Coming Soon: On the tee with Jayzee
During the summer there are many great things that you can do. You can go to the park, the beach or to one of my favorite places, the golf course.
Going to the golf course is one of my all-time favorite getaways. For four to six hours a day (my days out there are more towards the six-hour mark than the four) on the golf course you have the ability to escape all of your worries and troubles and focus on the finer things in life: finding your golf ball.
With that in mind I am off to embark on a summer long golf tour of local golf courses. My goal in this is to provide you (my faithful readers) with a “regular guy’s” opinion on how some of the public golf courses in the area.
My plan is to head out to one golf course a week throughout the summer, play a round, take some pictures and provide all the other “weekend hackers” like myself an idea on which golf course would suit you the best.
For us “weekend hackers” the game of golf is a recreational activity. It’s a thing we like to do with three of our buddies to get away from the wife, the kids, the job or all of the above. The majority of the round includes more drinking and trash-talking than it does actual golf, but that’s the best thing about it. We get four to six hours of no nagging, no crying and most importantly no cell phone.
Originally I started to play the game of golf in high school. A member of my high school golf team, I picked up the game thinking that one day in the professional world I may need to go out on business golf trips to schmooze clients or bosses or whatever. I mean I didn’t think that my ability to dribble a soccer ball would impress any potential business partners. But a good drive and solid iron game? Now that could really impress them.
Little did I know then, that eventually I would have no interest in schmoozing clients or impressing bosses. In fact, that’s the last thing on my mind right now.
So when I moved down here 10 years ago I stopped playing golf on a regular basis. As an 18-year-old college student none of my friends played golf, and when I would bring up the fact that I did, I was often subject to ridicule with comments like “golf is for sissies” and “what you couldn’t play a real sport?”
Years later those same friends that dissed me for playing the game went into the business world and were soon taking long lunches to go to the driving range and shelling out $400 of their bonus checks on new drivers and sand wedges. While I had rid myself of the “golf bug” they had caught it, and now I was left behind.
But I soon picked the game back up, and let’s just say that unlike a fine bottle of wine, my golf game did not get better with age. While I once was able to shoot 37-40 on nine holes, I was now shooting that on the first four holes. But I digress.
Regardless of whether or not I was scoring over 100 on 18 holes I still was enjoying the game. I enjoyed the camaraderie of going out for the afternoon with a couple of my friends, even if I was shelling out 60 bucks to suck.
But that’s the beauty of the game isn’t it? It’s the only activity in the world that you pay money to get angry at yourself. Yet we still go out and play, you got to love it.
That’s one of the reasons that I have decided to do a summer golf tour. I want to provide recreational golfers a tool, or guide to the courses around the area that will best suit their game and where they will have the most fun.
A lot of people in this area (Northeast Georgia) are avid golfers. Some of them have memberships to courses and have the ability to play all the time.
But this tour isn’t intended for them. This tour is intended for people like me, recreation golfers, whose game is more “Woods” than it is “Tiger” and who just enjoy a nice Saturday afternoon playing golf with their buddies as a means to get a way.
So tune in next week when my summer golf tour kicks off with a round at Traditions of Braselton on Hwy. 124 in Jefferson. My tour will be very detailed, from the layout, yardage and difficulty of the course to the price of a round to the price of a beer. Trust me, no stone will be left unturned.
After that, who knows where I will be headed, so if any of you have any suggestions, feel free to contact me.