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1
 
FAIRWAY TO HELL
BILOXI, MISSISSIPPI
 
“Judas Priest!”
 
The screaming 15-year-old caddy hasn’t just been bonked by an errant 9-iron shot. He’s caught sight of two golfers on the 3rd green at Hickory Hill Country Club near Biloxi, Mississippi. The pair play on.
 
“Judas Priest!” the caddy repeats, approaching the green. “You guys really play golf?”
 
Ignoring the gallery, one golfer sinks a 12-foot putt. The other whirls around to face the teenager. “Yes,” he replies. “But we do worship the devil at night.”
 
The putter is Glenn Tipton, and his partner is R. R. Downing, both on the near side of 60. They’re the lead guitarists in Judas Priest, Britain’s mock-satanic heavy metal band. In real life, Downing and Tipton feel more passion for golf than sympathy for the devil. They play the game as often as three times a week when on tour. Both claim to shoot in the low 80s, though when pressed Tipton admits, “There are times when the scorecard blows away.”
 
They’re such golf maniacs that they sometimes set up a putting green backstage. “We’re totally into it,” says Downing. “The yardages, which ball to use, who’s cheating …”
 
None of the middle-aged backers working their way around Hickory Hill recognizes them. But by the time the twosome reaches the 7th hole, every adolescent boy in Biloxi who’s ever tried on a studded dog collar—and the number would surprise you—is hiding out in the bunkers, ready to ambush Tipton and Downing for autographs.
 
A kid in a HELL-BENT FOR LEATHER T-shirt pops out from behind a tree: “I went to your concert! Boy, were you loud! I mean, you were good, but boy, were you loud.”
 
Downing and Tipton are in Biloxi for the 77th concert of their 80-date North American tour. Onstage, amid belching smoke and singer Rob Halford’s thumbscrew screaming, the pair strut, swagger, and carry on like point men in a mutant army looking for Mad Max. Their brain-bludgeoning guitar riffs roar like Formula One racing cars, terrifying parents from Copenhagen to Carmel.
 
In the less permissive ’80s, an enraged Tipper Gore, wife of the former vice president, had the lyrics of the band’s song “Eat Me Alive” read to a startled Senate Commerce Committee. “We’ve written hundreds of songs, and she has to pick on that,” says Downing. “Of course, it was a good one to pick on.”
 
Seems that everyone from parents groups to chain stores loves to pick on Judas Priest. Even the news of being banned from Malaysia doesn’t surprise them.
 
That has only given the guitarists more time to tee it up. They took up the game about 20 years ago, when their counterparts in Def Leppard, another band in the heavy metallurgical mold, challenged them to a game. “They thrashed us,” says Downing. “But we got the bug.”
 
At first they went to great lengths to conceal their new addiction. The sport might be fine for midlevel executives at U.S. Steel, but for heavy metal rockers, it presents something of a PR problem. “We felt golf could be detrimental to our leather-and-studs image,” says Downing. “But then we thought, if word gets out, parents might decide that perhaps we’re not bad chaps after all.
 
“On the other hand, if they hear Judas Priest is hacking down the fairway, they may assume we attach six-inch nails to our clubs before swinging them.”
 
Not so. Downing and Tipton take a genteel approach to the game. They wear subdued polo shirts and slacks, and white golf shoes with fringed tongues. They scrupulously observe golf etiquette, gently tamping their divots back into place.
 
Golf, Downing and Tipton say, is a calm counterpoint to the hectic pace of life on the road. Still, the silence of the links occasionally unnerves them. “I’ve played stadiums before a hundred thousand people,” Downing says. “And yet when the greenskeepers turn their tractors off and wait for me to take my swing, I get as nervous as hell.”
 
On this afternoon, the weather is fittingly theatrical: portentous black clouds, sudden shafts of sunlight, gusts of chilly air. “It’s all part of heavy metal golf,” Tipton says. “Usually, before teeing it up, a bolt of lightning comes down and scorches the earth: JUDAS PRIEST KEEP OFF.”
 
Tipton is still reeling from a night of rock and revelry. At the 8th hole, he slices his drive into the deep rough. But pulling out one of his heaviest metals—a 3-iron—he reaches the green in two. “I struck it a little better,” he says groggily. “I think my mind’s clearing a bit.”
 
The sky, however, is growing increasingly ominous. A rainstorm moves in and washes out the game. After nine holes, Downing has a 40. Tipton’s scorecard has blown away.
 
They ride the cart back to the clubhouse. “Hey, man,” yells a bystander. “Y’all Judas?”
 
“No,” says Downing wearily. “He’s among the disciples behind us.”
 
2
 
FAT ACCOMPLI
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
 
A 5-iron in one hand, two sticks of pepperoni in the other, Greg Laugeni clomps around the parking lot at the Yale Golf Club, chewing the fat with his partner, John Hardy. Considering that Laugeni weighs 390 pounds and Hardy 530 pounds, there’s a lot of fat to chew.
 
Laugeni plops down at the nurse’s station and has his blood pressure taken. When the nurse tells him it’s 158 over 120, he nearly plotzes. “If you’re right,” says the 36-year-old contractor, “I should have died nine days ago!”
 
“Eight,” corrects the nurse.
 
Hardy’s turn. A look of incredulity spreads across the nurse’s face. “You’re 200 over 100!” she says, flicking and reflicking the gauge with her finger. “This may be a world record. Have you ever had a cholesterol count?”
 
“Cholesterol!” Hardy harrumphs. “Lady, with blood pressure this high, what’s the difference?”
 
Hardy and Laugeni were in New Haven for the Fatty Open, an annual celebration of golf and gluttony at which Big Bertha could be a groupie. The one-day, two-ball, four-player scramble is perhaps the only sporting event with a weight minimum: Entrants are penalized 25 cents for every pound they come in under 250.
 
Before play began, each of the 88 golfers was required to sit on a meat scale rigged to a forklift. Hardy, Laugeni, and the rest of their foursome didn’t wind up owing a penny. In fact, they had a quarter-ton of breathing room—in their case, heavy breathing room.
 
Weighing in at 1,520 pounds, they took the prize for total heft (each of them was awarded a 50-pound block of butter, a 24-pack of toilet paper, and a chocolate chip cookie the size of a manhole cover) as easily as Hardy took the prize for highest blood pressure (10 pounds of bacon and a George Foreman grill. Hardy was only modestly miffed that the grill didn’t come with a car adapter).
 
“I’ll never get to be the fattest golfer in the Fatty Open,” groused 265-pounder Mike Guerra. “Hardy makes me look like a pencil neck.”
 
Called Hardware during his days as a defensive tackle at Ole Miss, Hardy is a veritable Victoria Falls of flab. The energy broker’s gut is so vast that you could hide Oliver Hardy in his navel. Compared to him, ex-offensive tackle Laugeni, who overheated so often at Holy Cross that he was dubbed The Radiator, is a mere cascade.
 
The weight of the quartet’s other two members—315-pound Brian “The Happy Tuna” Marcucio and 285-pound Wayne “Cracker” Ritzy—barely equaled that of Hardy’s appendages. “It’s flattering to be part of this group,” said Marcucio while posing for a team photo. “This is the first picture ever taken of me in which I didn’t have to try to look thin.”
 
The remainder of the Fatty field was larded with plump plumbers, stout salesmen, portly private eyes, roundish restaurateurs, fleshy florists, and one overnourished undertaker. “We need an undertaker on-site,” said Dave Horton, the club’s chubby chef. “Just in case.”
 
Horton came up with the idea for the Fatty Open in 1997. He was out on the links when one of his golfing buddies said: “Will you look at all the porkers out here!”
 
“You know, you’re right,” said Horton. “Let’s have a tournament for them.”
 
Displaying the perseverance of his namesake from the Dr. Seuss classic, Horton somehow cajoled the directors of the renowned 80-year-old club into hosting the fatfest. The proceeds help fund research for a Yale-New Haven Hospital study of—what else?—eating disorders.
 
“It’s less a tournament than a tailgate,” Horton says. “A bunch of large players hacking around, feasting all day, having fun. It’s not really about golf. It’s about food.”
 
Horton provides lots of it: Besides a buffet lunch and dinner, each golfer is entitled to a gift bag that includes a Slim Jim, Oreos, and a pack of Rolaids. Snack bars at the 9th and 13th holes are stocked with candy, cookies, chips, and beer. Barbecued franks and burgers await players at the 3rd hole, where hitting closest to the buffet table (about a 265-yard drive) gets you a microwave oven. (In the event of a tie, the ball closest to the mayonnaise wins. Last year, Ritzy claimed the prize after his ball landed in a hot dog roll.)
 
Sadly, not one of the gorging golfers was female. Horton had hoped for a women’s division, but so far, he hasn’t had a single taker. “Women get a little nutty about their weight,” he reasons. “When guys get big and fat and sloppy, they don’t care.”
 
Laugeni is living proof. Polishing off the “Please See Fatty, Page B-2 Porterhouse Steak” at Don Shula’s Restaurant in Miami Beach earned him a spot in the 64-ouncer Hall of Fame. Tears welled up in Laugeni’s eyes when he recalled the Zen-like night in college when he became “at one” with 12 lobsters, 72 jumbo shrimp, 14 eight-ounce steaks, two slices of prime rib (“not slabs—you know, thin”), a pineapple, and three bottles of wine. “My roommate watched me in awe,” he said. “Then he went into the bathroom and threw up.”
 
These days, Laugeni watches what he eats. It’s not that he eats any less, mind you; he just watches it. And it was hard not to stare at him tooling around the course in his cart while he clutched two wieners, three packs of Twizzlers, six bags of M&M’s, and a Diet Coke.