I suppose the first is Aurora Hills, a really terrible muni in the Denver suburb where I grew up. Not a good golf course, nor the first place I played, but probably the place I played the most growing up. I remember taking city lessons here and how on Friday mornings we could go out and play the back nine for a buck. I remember my mom dropping off me and my friends here in the morning and we'd play 18, 27, 36, as many holes as we could. It's the site of my first birdie, first hole out (same shot), and first eagle. I had the chance to play a lot of other better courses growing up, but well into high school I was still more than happy to meet a friend at Aurora Hills for a round. I was a course junkie from an early age and I knew this course was terrible in almost every way, but it was golf and I've always been happy to tee it up anytime anywhere.
The next is probably Castle Pines, which I visited as a spectator every year attending the now defunct International PGA Tour stop. This is a Nicklaus design in the foothills with huge elevation changes and waterfalls and no shame in their effort to emulate Augusta. As a kid, this was the best example to me of what a great golf course was--exclusive, hyper conditioned, hard, gaudy. In a few years I would come to reject almost all of that as 'good' in any way, perhaps especially including the mid-80's style of Nicklaus design.
In college in Tucson, I spent a summer playing a ton of rounds at a muni called El Rio. Built as a private club by Billy Bell in the late 20s and then re-worked by Tillinghast in the 30s (so they say--the Tillinghast society makes no mention of it) and an early site of the Tucson Open, by the time I was playing there it was a beat up maybe near death muni that was in the wrong part of town and on the wrong side of history. It's a short course, not well preserved, but with a nice layout on a small site and the holes have movement. They also have, almost universally, tiny little crowned greens and this is what led me to discover the real pleasures of golf on firm ground. I was playing here over a Tucson summer, usually on a walking rate of $4 for rounds after 4pm. In early summer that course was a s dry as it gets and holding a tony crowned green with any kind of lofted shot was absolutely impossible. You could bomb drives but miss the green even with a "good" wedge shot from inside 100 yards. So I had to learn to bounce it in, and not just bounce it in, but really judge where to land it, assess how much the hill in front might kill it, all that. It was a blast. Then the monsoons hit and suddenly the course was wet enough that you could stop your ball easily. And suddenly, even though I was scoring better (a late summer round here was the first time I shot in the 60s), it wasn't nearly as much fun. It would still be a few years before I'd make it up to Phoenix and see, via Talking Stick, how great a course can be playing firm when it's really designed for it.
Finally, I have to put out Pebble Beach. I think I visited Pebble four times before playing it. A couple times on vacation, just stopping to look at it--my dad had turned me on to golf and bless her heart my mom didn't complain too much if large portions of our vacations were devoted to just stopping in at golf courses ... just to look, maybe get a scorecard or a yardage book. I also got to see the 2000 US Open there. My dad was slated to go--I was back in Colorado for the summer, home from college--as a work deal and at the last minute someone dropped out and he somehow pulled strings to get me to come along. I literally left in the middle of a work shift to go pack and get to the airport. That was the first time I walked the course. It was also on that trip that I first said to myself, "I have to play here with my dad someday." And that was just one of those thoughts that lives in the back of your head. I was serious about it, but because the idea had first occurred to me in college when it was a complete impossibility, it sort of stayed like that, this idea of a thing I definitely intended to do someday, but without any realistic plan of when or how it was going to happen. Fast forward many years later, my dad is retired at 63 and has a heart attack. Little more than a year after my son, his first grandchild, was born. He had a triple bypass and made it through, but it was horrifying. That was late January 2011 (I was watching the Torrey Pines tournament when mom called with the news.) A year later I'm watching the tournament at Pebble and the thought of how I've always wanted to play there passes through my head and this time it kinda stuck. The memory of what my dad had gone through was fresh, because we were right around a year out from it. It really hit home--someday is something that can stop being a possibility. The next day at work I started actually looking at what it would really cost to go to Pebble, stay at the resort, play a couple times. And, yeah, it was a hell of a lot of money, but it was feasible. I talked to my wife, I talked to my mom, and pretty soon we were all in. And so in July 2012, the week he turned 65, I took my parents (and my wife and son) to Pebble Beach and played Spyglass and Pebble with my dad.