Now wait just a gorse-pickin' minute!
This course of your soul needn't be your home course! It needn't be one you play often! It needn't be in your own hemisphere!
For Dave Schmidt, it's Rye! No need for it to be any other. His need to travel to Rye (along with the approach thereto) is, it seems to me, perfectly parallel to Darwin's travels to Aberdovey; his affection for Rye, spiritually kin to Darwin's unreasoning fondness for Aberdovey. It matters not one whit if Shivas is ever a Captain (or even a Member) there. That's the course his soul loves best!
(Thanks, Golf2002, for those terrific pictures of Aberdovey. I like them all, a lot, but especially the one with the railroad tracks in the foreground, the two greens in the middleground, and the sea in the background; I like that one so much that I've made it, at least temporarily, my computer "wallpaper," replacing a picture of the magnificent vista provided by Nos. 17 and 18 at Sand Hills.)
For Tom I, it's Malone G.C. -- where he has spent but a week of his life! It's not Merion, and it's not Pine Valley, and it's not even Gulph Mills. And I say: Beautiful, Tom I! Even though my presence would have wrecked your solitude (solitude being a beautiful thing on a golf course, especially at dawn or dusk), I'd love to have been there with you on that empty course, learning to love the bounces.
And as for me? It's one of three courses, none of which I've played enough -- in enough conditions, at enough stages of my life, with enough different sorts of people -- to know for sure that it's my soulmate. One (Sand Hills), I've played for two days in 1996; one (North Berwick), I've played only one round, in the late fall of 1999; and one (Hazeltine), I've played just once since high school, when I played it pretty regularly (and quite cluelessly; this was long before the game became an obsession for me).
Sand Hills and North Berwick are wonderful golf courses in spectacular settings. You all know that. I loved Sand Hills' being in the middle of nowhere; I loved North Berwick's being in the middle of town -- or even more than that: BEING, it seemed, both the physical and the spiritual center of town. (I'm delighted to hear, from Brian Phillips, that the club's friendliness is a habit; that I didn't just get lucky the day I was there. I wish I'd known to say hi to Sam the Starter -- though he may not have been there that day; I was one of a very few players on the course, on a beautiful November Sunday.) Hazeltine, by contrast, is a fine, fine golf course, on wonderful rolling farmland, under those wide Midwestern skies -- not spectacular, I suppose, speaking as objectively as possible, but spectacularly representative of the part of the world that's my my part of the world: big, open, honest, straightforward, unpretentious. I've spent 21 wonderful long dawn-to-past-dusk summer days at Hazeltine (1970 and 1991 Opens, 2002 PGA), walking the course and watching the best in the world show how the game can be played. And after all three tournaments, I hung out there as long as they'd let me, this past summer walking the holes one last time, feeling bereft -- as though I were leaving home -- and aching to play the course again, just the way Dave Schmidt ached to play the forbidden Medinah.