An Ode to Fall Golf
The par-3 14th at Wine Valley Golf Club in Walla Walla, WA. | Lexie VanAntwerp
My heart sank when I heard the news.
It was a quarter to six and my brother Dylan and I were standing on the 13th tee at Wine Valley Golf Club, basking in the autumnal glow that had finally broken through grumpy clouds. It was as if Martin Scorsese had just staged the lighting for our romp across a spectacular set of finishing holes.
“Sunset is 6:15,” the single we’d been paired with said. “We should have time for a couple more.”
Four hours away in Boise, where we’d driven from earlier that day, that consequence of the time change had escaped my calculation. And the reminder of shorter days hit me like a putter to the shin.
I’d come to play a practice round ahead of the Wine Valley Amateur and dragged my brother and father along to introduce them to one of my favorite tracks. We planned to drive for a while, play some world-class golf, share a good meal in wine country, pile into a motel room and hustle home for Sunday football. Stopping after 15 holes, I thought, would surely spoil dinner.
But our efforts to chase the sun were complicated by the fact that the duo of couples ahead of us had used the first 12 holes to perform a case study in how not to play in a timely manner. It was a symphony of practice swings and synchronized cart driving in all the wrong directions. I watched them as if they were the ones pulling the sun behind the mountains.
Playing behind a group like that pulls a golf administrator like me in two directions. On one hand, a snail's pace indicates a larva golfer — newcomers who, without question, are at the heart of golf’s most recent boom. On the other hand, the burden of time is already a lot to bear in this game. I feared the growing pains that have come with a rapid introduction of new golfers were conspiring to kill a budding memory.
This was especially upsetting because my 25-handicap father was threatening to break 100 and had Dylan’s back pinned squarely against the ropes. A five handicap, Dylan battled a chilling case of the tops for the first five holes and was shaken to see my father go out in 45 as he stared down the barrel of his first triple-digit score in recent memory.
“I’d be having a lot less fun if this golf course wasn’t so good.” he said on the ninth tee. “And this guy is really keeping the vibes up.”
He nodded up to my father who sent his patented block slice skipping just off the far-right edge of the 80-yard-wide fairway into a small shrub. He had joked on the drive up that he was going to shoot 140 despite my insistence that Wine Valley’s linksy inspiration would be kind to his squirrely work with the driver.
While he seemed to be enjoying Wine Valley’s width, my father has never been one to obsess over the nuances of a compelling layout. He’s an eccentric character on the golf course, known for his readers falling off his hat while he swings and leaving his ball in the hole after putting out to “make way for others.” Still, I was glad my endless yammering about great golf courses seemed to be making more sense to him.
But what became clear to me about my father is that the possibility of playing less than 18 holes was profoundly outmatched by an adventure with his sons.
And so, we had one, hustling through the next couple of holes as fast as we could, coasting on a refreshing urgency from the group ahead. We reached the property’s high point at the 15th green as the sun melted into a sliver on the horizon, scurried through the short par three the 16th, and slapped our tee shots off of the 17th with just enough light to identify a good place to search for them.
Looking down the 18th hole, which cascades sharply down to the clubhouse, all we could see was the rough edges of the bunkers and the glow of GPS screens in the carts ahead zigging and zagging down toward a vague outline of a green — the newbies, like us, slurping up as much golf as they could get.
Trusting our feel for where the ball might have gone, we swept them off the tee, chased them onto the green, and used the residual light from the cart barn to guide them into the hole. My father steered it home for 94. Dylan escaped with 99 and a repairable chunk of his dignity. Dinner was delicious.
The past month of golf season has seen a smattering of ugly weather, more layers, and a sun that falls sooner than we’d like. It won’t be long until we see snow. But the discomforts and rugged inconveniences of golf in the shoulder seasons should not be approached with any sorrow. It should be welcomed as an opportunity to savor more moments on the golf course.
And search for balls in the leaves with people who make the bad rounds worthwhile.
Two participants wearing (prize winning) Rockford Peaches costumes to our Birdies n’ Boos Ladies’ Play Day event last week at Eagle Hills. | Shane René