I started golfing in my early 30s. I will leave it to the you, esteemed reader, to calculate how long ago that was. In retrospect one of the primary reasons I began this maldito sport was to have a mutual activity to do with my father. Never a dear or cherished relationship it was improving ever so slightly in this period.
If you know anything about golf you know two very important things. First, it can be and frequently is very addicting. Secondly, it is not an inexpensive hobby. At this juncture of my life, money, let us say, was not growing on trees, quite the opposite. One way to mitigate my golf expenses was to patronize suboptimal golf courses.
I was living in Arkansas and then Oklahoma in this period. Especially in Oklahoma and some in Arkansas there is a category of golf course ever so affectionately colloquially termed cow pasture golf. I imagine they are common in Texas too. I will admit to having played a few in Mississippi and Tennessee .
Picture this, a good ole boy has a piece of land. The land is basically worthless as farm land, so he has been trying to run cattle on a red clay desert or a sumac covered rock pile. After a while he realizes that he is not really making any money doing this. The reality being that without his wife’s day job they could not stay on the land trying to ranch.
That is when the brainstorm hits him. “I can build a golf course on the back 80,” he says to himself, then his wife, and finally his banker. He then proceeds to place 9 or 18 greens in random locations, 9 or 18 of what can loosely be called tee boxes even more randomly. He smooths out the edges of the two or three stock ponds on the property, and designates them as water hazards. He then remembers hearing something about routing and golf. He jumps on his tractor with the mower attached, and attempts to mow fairways between tee boxes and greens, valiantly endeavoring to not make those seem like a random process. He finally ends up by repairing the barbwire fence so the bull from the other 80 won’t wander the back nine. Voilà, a golf course has magically appeared. There my friends, you have cow pasture golf at its finest. And a many and a many times have I played golf on these illustrious tracts.
I would not go as far as to say the two sister golf courses I play most often in the St. Louis metro area are cow pasture golf, but at times it feels like they are not far from it. Generally the greens a very good. Although last year, for the first time that I remember, they had some issues with them. Whether climate, lack of help or both, I don’t know. Summer and fall the fairways are usually reasonably nice. The tee boxes are awful, but that seems to be a common problem at public courses.
However, between the management’s approach to golf course maintenance and the majority Southern Illinois clientele, Hoosier/Redneck golf course is what comes to mind. The picture above sums up the situation. There really are trash receptacles on the course at most tee boxes, but just dropping your Miller Lite can in the fairway is easier. The course’s raking machine was last in this bunker…when? Heaven forbid one of the patrons would grab the rake after splashing on this beach of construction grade sand.
Oh well, its reasonably inexpensive, and with my Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde golf game, it is better than I deserve.
And so it goes.