Golfers have a hard time explaining the appeal of their game to those who do not play. And in fact, golfers sometimes have a hard time accounting for their passion even to themselves. The old quip about how a round of golf is a “good walk spoiled” seems to stick with a lot of people. But buried in that line is an acknowledgment of something important about golf: Almost every round is, at the very least, “a good walk.”
And sometimes, it is better than that. It is a sublime walk. And the reason has a lot to do with the grounds where the game is played. Some golf courses are better than others, and some are a lot better. A few are transcendent—in the mind, anyway, of those golfers fortunate enough to play them.
There are legendary courses that every serious golfer would love dearly to play and that even most nongolfers have heard about: Augusta, Pebble Beach, the Old Course at St Andrews. They are to the aficionado what the seven summits are to mountaineers or the Michelin three stars are to epicureans. So golfers might imagine paradise as being something like an eternal journey from one of these courses to the next, playing each in the season when it is at peak and savoring not just the golf but the essence of the course and its neighborhood.
John Steinbreder, who writes about golf for a living, has been fortunate to live a mortal’s version of this dream, here on earth, and has been generous enough to share the experience with golfers who might never get to put a tee in the ground at, say, Pinehurst No. 1 but will appreciate the chance to live the experience vicariously, while reading From Turnberry to Tasmania. The subtitle catches its essence nicely: Adventures of a Traveling Golfer. Steinbreder has certainly done the traveling, and his passion for the game has made it into something like an odyssey as opposed to a mere tour. As, for instance, in his introduction when he writes:
Not exactly your regular weekend foursome at the club or local muni. But while this passage might appear to be a sample of the kind of travel writing that seeks only to swank it over the reader, Steinbreder is anything but a snob. It might be because he loves the essence of the thing—the golf—so much. With him, it is always about the golf, and his love for the game and the courses he plays and writes about is infectious.
His tour of the world’s great courses begins, of course, at St Andrews, and one may be tempted to think that quite enough has been said and written about the Royal and Ancient Golf Club. And in fact, while Steinbreder writes elegiacally about the course, he also takes the reader on a tour of some of the other “seventeen first-rate golf courses within an easy drive or walk” of the hallowed ground and leaves us thinking that maybe it is time, at last, to book that trip—and now, before we have to start playing from the forward tees.
So Steinbreder’s world tour begins where golf began, and then moves on around the British Isles, taking in those things that are in the neighborhood and appeal to his sensibilities. The right places for a glass of single malt, say; or after the day’s round, when he is playing near Dublin,
In the New World, Steinbreder plays the courses you might expect. And some that are surprises. Pebble Beach, of course, is part of the tour: It is a course that stimulates recall of memorable tournaments and great shots that were hit by great golfers on their way to winning those tournaments: “Jack’s one iron and Watson’s wedge.” Most readers will know “Jack” simply by the first name—and probably recall the shot, and will give Steinbreder some credibility points here. It adds significantly to this book’s appeal that the author is as much historian of the game as traveler to its iconic destinations.
Also that, like most golfers, he is on the lookout for what in the fraternity are known as “hidden gems.” These are the courses that are delightful, challenging, and memorable without being famous destinations. They might even be munis. But their pedigree is less important than how they play. So Steinbreder concludes the chapter that begins at Pebble Beach with a visit to “Pacific Grove Golf Links, a charmingly funky public course in a charmingly funky town of the same name.” That course, or a portion of it anyway, is known as the “poor man’s Pebble Beach . . . [and] at less than $50 a round, the price is right.” (Pebble Beach, by the way, is 10 times that.)
The grand golf tour continues to Australia, New Zealand, Bermuda, and the Caribbean. It takes in Italy and Portugal, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, Hawaii, and Nova Scotia. And Steinbreder finds something to love, and some lore to report, everywhere he goes. In his afterword, he provides us with a collection of “top-fives,” going beyond listing the actual courses and including such things as the top five golf lunches and the top five nineteenth holes. The man knows his golf and has appealing eagerness to share, almost as if he were trying to explain what it is about golf that makes some people love it so much.
The answer, in part, is that it isn’t just about the golf. And on that, Steinbreder gets it right on the sweet spot.
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
