Golf’s varied palette
CASTLE ROCK, COLORADO | When the BMW Championship set up shop at Castle Pines Golf Club here on the edge of the Rocky Mountains last week, everything about it felt new and fresh.
The views, the layout, learning how to breathe at more than 6,000 feet above sea level, all of it was different.
It could hardly have been more different from the week before at TPC Southwind in Memphis, a heat-hardened flat layout that asks good questions but lacks the natural charm of Colorado hillsides.
This week, the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup playoffs conclude at East Lake in Atlanta, a place that has undergone a facelift in the past year that will likely have a similar effect to seeing a new haircut on someone you’ve known for years.
What is old is new again.
That’s where golf has it over other sports. The playing field is different from week to week. It’s like having Italian for dinner one night, fried chicken the next and sushi the next.
Tennis courts don’t change. Some have grass, some have clay and some have whatever hard courts are made from, but the dimensions never vary.
Maybe that’s why there are a million good golf stories and jokes, and the next tennis joke you hear might be the first one.
It’s why some golfers keep track of how many different courses they have played. They check off how many of the top 100 they’ve played or start a bucket list of all the places they want to go.
It’s the same with football fields and basketball courts. Cameron Indoor Stadium oozes noisy charm, but the court is the same dimension as what most high school teams use. Ditto for Lambeau Field.
Baseball stadiums vary a little, but it’s still 60 feet, 6 inches from the pitcher’s mound to home plate and 90 feet between the bases.
Golf gives us Pebble Beach and Monterey Peninsula one week, Augusta National in all of its glory another week and the wind-swept landscape of Royal Troon another week.
Even if you tend to play your golf at the same place round after round, going someplace else once in a while is refreshing, like changing up your annual vacation plans.
Maybe “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” by Dr. Seuss is a golf book after all.
Ron Green Jr.
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