Summer, 2007. I had spent the last two semesters studying abroad in Vietnam and wondering what exactly I wanted to do with my life. In hindsight, the hard-fought answer that I arrived at, live in the mountains and work at a golf course, is a stunning example of both the stunning mental clarity and the stunning naivety of a 21-year-old.
Mental clarity, can you imagine a better life? Naivety, probably for a twenty-one-year-old who lives in Boulder for the rest of the year. The second revelation, that no one was my age and there was nothing to do at night, would come LONG after I wrote an extremely earnest letter to Mary Moynihan, general manager of Pole Creek, an all-world municipal golf facility in Tabernash, Colorado.
Mary hired me to be a cart boy. Her son, Michael, was two years younger than me (a rising sophomore at CU Boulder) and worked in the shop. Early in my tenure at Pole Creek, like my second or third day on the job, I went to play golf after I clocked out. Michael met me on the first tee and asked if he could join.
This was in 2008, before golf became popular with 18-21-year-olds. I was three years removed from my high school glory days and probably had a double-digit handicap, but at that point, I was honestly the best player I knew. When I say that point, I’m using the phrase literally to mean that exact moment in time, because as soon as Mike hit the ball off the first tee, I knew that someone was better than me at golf.
Mike is 6’2” but he liked to joke that his personality made him seem shorter. Over the last 16 years, he has filled in, and found a career in academia, where his intellectual curiosity doesn’t put him at odds with everyone in the freshman class (presumably). He stopped making the joke. But in 2008, Mike probably weighed 135 pounds. He was very into golf and very into computers. Based on that, at least the first time I met Mike, his personality made him seem like he was 3 feet tall.
His golf swing, from takeaway to followthrough, was perfect. I would later learn that Mike grew up playing junior golf. He also grew over a foot in his senior year of high school. At 5’2” and presumably less than 135, perfect mechanics kept him in contention at junior tournaments. Those mechanics didn’t change post-senior year growth spurt.
Mary started working at Pole Creek before Mike was born, so my new friend had grown up with a club in his hands, and grown at a course where the culture was large wagers on scratch games played from the tips. The summer I learned that I was terrible at golf, I also learned how to press bets. It was, to say the least, a formative year in my life.
That was also the summer I made my best friend. And I need to be honest here; if I had known that Mike and I would be lifelong best buddies, I would have written a less earnest letter to Mary. She will never let me forget that letter.
Outside of that, the friendship has been mostly smooth sailing. Two guys, one good at golf (him), one bad at golf (me), building a friendship centered around net games (a necessity) and the idea that when you’re gambling on a golf course, a player has the DIVINE right to double the bets they are losing.
I’m not joking when I call our friendship smooth sailing, but life outside of the friendship wasn’t. My post-college years were full of immense personal and professional strife. Personally, the breakup with my college girlfriend was long and GRUESOME. Professionally, financial struggles led me to drop out of a teacher credentialing program. I was laid off from a sales job, then tried my hand at digital marketing, where I was bored to the point of actual tears.
I chucked it all for a return to the golf industry, where I made the mistake of hiring Mike. (The mistake stemmed from my skills as a leader. Mike is an all-world cartboy.) I also took film classes at a community college.
Towards the end of the certificate program, I gambled big (six-figure bet) on an MFA in television production. Six years later, I’m still waiting to see if I rolled a 2 or a 12, but at this point, it feels like my best-case scenario for my grad school pass-line bet is a push.
I work to live. My job, a direct sales role at a software company, gives me the flexibility to spend a lot of time with my kids. They are the light of my life. I started dating my now wife 10 years ago. I’m still madly in love with her. Personally, I am thriving. Professionally, I am at peace.
Mike’s career path, a master’s degree at a prestigious college, a PhD from an even more prestigious college, a professorship at a highly regarded state university, was more linear than mine. (I’m not saying it was easier, academia is a bloodbath.)
His partner is wonderful. I’ve been to a lot of weddings, theirs was the only one where I cried. My wedding was beautiful. There was also a point, maybe 15 months into the 17 months that we spent planning it, where my then fiance told me earnestly that she was never going to talk to her mother again. My own mother pointedly disinvited my aunt after save-the-dates went out. I was copied on the email, subject line, (as you would imagine): DO NOT SAVE THE DATE.
At their wedding, it was very clear that they were doing this themselves, and for themselves, for no other reason than they were in love. I can tell you definitively that mother-daughter shouting matches were held to a minimum. There wasn’t a spreadsheet for guests and tables where names were added and deleted, then infinitely rearranged. Murder was not contemplated when the grade of shrimp was printed on the draft of a menu.
When Mike moved to London, but lapsed into a loose golf retirement that continued into the early part of his PhD program. At some point, he started playing again. Which led to an annual membership at a charming course where the pump house was a fire truck. This course was built and maintained by someone who clearly loved working with the land and also, CLEARLY, had never played golf.
We nicknamed the course Fire Truck Hills. I hit the ball hard, and relatively straight, but, not very far. When I played FTH with Mike, he would give me explicit instructions, hit the ball exactly here and hit it HARD. That’s a tall order, but there were times when I felt up to the task, and on a few shots I felt like I executed. On those shots, Mike would track the ball, then look over and tell me, “that’s not hard enough.”
Sure enough, 240 and dead straight would leave me an impossibly long shot from an unfathomable angle. I was often going 7-iron, 7-iron, two-putt bogey. Mike, was not.
For the final years of his PhD program, Mike upgraded his club. Robert Trent Jones Golf Club is Cornell’s home course. I know one other competitive golfer who went to Cornell. He doesn’t score that well (no athletic scholarships at Ivy League Schools) but he absolutely mashes the golf ball.
The other competitive golfer also went through a late growth spurt. Prior to shooting up, he would rain hell on the golf course. Sophomore year he was runner up in the state tournament. Junior year he came back a foot taller and with hands made of stone.
Before Mike became your favorite ball striker’s (me) favorite ball striker, I had assumed that my friend who played at Cornell shot up and immediately started smashing bullets. After Mike’s transformation, I have to assume that our guy, Bobby Jones, and the massive golf course he etched into the THICK, cold, sea level air in Ithaca plays some role in the honing of elite ball strikers.
Mike lived in Ithaca for 8 years, most of the time he was out there we kicked around the idea of playing Oak Hill. This started as something of a pipe dream, but while Mike was inching closer to his PhD, I was getting better and better at begging to access private golf clubs.
The first time our skills aligned was when I went to visit Mike for his wedding. I used Thousand Greens to request a West to East 36 hole day at Oak Hill, and no bullshit, 50 people offered to host me.
The wedding was in November, mere days both courses at Oak Hill flooded then closed for the season. Brooks was not yet one year old when Mike got married so I spent the summer after his wedding, the first summer we knew that playing Oak Hill was a possibility, chasing after a toddler. The summer after that, we found out we were expecting another child, which necessitated a new house, but not a golf trip to upstate NY.
Our make or break moment for playing Oak Hill came the next summer, when I had another newborn and a three year old. Mike was graduating from his PhD program and leaving Ithaca. As one does when they leave upstate New York, he planned to never return. If I’ve learned one thing about having young children, it’s that the timing is never ideal to do anything. WITH the support of my wife, I booked a flight to Ithaca.
The trip was Oak Hill East and West, Buffalo Country Club, and Craigburn. The perennial Major Championship host Oak Hill East is of course the star of this show, but if you’ve seen pictures of Country Club of Buffalo you know that it looks sick. Visually, at least in photographs, it is one of the most interesting courses that I’ve ever seen. Craigburn was a course that I hadn’t heard of, but I have a GCA friend who grew up in Buffalo, and this guy knows his shit. He told me Craigburn was the third course.
This trip, as these trips tend to do, really started to unravel as it moved from dream to reality. Craigburn was hosting their member-guest that weekend. We found an enthusiastic host at CC Buffalo, that host broke his ankle a few weeks before the trip. At Oak Hill, our host became less communicative as we got closer to the tee time.
Thinking optimistically, we drove to Rochester, ate a lovely dinner in a quaint part of town where the price was a literal fraction of what we would pay in Denver, then headed to our hotel, where we got to see the difference between young, hip Rochester and rundown, derelict Rochester. Very suddenly, being able to order the entire menu at a Chinese restaurant for $75 didn’t seem worth the trade.
Around 11 that night our host sent me a text that simply said, “See you tomorrow.”
My first perception of Oak Hill was that I wasn’t blown away by the practice facilities. The high point seemed to be an outdoor Trackman range that, with a gun to my head, and I’m not trying to sound ungrateful here, seemed a little cramped. I don’t mean cramped for a regular practice facility, but for a 36 hole layout and the host of multiple majors, I wasn’t quite sure how and where the pros would warm up.
When amateurs play the course (or at least amateur golf nerds), their host (at least when their host is also a golf nerd) schedules a West to East 36 hole day. The idea is the West course serves as a warmup for the East course. Walking down the first hole, our host answered my question about how the pros warm up, also on the West course. Except they don’t warm up with a practice round, the entire West course is converted into a practice facility.
If I were to comp Oak Hill West I’d give you Beverly, another splendid, mostly untouched Ross design that merges classic architectural templates and pastoral tranquility. Great holes, great walk, very peaceful. Beverly ranks in the high 20’s on my “every course ever played” spreadsheet. They also have, running away, the best practice facility that I’ve ever visited.
After my visit to Rochester I ranked West in the high 20’s on my sheet, one behind Bev. The West course IS the best practice facility I’ve ever seen. The best practice facility running away. Oak Hill West as both a top 30 course and a practice facility is a pretty good microcosm of Oak Hill as a club. It’s another world.
I soon found that the problem with interplanetary golf tourism is that my new environment had me marginally ill at ease. More specifically, is that I couldn’t fucking score. Par on the West is 71, we played from the 6,800 yard tips. Mike and Tyler (our host) would have ticked 59 with their fourball score. I was WAY on the wrong side of 90. I can’t tell you the exact number because this round has been purged from both my brain and my GHIN but you can bet your sweet, sweet ass I posted. I don’t think I made any pars. I can’t even remember a made putt.
Between rounds, I hedged against a repeat performance by demanding action from Mike and Tyler. At my wits end, I told them, and this is something that I do remember vividly, please think up a game where we can gamble together.
There is a snack shack between courses where I got a serviceable bloody mary and an excellent sandwich with peanut butter, bacon, and bananas. We sat in adirondack chairs and watched a group of older ladies hack their way up 9 West, they did not look like they were having fun. Tyler confirmed that the membership skewed older, male, and that play on the East course was more or less exclusively male.
On that note, we picked up our bags and walked to the vaunted and male dominated Oak Hill East. I learned the details of that afternoon’s game on the way to the first tee. Match play, net format. My two friends would be playing from the 7,000 yard black tees. I would be playing from the 5,400 yard green tees. I thought this was insulting, but based on my morning performance it was also fair.
Then, we heard the lightning horn.
And my friends, here is where the fun really began. Our host, Tyler, was a great guy. He was very into stats and very into the history of the club. He also had a nine month old baby at home, and no one with kids is going to believe me here, but he spent a total of FOURTEEN hours at Oak Hill with us that day. These hours were mostly spent playing one or two holes on the East Course, then sheltering from lightning.
We also saw every inch of the massive clubhouse (including a bowling alley!), all of the dining outlets, and even, as a last ditch act of desperation, the banquet facilities. Every possible conversational topic was exhausted. Here are some of the high points:
1. When Consolation divested from Ballast Point they liquidated the assets for less than the price of BP’s real estate holdings.
2. A BEAUTIFUL home ON the 13th hole of the EAST course was bought before COVID, scraped, replaced with a new build, and sold, DURING COVID, for $400,000. Tyler asked me to guess the house’s price and he simply would not believe that $6,000,000 was a real guess. Neither Mike nor I could explain the Denver housing market to him.
3. Initiation at Oak Hill is 150k. The waitlist closed when they hit the 10 year mark, invitations to waitlisted members are not first come first serve.
4. Monthly dues are reasonable, similar to what I pay at a downmarket club in Denver, and include a $330 monthly capital fee. There will never be an assessment.
5. Utilizing volunteers to staff up for a major championship in a downtrodden town on the Canadian border is even crazier than you’d imagine.
As for the course, I used the phrase pastoral tranquility to describe the West. In true yin and yang fashion, when thinking of the East course, the first words that come to mind are brutalist hellscape. And, wait for this, teeing it up (from 5400 yards) on a brutalist hellscape is FUN.
The scale of this place is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Or maybe it’s not the scale, but how they use the scale of the course to punish you. I’ve played Landmand, where EVERYTHING on the course is big. In contrast to Landmand, Oak Hill is ANYTHING but an infinite blank canvas built to foster creativity and shotmaking. Rather than teeing off into a huge fairway then hitting approach shots into massive greens where massive contours seem appropriate, Oak Hill has a collection of tight driving holes with UPhill approach shots to SINISTER greens.
Unlike the relatively untouched West course, the East course has been through many renovations. The result of almost 100 years of contracting whatever architect is en vogue and asking them to do anything and everything in their power to fuck up the pros is the creation of an absolute monster. If nothing else the course is something to behold.
Another by-product of building a course strictly to challenge pros, and this is something that I haven’t seen before, is the highest handicapped holes all stacked right in a row. I took eight from Mike, I got those strokes on back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back holes. Tyler called this “The Stroke Dome.”
This layout, an absolute nightmare for daily play, coupled with a 10 hour round, my hot putter, and a host who met us at the course just after 6:00 AM and was going home to his nine month old son and a wife that I can only assume was THRILLED to see him a mere 14 hours later, made me feel like this was a good time to forgive all bets.
Mike and I made it to the car, and I realized that I had left my wallet on the course. The outside staff gave me a cart with lights, I fired up the Tile app, and relived the day’s round hole-for-hole, shot-for-shot, far beyond the point that I realized my wallet search was futile.
I was bummed about the misplaced wallet but I tried not to let it shade my perception of the day. Mike could see that I was struggling, and when we got back to Ithaca he hit me with the two things he knew would remedy any situation, hand pulled noodles and berry soft serve ice cream.
Ithaca has unbelievable Asian food because so many Chinese students study architecture at Cornell. The berry soft serve comes from a stand built into the side of the Shortstop Deli. Keep these in your back pocket if you’re in the area, you never know when you’re going to lose your wallet.
The next day we played holes 55-72 of the three day trip, En-Joie Golf Course in Endicott, NY. We made it to the course well before our tee time, and would have had ample time for breakfast if the clubhouse restaurant had opened at the promised time.
As things happened, the disheveled line cook who burst into the restaurant while the bartender, 30 years removed from her starring role in a Whitesnake music video, was hemming and hawing over our order LIED when he told he us it wouldn’t be a problem to fry up some BECs before our tee time.
En-Joie uses seven minute tee time intervals. We were amongst the first people on the sheet, but something like eight groups had stacked up behind us while we waited out the breakfast delay. I forced my way through the gauntlet with a giant, foil wrapped sandwich and what may not have been my first (or second) bloody mary. Within the crowd, the release of tension was palpable after I mashed my tee shot. Mike’s ball traveled even further.
UNFORTUNATELY, it appeared that the twosome we were paired with had neither hit nor seen a golf ball until they grabbed an early tee time at En-Joie. What I’m trying to convey here, is that our last stop on the trip gave us the full public golf experience. Drunk before breakfast, running very late, and BLASTING 311 at a volume calibrated to help our new friends HIT the FUCKING ball (it made sense at the time). We were back in our element.
The novice golfers called it quits after 9 holes and Mike and I found ourselves alone and stripped of the altruistic intentions behind max volume 311. We turned the music down and started competing, taking a hard fought (net) match all the way to the 18th green.
After the match, Mike took me to get a Speedie, Binghamton’s bland but palatable regional fast food sandwich that tastes much better than you think clubbed chicken breast marinated in Italian dressing and chargrilled would. We grabbed some beers at a microbrewery and I even had time for a shower and a nap before my lack of any kind of identification necessitated an EARLY arrival to the airport.
Security at Ithaca Tompkins International is a fucking joke – I was at the at the gate in mere minutes with HOURS to kill before my flight. I wandered aimlessly through the lone, tiny terminal and had all of my credit cards canceled and reissued. It was early evening, and I was chock-full of fast food, sobering up, and very sore from (what is now, in my late 30’s) the heroic amount of golf my best friend and I had played over the last three days.
It might as well have been 2008, the major difference I didn’t have to go in for a closing shift at the golf course that night. This nostalgia was tinged with euphoria. Fifteen years later I have kept the good (friendship) and done away with the bad (washing golf carts for a living). I found my gate (I think there are two gates at this airport), eased my sunburned ass into a chair, and waited for my plane. I was ready to go home.
A few days later my wallet was turned into the shop at Oak Hill. They (charged me for shipping and) mailed it back, along with a scorecard from the East course. When I opened the envelope, the billfold and scorecard were completely drenched. Just absolutely sodden, and completely covered in mold.
I suppose that’s what I get for having fun and scoring well on my visit. One way or another, the East Course will get you. Also, I spent like $500 in the shop.
Straight Gross 