Secret In The Dirt - Golf's Greatest Social Network

Welcome Geo, don't sweat the bouble post, I got rid of it for ya. We have a course in the next town that still does the honor system at times. Sign outside says put money in the box and park carts near pro shop when done, someone will show up later to put'em up. That is small town America right there.

Dang it, sorry for the double post!!! I did not realize it went through the first go round, I did not hit refresh until after I'd posted the second time!! No X to delete one of the posts either! ooops
I'll know from now on....

The course I learned to play on was in Rhode Island, Meadowbrook was the name of it! Excellent pasture course as well! There when it was off season they had an honor system set up where you simply placed your $5 into an envelope and then into a locked box out by the 1st tee! Not sure if that course still exists, I sure hope so and the World needs more like it, if those in the golf industry want to see more golfers involved in the game!

Cheers!

You betcha! Here in south-central Virginia, not only are most the courses I play old pastures, they're very hilly! I'm in Franklin County, VA! Know by it's awesome bluegrass music and is said to be, the moonshine capital of the world! Biggest liquor still found in the U.S. was less than 15 miles from my place! One of the pasture courses I play is Beaver Hills, located in Martinsville, VA! I enjoy it because, it's one of the only courses around I would classify as economically feasible for about anyone! Another I play when I can afford the time and gas to get there is, Ringgold , located in Ringgold, VA, not far from Danville, VA! Again, a very affordable pasture course! Sure there's others closer to me, but I cannot afford to pay $40+ per round! Neither can most average folks! Yet all I ever hear and see on The Golf Channel, is how the game needs more introduced to the game and playing it! If the golf course owners World wide would make their course economically feasible for All to play, more would be!!!
Which is why I also like to play a nice little CHEAP Par 3 course near me here called Brookside, located in Roanoke, VA!

Which leads me to a fantastic idea/concept I have came up with! Anyone with extra $$$ looking to invest in a golf based industry, please contact me! I don't have a clue why nobody else has thought of this, or already not doing it?!?!?

I actually have a couple of ideas/concepts, based in the golf industry! I just don't know how to get them in front of the right folks! Especially without losing them (my ideas)! I'm sick and tired of working a JOB, which I have none as of the moment!
Does anyone know what JOB stands for?
Jacka$$ Of Boss

The course I played growing up was a real dog track. 9 holes that probably maxed out at about 2800 yards. It was hard to tell where the fairway ended and the rough began (or the green for that matter)! The two hazards one had to avoid were the irrigation ditch on #3 and O.B. into the corn fields on 4 & 5. Yes, this was a genuine 'Mom and Pop' establishment, with the owner and his wife living in a little brick ranch-style adjacent to the pro shop. A dank old clubhouse which smelled of the old man's pipe smoke and potato chips. Shabby is it was, I remember the old place fondly. It was there I learned the game, hit my first drive past the 100 yard sign on the range, made my first birdie. Come to think of it, I don't know if I would have ever picked up the game if it wasn't for that little cow pasture where I and the other kids could trade a few bucks (literally!) for a whole day's worth of golf; free from old rangers giving us the evil eye just 'cus we were kids or big, scary grown-ups pressuring us to play faster. I think the old man ended up selling the place and they built a mini-golf course on the property or something.

Geoff, thanks for the awsome information. That is why I love this site. Our lil course in Brady is only 9 holes, but I think there is something special about the course you grew up playing on.

I used to hang out at Mustang Creek Golf Club in Taylor Texas, a few miles east of Round Rock, generally NE of Austin. It's a very old (1915) nine-hole that looks like they moved the cows and dug nine holes. Actually it's a very well-regarded test for a nine-hole course, and the pro shop is PURE GOLF CLASS. They make the sandwiches in the kitchen at home before coming to open up and stock the glass-door refrig with P&J, baloney, cheese, pimento cheese, ham and cheese, and egg salad sandwiches on white bread wrapped in WAX PAPER!! Oh yeah! $1.50 each all you want any day. The coke bottles are in the coke cooler by the screen door. http://www.mustangcreektaylor.com/

two quick cow-pasture tales to illustrate the fundamental importance of pastures to the origins of the game:

In the mid-1800s the British professional and management class had sufficiently benefitted from the Industrial Revolution spreading the wealth down from the Aristocracy that they went on vacations to Biaritz and other continental spa-resorts. Alas, the French didn't value golf as much as the Scots engineers! They had casinos and horse racing instead. What a bore! So the Scots jumped the fence and started whacking featheries about, bruising a few dairy cows. A little later, they drafted Willie Dunn Jr. to come over from Scotland and make a proper course so they could play a proper game in Biaritz.

Well, the Vanderbilts took the Clipper Ships over to Biaritz and saw Willie and bought him and took him back to Long Island to design Shinnecock Hills for the Gilded Age rich in America cica 1880-1890.

Along about this time when the railroading of America was underway with large resorts at the far end of the line used to draw traffic to the trains (New Yorkers and Newport Rhode Islander headed to St Augustine's Ponciana and Miami's Biltmore golf resorts), the Industrial Revolution was a bit delayed in America but was still generating wealth in the middle class. The Methodist presacher to the US Congress, Edward Everett Hale, was a wholly headed populists liberal and he wanted the middle class to have spas, too, just like the private-rail car Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. And he told the head of the company that made soda fountain machinery (a business not smaller than today's big screen tv business) to buld a spa for the middle class about halfway to Florida so the train ride wouldn't cost so much and to locate it in the pine wastelands where all the trees were killed getting tar out of them. The soda jerk king was Richard Tufts of Boston's America Soda Company, which made the machines that spewed out the sassparillas and later the Cokes. So Tufts bought cheap land in the sandhills of North Carolina and made a resort spa for the newly wealthy. But he didn't know squat about golf. The yankees came and said, "Where's the golf?" Then they jumped the fence into the neighboring cow pasters and whacked guuta percha balls and the new ones too, bruising dairy cows and making the local famers mad because the milk came out sour. So they complained about the Pinehurst resort guests playing "golf" in their pastures. Mr. Tufts said, "What's golf?" Once his son explained it to him and suggested the resort add golf to its amenities, Tufts contacted Donald Ross and shipped him south. (Ross was hanging out at the time in Massachusetts working for a golfing doctor.)

So Shinnecock Hills and Pinehurst both came from golfers jumping the fence to hit shots in the cow pasture.

wagga wagga golf club was pretty rough...but hey it had 18 holes

A horrible day of golf is still allot better than a great day of work.

Me