Flagged

My book on walking some of the sweetest golf courses in the Carolinas is deep into production and is due out in the spring of 2021. To commemorate its launch and provide a fun talking point around its contents, I commissioned the production of a golf bag in the book’s honor.

Six of the eighteen courses featured in “Good Walks—Rediscovering the Soul of Golf at Eighteen of the Carolinas’ Best Courses” are displayed on my bag produced by FlagBag Golf Co. of Portland, Oregon.

Meanwhile, Pinehurst No. 2, Palmetto and Grandfather are displayed on the other side of the bag.

Logos from the clubs as depicted on pin flags have been stitched together in a simplistic, lightweight carry bag, and I took care to vary the architects and eras.

• The oldest club: Palmetto (Alister MacKenzie, launched 1892);

• The most famous: Pinehurst No. 2 (Donald Ross, first opened 1907);

• My favorite Tom Fazio design: Eagle Point (opened 2000);

• My overall favorite: Old Town (Perry Maxwell, opened 1939);

• An aesthetic marvel: Grandfather (Ellis Maples, opened 1968);

• The most winsome walk: Old Chatham (Rees Jones, opened 2001, not a residence in sight);

• And coming soon to represent old-world elegance at its finest, a head cover with the blue-striped mark of Biltmore Forest (Ross, 1922).

This bag and the philosophy governing the leadership in FlagBag Golf—brothers Josh and Matt Smith and longtime bag purveyor Todd Rohrer—dovetails perfectly with my own and harkens to the reason I wrote the book in the first place.

Golf is about the challenge of hitting a good shot, letting go of bad ones, managing your way around the course, walking the ground, conversing if you want, commiserating to yourself if you don’t, studying nature and the architectural nuances. Celebrate a birdie, yes. But be grateful to be out there, no matter what. And avoid artificial contrivances (sorry, ClubCar) at all costs.

“I played with a stand bag on my college team, but every summer I’d go back to the simple walking bag that you’d lay down,” says Josh Smith, 44, a former college player at St. Mary’s College of California and today the superintendent at Orinda Country Club, just east of Berkeley. “I’m still not sure why a stand bag is important. I like the connection with nature, the old style that lays on the ground. I’m not a big doohickey guy with separate pockets for everything you own.

“One of the marketing slogans we’ve played around with is, ‘Less is more.’ It ties into minimalist golf. Minimal strokes wins in golf. Minimal wins in architecture, swing thoughts, golf bags.”

Adds Matt, 45, who holds an MBA from Dartmouth College and joined his brother in this six-month-old venture to take used pin flags and turn them into golf bags: “Everything we like about golf is kind of keeping it simple. If you think about golf at its most simple roots, it’s a club, a ball and a hole. And the fact that never in history up until this time, no one had the idea of a flag and a bag. It’s incredibly simple.  So many people say, ‘Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?’”

The idea occurred to Josh one day while rummaging through the maintenance facility at Orinda and noticing a stack of used flags.

“They were too cool to throw away, but no one had a purpose for them,” he says.

He thought that the sturdy nylon used for the flags would be suitable to make a bag—three flags stacked and stitched top to bottom would be just enough material.

“The flags are built to withstand the elements 24/7,” Josh says. “After a full year flying, they’re still strong. That’s perfect for a golf bag.” 

He canvassed some contacts in the golf business and learned that used flags are easy to come by. At first, Smith thought of making a rudimentary quiver bag for his daughters himself, but the demands of his vocation as a club superintendent job and his avocation of painting golf holes (you can see some of them here) had his plate stacked high enough. So he reached out to Rohrer, the previous owner of MacKenzie Golf Bags who now is co-owner of Macdonald Leathergoods, a niche manufacturer of golf bags. Rohrer liked the idea and had the manufacturing acumen that the Smiths lacked. The three pooled their ideas, and the Smith brothers formed FlagBag Golf in early 2020 and signed Rohrer on as their production partner.

The bags weigh two pounds, have one pocket and are trimmed in leather and/or suede. They are custom-designed for individuals and clubs, and soon the company will have more retail exposure at resorts such as Pinehurst. Early clients included members at Bandon Dunes, Seminole and San Francisco Golf Club, and the Smiths have gotten the kind of personal requests they’d hoped for—European Tour pro Barry Lane, for example, plans to have a bag made of flags from clubs where he’s won tournaments.

“People love the idea of having a flag flown on their golf course turned into a bag,” Matt says. “It’s a simple piece of nylon, but it means so much more than that to members and staff at that club.”

Readers of this blog and my assorted magazine screeds are aware of my affinity for golf bags—“I’m a tart for golf bags,” I admitted in a PineStraw Magazine piece years ago—and it’s sad to see most golfers have stiff cart bags in black or gray made in the Far East screaming with the name of the manufacturer across the side.

“Your bag is the most personal relationship you have with any piece of golf gear,” Rohrer says. “You spend four hours with the bag slung over your shoulder. When you’re not on the course, the bag sits in the corner of your office or maybe your bedroom and your eyes always go to it, right? It’s calling to you.”

Josh Smith carries the very first FlagBag, stitched from various hole flags at his home course of Orinda Country Club.

I met Rohrer in Pinehurst in 2011 and we talked of the beauty and history of the MacKenzie bag, which was conceived by PGA Tour player Peter Jacobsen in the mid-1980s when a caddie at St. Andrews poo-pooed his bloated tour bag and switched him out to a bare, stripped-down leather bag for his game on the Old Course. By then, I had owned one each of the early leather MacKenzies and a subsequent model made of ballistic nylon.

“These bags speak to a simpler time,” Rohrer said. “You don’t always need what is the ‘latest and greatest.’ So many of these things sold in the business the last 20 years don’t really improve the game. Just look at Pinehurst No. 2. What have they done? Put fancier grasses on it and made it greener? Absolutely not. They’ve gone back in time.

“If the goal is to have fun, and enjoy the walk and the game, it’s pretty easy to keep your head and your golf bag light.”

I look forward to following the growth of the Smith brothers and FlagBag Golf. “What keeps us up at night?” Matt muses. “How to scale up production. These are well-made, quality bags. The demand is there. Finding the talent to make them is the biggest challenge.”

Meanwhile, I’ll sling my bag over my shoulder during my book tour in 2021 and have plenty of material for conversation.

“These are fun bags, truly unique and personalized,” Josh Smith says. “They have some sort of meaning to every owner.”

Watch for Lee Pace’s book in the spring of 2021 from University of North Carolina Press. Meanwhile, you can learn more about Flagbag Golf by clicking here.