A first-class golf course brings us to our knees.
by Michael Ransom (www.mransomwriter.com)
Reading time: 5 minutes
Spring has arrived, and those of us Minnesota golfers who have wintered “up north” look forward to hitting the little white ball around. We don’t ponder why; we just do it. One of the most fun parts of the sport is retelling fabled stories, like the one that follows.
One of my most memorable golf outings occurred in Florida in the late 1980s. Jeanine (my wife), Ben (our son), Jeanine’s mom, my dad, and I were going on a baseball spring training vacation in Orlando. (At that time, the Minnesota Twins trained there at Tinker Field.) My uncle Ross had planned to come, but at the last minute he couldn’t. We asked our friend Jim Gilkinson to fill in for him, and he said yes. Jim loves baseball, golf, and tennis. At the Rochester Indoor Tennis Club, a few weeks before we left, Jim and I visited with Larry Osterwise, the IBM Plant General Manager, after a tennis match. When we mentioned our trip to Florida, he said we should check out a golf course he had heard was a really good one called Turtle Creek, a course not far from Orlando. Larry either vacationed near there or somehow knew about it.
Turtle Creek is a top-notch, semiprivate course. Jim and I golfed mainly public courses. Fancy courses tended to psych us out and put a little extra pressure on our game. If we were invited to golf at the Rochester Country Club, for example, it was a big deal. I called Turtle Creek and made a reservation for us to play. I told Jim that the person I talked to seemed obsessed about noting that golfers must wear collared shirts. He mentioned it multiple times during our phone call. I noted the importance of this to Jim several times, too, to make sure he’d pack his collared shirt. I worried that if any of us forgot to wear one, we’d end up in a Florida prison. They also noted that Dad would have to pay a fee just to ride along in the golf cart. Just another sign of how exclusive this place was. One concession to the high-priced golf was that the green fees included a free lunch for us all, even for Dad.
Frank Earnest, a friend who had moved from Rochester and lived an hour or so drive from the course, joined us. He, Jim, Dad, and I arrived, enthused and excited, all wearing our collared shirts on a beautiful Florida March spring day. (Dad wore a collared shirt, too, even though he was just riding.) It would be an understatement to say that we were pumped, nervous, and ready to begin our round.
Things took a turn immediately after we drove into the parking lot. As we were getting our clubs out of the trunk, a perky clubhouse assistant pulled up in a snazzy golf cart, ready to load our golf bags onto it for our round. Jim and I looked at each other. Yikes! We weren’t used to this kind of treatment. Could we decline his offer? Did we tip the guy? In hindsight, it seems like our golf wheels started to fall off as we watched him strap our clubs to our cart.
We had allowed ourselves plenty of time to hit balls before we teed off. We checked in and headed to the range, one like none we had seen before. It was a giant lake into which (not over which) you hit your range balls. This seemed appropriate when we looked at the course layout; there was water on fourteen of the eighteen holes. You had to carry water on six of the holes. Osterwise had not mentioned this. With each ball we blasted into the giant lake, Jim and I grew more worried about what awaited us on the course.
And what a disaster it was. Jim and Frank could break eighty on a good day; I usually shot in the mid to upper eighties. That day, I’m not sure if any of us broke one hundred. We shanked, hooked, sliced, and sclaffed balls into every body of water on the course. Frank ran out of balls before the back nine. None of us had ever been part of such a fiasco.
When we weren’t in the water, we were in the sand. After about eight holes, Jim and I started complaining that it was odd that such a pricey course with so much sand wouldn’t have rakes by the bunkers. In the midst of one of those whinings, Jim noticed that every cart, ours included, had a rake on it for our personal use. Just another thing to psych us out.
We finished our eighteen holes and staggered into the clubhouse, thinking that even though we had golfed miserably, we’d at least get a free lunch out of the deal. We, and not the course, would have the last laugh. At the restaurant, when we mentioned this, our waiter informed us that the offer was only good on Tuesdays, and it wasn’t a Tuesday. So, in the end, Turtle Creek did get the last laugh.
On the ride home, Dad totaled up the damage. “Jim,” he said, “looks like you shot a 115.” Jim didn’t say a word; just accepted it as his punishment. “Oh, wait,” Dad said a few minutes later. “I made a mistake; you had a 105, not 115.” Jim had to laugh about having such a bad round that he didn’t even notice an added ten strokes.
After coming home, at our next Saturday tennis session at the club, we told Osterwise that we had golfed Turtle Creek. “Really,” he said. “I’d like to hear what you thought about it. I’ve never golfed there; it’s much too expensive for me!”
From that day forward, if Jim or I were ever having a bad day on the golf course, we would look at each other and say, “Well, at least it’s not as bad as Turtle Creek!”
Note: The above story is from Mike’s memoir The Older I Get the Better I Was that is now available on Amazon. LINK