I flirted with golf through my first twenty-one years growing up in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and matriculating at the University of North Carolina, but it was not until taking a physical education class in the sport my last semester in Chapel Hill in 1979 that I gave serious thought to pursuing the game with any degree of consistency, passion and focus. My first job was with the Asheville Citizen-Times, and with working mostly evenings for a morning newspaper, I had my days free. 

It’s a 23-mile drive along U.S. Highway 64 on an east-west axis between the towns of Lake Toxaway and Highland in the far western corner of North Carolina. This patch of waterfalls and thick green foliage of rhododendron and laurel is commonly referred to as the Highlands Plateau. It’s thick with outstanding golf clubs, with some 13 courses along the way, among the most notable the Donald Ross-designed Highlands Country Club (1928) and Tom Fazio-designed Wade Hampton Golf Club in Cashiers (1987). 

The names Ross and Raynor, MacKenzie and Maxwell roll off the tongues of golf design wonks in the Carolinas with ease and abundance. Not so common are the names Wayne Stiles and John Van Kleek.

Both were landscape architects from the early 1900s who formed a golf course design partnership in 1924, Stiles focusing on courses in his native Massachusetts and New England and Van Kleek operating from an office in St. Petersburg, Florida. Stiles and a prominent Greensboro lawyer, developer and state senator named Alfred M. Scales got together when Scales conceived a residential community four miles west of downtown.

My book on walking some of the sweetest golf courses in the Carolinas is deep into production and is due out in the spring of 2021. To commemorate its launch and provide a fun talking point around its contents, I commissioned the production of a golf bag in the book’s honor.

Three years after walking UNC Finley Golf Course in Chapel Hill with a 9 a.m. tee time on a hot summer day and writing about the experience for the introduction of a book to be published by University of North Carolina Press, I found myself right back where I started. Only on these consecutive Saturdays in July 2020, my tee times were 11:12 a.m. and 12:24 p.m.—square in the teeth of typical summer weather in the South, with temperatures hitting the lower to mid-nineties on twenty-two consecutive days.

During the last week of August I turned over to the editors at University of North Carolina Press my manuscript of 60,000 words and flash drive of several hundred photographs assembled during a two-year period for a book about walking some of the top golf venues in the Carolinas. The idea was to find eighteen courses crossing dimensions from private to resort to municipal that offered outstanding golf and fostered a culture of walking—by lugging, pulling a trolley or taking a caddie. 

They are known as push-carts, pull-carts, caddie-carts and trolleys. They are revered in some locales (i.e., the United Kingdom) and sniffed upon at others (many high-brow American clubs). They began as simple devices made of lawn-mower tires mounted on a steel chassis and have evolved into high-tech gadgets powered by batteries and in some models with hands-free remote control. 

Through mid-June of 2019, Hayes Holderness had played seventy-eight rounds of golf in five foreign countries, seventy-two of them walking and most of those carrying his bag. In April he became one of the first two players to ever walk and carry his clubs at Santapazienza, a private course an hour outside Sao Paulo, Brazil, designed by Tom Fazio and his son Logan up and down a mountain and through a rainforest. In May he walked in a heat index of 120 degrees in Vietnam and, instead of a standard leather glove, wore rain gloves on both hands to absorb the sweat.

Old Town Club in Winston-Salem was designed and built by Perry Maxwell in the late 1930s, two decades before motorized carts became a blight on the American golf landscape. These grounds were  lovingly and reverently restored in 2013 by architect and native son Bill Coore, who would sooner chug kerosene than ride a golf cart. Coore used to walk and play this course frequently during his days at Wake Forest University in the late 1960s, and the more he studied the placement and shapes of the design elements, the more he became fascinated with the art and science of what would in time become his calling.

The first tee at Charlotte Country Club sits three miles to the east as the crow flies from the intersection of Trade and Tryon Streets at the heart of the Carolinas’ biggest city. But because the club’s founders had the good sense and fortune to acquire enough land to have accommodated nine more holes that never materialized, this club in contrast to many other early 1900s, in-town clubs with Donald Ross-designed layouts has plenty of elbow room. There are houses visible only along the right side of the first two holes, the rest of the layout with a verdant buffer of leafy hardwoods. There is even a fifteen-acre practice facility with two teeing grounds and a short-game area.

This story is not about golf, so it’s a bit out of place on this blog. But it is about walking—lots and lots of walking the streets, alleys, paths and bridges of Italy. So it will have to do until I set up a travel-writing venue. And judging by the fun and adventure my wife Sue and I found on our recent excursion across the Bel Paese (the beautiful country), I’d say that’s just a matter of time.

When Howard Lee was Secretary of the Department of Natural Resources under N.C. Governor Jim Hunt in 1977, he delivered a speech suggesting that the state of North Carolina should build a hiking trail stretching from the mountains to the Outer Banks. At the time, Lee was in his early forties and remained physically active by hiking and playing tennis.

The rain fell in barrels across central North Carolina in 2018 and the first days of 2019. Lowe’s was selling do-it-yourself ark kits and Amazon was shipping snorkels and flippers into the thousands. Some said the area from Pinehurst northward toward Raleigh got more rain in a record-setting year than Seattle ever gets. In fact, the rainfall registered at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in 2018 was twenty-five percent above normal and double the standard over the month of December. It turns out that Hurricane Florence and Tropical Storm Michael back in the fall were just appetizers to the near daily deluge of rain the state received as one year folded into the next.

Steve Miller works from his home in the leafy enclave of Biltmore Forest just south of Asheville as an adjunct professor at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and as a business consultant and a corporate board member. After a day of drafting reports, processing emails, returning phone calls and text messages, he’s ready at four or five o’clock to slip down the street to Biltmore Forest Country Club, sling a bag over his shoulder and go for a walk.  

I am standing on the ninth tee at Grandfather Golf & Country Club, my heart-rate elevated halfway to the moon, a wisp of perspiration on my brow on a mid-sixties May afternoon, my legs stressed from climbing twenty-seven steps through a passage carved in the rhododendron thickets leading from the eighth green. And getting to eight was no picnic, either—it’s sixty feet uphill from the one-fifty marker in the middle of the fairway to the green, your sightline angled up the ground to the heights of Grandfather Mountain at 5,945 feet above sea level.

In the spring of 1991 I was writing my first book for Pinehurst Resort & Country Club, this one built around the tribulations, trials and adventures of eighteen noted names in golf and their experiences in Pinehurst and, specifically, on the renowned No. 2 golf course. The result was Pinehurst Stories, which I like to think was an interesting read and played at least a modest part in club management’s efforts to fortify its heritage and brand as it sought to land a major championship such as a U.S. Open or Ryder Cup.

A 1924 land plan drawn by Olmsted Brothers for a new golf club and residential community north of Charleston included thirty-six holes of golf and some two hundred residential lots lining the fairways. The first course opened in 1925 under the architectural auspices of Seth Raynor and was a triumph from the beginning, Raynor saying he had been “charmed” by the land and the combination of sandy loam and sweeping dunes certain to “make one fall in love with golf.”

The year 2018 is going to be a busy one profiling the golf courses and walking experiences for this blog and my forthcoming book with UNC Press. That along with having passed my sixtieth birthday last June gives me extra motivation to tighten up several areas of my golf game. I wrote two weeks ago about my strength and flexibility issues (and that project is well under way). Now it’s time to address my putting stroke.

For many years I have known my golf swing has been besmirched by a slight lateral move with the upper body off the ball, a tendency to lift just a hair as my backswing unfolds and mediocre extension of my hands at the top of the backswing. My grip, posture and tempo are sound; but all the extra moving parts early in the swing have robbed my ability to hit powerful and consistent shots. I’ve always believed my handicap hovering in the six to eight neighborhood could have easily been whittled a few strokes if I could slay these demons.