In August of 2003, I was invited by a business friend to play in a guest-member golf outing at Medinah Country Club. The course is famous for its difficulty and hosting professional golf tournaments such as the US Open in 1949, 1975, and 1990. My business friend, a commercial printing broker, helped me accomplish a number of great things, such as organizing a highly successful literacy support program reaching 175 public libraries and 375,000 families, and also producing a poster that placed in the top four Cream of the Crop running posters from Runner’s World Magazine.

Working with him was great even though our politics and personal views were political opposites. He was conservative and I am a liberal and progressive. But we liked each other and often had lunch to discuss our personal and professional lives. Once in a while, we’d go golfing together.

Honest advice

But he was the much better golfer. I shoot in the 80s and he was an ace at golf, often scoring in the 70s even on tough courses such as Medinah. Thus when he invited me to play in a golf outing at that course, his advice was simple and sound: “If you hit into the woods, play it out to the fairway. Don’t try to hit through them.”

I was eager to try playing the course because my late grandfather-in-law was once a club champion of some sort at Medinah. But my father-in-law didn’t care for the game of golf and never used his Medinah membership for anything but taking his kids to the restaurant and other fun. When asked why he didn’t play golf, my father-in-law replied, “Nature Is My Country Club.”

That quote stuck with me, and I used it years later as the title of the book I wrote about the golf industry and its changing dynamics.

So when I finally played Medinah, I paid close attention to my conservative friend’s advice. We teed off under clear and beautiful August skies, but during the first few holes the clouds moved in and were threatening rain. Suddenly, sheets of driving droplets poured through the trees as if there were an air raid going on. We piled into our golf carts and headed toward the ninth hole turnaround spot, but the rain kept up and soon the fairways shone as if they were an ice-skating rink. We piled into our carts during a partial pause in the storm and hustled back to the main clubhouse.

Rainout

The outing was cancelled, so the club food service swung into action as we gathered in damp shirts to have a meal and talk about the shots we’d made and missed. The next day, I pulled out my quasi-official personal journal, and wrote about the experience, which ended weirdly, and that’s the whole point of this story. What do you do, and how do you respond, when life throws corrupt circumstances your way?

Journal Entry August 7, 2003

“Nature was not able to be denied yesterday. In spite of millions of dollars of manipulation of a golf landscape. In spite of affectations in architecture and social structure. In spite of metal clubs and synthentic balls and electric carts, the rains came furiously and washed away the Camel Trail Golf Outing at Medinah Country Club.”

“It was an impressive environment if you like your thick woods without leaf litter, your ponds without grass along the edges and your open fields manicured to a carpet length smoothness. This time around I heard and saw no birds, I realize. Not even a vagrant heron in the shallows, for there were, apparently, no shallows in the lakes. Just opaque, moody depths that the golfers call hazards. It is an interesting metaphor if you stop to consider the manifold meanings of the word hazard. And their role in the game of golf is nearly absolute save for a lucky skip if a shot is hit so low the ball skims over the surface to safety.”

“The entire course became a waterway when the skies, heated to a froth by the August sun, unleashed. We played a hole in the sprinkles, but when driven to the Halfway House (not one for the poor, but for the wealthy) accompanied by one of our fore caddies, a strange allotment of youth and ethnicity including our own, a quiet Latino named Jesus. His nervous but eager eyes and partial grasp of the language actually made me more comfortable in the situation. I too felt like a foreigner in the face of so much. At so much a cost.”

“We sat and drank as the rain fell straight down from the sky. Light beer and cigars at our table. Less calories and more smoke. The cadre of men stood close to one another and talked loudly, determined I guess to ward off what might be perceived as too much of an intimacy. We talked of things men in a group talk about; other rounds, other exploits, drugs of our youth, and women.”

“But the storm would not let up to relieve us of these sentimental strivings, so we trekked to the clubhouse in our sheltered carts which still could not keep out the wind and rain, especially for Jesus, whose back got soaked while perched on the front of the cart. Giant puddles whooshed as we followed the paths, and one could see rivulets and pools forming on every fairway. Lightning flashed and thunder crashed again. We left behind a tree on the 7th hole dated to 1664. It has seen, if the claims are correct, over 440 years of storms, snows, heat, cold, winds and the like. It too is a hazard for anyone who hooks his drive on #7 at Medinah. A little black sign proclaims the tree a a State Champ for the ages.”

“We dine on giant slabs of red beef and more drinks. The dinner talk turns briefly to business while the storm sinks to the south. Twillight comes with sunshine and slowly the fairways clear of water but the greenskeeper declares the course officially closed. We are too late to finish a round anyway, darkness a worse enemy even than lightning, to a golfer.”

“I recall that my second shot remains perched in the grass on the 7th fairway, or was it in the rough? I will never know. The course vanished behind me like the memory of a funeral. We came into the lavish clubhouse, furnished and decorated like a regal crypt, to toast ourselves or something.”

“After dinner it was Showtime. An obscene but somewhat sweet comedian cracked wise on dogs, wives, kids, and driving, especially drunk driving.

 ‘HOW AM I GOING TO GET HOME THEN?” he taunted the crowd. Some joke.”

“Then came the strippers, bare to the bone, which I didn’t know was legal. The two pretty girls allowed four willing men the chance to grope them repeatedly while the crowd howled vicariously. The show ended and a host of apparently decent men stood up to leave when the girls started working the audience for money. Like I said earlier, too much intimacy is simply too much for a crew this removed from nature, human and otherwise.”

And all of this is true exactly as I described it. When relating this story I was once challenged by someone defending Medinah’s honor. “They don’t allow stuff like that there,” the apologetic attempted to claim. “All I know is what I saw,” I responded. “I turned to the guys at my table and told them, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m married. And I’m leaving. And we all left before the strippers got to our table.'”

We live in an age when that scene at Medinah is the regular appetite of those at Mar-a Lago, and the White House improper, it seems.

Christopher Cudworth is the author of the book Nature is Our Country Club: How Golf Explains Sustainability In A Changing World.