Keeping calligraphy alive

Forgive Paul Pope if he seems a little batty. He’s been sniffing marker fumes for the past 26 years.

That’s because Pope is a PGA Tour calligrapher.

Through the advent of digital scoreboards and bionic equipment, golf calligraphers are one of the traditional aspects that have remained part of the game.

It wasn’t difficult to spot Pope, who provided scores to the public during the Toshiba Classic at Newport Beach Country Club.

His artist’s canvas, long, yellow sheets of paper tacked to a wall of white plywood, sat outside the main entrance tents, to the left, just before the putting green.

Pope was the tall man in half-rim glasses Classic-goers saw busily filling in scores at the big, brightly-colored board.

The bright colors are Pope’s trademark, something he learned from Curtis Strange’s stepfather, who used to be a golf calligrapher as well.

“I look at the scoreboard as a blank canvas,” Pope said. “When you start out, it’s blank, and then you start to color it in. I’ll write, probably 22,000 numbers this week alone.”

He designed the main scoreboard, one of only two paper boards on the premises that had the name and score of every player in the Toshiba Classic. It shows every golfer’s score on each hole — every eagle, birdie, and bogey, and sometimes, though not this weekend, the occasional ace.

The electric scoreboards which were scattered across the course only show the top 15 players. And the information is limited to that particular day.

“I put pertinent information up there that the public, players, caddies, can relate to,” Pope said. “This is the information that the everyday public doesn’t see. It’s on a computer. You can get it on the Internet, but when you’re here at the tournament, this is the only board that lists all the players. ... A person can come up here, go right to the Fs, and see what Fred Funk shot for the past two days.”

It’s no small task. Writing out the names of every golfer, from Mitch Adcock to Fuzzy Zoeller, in his modified Old English style, took Pope four hours of painstaking work. He lined the black marker lettering with a subtle, but not imperceptible, striping of gold ink for the final touch.

There are 10 full-time tour calligraphers spread out across the country, and Pope’s been working for the tour for 13 years. Some practice their art with paint brushes. Others use chalk. Pope’s always stuck with markers.

With all that writing, Pope has become accustomed to the marker fumes, which are so strong they even waft off the board when all his markers are capped.

“You don’t understand, honey,” Pope said with a laugh. “It’s a legal high.”

There’s no white-out for calligraphers, and certainly no backspace button.

That’s not to say they don’t make mistakes.

They do.

“It’s called cut and paste,” Pope said. “You’ll never be able to tell a mistake out there. There’s mistakes up there. You just can’t see them. We cut out a strip and glue it over the mistakes.”

In addition to their board responsibilities, tour calligraphers are also the ones who figure out the next day’s pairings. At the end of each day, there’s a rush to get the last results up, then figure out who’s in what group.

Pope has help. This weekend, Lisa Dallendorfer, a former Capistrano Unified School District teacher, drew outlines in pencil for Pope to fill.

But he’s the only one with the ink.

Pope carries about $2,500 worth of markers in a tattered metal briefcase he’s had since 1994, when he first started doing calligraphy for the tour.

Since he’s an independent contractor, his supplies, from the $3 Sharpies to the funny-looking rectangular markers he orders from Germany for $15 apiece, are a tax write-off.

Some of them are fat, round cylinders thicker than your thumb. The German markers from Holbein Artist’s and Designer’s Materials which sport 1 1/2 -inch wide nibs, have plastic gray rectangular casings, about four inches long. They’re refillable, and Pope drags around stained boxes of ink, too.

The whole shebang comes with him, through every security line at every airport, as a carry-on.

“I can lose my clothes,” Pope said. “I can buy new clothes. But I can’t lose these.”

SORAYA NADIA McDONALD may be reached at (714) 966-4613 or at soraya.mcdonald@latimes.com.