Three hours, forty minutes. On foot. On a busy Thursday afternoon on a popular golf course on an Indian summer afternoon with temperatures in the low-seventies. On a course where Sam Snead, Gary Player and Davis Love III have won. Where the great Scotsman Donald Ross conceived and routed the course. Where the holes are framed by the wispy brownish grass called broom sedge from which the property derived its name a century ago.

Last week I made the shortest walk yet in my “Random Walks” sojourn—just 789 yards of Bermuda turf on a sand base just outside the south entrance of the clubhouse at Pinehurst.

Yes, I have a wandering eye. I have moved from one pretty thing to another. I check out the curves, the details, the accessories. I enjoy going into a busy place with a pretty one on my arm. I reflect on my exes from back in the day and wince that I could have been so stupid to have been with that. If mine is hanging out with others, I’ll generally snicker at the ugliness of all that surrounds my jewel.

It’s five o’clock somewhere, the time to pop the seal on that bottle of Colonel Taylor Four Grain if you’re a mind. Here at Linville Golf Club in the cool and green North Carolina mountains, though, happy hour is setting off Donald Ross’s 1926 museum piece with your golf bag slung over your shoulder and a spring in your step.

Riding a motorized contraption though the pine forests set well to the perimeters of the holes of Pinehurst No. 2 is no way to spend four hours. Lost is the feel of the sandy loam under your feet, ignored are the moments to consider that seventy years ago Ben Hogan tread this ground and forty years ago Jack Nicklaus did as well. There are bunker edges to study, random growth amid the wiregrass to examine, problems ahead to contemplate—i.e. loft a chip over the edges of the crowned greens or pop a seven-iron into the slope?

Last week I had the pleasure of playing two mainstays in the Durham golf community—on Sunday at Hillandale, a daily-fee course scrunched between the busy Hillsborough Road complex to the south and I-85 to the north, and Wednesday at Hope Valley, a club tucked into a leafy neighborhood of streets with dignified names like Dover, Exeter, Eton, Rugby and Cornwall.

This week I ventured down memory lane into my early days covering golf from 1980-84 for the Durham Morning Herald, lugging my sticks around the venerable layout at Hillandale Golf Course. This is no-frills daily fee golf, a $25 tariff to walk on a weekend with a rich history that dates back more than a century.

Perhaps it was prophetic that the very month I signed a deal with UNC Press to write a book about the joy of playing golf by foot and foot alone I was presented by the golf gods, neatly wrapped with a ribbon and bow and sweat band, a case study illustrating my renegade approach to the game.