My friend Burt McHugh is about as mild-mannered as a man can be, but now he was being pushed to his limits. I could feel his pain. We had left Philadelphia, where we both live, on a recent Sunday afternoon in a driving rainstorm. We were intent on playing a late-afternoon game at the Yale course, a hilly Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor track that Burt — High Orthodox, when it comes to golf, as am I — played as a member of the Penn golf team 25 or so years ago. The storm followed us on our drive north, but when we got to the course it was merely showering. Still, the course was closed.
"The course is closed?" Burt said to the pro shop counter man, echoing the message he'd just delivered. You'd have to know Burt well to hear the desperation in his voice. His morning game in Philadelphia was called after 16 holes because of the weather. And now this. He noted that the rain had almost stopped. His rain gear was on and his umbrella was in his bag — he was ready to go.
"The course is closed."
He staggered out of the shop, without even buying a golf hat. Burt always buys hats. The man was lost.
By Monday, the weather was fair and Burt was back to normal. We were on our annual golfing bender, a short and intense escape from our mundane one-round-a-day lives. (In actual fact, one or two a month.) He bought a hat before our morning game at the regal links of the Newport Country Club, in Newport, R.I. He bought another hat before our midday game at Sakonnet, a little Donald Ross gem with coffin-shaped bunkers in rural Little Compton, R.I., where Ross had a summer home. He bought another hat before our late-afternoon game at Rhode Island Country Club — Ross again — with a windswept, bay-front finish that could appear without warning in your golfing dreams.
On Tuesday, three more games in the Ocean State: a morning round at Metacomet, another work of genius by Donald Ross, where the transplanted Scot managed to get in 18 sound holes on about 100 acres in East Providence. We finished our two-day trip with 36 holes on Tuesday afternoon at Misquamicut, a sublime Donald Ross course in Watch Hill, R.I.
Because Burt and I live in Philadelphia — the epicenter of the Golden Age of American Golf Course Architecture — we are more than a little spoiled. (We have the good fortune to belong to private clubs, and once you belong to one you are sometimes invited to play others, in-state and out-of-state, too.) A brief list of some of the shinier pre-World War II gems in the Golf Association of Philadelphia: Philadelphia Cricket, Rolling Green, Philadelphia Country, Merion East, Gulph Mills, Torresdale-Frankford, Pine Valley, Lu Lu Temple, Huntington Valley, Whitemarsh, Merion West, Philmont . . . The list goes on.
In golf, as in life, it's good to have friends, and I called two to help Burt and me with our Rhode Island trip: Brad Faxon, the veteran Tour player who lives near Providence; and David Fay, the USGA executive director who often goes to Rhode Island for vacation.
It turns out that two days — even at three rounds a day — is nothing like enough time to do justice to Rhode Island golf. Except for a brief drive-by while U.S. Amateur qualifying was taking place, we barely got to see Wannamoisett, outside Providence, which some in Rhode Island consider to be the best course in the state. (Wanno's a Ross, too.) We didn't get to the nine-hole Jamestown municipal course, either, 100 years old and much enjoyed by David Fay. (Speaking of munis and David Fay, he played a significant role in bringing the U.S. Open to Bethpage Black and Torrey Pines.) But the five Rhode Island courses we did play were pure and great and a reminder of the primal understanding of the game that the pre-computer architects had.
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