When the PGA Tour pulls into Innisbrook Resort each March for the Valspar Championship, I am reminded of a golf trip I took there several years ago with my dad and two companions.
What sticks in my memory isn’t so much the golf but the meal in which I partook after one 36-hole day in the Florida heat.
As we weighed dinner options back at the condo, my dad’s pal Tim insisted that there was only one worth considering. And it came in red-and-white striped paper buckets bearing the likeness of Colonel Sanders.
The buckets arrived, beers were cracked, yarns were spun, laughs were shared. By the time dinner was over, I had never felt so satisfied.
Tim’s suggestion that we order Kentucky Fried Chicken wasn’t surprising. A year or two earlier, on another golf trip to Orlando, this one-time New York Yankees farmhand was elbow deep in a finger lickin’ good bucket at the hotel while my dad and I, with eyebrows askance, consumed other offerings.
This time, however, our appetites trumped any healthy-eating considerations, so we went all in. The buckets arrived, beers were cracked, yarns were spun, laughs were shared. By the time dinner was over, I had never felt so satisfied.
Recalling our long-ago repast causes me to reflect on how the simplest rituals of food and drink can enrich the golf experience – whether it’s playing, watching or, in my case, writing about the game. As a kid, there was nothing I looked forward to more than reaching the seventh tee at our local muni, where Otis Corthell operated a snack stand called “7th Heaven.” After hitting our tee shots, my junior companions and I would hike up the fairway munching Otis’ steamed hot dogs and gulping coffee-flavored milk, with frozen Snickers bars thawing in our bags for the back nine.
Caddying for my dad as a teenager, I relished tube steaks doused with ketchup and celery salt from the 14th tee snack shack at his club, sometimes downing one for breakfast if his dew-sweeping foursome started on the 10th tee.
In my 20s, I had a standing game that typically finished around noon at a course right near a McDonald’s. Though hardly salubrious, a post-round cheeseburger and fries were often a featured pairing.
And when my golf writing career took me to Scotland, enjoying a pint of Guinness with my local playing partners was the perfect postscript to a round at North Berwick. (On that same trip, incidentally, I shared a meal with a couple of British Amateur contestants from the States, and we were introduced to pizza topped with corn kernels.)
At the Masters, past champions will feast on Rory McIlroy’s Champions Dinner while patrons will praise Augusta National’s affordable concessions and pimento cheese sandwiches. But while covering the tournament, an evening spent with colleagues recounting the day’s highlights over takeout pizza and subs is hard to beat.
Mike Cullity
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