Utah: Where It Started

The beginning of a game I thought shouldn’t be that hard.

I didn’t grow up playing golf.

Actually, I didn’t grow up around golf at all. I don’t remember knowing anyone who played. Nobody in my family belonged to a country club. We didn’t watch the Masters. There wasn’t a golf club anywhere in or around our house.

I was a basketball and football kid.

At 6’4″, I played offensive and defensive line in high school, although I was probably too skinny for either and spent a fair amount of time getting beat up by bigger guys during two-a-days. Eventually I decided basketball was a better idea.

I played basketball all through high school, worked pretty hard at it and got good enough that, after I got to college, I attempted to walk on to the basketball team at the D-1 school I attended. I survived several days of tryout scrimmages in the Marriott Center and even managed a few pretty nasty dunks.

I did not make the team.

In the summer of 1992, I had not yet turned 22. I was back in Provo and needed a PE credit.

My friend John suggested a golf class that fit our schedules.

John and I had been friends since our freshman year. He was in the accounting/business program and is still probably the smartest guy I know. Neither of us really knew how to play golf, but his dad had played a little and John had the idea that golf might be useful someday in business.

That seemed plausible to me.

It also didn’t look that hard.

I mean, the ball is just sitting there.

Nobody is guarding you. Nobody is trying to tackle you. You don’t have to come off a pick, remember a motion offense or figure out whether the guy across from you is about to run you over. There aren’t even any teammates to mess things up.

It’s just you and a little white ball that isn’t moving.

How hard could that be?

As it turns out, pretty hard.

Our golf class was taught on the BYU football practice field by Dean Wilson. He was on the golf team at the time and later played professionally for years, eventually winning on the PGA Tour. So I guess I can’t blame the quality of the instruction for my general ineptitude with a golf club.

I whiffed. I topped balls. I hit them sideways. Sometimes I made solid contact and had no idea why or how.

But I was hooked.

I was working graveyard shifts at a gas station and early mornings cleaning locker rooms in the PE building, and I eventually saved enough money to buy a cheap set of Wilson golf clubs at Walmart.

They weren’t great clubs. Unless you found the sweet spot, which I didn’t do very often, hitting them could feel a little like hitting a rock with another rock.

The golf balls didn’t help.

I couldn’t afford to lose new balls at the rate I was losing them, so a significant percentage of my early inventory consisted of balls I found. There were a lot of Top Flites in those days. We called them Rock Flights.

Sabrina and I were dating at the time, and somehow she approved of this developing interest. Her dad had played a little golf and she didn’t mind as long as I didn’t get carried away.  Have I ever gotten carried away? Possibly.

But she is still my biggest fan and my favorite companion on our trips to see great golf played in amazing places. Back then, she even went with me at night to walk the golf course near our little house looking for lost golf balls.

As with everything else she tries, she got really good at finding them…more golf for me.

This is perhaps not the traditional country-club introduction to the game.

East Bay

For our PE class, we had to play several nine-hole rounds to get an A. Most of mine were at East Bay Golf Course in Provo, the course now known as Timpanogos Golf Club.

My memories of East Bay are not particularly glamorous.

There was water. A lot of it seemed to attract my golf balls.

There were also a lot of birds, a lot of bird “residue” and a distinctive swampy smell. It wasn’t exactly Augusta National.

I bought a ball retriever.

I used it proudly for several years until someone finally explained to me that carrying a ball retriever wasn’t particularly cool. That retriever definitely paid for itself many times over.

I’m not sure what I shot in those first rounds. I’m also not sure all of my scores would survive a USGA rules committee audit. We tried hard to follow rules we didn’t really understand but that “Coach Dean” had taught us.  I am still learning the rules, and thankfully, they keep changing so we can keep learning them. 

Mostly, I remember losing golf balls.

And then every once in a while, I would hit one.

The One That Got Me

Somewhere in those early days I played Cascade Golf Center in Orem, a course that is gone now.

I remember standing on a par 5 with the Wasatch Mountains in the background. I hit my driver and absolutely crushed it.

At least that’s how I remember it.

The ball took off against the mountains, and for once it did exactly what I thought a golf ball was supposed to do.

It felt amazing.

I’d played other sports most of my life. I knew what it felt like to make a jump shot or throw down a dunk or do something physically exactly the way you intended.

This was different.

There aren’t many feelings in sports quite like hitting a golf ball exactly the way you meant to hit it.

That may have been part of the problem.

Because once you’ve done it once, you start wondering why you can’t do it again.

Next thing you know, you’re a “golfer.”

A Game You Can Play for the Rest of Your Life

My dad never played golf.

He was born in 1929, grew up in a very different time, served in the Air Force, came from an agricultural background, earned a Ph.D. in agricultural economics and worked incredibly hard to provide for six kids.

He was very funny in his own way, but he could also be pretty stern and demanding. I relate perhaps a little too well to the jokes about people from my generation saying, “You can’t hurt my feelings. I held the flashlight for my dad.”

Golf wasn’t something he would ever allow himself to spend time or money doing.

But interestingly, when I started playing, he encouraged it.

He had spent part of his career as a stockbroker, and he told me that a lot of the people he worked with played golf. He knew clients who played. He told me that a lot of business was done on golf courses.

At 22, I didn’t know whether that was true.

It turned out he was mostly right.

Not necessarily because people close many deals standing on the 14th green. But I’ve learned that four-ish hours on a golf course with someone creates a different kind of relationship.

You learn things about people.

You learn how competitive they are. How they react when things go badly. Whether they cheat when nobody is looking. Whether they can laugh at themselves. Whether they’re generous. Whether they’re miserable to be around when they’re losing. Whether they are even more miserable to be around when they are winning.

I’ve always thought one of the better ways to learn who someone really is is to play a round of golf with them.

Golf became a significant part of my career. I played with lawyers and coworkers and executives and customers and vendors. There were trade-show golf events and industry outings. One vendor invited us to a Masters practice round every year for roughly a decade, which explains both the number of rounds I’ve played in South Carolina and the unreasonable amount of Masters paraphernalia in various places around my house.

Over the years there have been golf trips to Bandon Dunes, Kohler, Cabo, Cancun and other places with people who started as business associates and became friends.

My dad understood something about the game he never played before I did.

The People

What he couldn’t have known was how much golf would become connected to the people in my life.

Sabrina has never really become a golfer, although we’ve hit many balls together at ranges and Topgolf, and she has walked courses with me, ridden along, watched golf with me and built vacations around it. Every Christmas Eve since Topgolf opened near us in Arizona, our family has gone together.

Our kids grew up around the game.

When our oldest daughter, Sydney, was about two, we bought her a set of Little Tikes plastic golf clubs. She swung them constantly. She eventually played junior golf and four years of varsity golf in high school. I played in a tournament with her once where the other players somehow decided her name was Cindy. All these years later, I can still call her Cindy and she knows exactly what I mean.  Golf gave me an instant forever inside joke with her.

Ben was a basketball addict, and for years golf lagged behind basketball, volleyball and track. Once, during a break at a basketball tournament in San Diego, we went and played Torrey Pines South.

He now plays whenever he gets the chance. The last round we played before he left for medical school, he beat me straight up for the first time. I was incredibly proud of him. As usual, I was not happy about losing. Those are two different things.

In a couple of weeks, he’s driving from Houston to El Dorado, Arkansas, to meet me at Mystic Creek. If all goes according to plan, Arkansas will become state number 49.

Megan can play too. I still remember her chipping over a creek and into the hole at the little par-3 course near our place in Flagstaff.

And Zach, our youngest, played high-school golf in New Jersey and has also become one of my regular golf buddies. We’ve made trips together to Montana and Missouri, and he and Ben joined me for Kentucky.

Some of my favorite hours with my kids have been spent on golf courses.

Every once in a while, when I’m playing with one of them, I’ll ask:

“Do you know how many times I did this with my dad?”

They all know the answer.

Zero.

I’m not complaining about that. My dad and I had other things.

But I’m glad this is one of the things I have with them.

The $5 Bill

Golf has also given me friends I probably wouldn’t have had otherwise, and more time with friends than I otherwise would have had.

My friend Chris and I played a lot of golf together. One of our trips was in Utah, where we played some spectacular courses around Park City, including Promontory, Tuhaye and Victory Ranch.

We had the time of our lives. I lost one round and was on breakfast duty the next morning. No foreign articles made their way into the omelettes, I promise.

I still have a five-dollar bill that Chris signed after losing a golf bet to me during a round in California.

It was the last round we ever played together. Not long afterward, he unexpectedly got sick. A few months later, he was gone.

I’m really glad we played all those rounds.

And I’m keeping the five bucks.

The Long Game

I didn’t start playing golf because I had some grand plan to play in all 50 states.

That came much later.

Years after that PE class, I was in Louisiana working on a legal matter and found myself with a free afternoon. I brought my clubs and decided to see what golf in Louisiana was like.

Spoiler alert on Louisiana golf…there could be alligators, among other things (you’ll read about that when Louisiana goes up).

By the time I got to Louisiana, I’d probably played golf in nine or ten states, mostly because work or life had taken me there. I started wondering how many I could get.

Then I started looking for continuing legal education programs in states where I hadn’t played. If I had to travel somewhere for work, maybe I could go a day early. If we were taking a road trip, maybe I could find a course along the way. Sometimes I could get two or three states in a few days.

At some point, without really planning it, playing golf in all 50 states became a thing.

Then it became the thing.

This is Chapter 1 because Utah is where it all started.

I’ve now played 51 rounds on 22 different Utah courses. I’ve played inexpensive municipal courses and some remarkable private ones. I’ve played with friends, coworkers and family.

And over the years I’ve figured out something else about why I’ve kept doing it.

Golf has a way of resetting my brain in the most delightful way.

I’m outside. I’m doing something physical instead of looking at a screen. I’m trying to solve a problem that has nothing to do with work. I’m noticing mountains and trees and grass and weather. Sometimes I’m catching up with someone I haven’t seen in years. Sometimes I’m alone.

Either way, for a few hours the assignment is remarkably simple:

Find the little white ball. Hit it again. Try to do it a little better this time.

I’m 56 now. I’ve played somewhere around a thousand rounds of golf. I’ve played the Old Course at St Andrews, the birthplace of the game. I’ve played in 48 states, with number 49 coming soon and only Georgia after that.

If I could tell that 21-year-old kid standing on a football practice field in Provo where that goofy little stationary ball was eventually going to take him, I don’t think he’d believe me.

He’d probably assume wealth was in our future. Golf looked like a rich person’s sport to me back then.

But I do remember hearing something else about golf when I was first learning the game.

Someone told me it was a game you could play for the rest of your life.

That part, it turns out, was true.