bring some smiles and some touch of home in what’s obviously a very tough situation. Some friends who donated are against the war, but it wasn’t about that. They’re there, and we just wanted to make their life feel a little more normal.”
To contribute
For information on making donations to the CSM Jonathan Langford Memorial Driving Range, contact Innovative Golf Equipment Services via e-mail at guru@myclubguru.com.
