Full Circle

Three years after walking UNC Finley Golf Course in Chapel Hill with a 9 a.m. tee time on a hot summer day and writing about the experience for the introduction of a book to be published by University of North Carolina Press, I found myself right back where I started. Only on these consecutive Saturdays in July 2020, my tee times were 11:12 a.m. and 12:24 p.m.—square in the teeth of typical summer weather in the South, with temperatures hitting the lower to mid-nineties on twenty-two consecutive days.

I remember telling someone back in 2017, “Well, I’m not crazy. If I were going to play in the afternoon, I might very well ride.”

A good day's work: Nearly six miles and 800 calories burned.

But after three years meeting passionate walkers and playing their home courses across the Carolinas, peering under their hoods and inspecting the wiring that powered their zeal and energy to play on their feet and not their derrieres, I had become even more militant in my efforts to avoid golf carts at all costs.

Ninety-three degrees and a bright sun? Still, no cart.

I picked the lightest bag in my arsenal, a three-pound Jones Sports Players Series, and trimmed down to eleven clubs, replacing my three- and five-woods with just a four-wood and paring back to one wedge instead of three. I wore light-colored clothes and the bucket hat I have taken to recently to keep the sun off my ears. I was generous applying the sunscreen and body powder. I hit only a dozen balls for warm-up—enough to get loose but not enough to waste energy. I brought a thirty-two ounce bottle filled with ice water and an extra twelve-ounce bottle of water for the front nine. I had a Gatorade and more water in a cooler in the boot of my car for a quick fill-up at the turn given that Covid-19 restrictions had limited the availability of water on the course.

Finley Golf Course, a 1999 Tom Fazio design on the same site that once housed a low-budget, poorly draining course that dated to the 1940s, is imminently walkable, the only issues being longish jaunts between the eleventh and twelfth and fifteenth and sixteenth holes (the first stretch to navigate from the east side of the course to the west, the second to circumnavigate a wetlands area). And the steep rise into the green of the par-four sixteenth is always a bitch, coming as it does late in the round.

The numbers: roughly 5.8 miles walked each round and an average of 785 calories burned per loop. One score of seventy-nine, one of seventy-eight.

And I loved every step of the way, challenging as some of them were as the rounds wore on. But that’s part of the draw—taking on something that’s physically and mentally difficult, the art of getting comfortable being uncomfortable.

On the first of these rounds I met Scott Hanna, a former football player at the University of Colorado (1985-89) who’s in sales and recently moved to Chapel Hill from Austin, Texas. Hanna was generally a rider when playing in the Texas hill country on a course with a number of water hazards that required navigating. But his background in athletics coupled with finding tighter, relatively flatter courses at Chapel Hill Country Club and Finley prompted him to start walking and carrying more. He showed up for our round with three guys he’d never played with before and assumed everyone would ride. When he saw two of us where going to walk, he ditched his cart, slung his bag on his shoulder and joined us on foot.

“In Texas you’d have guys with speakers on their carts and coolers,” he said. “That’s fine. But I’ve gotten to really enjoy just lugging my own stuff, making a bee-line to my ball. If we get a few days of rain and carts are stuck on the paths, walking’s even better. You have all your clubs right there and you’re never guessing what club you need and having to carry several across the fairway. It’s super enjoyable.”

But there was something much different about these rounds in the summer of 2020. They were played under the daunting shadow of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. All across the nation and the Carolinas, golf was one sport and activity that was thriving through the dark morass of the pandemic.     

Golfers could get outside for fresh air, sunshine and exercise. The nature of the game allows for social distancing. Course administrators adapted to containing the virus by removing ball-washers and bunker rakes and decreeing golfers not touch the flagstick and ride one golfer to a cart. Some golf shops closed and instructed their personnel to meet the golfer at the front door, take their credit card and slip inside to process the transaction.

The number of scores posted to the USGA Handicap Information Network rose twenty-two percent in May 2020 over the previous year. National Golf Foundation data said rounds in San Francisco, Phoenix and Orlando jumped more than twenty percent year over year. Golf Datatech, an industry research firm, reported that rounds nationwide were up 13.9 percent June 2020 over June 2019, and rounds in the South Atlantic (including the Carolinas) were up 19.2 percent.

“We’re hearing rounds are up in many instances, and what’s contributing to that is new golfers, mothers and kids going out, and more lapsed golfers returning to the course,” NGF President and CEO Joe Beditz said in June 2020. “It’s not just the same core golfers playing more rounds.”     

Tom Pashley, president and CEO of Pinehurst Inc., said in the spring of 2020 after his resort’s nine courses had reopened under strict virus-containment protocols, “One of the things I hope comes out of this is that more people will enjoy the walking game. I think that can be a nice outcome—more people walking the golf course.”

Walking rounds are up significantly at Grandfather Golf Club in Linville during the summer of 2020, and why not, with views like this one on the 18th hole?

Big Max Golf, a European-based manufacturer of high-tech trolleys, hit its 2020 sales target in six weeks from April to May, fueled by brisk sales in the United States.

“We’ve had a container landing every week from factories in the Far East for the past six weeks, and every one is selling out as soon as, if not before, it hits the warehouse,” company official David Wheatley said in June.

Wherever you looked around the Carolinas in the summer of 2020, you saw a healthy game and a return to the game’s venerable roots.

Forest Creek Golf Club in Pinehurst never shut down to its members but it did banish carts to the shed in the early days of the March national lockdown. Previously the club had banned trolleys but moved quickly to allow them. Bob Peele immediately bought a Bag Boy electric cart—one of many high-tech, motorized trolleys available today—and played twenty-one rounds with it in May and June.

“I took 17,000 to 18,000 steps a round and the calorie burn was huge,” says Peele, whose initiative motivated up to ten buddies to buy trolleys as well. “I’ve backed off in the summer heat, but I’ll be back on foot in the fall. I think walking is here to stay with a lot of our members.”

Walking rounds at Biltmore Forest in Asheville were up to nearly three-quarters of all rounds played through July. Director of Golf Jon Rector said he couldn’t keep lightweight carry bags on the shelves and was selling them before the manufacturer filled the order. And even restricting golfers who ride to one per cart, the club wasn’t running out of carts on busy weekend days.

“Often you feel a crunch midday when the morning players are still out and the afternoon groups are checking in,” Rector said. “Other courses in our area are running out of carts by eleven o’clock. We haven’t had a problem. The demand hasn’t been high enough.”

William McKee founded Wade Hampton Golf Club with the idea it would be a great walk, and he's immortalized on the first tee with this statue.

Old Town Club in Winston-Salem through July had seen a forty-four percent increase in walking rounds over the previous year. Sales of lightweight carry bags were up sixty-one percent. Overall rounds were tracking to be up fifty percent year over year.

Rick Hopkins of Charlotte is a partner in the Stitch Golf Company that makes bags, headcovers, apparel and accessories and is headquartered in Apex. He said in early July the company could not keep its bags in stock.

“People are walking like crazy,” he said. “I played at Charlotte Country Club the other day. We teed off at 1:40 on a Thursday afternoon. It was ninety degrees and all four players were walking—three with trolleys and one lugging.”

Chip King, director of golf at Grandfather Golf & Country in Linville, said in July that walking rounds were around thirty percent during the pandemic compared to ten percent in normal times. The club required solo golfers in carts (unless two golfers were in the same family) and waived fees it normally charged for members to use their own trolleys rather than club-owned trolleys.

“It’s wonderful seeing our members walk these fairways, walk across the bridges, walk through the woods,” King said. “They’re looking into the streams, looking up into the trees. They’re seeing things they’ve missed for years just whizzing past in cart. They’re having a wonderful time doing it.”

King said he had played more in the previous four months than ever in his professional career and had ridden only nine holes.

“The rest of the time, I’ve walked and carried. It’s fantastic. I’ve fallen back in love with the game.”

And that is pretty much the whole point. ⬛

Lee Pace’s book about his experiences walking eighteen of the best courses in the Carolinas will be published in the spring of 2021 and is titled, “Good Walks: Rediscovering the Soul of Golf at Eighteen of the Carolinas’ Best Courses.”