Most golfers would prefer to walk 18 holes of golf and take a straight line to their approach shot to the green. The erratic pattern of a golf cart serving two people makes it more challenging to concentrate on your next shot. Walking toward your ball with the target green in the distance is better preparation for an approach shot than zigzagging across the fairway between your and your riding partner’s ball. But not all of us have the stamina to walk 18 holes, and golf is a social game, maybe the most social of all games; sharing a cart with a friend you haven’t seen in a while is, at least for me, more important than a good walk that helps shave a stroke or two off your final score.
And that is the way it was for me with three good friends -- Andy, Bob and Brad -- on my recent one-week golf trip through Virginia and the Carolinas. After my first round on Monday at Shenvalee Resort with my new friend Jefferson Burgess, I made the 90-minute drive to Richmond and the home of my friend of over a decade, Andy, and his wife Anna, who kindly hosted me for the night in their beautiful home. Andy is a former professor and chair of the Statistics Department at the University of Richmond. We had first connected when he visited my website and emailed me with a few questions about golf real estate and private golf club membership. We later met face to face for the first time in his office at the University of Richmond when my wife and I were making college tours with my daughter 14 years ago.
The private Salisbury Country Club combines water and sand into a pretty -- and challenging -- layout.Andy and I have stayed connected since then and when we get together for golf and a meal, which we have done at least a half dozen times since first meeting, we re-bond with serious conversations about golf and our families. After a terrific meal at a local Mediterranean restaurant called Pegasus and a good night’s sleep, Andy and I headed to Richmond’s Salisbury Country Club, where he is a member. Salisbury is a welcoming club with 27 holes of golf; I can vouch personally for 18 of them as being expertly tended, with welcoming fairways, bright white bunkers and large, manicured greens. As I strode toward the pro shop with Andy, I noted the three white Adirondack chairs pointing toward the heart of the golf course, a beautiful contrast with the green fairways beyond and about as relaxing a pre-round tableau as you would want.
Would that my golf game during our round was as “relaxed” as that. After shooting my age for the first time the day before, I must have still been in celebration mode. Salisbury’s modern layout and open fairways were made for the best part of my game, my tee shots, but I was all over the place. My approach shots and putting was not much better. There are days when no matter what adjustments you make, everything is wrong. And this was one of those days. On such days, it is good to have a friend in the cart with you. Andy, who was generous in his commiserations, made my bad golf irrelevant, something good friends do well.
Many of the approach shots at Tanglewood Championship are befitting of a golf course that hosted the PGA Championship.I first met Bob when he was hired to build an executive business program for the global corporation where I worked. He was at the time a professor of business at the University of Virginia and later was named dean of the university’s Darden School of Business, one of the best in the nation. I participated in that executive program he helped develop and we became good friends, never at a loss for conversations about both business and family. Bob lives in Chapel Hill, NC, and met me at Tanglewood Park in Clemmons, NC, just south of Winston-Salem. We played the Robert Trent Jones, Sr., Championship Course where, in 1974, Lee Trevino beat Jack Nicklaus by one stroke. (Older golf fans might remember the final round in which Trevino waved a white towel from the fairway after Nicklaus made a putt less than a couple hundred yards ahead.)
Every year, typically in May, my friend Bob and I meet for a week of golf at the Crail Golfing Society. Every one of its 36 holes has at least a peek of the North Sea.For the last few years, Bob has met me in Crail, Scotland for a week of golf in May. I am an overseas member of the 36-hole Crail Golfing Society, and my annual dues provides me with a total of 16 rounds on the two outstanding layouts, each with views of the North Sea from every hole, and guest fees that are ridiculously reasonable. I admire Bob’s adventurousness; every morning around 5:30, he leaves the bed and breakfast we rent for the week and explores the nearby coastline, returning almost two hours later with stories about his walk and a half dozen or more golf balls he has retrieved from the rocky beaches adjacent to the Crail Balcomie and Craighead golf courses. We never run out of topics to talk about, on and off the course, and we plan another reunion at Crail next May.
Brad and I initially bonded on the Internet over our mutual love for golf and our desires to write about it. Brad maintains a website called “Shooting Your Age,” and when I invited him to stay and play at Pawleys Plantation in South Carolina, where my wife and I own a condo on a Jack Nicklaus golf course, we started discussing some of the peculiarities and challenges senior golfers face. In 2020, after I published my book Glorious Back Nine: How to Find Your Dream Golf Home, Brad and I started talking seriously about putting our experiences and opinions about senior golf into book form. That resulted in Playing Through Your Golden Years: A Senior’s Golfing Guide. We survived the editing process after some spirited discussions. I admired how serious and aggressive he was in getting some important senior golfers to share their insights with him; he even landed a quote from former PGA professional Ken Green praising our book’s relevance for senior golfers.
Only one hole at Stoney Point abuts Lake Greenwood, but it is a beauty.Brad and I overcame some mediocre golf we played at two excellent South Carolina courses, The Links at Stoney Point in Greenwood and Carolina Country Club in Spartanburg, and we had a good time discussing our favorite pastime and the real estate adjacent to the golf courses we played. (Brad and his wife Alice are contemplating a move from Charlotte, NC, to a golf community in the Carolinas in the next couple of years.)
The Carolina Country Club in Spartanburg, SC, is something of an unsung gem in the state. Challenging and in beautiful condition, my playing partner for the day asked the pro for membership information after our round.I learned a couple of key things during my weeklong golf trip. First, my 75-year-old body is not made to play golf on five consecutive days, or even two for that matter. I posted a 75 on Monday and an 82 on Wednesday, and the other three rounds were well into the 90s, roughly eight to 10 strokes higher than my handicap. If I make such a golfing trip again, I will schedule off days before and after my rounds. There are plenty of sightseeing opportunities in Virginia and the Carolinas. Most of all, though, I learned that when you choose the right golfing companions, it does not matter how you play. That -- and a good 19th hole -- will help you put those bad strokes behind you.