Scott Dow

I was born in 1959, growing up about 25 west of lower Manhattan in Madison Borough, an awesome place to grow up. Early on, I developed a great love of sports and competition but my first love was baseball, a sport I played competitively in high school, at Bucknell University and right on through my 20s and into his 30s in men’s leagues like the Morris County Majors and the Met League. Now, at an older age, my sporting loves have been reduced to golf, curling and basketball.Graduating from Bucknell with a BSME in the requisite 4 years in 1981, I embarked on an entirely undistinguished engineering career until, around 1990, I stumbled across the field of vibration analysis on machinery. Having found something that piqued my interest, by 1993 I was the co-owner of a small business that specialized in the technology. I developed training materials and classes so unique and effective that they resulted in invitations to deliver them in exotic locales such as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and England. Teaching is something I love and I remain active as a senior instructor for the Mobius Institute, the world’s leading vibration training organization.Although my engineer’s brain, governed by logic and reason, remains an inescapable part of who I am, I’m even more governed by my creative and fun-loving sides. My training classes were set up as games that force students to think their way through challenging problems while illustrating important aspects of a complex technology. I also love music, having played guitar for more than 20 years, and writing. The Flem Cup will, in all likelihood, be the only book I ever write. It is my memoir of the story behind an extraordinary golf trip that ran from 2001-2005 but it is far more than just that. It is a story that I was blessed to be an integral part of, a story that has become even more remarkable in hindsight due to the numerous sub-plots running through the event.There is the story of my friend, Ian Jennings, the most remarkable man I ever knew. There was the golf itself, intensely competitive and hard fought each and every year. There were the hilarious antics surrounding the event every year, antics like the drink buying scandal, the hot sauce incident and many more. There was the creation of a whimsical “news” website that became the source of so many hilarious stories, real and imagined, over the years. There was my own story, a story of someone who looked fine to the world but was lost on the inside. Finally, there was the story of a great friend who showed me the way to hope and redemption in a world of loss and sadness. So the Flem Cup is a truly remarkable story and it has been my great privilege to be the one to write it. Going through it changed my life and I hope that in some way, great or small, reading it may change yours.