The golf thread in Tom Coyne’s life is enough to make anyone who loves the game jealous.
The 50-year-old from Devon, who grew up playing and caddying at Rolling Green Golf Club in Springfield, is the full-time editor of a golf magazine, the full-time owner of a golf course, a YouTube story creator, a golf course designer and a five-time author writing his next book.
“It’s a little scary when you put it all together,” Coyne said. “It’s a juggle. It goes with the season. This is a good writing season.”
His gig with The Golfer’s Journal, a printed and digital quarterly, provides a daily journalistic grind that submerses him in all things golf. He joined the staff in 2016 as a writer and in January 2024 as an editor and hosts the publication’s podcast. He also plays in many of its Broken Tee Society events around the U.S. and internationally, including his tournament, the Coyne Cup, in southwest Ireland in late September.
“That cycle doesn’t come to a close,” he said. “It’s a really fun job. If you have an idea, you can go out and make it.”
In 2023, he became involved with Sullivan County Golf Club in the Catskill Mountains of New York. After a year of leasing it, he bought the nine-hole layout designed by Maurice McCarthy and Len Rayner, the longtime pro and superintendent at Leatherstocking Golf Course in Cooperstown.
“I still think this will be my best year and thanks to technology, I still hit it pretty far. My game is sharper, and I make less ridiculous mistakes.”
Tom Coyne
He and his associates reopened a shuttered clubhouse while he was hands-on, mowing fairways among a myriad of maintenance tasks.
Coyne and his design partner, Colton Craig, authored a restoration last year that includes a new routing, three new par-3s and a new par-5 with dramatic views. It is open from April until the Northeast weather doesn’t cooperate. He enlisted Philadelphia golf artist Lee Wybranski to design the club’s logo and scorecard design.
In 2025, the course, which opened in 1925, has a new putting course, driving range, cart paths and pro shop. It also houses a clubhouse restaurant called Otto’s.
Coyne and his wife, Allyson, bought a home in the area last year and it is their “summer spot” when he is not on the road.
“It feels like Vermont with only a third of the travel,” Coyne said.
His affinity for writing took hold as an English major at Notre Dame in the 1990s. His plan after graduation was to pursue a master’s degree in Irish literature at Trinity College in Dublin. A week before he was to travel to “the Old Sod” he received an offer from the fiction writing program at Notre Dame (master’s in fine arts) that featured a tuition waiver and a stipend. He’d been on the waiting list as No. 6 with five places in the program.
“I owe a thank you to whoever turned down that spot at Notre Dame,” Coyne said with a chuckle. “I wonder about that. There is someone out there who changed the course of my life.”
For his thesis, when others were vying for the “great American novel,” Coyne decided to focus on writing about golf because it was what he knew.
“It was a different thing to do in that environment,” Coyne said. “Writing about golf in an academic environment where we are all trying to publish for The New Yorker and write things of literary, capital L, quality. I thought I could try to write something literary about golf and certainly there is a long tradition of that. That was a turning point for me when I could write about something that was a big part of my life.”
The focus became stories about a caddie who was a golf prodigy that evolved into his first book, “A Gentleman’s Game,” that also became a movie with Gary Sinise in the lead role.
“I graduate in May, in August I had an agent, he sold the book and then he sold the movie the next week,” Coyne said. “There I am living in my parents’ house. What am I going to do? I wrote a book at 24.”
Coyne tactically pivoted to nonfiction writing, explaining: “The great thing about nonfiction is that you can come up with an idea or an adventure and write a book proposal. With fiction, you just write the book.”
The proposals spawned his next five books – “Paper Tiger,” “A Course Called Ireland,” “A Course Called Scotland,” “A Course Called America” and “A Course Called Home,” due to be published next year.
In “Paper Tiger," he moved to Florida to sharpen his game and his body to attempt to qualify for the PGA Tour. Although he was unsuccessful in Q-School, he became a more known quantity in golf and golf writing.
A venture into planning a buddies’ trip to Ireland turned into “A Course Called Ireland.” Using a map of the Emerald Isle, he used push pins for the planned stops.
“It started to look like a golf course,” Coyne said with each successive pin. “With those flags, it looked like a routing.”
His instincts told him that walking all those links layouts would be the selling point of his pitches.
“Walking became the most important part,” Coyne said. “I would stop at places that got me off the typical tourist stops; places I would never go if I had a car or was on a bus.”
“Ireland,” of course, begat “Scotland,” which begat “Home.”
Coyne retains a nearly scratch USGA Handicap Index at his home course, Waynesborough Country Club in Paoli. During his honing period for “Paper Tiger” his best index was +1.
“So, I am not miles off from where I was,” Coyne said. “I still think this will be my best year and thanks to technology, I still hit it pretty far. My game is sharper, and I make less ridiculous mistakes.”
The golf multi-tasker calculates he has played more than 1,000 courses in more than a dozen countries and lists his top five GAP-region courses as Rolling Green (“People don’t appreciate how good it is.”), Merion East, Bidermann Golf Course in Wilmington, Delaware, the Wissahickon Course at Philadelphia Cricket Club and, no surprise, Pine Valley.
Yup, you are jealous, admit it.
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Top: A cart can't carry everything Tom Coyne juggles in his overflowing life in golf.
COURTESY Jaren Hunsaker