Loudest pants at Olympics have Sonoma connection

<p>These Olympics have been golden for the Sonoma-based maker of the wacky pants that helped Norway's curling team stand out from the competition.</p><p>“Our business doubled,” said 20-year Sonoma resident Scott “Woody” Woodworth, the founder of Loudmouth Golf. His favorite scene from the Vancouver Games is of the handsome Norwegian curlers doing their thing in his company's audacious, colorful pants.</p><p>Woody was working as a graphics designer and golfing on the side when it occurred to him in 2000 that since knickers and shocking argyle socks had migrated from the greens, golf duds had become awfully dull.</p><p>“Golf was supposed to be played in loud clothing,” he said. “Isn't that the joke?”</p><p>So 11 years ago he found a lovely fabric — light blue, with pictures of Bugs Bunny and his Looney Tunes buddies in a golf cart. He had a pair of pants made and was giddy about wearing them onto the links.</p><p>“People came up to me all the time, asking me where I got them.” There were also, he admits, “other guys who afraid to look at me.”</p><p>Spotting a business opportunity, he and some partners created Loudmouth Golf and began turning out retro golf garb so brilliant it can hurt to look at. The duds were made first in California but now the production happens — where else? — in China.</p><p>The enterprise (loudmouthgolf.com) has done extremely well, having scored its first hole-in-one when pro golfer John Daly began sporting its designs. </p><p>Woody didn't know his firm's pants were going to to the Olympics until the office received a panicked call from the Norwegian curling team. One player's Loudmouth Golf trousers didn't fit and he needed another pair shipped to Vancouver post haste.</p><p>Since the team first took to the ice in their startling argyle-patterned pants, Woody's creations have been on the Today Show and all over the Internet.</p><p>He still likes golf, especially golf played in pants that scream. But suddenly Woody loves curling.</p><p>PIZZA BOX PERFECTION: Environmental-studies teacher Stefan Klakovich stepped into the Mombo's Pizza in Sebastopol and gaped in starstuck disbelief.</p><p>He'd just been talking to his Windsor High students about the colossal assortment of things Americans throw away every day — including a boggling number of cardboard pizza boxes.</p><p>And there was a reusable, plastic pizza box. Mombo's owner Fred Poulos just became the first North Bay pizza-maker to offer them.</p><p>Fred will sell the nifty, washable boxes for $10 at his Sebastopol and Santa Rosa restaurants, and he'll give the people who use them a $1 discount on every future pie.</p><p>With this, we have lived to see the perfecting, environmentally speaking, of the take-out pizza.</p><p>SCHOOL OF LIFE: Folks who pay a little something to groove to the music and taste the “fabulous Sonoma County comfort food” at a benefit Saturday for Sebastopol's Nonesuch School will help kids get into the funky and fascinated country school — and out.</p><p>Friends of Nonesuch (www.nonesuchschool.org) say money from the event at Sebastopol's Masonic Center will allow low-income kids to enroll and also assist efforts by students to venture out and be lend a hand to a world that needs it.</p><p>Nonesuch kids have worked in New Orleans more than once since Katrina and they want to go again.</p><p>LIGHTS AND CAMERAS will run hot at Memorial Hospital today as the American Heart Association tapes personal accounts of women affected by heart attack or stroke.</p><p>If you've got such a tale to tell, call 227-6828 to see if you arrange to be filmed at the Heart & Vascular Institute between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. Who knows, your story from the heart might make it onto TV.</p><p>Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.</p>