Now that my son Nick is a young adult at the beginning stages of a civil engineering career, we don’t see a lot of him around Lake County. However, he and I continue to have a neat connection through the game of golf. He took up the game as an 8-year-old, had a golf course in his backyard with our proximity to the fourth fairway at Buckingham Golf and Country Club, and continued to improve at the game at a fairly young age. Yes, since he was 15 years old he has become a far better golfer than I.
When Nick was 16 years old, he started having a greater understanding of the game and its historical traditions. We went to the United States Amateur that summer at the Olympic Club in San Francisco and he was stunned by the layout as well as my running commentary about Jack Fleck and Ben Hogan, Billy Casper and Arnold Palmer, Scott Simpson and Tom Watson.
That Christmas I decided a cool present for Nick would be a round of golf at a golf course of note. I scoped out the options available in Northern California and booked us a tee time a few days after Christmas at the Pasatiempo Golf Club in Santa Cruz, a top-100 golf course designed by Allister Mackenzie and his design foreman, Jack Fleming. During the course of our round on that cool December day, I could see that Nick was starting to understand the nuances of the game’s master designers. It also was interesting to spend some time in the clubhouse after that round and check out all the golf memorabilia of Pasatiempo’s most famous resident, Juli Simpson Inkster. It was a great day of golf and I decided I had hit a winning tradition for a cool Christmas present. I also got to play a great golf course.
In the ensuing years we went to Harding Park in San Francisco, the Ocean Course at Half Moon Bay, Spyglass Hill at Pebble Beach and finally Pacific Dunes and Bandon Dunes in southwest Oregon. The past two years have included a pair of four-day excursions to play all five of the golf courses at the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort.
This past Christmas, Nick returned the favor and gave me a gift of seven rounds of golf during a five-day period on the Robert Trent Jones Trail in Alabama. I have always spoken positively of a trip to Alabama that I took with golf rules official Jack Lucich of Clearlake. We spent eight days in the summer of 1999 on the RTJ Trail and played all 20 courses. During the past 16 years the Trail has grown by four additional sites and eight courses. Nick and I would play an array of courses on four sites in the Auburn, Montgomery and Birmingham areas of the state.
We flew into Atlanta on Tuesday evening, drove 90 miles and settled into the Auburn area. That Wednesday morning we were scheduled to play the Lake Course at Grand National, a former site of the Web.com Tour finals as well as the NCAA Championship. When I was last in Alabama, I thought this was the best course we played on the trail. Our opening-day round was a great day of golf. While the course wasn’t very crowded, we were not alone as far as maintenance staff was concerned. Grand National will host the PGA Tour’s Barbasol Championship this July and work was already starting on clearing areas for stands, television towers and the like.
We were the final pairing that day and every time we finished a hole, the grounds crew rushed out to put tarp on the greens to protect it from the cold night weather. A lot of the courses on the trail also had giant fans next to the greens to keep things warm.
The next day we played at the Links Course at Grand National and played our first jaw-dropping hole of the trip, a downhill 260-yard par-3 surrounded by water. Unlike Nick, who busted a 3-wood green high to the right, I went down to the shorter tees and played the hole from a more manageable 195 yards.
We were on the road that afternoon, checked into our hotel in Montgomery, and saw the 54-hole Capitol Hill complex right from our room. We had a two-hour frost delay the following morning, finally teed off at 10 a.m., knocked off our first 18 holes in three hours, returned to the links after a fast lunch and played a second 18 that afternoon. We also checked out the Confederate White House in downtown Montgomery and saw a New Orleans jazz band play. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the par-5 10th hole at the Judge Course at Capitol Hill. It stretches out to 711 yards. A drive, two 3-woods, and a 4-hybrid got me home in four.
We drove into Birmingham on Saturday morning and played the relatively new Ross Bridge Course in suburban Hoover. Ross Bridge is a gem course. It’s difficult, it’s beautiful, and is now my favorite RTJ Trail course. It stretches out to 8,191 yards. Nick played it from 7,446 and I went to the sissy tees that equaled 6,783 yards. Nick channeled his old competitive self, shot a 2-under-par 34 on the back nine and carded a 75 for his best score of the trip. I spent most of my week hovering in the mid-80s.
On Sunday we traveled the five miles to Oxmoor Valley and played 36 holes that day. My yardage book from 16 years ago was a bit obsolete as several of the water hazards at Oxmoor had been filled in and a dam and a lake had taken its place. We got back to Atlanta on Monday morning, getting out of the South just before the sub-freezing weather and dusting of snow, and found ourselves back in sunny California later that day.
It was a great golf trip and a nice bonding week. I have always been a fairly fast golfer and Nick plays even faster than I do. It made for a bunch of great, no-nonsense three-hour rounds. While we enjoyed the gasoline prices of $1.92 we weren’t fans of the 12-percent adult beverage tax.
True the courses are downright tough, sort of like playing the sixth and eighth holes at Spyglass Hill over and over again (same course designer). Yet they are beautiful to behold and a great challenge, even if your game is in the aging stage. While I’m not looking to become the next Travelling Joe from Golf Magazine or the Savvy Traveler from Links Magazine, I do enjoy this playing of other golf courses in other parts of the country, whether it’s in Bandon, Oregon, or Hoover, Alabama. And while I don’t know how many more of these father-son trips we’ll have during the coming years, I can already smell the salt water aroma from Waterville, Ireland, and hear the church bells in St. Andrews, Scotland. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?
