Post by venezia4ever on Sept 4, 2007 10:58:18 GMT -5
Alice Cooper traded alcohol's trap for sand traps
Susan Whitall
Detroit News
Sept. 1, 2007 12:00 AM
Alice Cooper was 25 when he first picked up a golf club.
It was 1973, and the shock rocker, known for mock-guillotining himself onstage, was in the thick of his hard-drinking days. He'd been quaffing beer all morning and watching horror movies in his hotel room while killing time before a concert when his roadie, Joe Gannon, dragged him out to a course.
Gannon teed up a ball and handed his boss a seven iron. To the roadie's shock, Cooper whaled it.
"I hit it down the middle about 175 yards, with a little draw on it," Cooper says. "I said, OK, what's so hard about that?' "
He's not kidding, as you find out in his new book Alice Cooper, Golf Monster: A Rock 'n' Roller's 12 Steps to Becoming a Golf Addict (Crown, $24.95).
In it, Cooper, who lives in the Valley, relates how discovering a passion for golf helped him control his alcoholism by transferring one obsession for another. Along the way, he offers tips he's picked up while becoming one of the most skilled golfers on the celebrity circuit.
"It's not a book about how to stop doing something, it's about how to become an addict," Cooper joked in an interview.
Golf Monster includes stories from Cooper's rock career, which spawned such hits as I'm Eighteen, School's Out, Be My Lover and No More Mr. Nice Guy. The book is more honest, he says, than his 1976 autobiography Me, Alice. Stories about his rock life are interspersed with chapters about Cooper's experiences as a celebrity golfer.
That first game with the roadie, and many more to come, led to full-blown golf madness for Cooper, who was at the height of his fame as a mascaraed, snake-wielding rock star.
His new obsession would come to rule his world as much as music, alcohol and horror movies. It eventually replaced the booze.
"I call golf the 'crack' of sports because if you get good at it, you just want to do it more," he says.
Over the years, as Cooper's star rose in rock and roll, his drinking spiraled out of control. He would down six-packs before going onstage. Finally, Cooper's wife, Sheryl, and longtime manager Shep Gordon staged an intervention, forcing him into one of two rehab stays. The second one stuck, and he officially traded the alcohol addiction for golf.
Alice Cooper, Golf Monster is most amusing when Cooper describes some of his early forays into the wide world of celebrity tournaments, when it was still a novelty to see a long-haired rock and roller teeing up.
"Now that rock and roll has hijacked the game, I'd like to say I was one of the first to do that, and made it popular," says Cooper, who has "shot a few 67s in my life."
He adds: "When you get a character as unconventional as Alice Cooper playing golf, it opens the door to a lot of guys that would say, 'I want to play golf, but I'm a rocker, I can't do that.' You can say, 'Wait a minute, Alice Cooper plays golf, Iggy plays, Roger Waters plays, Lou Reed plays, Bob Dylan plays.' "
Wait a minute, Bob Dylan plays golf?
"Oh yeah, he plays every day with Neil Young," Cooper says. "It's not the old country club game anymore. I go out to the public course, and there's a bunch of guys with long hair and tattoos, drinking beer and playing golf, and I go, 'That's the way it should be!' "