This is a fun topic. I grew up thinking golf was a dumb game for old men and sissies that couldn’t play other sports. Ironically, I spent a lot of my summer days around a golf course. My parents were members of a private club down in a 500 foot deep rugged canyon. There were beautiful pristine springs, crystal clear spring-fed lakes, no housing, countless wild overgrown acres surrounding the golf course, a major river beside it, and wildlife everywhere. We (my best friend and I) hunted, fished, shot the rapids on our backsides, and had thousands of adventures. At one point we even had a secret “fort” hidden in a dense thicket of brambles, trees, rocks, and streams where we could hide from the crusty head pro who was always trying to catch us “shooting” the forbidden rapids. We stayed overnight there many times, cooking on an open fire the fish and crayfish that we caught. We only ventured near the clubhouse if we were starving for a hot dog or burger. We only went on the course to play tricks on the golfers—the ole snake in the cup for ladies day sort of thing. Later on, we took girlfriends skinny dipping and explored a new side of nature. I loved the place and still do as I live across the river from there today.
So what did I learn about gca from my home course? That golf can accommodate a wonderful romp through a natural world, an outdoor sport played in all elements, that courses are home to all manner of critters, and that late at night putting greens can serve some delightful pursuits. I almost never play a round of golf without pausing to take in the beauty of the landscape and remember in some fashion the freedom of those days.
Sometimes I think that I got into gca precisely because I thought it was a stupid game for my first 40 years. Once I started playing I loved it, of course, so I gravitated to the literature, the history, and the design books almost as if I needed to find an intellectual justification for being addicted to such a stupid game. Given the effort, thought, and intellectual aerobic displays that many on this site put into their posts, it would seem like we’re here to seek out other like-minded lunatics and that the study of golf architecture is just an excuse to justify a passion that we’d not find reasonable in other areas of our lives. Once I attended a discussion group at a Harvard reunion where we were asked what we did with our free time away from work. I said that I was on my way back from spending three weeks playing golf in Scotland. The looks on the faces around me could not have been more shocked than if I had said that I was a HIV positive serial rapist. Imagine if I told them that I had played 60 rounds of golf that year.
I took a break from this post to walk over and have a drink with a couple of golfers in the clubhouse (time to end this). There must have been 60 high school kids on the practice tee and putting green working on their games. We have three high school teams here this year. What a cool sight after a long winter.