What Were We Thinking!

I have been hiking with SO and friends almost weekly and walking the golf course. I talked my friend the Gardener into walking the golf course and he bought a pull cart for his clubs. Chad Feldheimer, the young gun, refuses to walk. But the benefit for me is that I put my clubs on Chad's cart and I walk without having to carry my clubs. It is almost like having a caddy!

A few weeks ago, the Gardener and I walked Papago Golf Course, which is Phoenix's best municipal golf course. We usually play from the blue tees, which are 6,800 yards, but for some reason we started playing from the black tees, which are over 7,300 yards and once we realized what we were doing, it was too late so we stayed the course (no pun intended). From the black tees, Papago is a real man's test of golf. There are six par-4s over 440 yards. The par-5s average about 550 yards and three of the par-3s are over 235 yards! The course rating is 75.0 and the slope rating is 130.

We teed off on Sunday afternoon at about noon and finished in less than 4 hours walking. One single playing in a golf cart played through and otherwise we did not run into anyone else on the course or have anyone coming up from behind. The weather was absolutely perfect -- about 75 degrees with sunny skies and no wind. Papago used to be the busiest municipal golf course in Phoenix -- about 100,000 rounds per year! Golfers would park in the parking lot at 4 a.m. in the morning on the weekends in order to get a weekend tee time. The course got so much play that it fell into disrepair. In the mid-2000s the City of Phoenix and the Arizona Golf Foundation (an affiliate of the Arizona Golf Association) jointly undertook renovation of the golf course to restore it to its original luster. The Foundation did a great job on the golf course renovations but ran out of money before it could complete the new clubhouse (after razing the old clubhouse). A double-wide trailer stands as the clubhouse until there is enough money in the City budget to build the new clubhouse. However, in order to pay for the renovations, the City and the operator raised the in-season daily fee rate to $50 plus a cart fee, which out-priced a lot of the muni-golfers. Although Papago is a good as, if not better than, most of the semi-private and resort courses, golfers that are paying $65+ per round are generally not willing to pay that amount for a municipal course unless it is Bethpage Black or Torrey Pines.

Papago is a really well-designed walking course. You walk off of the green and the next tee box is usually within 20 to 30 yards -- unless you are playing from the black tees. We dropped our golf bags at the blue or white tee boxes and then started looking for the black tees. In some cases we needed binoculars to find the black tees. We then trudged back 50 to 90 yards from the front tees to our tee box. Sometimes the beginning of the fairway looked so far away I thought there was no way to reach the fairway, let alone reach the green in regulation. By the time that we got to the 18th hole, which is 464 yards long and about 50 yards back from the white tees, we were dragging and just trying to get to the clubhouse (or double-wide trailer) without too much damage. The Gardener shot an 87 and I shot an 88. With a 75.0 course rating and a 130 slope rating, my differential was 11.3, which is one of my best rounds of the year.