Weekend Chat: When Golf Isn’t “Golf”

Hello, Club TFE!

As he warned you all last week, Will Knights has flown the coop for a few weeks of impossibly well-earned delayed honeymoon time.

In what hopefully isn’t a crushing disappointment, that means you once again get me, Jay Rigdon, as your moderator/proctor for Weekend Chat purposes.

But first!

Club TFE Housekeeping

– Not a ton to note here, but I will add that if you or someone you’re shopping for is a Chambers Bay fan, we currently have all Chambers Bay photography discounted in the Pro Shop discounted by 15% with the code CHAMBERS. That’s part of our new Course of the Month program, which debuted on October 1st.

Your Weekly Question

These last two weeks have seen a surprising amount of TGL headlines, from hole reveals (one pictured above, via the TGL) to news of a five-part documentary surrounding the formation of Boston Common Golf, a documentary which will almost certainly be about five parts too long.

⛳️ 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗢𝗨𝗥𝗦𝗘: We partnered with three top golf course design groups to create dynamic custom holes that will come to life during our inaugural season.

Watch 👇 to learn about our course.

Click to check out the details behind our designers – @beauwelling, @arqpiza,… pic.twitter.com/LM1mY1EXMm

— TGL (@TGL) September 19, 2024

And while the sudden invasion of TGL chatter reeks of a concerted PR push, it did prompt me to think about simulator golf, as well as other non-traditional forms of the game. That particular mental rabbit hole led to a full-out contemplation best summarized thusly: what’s the best non-golf form of golf?

(That was the TL;DR moment for anyone in a hurry, by the way. Go ahead and skip down to the comments, I won’t be offended.)

My first golf experience came playing a PC game in the early 90s as a six-year-old. I also owned PGA Tour ‘96 for the original Game Boy. (I don’t know why, but I played as Brad Faxon every single time. Brad, if you’re reading: sorry for all the times I blew five-foot putts in the way back of the family minivan. Those controls were not precise.) I knew the island green at TPC Sawgrass in multiple low-res virtual settings before I ever saw it on TV, much less swung a club myself. And then there’s miniature golf, of course. I still remember specific designs and obstacles at the long-gone Adventureland in North Webster, Indiana. (It was 36 holes, practically a resort. There were also go-karts, rides, and one of those giant, metal, multi-tiered slides that I was always too scared to go down after witnessing another kid tumble forward at the bottom and flip/roll like he’d caught the infield grass at Daytona.)

The list is long, too. All the virtual versions you can think of, from more hardcore sim games to impossibly fun RPG titles like Golf Story. Golden Tee might deserve special mention, too, given its cult following and decades of service as the key corner tenant of every town’s second-best sports bar. Wii Golf, as well, for the rare combination of requiring actual physical movement and making golf accessible to a much wider and more casual audience. And then there’s the driving range and its evolutionary offshoots, places like TopGolf, simulators and simulator leagues (an important quick fix for the winter-state golf addict), all of which attempt to provide a truncated experience of what you find on the actual course. (Not to mention all the other various golf-named games. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was the first time I clicked Golf on the family computer only to see a convoluted game of solitaire pop up.)

We haven’t touched on disc golf, here, either, or other sports grafted onto the game. (I also recently came across Footgolf. Which, sure, okay.) I even have a gifted dartboard sitting in a closet at my apartment that I keep meaning to find a place for, more because I like the look of it than due to interest in the game it promises, although I’m not not curious.

And hey, maybe you’re reading all of this and thinking that no other form of golf is as good as the traditional version. That’s fine too! It’s okay to hold that version of golf in the highest esteem. But surely there’s something in second place for you. It can be a specific game, format, activity, or something completely outside the box that I haven’t mentioned here. Anything at all, as long as it doesn’t involve walking onto a golf course with golf clubs.

Looking forward to the responses!

Thanks for another week of reading, watching, and listening. Have an excellent weekend, enjoy the Dunhill and the Sanderson, and I’ll be back next week!