By Ron Whitten
In celebration of Golf Digest’s 70th anniversary, we’re revisiting the best literature we’ve ever published. Each entry includes an introduction that celebrates the author or puts in context the story. 

Golf Digest began keeping records for longest, oldest, youngest, fastest feats in golf in the 1950s. The most voluminous were for holes-in-one, which have also been the most disputed. I remember in the early 1980s being dispatched to a club in Texas to investigate a golfer who claimed to have made more than a dozen aces in a year—something you can’t definitively prove, but you sure can cast a reasonable doubt on its veracity. We came away not denying the record, but just not recognizing it, either. One of the oldest and most contentious records that we attest is described in this story published in March 2001, more than two decades after it occurred.

The investigative reporter here, Ron Whitten, took up golf as a 13-year-old in Omaha—where the hole-in-one happened. Between his junior and senior years of high school, Whitten attended the Summer Engineering Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago, where his roommate’s father belonged to the venerable Chicago Golf Club. Ron became enthralled with its C.B. Macdonald design and set his sights on a career in golf-course architecture. He ended up taking a wrong turn and going to law school and working as a state prosecutor in Topeka, Kan. As a sideline, he researched and wrote the definitive encyclopedia of golf courses and architects and eventually came to work for Golf Digest as our architecture editor in the mid-1980s. He has been the embodiment of America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses ever since. With this article, Ron returned to his prosecutorial roots and to the golf course of his youth, the one with the unlikely name, Miracle Hill. —Jerry Tarde

On Oct. 7, 1965, Bob Mitera teed up a ball on a downhill par 4, holed his tee shot and made national headlines. It has been all downhill from there. Or so it seems.

His was no ordinary hole-in-one. It was the longest ever achieved on a straightaway golf hole. It happened on the 444-yard 10th hole at Miracle Hill Golf Course in Omaha. It was the first ace for Mitera, the only one he has ever made.

I was an Omaha boy at the time, a high school sophomore who played much of my golf at Miracle Hill, a wind-swept cornfield of a course on the edge of the Papio Creek. I didn’t know Mitera back then; I just knew of his accomplishments. I was a beginner, a hacker. Mitera was a star. From 1956-’58, he won three consecutive Omaha junior golf championships. As a 17-year-old student at Creighton Prep High School, he won the city’s public links tournament. When he made that hole-in-one, he was a 21-year-old junior at Creighton University in Omaha, a member of the golf team and a 2-handicapper. At 5-6 and 165 pounds, he reminded local sportswriters of Ben Hogan. One even dubbed him Bantam Bobby Mitera.

In 2001, his ace remains the longest in Golf Digest’s record book. Having stood for more than 35 years, it’s one of the oldest records in the game. A record that even Tiger Woods might never break.

“Tiger Woods can have the record,” Mitera told me recently before abruptly ending our telephone conversation. That was the first of several attempts I made to get Mitera to talk about his ace. I called him back several times, never getting more than a few minutes’ conversation. Mostly he’d berate me for pestering him, then hang up. He’d be angry, but he never used a word of profanity.

So I went to his home, a nondescript beige duplex in northwest Omaha, less than two miles from Miracle Hill. Once, he shouted at me through a closed door to leave him alone. Another time, he opened it and spoke with me for a minute, then firmly shut the door in my face.

The man I traced and finally tracked down might be the most reluctant figure in the history of golf, the Bobby Fischer of the game’s record book. It took me six years of on-again, off-again research to determine that Bob Mitera still lives in Omaha. Since he lives with his mother, his name doesn’t appear in phone books or city directories.

At 57 [in 2001], Mitera doesn’t have a job but apparently isn’t lacking for income. He had joined his father’s grain-commodities business after graduating from Creighton, then liquidated the company after his father’s death. He still wears dark horn-rimmed glasses, just as he did in college, but now has a full beard, mostly white, and a noticeable paunch. But he looks as if he could be a 2-handicapper if he still played golf. But Bob Mitera gave up the game a few years ago.

In one of my phone calls, I asked him why he quit playing.

“You don’t think I know why you’re asking these questions?” he said. “I’m no dummy. I’m a college graduate.” He then hung up on me. Why was I asking those questions?

Because for decades there have been rumours that Mitera’s hole-in-one had been a fraud, a prank perpetrated either by Mitera or by the foursome ahead of him—or worse yet, a publicity stunt. Some guess that shame made him quit the game. Others speculate that the nagging rumours made him quit.

There’s no question he has shunned the spotlight for nearly 20 years. Was he simply modest, tired of defending himself or frustrated over others cashing in on his achievement?

I’d always believed he’d made that ace. But sceptics had some powerful arguments. I just wanted to know, was his a legitimate ace?

THE LAY OF THE LAND
To understand the scepticism of some, you have to see the 10th hole at Miracle Hill. The fairway extends along a plateau for about 270 yards, then drops at least 50 feet downhill from there, to a slightly domed oval green positioned, in the words of one Miracle Hill regular, “like an egg sunny side up.” The terrain of the 10th resembles the 15th at Augusta National, which, of course, is a 500-yard par 5. But to put it in perspective, imagine someone standing on the 15th tee at Augusta and driving a ball into the pond in front of that green. Or, more precisely, into a paper cup floating in that pond. That’s how incredible Mitera’s shot was.

You can’t see the green from the tee. So Mitera didn’t see his ball go into the hole that day. Or even see it reach the green. Nor did his friend Benny Houlihan, a fellow Creighton golf-team member who was playing with Mitera that day. Houlihan still lives in Omaha but hasn’t seen Mitera in 20 years.

Mitera wasn’t particularly excited about the ace at the time, Houlihan told me. “Bob’s reaction was somewhat indifferent. He was a pretty good player,” Houlihan says. “It wasn’t an unbelievable shot. After all, I hit it over the green that day.”

I tracked down Jerry Dugan, who was the pro in the clubhouse when it happened. He remembers the boisterous Houlihan coming in after the round.

“He told me Bob Mitera made a hole-in-one on the 10th. My answer was kind of vulgar,” Dugan says. “So I grabbed their scorecard. Sure enough, they had a ‘1’ down for the 10th hole.”

Mitera’s score for the round was 74.

“Bob Mitera was kind of a laid-back person,” Dugan adds. “He wasn’t jumping up and down or anything like that. But he was all smiles. Of course, at that point in time, nobody knew it was a record. Everybody was just impressed about the fact that he could make a hole-in-one on a par 4.”

It was soon recognised as a national record. The March 1966 issue of Golf Digest proclaimed it the longest ever (but with an erroneous headline that called Mitera an Oklahoman). That year, Golf Digest flew Mitera to New York City, where at a press conference, he was presented a trophy, cosponsored by the magazine and Beech-Nut/Life Savers Inc.

Speaking to New York sportswriters, Mitera first expressed his frustration. “Nobody believes me,” he said. “Sometimes I feel more like I’ve committed a crime than made a hole-in-one.

“The people who saw it believe it happened—that is, those who were playing with me and the group just ahead,” Mitera said. “But everybody else just laughs and says, ‘Don’t kid us—it’s impossible.’ So I’ve just stopped telling people about it. … It was mostly luck and circumstance.”

Years later, in a 1982 interview with Omaha World-Herald sports editor Michael Kelly, Mitera again voiced his frustration, saying he wasn’t proud of the shot.

“Why should I be?” he told Kelly. “It’s just something that happened. It was an accident. I hit a ball and it went in the hole.

“There are people who have done a lot better things in golf than that.”

AN UNDERSTANDABLE RETICENCE
I’ve found reasons for Mitera’s lack of enthusiasm. First, his shot was definitely aided by the wind. Winds from the northwest that day were gusting between 40 and 50 miles per hour. The 10th was playing straight downwind in addition to that 50-foot drop. As mentioned, Houlihan, playing with Mitera, hit his tee shot to the back collar of the green. Virgil Milford, playing with them, found his ball just short of the green.

Miracle Hill was in its fourth season, but its sprinkler system hadn’t worked properly for weeks. Its bluegrass fairways were dry and hard. There was hardly any grass on the hillside of the 10th, says Kenny Fritz, who played a few groups behind Mitera that day.

Combine a rock-hard fairway with a 50-mile-per-hour wind at your back, and a 444-yard shot doesn’t sound quite so monumental.

It looked especially suspicious that this enormously long act happened on a downhill par 4 at a course called Miracle Hill. So it wasn’t until 1968 that the *Guinness Book of Records* finally listed Mitera’s hole-in-one as a world record. Herb Davis, who with his father and brother John founded Miracle Hill in 1961, recalls that his father was irritated with the delay.

“Dad asked the Guinness people, ‘How come it’s taking you so long to certify this?’ They said, ‘Well, we have no question at all in our minds that the boys think they had a hole-in-one. The concern we have is that the people who were on the green did it as a joke.’

“But,” Davis says today, “the guys who were in front were all executives with some gas company and consistently stayed with their story. Because they were responsible people, after a period of time, the Guinness people accepted them, and finally certified it.”

THE SURVIVING WITNESS
Two witnesses saw Mitera’s shot go in the hole. One, Chester Hopper, died more than a decade ago. The other, Richard (Bugs) Keckler, is now 68 years old [in 2001], retired and living in Weeping Water, Neb., after operating service stations and a heating-oil business.

Richard (Bugs) Keckler, 68, played one group ahead of Mitera and remembers seeing the ball onto the green and into the hole.

“Chet Hopper and I were just leaving the green when it rolled into the cup,” he recalls. “It hit probably 75 yards short of the green, ran down the slope through a swale, up onto the green and into the hole. We went on over to the 11th hole [a par 3], and pretty soon a guy came down over the hill and we said, ‘Hey, fella, your ball went into the hole.’

“I’m telling you, I saw it go in. Now, I didn’t see him hit it. Whether he had somebody who saw him hit it off the tee, I don’t know. And we didn’t say it was a hole-in-one. But I swear to God, we saw the ball go into the hole. That’s the way she happened.”

After 35 years, memories fade. Keckler doesn’t recall seeing anyone but Mitera come down the hill that day, insists he invited him to join his group and says Mitera declined. Back in 1966, Mitera reported that he found the ball in the cup after a lengthy search, and said nothing about Keckler telling him it was there. More recently, Houlihan told me that he, not Mitera, found the ball in the hole. Sadly, Houlihan now experiences some memory lapses as a complication of diabetes. But in my conversations with him, I found nearly all his recollections were consistent with those of others.

Part of Mitera’s antagonism is his feeling that everyone, including this magazine, has capitalized on his accomplishment at his expense.

“What did I get out of that?” he asked me during one of our terse phone conversations. “You guys [Golf Digest] flew me to New York. A 21-year-old college student. Stuck me in a hotel, trotted me out to a luncheon. You probably sold a million magazines from that. What did I get out of that?”

What did you want out of it? I asked.

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing,” he replied sarcastically.

In truth, he received a trip, a trophy and national publicity. But publicity was obviously a sore point with him because, while he was still a teenager, Mitera lost his amateur status after the World-Herald reported that he had accepted a $30 cash prize at a golf tournament. His amateur standing was later reinstated, and he played on the Creighton golf team, but decades later Mitera still resented the paper.

“That completely ruined my golf career,” he told the World-Herald in 1982. “It was blown out of proportion.”

REVISITING THE SCENE
I visited Miracle Hill recently and came away appreciating Mitera’s frustration a bit more. A plaque commemorating the shot is imbedded in the back tee on the 10th. Behind the tee box is a small rain shelter with a long sign declaring the hole as the site of the world’s longest hole-in-one. The club’s scorecard and advertising brochure prominently herald that fact. Shirts on sale in the clubhouse have logos that read, “World’s Longest Hole-in-One, Miracle Hill.” The shirts don’t mention Mitera by name.

“I had that logo made when I got there,” Wes Melnack told me. Melnack became the pro at Miracle Hill in 1979 and remained there until 1988. “I sold one of those shirts to every out-of-towner passing through,” he says. “I don’t know how many I sold. Thousands. But that was my idea.”

Bob Mitera has never received anything from the sale of any of that merchandise. Indeed, Miracle Hill’s owners and employees had no idea what became of him.

When Miracle Hill first opened, the 10th was the first hole. But a year later, the nines were switched, mainly because the first faced east, into the morning sun, a poor direction for an opening hole. In the 1980s, the course adopted a policy that reversed the nines every week, to allow evening leagues to play a different nine each week. So some weeks Mitera’s hole is the 10th, other weeks it’s the first.

In 1976, the hole was remeasured and found to be 447 yards. Golf Digest’s record book now uses that figure as the official measurement. But Miracle Hill retains the original 444 yards on all its advertising.

A few years ago, the tee on the hole was extended, so it’s now a 460-yard par 4 on the scorecard. Back in my youth, from the regular tees, I was never able to carry the hill with my drives. But to look at the 10th today, even from the back tee, it doesn’t seem nearly that long. So I measured it using a laser range finder. From the plaque noting the location where Mitera teed off, it was 242 yards to the centre of the fairway at a 200-yard stake. From that spot to the flag (on the front half of the green) it was 202 yards, a total of 444 yards exactly.

The hole is now treelined, with two fairway bunkers on the left added a decade after Mitera’s feat. A far better irrigation system has the hole lush with ryegrass. Even with a helping wind, there’s little likelihood that someone could bounce a drive all the way to the green these days.

The more I researched, the more I found justification for Bob Mitera’s attitude. Some people just don’t believe him, or refuse to give him credit. In 1998, the United States Golf Association’s Golf Journal ran a 50th-anniversary timeline, detailing various obscure golf facts. It credited the world’s longest ace to Lou Kretlow (a former major-league pitcher) on March 26, 1961, on the 427-yard, par-4 16th at Lake Hefner Golf Course in Oklahoma City. It failed to mention that Mitera shattered that record four years later.

The 1996 edition of the Guinness Book of Records seemingly replaced Mitera’s ace with a 1995 hole-in-one by Shaun Lynch, done on the 496-yard, par-5 17th at Teign Valley Golf Club in Christow, England. That’s a dogleg-left hole, downhill from the turn, and Lynch cut across the dogleg. In fact, he used a 3-iron off the tee. His shot actually travelled less distance than Mitera’s, but his ace occurred on a longer hole. The 2000 edition of the same book now lists both aces: Mitera’s as the longest on a straightaway hole. Lynch’s as the longest on a dogleg.

Golf Digest, however, continues to list Mitera’s shot as the world’s longest hole-in-one, period. No qualifier. No asterisk.

Having talked to two eyewitnesses, I’m still convinced he made it.

And Bob Mitera couldn’t care less.

The post The 444-yard hole-in-one appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

Being a completist is hard work. Just ask Terry Inslee, who joined our panel in 1984 and is our most prolific rater, having evaluated 3,050 courses. He’s played 93 of the 100 Greatest and 96 of the Second 100 Greatest. The seven he’s missing from the first list roll off his tongue quickly: “Augusta National, Boston Golf Club, Shinnecock Hills, Sebonack, Friar’s Head, Garden City and Old Sandwich.” Inslee is retired, but over a career as a Missouri-based sales rep with a national territory, he worked in a lot of golf on business trips. Why hasn’t he played them all? Though association with Golf Digest does open doors, personal connections and the rub of the great green in the sky are still paramount, even for our panelists.

Told there was a golfer who’d accomplished the feat of playing “the century” in a calendar year, Inslee is impressed, if not a little shocked. “Completing the 100 is a major logistics problem. You’re always juggling so many balls in the air—the schedules of different hosts and your own, tournaments, outings, renovations, weather … for someone to do that in 12 months is absolutely amazing.”

“You ought to award the guy a green straightjacket,” says Senior Architecture Editor Ron Whitten. Salty as Whitten can seem, the heart connected to the fullest brain in golf architecture has a soft spot for any golfer so passionate.

Who could and would pull off such a stunt? Clearly, someone who isn’t working. Has to be a Golf Digest panelist, right? Not the case. Then some mid-am silver fox with a private jet and a fat Rolodex, right? Wrong again. Our golfer of the year is as unlikely as the idea itself.

Jimmie James, 59, was raised the fourth of eight children by a single mother. Their house in the sawmill town of Huntsville, Texas, had no plumbing or electricity. On the dusty and uphill path to the store, Jimmie and his siblings and half-siblings would walk from their black section through the Latino section before getting to where the whites lived. Signs forbid him to drink from certain fountains.

The James kids survived on what they could hunt and grow, and later on USDA-issued cheese, dried mashed potatoes and canned meats. Despite the nearly crippling cost of commuting via taxi, their mom worked the same job as a nurse’s aide for 30 years. “Our mother had a tremendous amount of drive. She taught us determination, integrity and to never complain,” says James, who was the first of his siblings to graduate high school, although all would become productive and comfortable members of society.

With a job at a department store and a partial scholarship, James earned an engineering degree from Prairie View A&M University. His climb up every rung in a 33-year career at ExxonMobil rivals any fiction by Horatio Alger. Last year, he retired as Manager of Americas Fuel Operations. “I was responsible for making sure that every town in North, Central and South America that needed fuel got it, while keeping the company’s workers safe without impacting the environment. It was a very high-stress job with a lot of global travel,” James says. “When I retired and went from 100 miles per hour to 30, I wanted a project to keep me engaged, because I’d seen others struggle with this transition in their lives.”

The athletically built James, who became a 12-handicap after taking up golf at 45, had the idea that for the first year of retirement he’d play two golf courses in every state. A previous trip to the Old Course at St. Andrews, when a golf buddy canceled last minute because of a work conflict, instilled a taste for the thrill of playing as a single and pairing with locals, and he thought he might re-create that experience again and again. But then a grander notion popped into his head: If he was going to play 100 courses in the United States, why not the best?

“Since the Golf Digest rankings update every two years, it occurred to me that perhaps no one had ever played the entire list while it was current,” says James (correctly), who at the time of conception had bagged just four: No. 16 The Country Club, No. 22 Whistling Straits, No. 75 Congressional and No. 21 the Ocean Course at Kiawah—the latter multiple times, because he has a residence there. For good measure, he’d play these four again. “It was important to me that I play each course within the 12-month time frame.”

Photo by Nathaniel Welch
Jimmie James, 59, was raised the fourth of eight children by a single mother.

GETTING TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
Funny how the most remarkable adventures will derive from logic entirely self-imposed. In 2015, the Swiss skier Jeremie Heitz announced his intention to climb and descend the 15 most famous 13,000-feet peaks in the Alps in two seasons. Most thought he was nuts, not only for how fast he ripped down these cliff-choked and avalanche-prone lines, but because high-alpine navigation requires exact weather conditions. Forcing an agenda against time across a wide geographic area would surely lead to poor decision-making. There were scares, but with cojones and a little luck, Heitz pulled it off, and the journey of his accomplishment documented in the Red Bull film “La Liste” is beyond compelling.

In golf, of course, the major obstacles are exclusivity rather than extremity. That’s why James knew his first course had to be Augusta National. “As I pursued my quest, I anticipated that a lot of people would ask if or how I was going to get on Augusta. Playing there first gave me credibility. People knew I was serious.” James met his wife, Erika, on a flight.

Walking to his car, he kicked himself for not getting her contact details and rushed back to intercept her at the gate of her next connection. The Dean of the Goizueta School of Business at Emory University, Erika is also an overachiever. When she took the job, she made an open plea to her board that if anyone would invite her husband to play golf, she’d sure appreciate it. That led to James’ quest kicking off in style, aboard the private jet of the golfer who had the Augusta connection.

“Augusta wasn’t my favorite golf course [that was Cypress Point], but it was my greatest overall golf experience,” James says. “From the drive up Magnolia Lane, to warming up on the Par-3 Course, to the pimento-cheese sandwich for lunch, to the gallery of staff coming out to watch our opening tee shots on the championship course, I never wanted the day to end.” Having 1992 U.S. Mid-Amateur champ and Augusta National member Danny Yates in the foursome added to the ambience, and after the round, Yates offered to help James with entree to other courses. James declined.

“Once you get introduced into a certain circle, you could really leverage someone for their contacts, but I didn’t want to lean on any one person to help with more than a handful of courses. The fun was going to be meeting people as I went and letting this network of people develop naturally.” As such, James rarely planned his itinerary further out than a month. Though we must insert one small asterisk: James played Augusta National in May 2017 during his last month of work. Not until he was settled into retirement on June 12 did his quest officially begin, he says, and he completed the list on June 11, 2018, so he gave himself a year to play 99 courses. The judges will allow it.

James is a successful guy, but he and his wife still have two teenagers who will want to go to college. Cashing out his modern road warrior’s chest of accrued hotel, airline and car-rental rewards points, nearly half of the travel for Jimmie’s Top 100 Golf Course Tour with the namesake blog was booked without opening his wallet. And with the sort of status so lofty at United Airlines it’s unpublished, James could make last-minute flight changes without getting penalized. Like, say, when his No. 5 Oakmont invitation suddenly materialized when he was on his way out to No. 73 Cherry Hills.

A few manic travel moments aside, mostly his year unfurled beneath prime season sunshine at a pace befitting the game. James loved hanging around putting greens, starting conversations and seeing where they led. “Whenever I told anyone what I was doing, the reflex response was to wonder how they could help.” Who did they know, and where?

“I think this trip gave my husband an even greater appreciation for the goodness in people, the beauty of the human spirit, than he already had,” Erika says.

Says former Southern Cal quarterback and retired athletic director Pat Haden, a member of No. 3 Cypress Point: “I’ve been on trips to Ireland and Scotland where I got hooked up by local members, and part of being a golfer is the joy of sharing what you have. … Jimmie is such a thoughtful, pleasant guy, that I was glad to help him, but it wasn’t until months later that I truly understood his personal history.”

When James was an intern in college, his host for the summer was shocked when a black person showed up at her door. She hastily concocted a back story and made arrangements to protect James from being arrested if he was seen in the neighborhood after dark. “Forty years ago, there’s no way I could’ve played all these courses,” James says. “There were people who warned, last year, that there would be some courses I couldn’t get on, but I felt totally welcomed and respected everywhere I went.”

Race wasn’t an issue, and neither was weather—except in California. In the so-called Golden State, rainouts, wildfires and deadly mudslides conspired against him, and he needed six trips to play 12 courses. For his entry on No. 80 Valley Club of Montecito, a region that was devastated, James wrote, “It goes without saying that the people had a lot more to deal with than some guy trying to play golf. We and our planet are a resilient lot, but incidents like this show how fragile life can be.”

*567,500 UNITED AIRLINES MILES REDEEMED FOR 42 FLIGHTS **91 DAYS OF RENTAL CARS, INCLUDING 12 FREE FROM NATIONAL ***980,000 MARRIOTT REWARDS POINTS REDEEMED FOR 75 NIGHTS

SOME OF THE HIGHLIGHTS
Such a year is filled with superlatives, but for brevity’s sake, we’ll mention just a few. The most expensive green fee was $750 at No. 63 Canyata in Illinois, although James did have the place to himself. A lone pyramid of range balls awaited his arrival. The private club averages 350 rounds per year.

The strictest cellphone policy seemed to belong to No. 14 Chicago Golf Club, where use of any kind is permitted only inside a car. In the official pamphlet emailed to guests in advance of play, it is also advised that the standard bet is a $1 nassau.

James’ most indelible memory might be the sudden silencing of silverware on the patio that occurs when you address your opening tee shot at No. 6 Merion. And though James encountered an outpouring of hospitality almost everywhere, the vibe at No. 56 Old Sandwich sticks in his mind: “I stayed for three hours after my round. They wouldn’t let me leave!” A multitude of members became highly engaged with his blog.

If there’s one rule to being America’s guest, James says, “it’s to realize that every club is a refuge, and to never disrupt that sanctity.” He made a habit of writing thank-you emails to head pros and club managers on every flight home, always noting the terrific service of their staff while cc’ing his hosts and playing partners. “If I’d acted questionably, word would’ve spread and ended my quest quickly,” James says. “The other critical element is memory. I have a pretty good knack for remembering names and making connections.

There’s a great underlying community of golf at this level, and if you make the effort to know who trained as an assistant under which head pro and where, the rivalries between certain golf-management schools, the home club of a winning member-guest partner—these things come up in conversation, and they give you the opportunity to demonstrate your sincere love for the game.”

But being well-informed with an open checkbook for guest fees and your clubs in the trunk isn’t always enough. James says the hardest place to get on was No. 71 Milwaukee Country Club. He worked his contacts for months to nail down a host, and even then had to tee off on the 10th hole, as do all groups with multiple guests at MCC during midday peak times, per club policy.

When James ran global fuel-supply lines, the master logistician never left anything to chance. But toward the end of his golf mission, he had to get lucky. With 35 days remaining, he had 29 courses to go. Leaving No. 4 Shinnecock Hills unpegged the spring before it was hosting the U.S. Open was poor planning, and not all segments of his trip to the important New York area were locked down.

Because the front nine of Winged Foot’s No. 10 West Course was being renovated—by Gil Hanse in advance of the 2020 U.S. Open—James had to play a composite 19 holes with the No. 62 East Course. (The judges will allow it, though not without some grumbling.) Like at Baltusrol, the only other two-banger property with its No. 39 Lower Course and No. 61 Upper, James saved in the golf shop. Because he purchased a hat and ball marker from each club, these two Tillinghast playgrounds made his collections 98. (Each of Bandon Dunes’ four 100 Greatest Courses has its distinct logo and merchandise.)

Across a leafy residential street from Winged Foot is No. 76 Quaker Ridge, another Tillinghast design. Not to assail his geography, but James was unaware of the true proximity. As he approached on Griffen Avenue in search of the Hutchinson Parkway, something like fate intervened. A guest in an outing struck a massive slice at the eighth, a short par 4, which connected with the windshield of a passing pickup. Head pro Mario Guerra was summoned to mediate. Despite Guerra’s assurance that the club would cover the cost of a new windshield, the driver was reluctant to move his truck until police arrived, and with traffic backing up with impatient drivers, Guerra feared another accident.

“Then, walking up the shoulder of the road, I see this tall African-American guy with a big smile. He comes right up to us and starts in, ‘Gentlemen, I’m sorry for this damage that has occurred today, but with every unfortunate situation there is a silver lining. Do you believe in destiny? You see, I was born poor in south Texas and am now on a quest to play all of our nation’s greatest courses and …’ He goes on, and the golfer, the pickup owner and I are all stunned by this guy. I was impressed with how he handled himself. I gave him my contact details to ping me that night, and I played with him a few days later.”

To avoid traffic, James caught a ferry across Long Island Sound to make the first of several tee times. So he wouldn’t get dinged with a weeklong one-way rental, he exchanged that car at LaGuardia Airport for a fresh one to drive to Boston. On a separate trip for Shinnecock, member Jimmy Dunne did a solid and rushed home early from his college reunion so he could host James on the final day guests could play before the U.S. Open.

During this home stretch James recognized a tension within himself. Was the urge to complete the mission overwhelming his ability to savor the experiences? To get back in a slower gear, he mindfully returned to what he’d really been doing all along: making small talk with as many employees at each club as he could. His go-to opening line: “What’s the one piece of advice you would give me for playing this course?” These interactions supplied the texture to make days memorable within the blur.

Of course, while James was making chit-chat with locker-room attendants, his wife kept things together at home and survived their teenage son learning to drive. “He traveled so much when he was working, that it didn’t feel that different, except the cadence of the golf trips was more random,” Erika says. Despite her husband grabbing a trip to Ireland and an additional 70 rounds along the way, he did make it back for a lot of important dad activities. For his 99th course, the couple walked together in their back yard at Kiawah, and his last course he could drive to, No. 25 Wade Hampton in North Carolina.

All this golf helped James’ handicap drop as low as 8.5, but toward the end his body broke down and he regressed to 9.4. Comparisons to Bobby Jones’ 1930 or Tiger Woods’ 2000 are troubled, but it was a pretty damn good year, and James deserves the microphone:

“I believe that there were four critical components needed to complete this quest—an understanding and supportive spouse, time, financial resources and connections. Save the understanding wife, I would have been hard-pressed to have the other three 100 years ago. One hundred years ago, my time would have been totally consumed with obtaining the basic requirements of food, shelter and clothing. Today so many more of us have much more time for leisure, more disposal income, and a much larger circle of friends and associates than we would have had. For all this current talk about tribalism, there is so much more that links us than separates us. Yes, I really do believe that ours is a world that is better today than it ever was. I also believe that in another hundred years, it will be even better… Our imaginations, our creativity, and our belief in things bigger than ourselves will make it so.”

One last observation from the golfer who’s seen it all? “Oh, yeah,” James says. “Without fail, a member at every golf course, except one, told me to tell the people at Golf Digest their course should be ranked higher than it is.”

The post A Regular Golfer’s Quest To Play America’s 100 Greatest Courses In One Year appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

To see how Bethpage Black might hold up, I headed to the course on May 19, paid the $135 green fee, got paired with three locals and teed off at 7:50 a.m.

My first impression of the Black was that the freshly mowed fairway at No. 1 seemed surprisingly narrow. Clearly, the fairway dimensions established at its first major, the 2002 U.S. Open, have been retained.

The place was wall-to-wall green. Trees were fully leafed. The primary roughs, a hodgepodge of bluegrasses, ryegrasses, fescues and even a bit of Poa annua, were densely green, if a bit clumpy: shoe-top deep at one spot, ankle deep at another. Attribute that to different growth rates of the varieties of grasses. One sweep by a rough mower, and everything would be a uniform depth.

The far roughs of tall fescues were still immature on this spring morning. They won’t become tall, wispy, golden waves of grain until July or August. The only color contrast in the rough were accents of straw-colored Broom Sedge, knee-high and taller, in random spots around some bunkers. A park horticulturalist propagates new tufts that are transplanted in patches to provide the Black with some additional rustic look.

The fairway turf was quite good. A ryegrass/Poa annua mix, it was mowed tighter than expected, providing some extra roll, but not so tight as to make any lie feel uncomfortable.

The greens, mostly Poa annua, were pleasantly firm. A well-struck iron would bounce, then grip; recoveries from surrounding tall rough were tough to get close. Though the greens were not of championship pace, they certainly rolled fast and true, probably 10 on a Stimpmeter.

The Poa annua greens alone would seem reason enough to welcome a May date over August for the PGA Championship. Poa is notorious for dying in the heat and humidity commonly found across America in August. The temperature on a normal May afternoon at Bethpage is in the mid-70s, perfect weather for golf, but the day before my round, the temperature in New York City hit a record high of 91 degrees. At the time we finished play on the Black at 12:30 that Friday, the thermometer was at 89, and the humidity was clearly above 50 percent. Crews were busy spraying mist on the back-nine greens.

After my round, I spoke with Andy Wilson, Bethpage’s director of agronomy, who oversees all the courses at the state-park facility. (Mike Hadley, the superintendent assigned to the Black, works under Wilson’s supervision.) I told Wilson the course seemed tournament-ready that day, except that the sand in the bunkers was incredibly fluffy, resulting in many buried lies for our foursome. Wilson explained that the crew had rebuilt all greenside bunkers last winter, installing a Better Billy Bunker drainage system to keep sand from eroding down faces after heavy rains. (Workers had done the same to all fairway bunkers the previous winter.) They had just completed the process of installing new silica sand in all the greenside bunkers two weeks before. It will take time for the sand to settle. They’ll water and hand-pack the sand as time permits to achieve the desired firmness. This was all done in preparation for the 2019 PGA; by then, buried bunker lies should be rare.

We discussed the logistics of a major in May versus August. “Agronomically, May is probably a slight advantage over August,” Wilson said. “Certainly, Poa annua greens are much easier to manage in May. Also, we don’t have the weed pressure in May that we have in August.”

But there’s still the specter of a late winter that could postpone growth of grass until late spring. Wilson dug through past weather records. The last full winter snow cover on Long Island was 1996; it lasted until early April, which would still provide approximately six weeks to prepare the turf. Frost is rarely an issue at Bethpage in May, although it can be chilly some May mornings.

Seasonal labor could be an issue at some courses, Wilson conceded, but most of his seasonal interns are turfgrass students from Rutgers University and Penn State, both of which dismiss students by early May. Volunteer labor, mostly superintendents from other courses, would likely take time off from work in either month. Available spectator parking might be an issue in spring versus summer, but that’s not Wilson’s area of expertise.

A possible PGA move to May would allow Trinity Forest in Dallas and other courses in warmer-weather areas to potentially host the championship.

I don’t see many Northern venues jeopardized by a May date—Oak Hill in Rochester has somewhat similar weather as Bethpage—but such a move could add Southern locales to the mix. Southern Hills in Tulsa, recently announced as a PGA site, the year to be announced, would definitely benefit—May can still be hot but not as reliably steamy as August. Same with previous PGA hosts Atlanta Athletic Club in Georgia and Shoal Creek in Birmingham, Ala. The new Trinity Forest in Dallas could become a contender. (The last PGA in Dallas was in August 1963.) Champions Golf Club in Houston, site of the 1969 U.S. Open, could be another possibility. Even a tropical Florida course like the Blue Monster at Trump Doral could get consideration. (The last PGA Championship in Florida was at PGA National in Palm Beach Gardens in 1987; when the PGA was played at the original PGA National, now BallenIsles, the championship was moved to February 1971.)

Among Southern venues, where escape from intense August heat would likely be appreciated by players and spectators, the concern would be whether the predominant turfgrasses—Bermuda and Zoysia—would have sufficient warm weather in which to fully grow. Another concern might be the transition from winter over-seeding to summer turf, which normally occurs in April and May, resulting in splotchy fairways for a few weeks as winter turf dies off and awakened Bermuda overtakes it. The simple solution, of course, would be to forgo over-seeding for the winter before a PGA Championship.

Bethpage’s Wilson is stoic about the date for the 2019 PGA. He helped prepare Bethpage Black for the U.S. Open in June 2002 and June 2009, the latter a dreadfully rainy week, as well as for The Barclays PGA Tour event last August. He has always anticipated that the 2024 Ryder Cup at Bethpage would be in late September, although that might change if the golf schedule changes to avoid a TV-ratings conflict with football.

Based on one unscientific, single-round examination of Bethpage Black, we can expect that Wilson, Hadley and crew will have the course in championship condition should the tournament move to May 2019.

The post A PGA Championship in the Northeast in May? We took Bethpage Black for a test run appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.