GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

I was first attracted to the sport of golf during the summer of 1971, when I found Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino and an amateur named Jim Simons riveting theater on ABC-TV’s grainy images from Merion Golf Club in the U.S. Open. My dad bought me some clubs, and I tried to teach myself the game from some stupid and dangerous cover story in Golf Digest called “Square to Square,” which is perhaps why it took nearly a decade for golf to supplant my seasonal devotion to football, basketball and baseball. When I ventured into the newspaper business in 1979 and found the golf beat among my domains, the love affair was ignited. The more I wrote, the more I played. The more I played, the more I wrote.

My romance with golf has evolved over four-plus decades of writing and playing, of course with the requisite to-and-fro cycles. As a Spanish playwright once mused, “When love is not madness, it is not love.” I have posted sweet scores and nasty numbers. I have met saints and scoundrels. I have discovered “it” — whatever it might be on a given day — and have at other times been rendered clueless. But the tryst continues unabated.

Now spring is upon us once again. The fairways are green and taut. The sun lingers well into the evening, inviting that golden hour nine holes. It’s time to sweat again walking up that fairway on the back nine, to remember all the reasons we’re smitten with golf.

Today I love the sport because of the number at the end of the round. I am what my scorecard says I am. I am a 78. Or a 92. Period. If I played golf on the PGA Tour, I’d post my score and bolt. No talking to the media. The number says it all. Which is why I run for the hills when I casually ask, “How’s your golf game?” and the guy wants to take me hole-by-hole. And I love knowing, whatever my score says I am today, I can be something better tomorrow.

I love tinkering on the practice range — long thumb or short thumb? Flared feet or square? Good connection at the top. Dead hands with the wedges. Get the toe of the club through the ball. Good posture (flat back, not rounded). Follow the shot with the body.

I love lugging my bag around an old Donald Ross golf course — Mid Pines in Southern Pines, Hope Valley in Durham, Forsyth in Winston-Salem, Biltmore Forest in Asheville, Cape Fear in Wilmington, among them. I love the compactness, the quirky and smallish greens, the fairway undulations, the classic old homes lining the fairways. I love to see these heirlooms are being well taken care of by a strong greens chairman who knows the benefit of cutting down some trees. You want healthy grass? Give it some air and some light.

I love the outliers in golf — Pete Dye, bunker rakes with wooden tines, poa annua greens, courses with nothing more than a simple mark at 100, 150 and 200 yards, clubs that do not have a painting of a guy in a red coat hanging on a wall, small scorecards of uncoated card stock that fit easily into your pocket. And I know the kids need the work and mean well, but I really love it when I drive up to a golf course and am left alone to gather my clubs, shoes and accouterments at my own leisurely pace.

I love the quirks of golf course architecture. Seth Raynor had his squared-off edges on some greens, spines running through others and his signature holes like Alps, Redan, Road, Short, Cape, Biarritz and Punchbowl. Mike Strantz had his blind shots, right angles, sand pits, berms and ridges. Perry Maxwell had his dramatic rolling greens like the gems found today at Old Town Club in Winston-Salem. And Tom Fazio has his knack of unveiling a golf course with everything properly outfitted in cashmere and pearls. As one client, William McKee of Cashiers, has said: “There’s nothing loud, just soft, rolling, curving lines. Tom simply has this uncanny ability to create courses that have an evolved appearance, courses with instant patina.”

And God do I love going to the British Isles to play golf. There is the drive north to Dornoch and the deranged Scottish skies, sunny to the left, stormy to the right. There are the trophy courses, Ballybunion and St. Andrews and Turnberry, but there are the hidden gems, Enniscrone and Ballyliffin in northwest Ireland, the Lahinch Old Course farther south, and the northeast corner of Scotland with Nairn and Brora.

I love the literature of the game, especially with Charles Price commiserating about the old days in Pinehurst, Dan Jenkins recreating the glory days at Goat Hills and P.G. Wodehouse with another side-splitting work of fiction. I love ducking into the Old Sport & Gallery in the village of Pinehurst and rifling through the collectibles and vintage books, of rounding the corner to the Old Golf Shop and marveling at the reproductions of famous golf paintings — a watercolor of the ninth tee at Hoylake, Old Tom Morris in front of his golf shop at St. Andrews, golfers enjoying the game on a rudimentary course beneath Edinburgh Castle.

I love the peach cobbler and pimento cheese at Augusta National, the stovies at St. Andrews, the clam chowder at Pine Lakes in Myrtle Beach, the omelets cooked to order at The Carolina, the ice cream sandwiches at the turn at Eagle Point in Wilmington and the BBQ chicken wraps at Old Chatham in Durham.

And boy do I love the Zone, when I find it. You know that 10-foot putt is bottoms, you pick a fairway stripe off the tee and nail it, your mind is so pure and uncluttered and that click at impact so sweet and soft. I once shot near-par with two swing thoughts: Stop (at the top) and GO!

I love the friends I’ve made, the people I’ve met in golf. I lament that colorful personalities like Harvie Ward, Billy Joe Patton and Bill Campbell have long departed. As Campbell, a gentleman’s gentlemen in the game, so aptly noted, “In golf there are no strangers, only friends we have not yet met.”

And of course I love golf because of Pinehurst. There’s nothing quite like the rocking chairs at The Carolina, the stroll from the old hotel past Ailsa House, Beacon House, Heart Pine House and Little House to the golf courses. The spires of The Village Chapel loom above us all, serenading us with hymns throughout the day. The No. 2 course at sunrise is quite sublime: an orange orb flashing behind the third green, for example, through the trees separating the fourth and fifth holes, bathing the convex putting surface and all the dips and hollows around it in blissful light and shadows. Mist hangs in the air. Woodpeckers chuck away in the pine forests.

Scottish golf pro Tommy Armour felt the love many decades ago: “I have seen strangers, jaded and dull, come to Pinehurst and after a few days be changed into entirely delightful fellows.”

There’s a lot to love in that sentiment.