The Compelling Journey to Play America's Top 100 Courses...In One Year!

Hi, This is Gene Thornton from Nutley, New Jersey, and I play at Hendricksfield Golf Course. This is Golf Smarter number nine hundred and fifty. Playing from the rough takes two stories. Both actually have contrasting parameters to them. One is the story of my life starting in abject poverty, moving into a world of successful businessman globe triding around the world filled with more privileged than poverty. There's a parallel story that's told of me playing the top hundred golf

courses. I use that story also to show the contrast in the world of golf, which for so long was like a standard bearer for segregation. So you have this black guy who grew up in poverty that's going to all of the most exclusive golf courses in the country, places where people who look like me were prohibited from going. The compelling journey to play America's top one hundred

courses in one year with author Jimmy James. This is Golf Smarter, sharing stories, tips and insights from great golf minds to help you lower your score and raise your golf IQ. Here's your host, Fred Green. Welcome to the Golf Smarter podcast. Jimmy. Hello, Fred, happy to be here. I'm great. How are you today? Doing well? How are you?

I'm doing well too. I'm so excited to talk to you because your book it comes to me and last week we talked to somebody about, you know, creating your own bucket list, and then this week I have this book where you exceeded bucket lists goals. Right. I mean the quote alone from Rick Riley on your book is so perfect. He says, I'm so damn jealous of Jimmy James. I only pulled off my dream golf adventure, but he wrote a book so good. I haven't spoken my laptop in a

week. I love that because he's prolific at the very least he is. He writes a lot of really good books, has a great sense of humor. I even quote him in my book and Playing from the Rough when I'm playing at Augusta on the twelfth hole and he talks about all of the green jackets that have been lost on the twelfth hole. More green jackets have been lost on the twelfth hole than at the Augusta dry cleaners. But he has a way of really getting to the heart of the matter. Yeah, he

really does, but you did too. This book goes in so many directions, as far as you writing a memoir about your life, but also a memoir about your golf adventure. Give me a summary, Give that person who's listening, give them a summary of your book, and then we'll go from that, all right. Well, Playing from the Rough takes two stories that

both actually have contrasting parameters to them. One is the story of my life starting in abject poverty and moving into a world of much much different successful businessman globe triding around the world, more born into a life of poverty, entered into a world of filled with more privileged than poverty. There's a parallel story that's told of me playing the top hundred golf courses, and I use that story also to show the contrast in the world of golf, which for so

long was like a and a bearer for segregation. So you have this black guy who grew up in poverty that's going to all of the most exclusive golf courses in the country, places where people who looked like me at one time were prohibited from going and so a contract were prohibited from from being from playing,

but not from being an employee, not from working here. But so it's the it's it's really two stories braided together with common themes of progress made but in need for even more progress to be made exactly exactly, and the stories are both compelling just as standalone stories. They're both compelling. And as you mentioned, you played Augusta That, so your goal was to play This was post retirement from a various successful business career, and we'll get into the

details of that later. But you set a goal for yourself to play the top one hundred courses in the United States in one year, not just play them, but to do it in one year, which is quite a bodacious goal to set for yourself, and you do it by starting at Augusta National,

probably the hardest of all the courses to get onto. What is so that in itself sounds a little insane, probably probably because it was insane, making it even more insane, is that my goal was to get on the all of these courses without ever asking, by just talking about what I was doing and seeing through kindness and generosity and interest and if I'm able to stir with it and others that it is a desire to help me achieve a goal

that I've set for myself, and so that makes it even more ridiculous that I thought I could do something like that. But for the most part, seventy five percent of the people who hosted me or helped me during the journey I did not know when I started the journey. Wow, wow, So how did you get to the first one? You weren't invited as far as Augusta's let's establish how you got onto Augusta. Then started the journey of having people invite you. Yeah, so when I actually when I played Augusta,

and I'll tell the story of how I got on too, Augusta. Augusta was a present, a gift for my wife. Both of us have careers, dynamic careers, and we traveled a lot in those careers and we moved a lot, sometimes driven by my career, sometimes driven by her career. She was a professor and then senior associate dean at the Darton School at the

University of Virginia, and I was with ex On Mobile. We were headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia at the time, and then the opportunity to become dean at the Groizwetta School at Business School Embra University came along for her and to show appreciation her appreciation for my support in her making that move into that job.

She was determined to get me on to Augusta National. So at a board meeting with her advisory board, she asked if any of her advisory board members knew anyone from Augusta that would be willing to invite her husband to come and play at Augusta National. And Lynn Rodgers, an Atlanta businessman, said he was friends with Danny Yates and the Yates family in Georgia. They're like royalty such a Charlie as so Danny is Charlie's nephew, so so Charlie's Dan,

Danny's dad Pete. Dan Yates is a cousin. A is a brother too to Charlie Yates and uh to Charlie Yates Senior. So Charlie hs Junior and Danny are cousins Solis. Charlie Yates Junior is a friend of a friend of mine who I'm hoping next year when I come to Atlanta, will I'll be playing golf with Charlie Yates. So I've played golf with Charlie HS Junior

ourselves, and Charlie and I similar circles. Charlie and I served together on a committee for an event at East Lake, and we also helped support a program that Emery University has for exchange program where students from Emory and Georgia Tech go over to Saint Andrew's for one year program. And so Charlie and I know each other through that also. So getting back to what we were talking about earlier, So that's how I ended up on Augusta. It had nothing

to do with playing the top hundred courses in the world. It was my wife being determined to give me the opportunity to experience what it would be like to play golf at Augusta National. I totally understand a determined wife who can break down a lot of walls. Yes, it's a similar situation. Oh, that's a phenomenal story. So let's just review your round at Augusta.

How did that go well? And walking on starting with walking on the grounds, not just your golf itself, but what did you go through when you arrived? You know, it's interesting. So we flew in from Atlanta and picked up at the Executive Airport and a van driven to Augusta and you drive down Washington Avenue Washington Street, and it does not prepare you for Augusta Nashville. It's this four long stretch of land with Neon signs and strip malls.

And then you make a turn and the gates open up, and you're riding down Magnolia Lane with the over arching branches of the magnolia trees, looking straight ahead at this antebellum club house with a wrap around port, and then it hits you. It hit me. I am your breath away, I am at Augusta National. It's it's surreal, and so you you you have to catch yourself. So we played. We played the part three first, and then we had lunch, and then we went to the first tea and I

really don't even remember. My head was so far above the clouds. I don't even remember how we got from the clubhouse to the first tea. They're just next to each other, but I really don't remember that walk. And then I'm really nervous. I don't want to embarrass my host. I don't want to embarrass myself. And this is a part of where I think back also to just how did this kid who used to run barefoot down a dirt road playing baseball with a stick and a doll's head and a bunch of stinky

little kids just like me. Get to the first tea of Augusta National Golf Club, and so that's all going through my mind and I'm there. I'm just trying to make a swing, and fortunately my ball ends up in the fairway, left side of the fairway, a little short of Danny's drive.

He teed off first, and then I followed. Then the other two guys teed off, and I really couldn't fill my feet when I'm walking down that fairway thinking about the history and all those Masters champions that had taken that same walk, the legends, and I'm here, I'm walking down the fairway and so I'm really trying to breathe. And so I thought, well, let me talk because I do that easily. That's my comfort zone. And so I talked to my caddy and get the club and I'm like one hundred and

seventy yards out from the pin. In a good shot lands on the green and true to Augusta, it rolls off the green, off the right front of the green. But I'm still thinking, I'm at Augusta. I'm going to par that first hole. I'm going to make par on my first hole on the championship course at Augusta National. A chip and three putts later, I'm walking off the green with the double bogie. So I had more putts than swings at Augusta Nashville. The hallows and mounds, the undulation of the

greens, which television doesn't do justice to. It's just it's hard to They're hard to navigate. So eventually I collect myself and on Flowering Crab Apple, which is you know, as you know, all the holes that Augusta have names, and so on that fourth hole, after starting with three double bogies, I hit a high six iron over the bunker to a front pen position. The ball plops onto the green and I'm feet away from a birdie. Then I leave it short. But that's how that's my first part Augusta National.

And I calmed down from there and I got bogies and maybe another double and it's just magical, and you're everything is perfect, and it's this idea again. I'm coming from a world. I was born into this world that lacked almost everything, and there I am standing in this world that lacks almost nothing, where every blade of grassousness, every blade of grass, where every blade of grass is in its place, where every need that a person probably

could have when they're there is met. And so it's quite the contrast from from the world I was born into, in the world I found myself in tracing across these manicured this manicured, neatly manicured law amazing. We're talking to Jimmy James, whose new book is called Playing from the Rough, a personal journey through America's one hundred great as golf courses, and we're going to talk

more about it right after this. Jimmy, the way you describe your first impressions at Augusta as you can't remember how you got to the tee, you were, you were floating, you were, it was so in your head. Did you journal as soon as you got off the course or how did how did you remember so many details of so many rounds of golf? Were

you journaling through that? And well, I'm not going to ask the second question all to start with that, So I wrote a blog right after I got home, So while it was still fresh in my mind, I wrote a blog, and for the first five or so courses, I just remembered everything, and then we took vacation, came back. We took vacation, went to Ireland for a week family vacation. We came back and I started again. And by the time I got to about the tenth course, the

details of every single shot in every single hole started to blend together. So I started then taking notes during each round so that I could make sure I

never courses during when I wrote a blog about it. So I had notes and details on every hole, every shot, what every hole, how I saw every hole, to the to the engineer, to the engineer's minds detail, and so that that served as a as some hard drive memory for me and for years, so I could I could meet someone from a different from a particular course and I could tell them each shot I took on their course. But as more time has passed, then that that starts to fade.

Well, when you played that many rounds, I mean, had you ever played one hundred rounds in one year before? I played a hundred rounds in one year, and that year I played about one hundred and seventy five rounds. So in addition to playing all oh so an addition to playing and on some of the courses, some of the top one hundred courses I played more than one round, but across that year, I played about one hundred and seventy five rounds of golf. You like retirement, although it doesn't feel like

retirement when you're writing a book. No, that's right, No, you're absolutely right. My wife published a memoir last June twenty twenty three, or her memoir, and I had her on the show episode nine hundred to help promote the book. And so living with somebody as they're writing a memoir takes years. It is hard work. It takes a lot of mental fortitude and memory, like jogging your memory, going back finding things, trying to remember

exactly and trying to be accurate as best you can. But here you're all doing this in a year's time. But then you have your whole life to

talk about it. Yes, and so that's that's one of the One of the things was while playing that would I would think back, certain things would spark memories from my life, and I would make a note about that because it was a part of my experience on that golf course, and I really wanted to capture the experience of what it felt like to be on the golf course, and I did a blog, and I wanted the reader of the blog to feel that they were right there with me on every single swing,

and at the end of that blog they could feel that they had experienced that course vicariously. And so I wanted to be very detailed so that they could picture in their mind exactly what I was doing and where the setting, all those things. So that helped a lot when I started writing the book, because I could refer back to those blogs and be reminded, and it would stir sort of the emotions of the moment, and that brings memories back.

So I want to go over like the sequence of events when your wife presented you with this opportunity to go play as your retirement present, to go play Augusta. At what point from there did you go, Oh, wait a minute, I want to now try to get to one hundred courses, the top one hundred courses in the United States. Where did that fit in? So first she told me about the gift to Augusta. Then later she gave

me a book by this guy John Sabino. So I had decided I was going to retire, and I was putting together a plan on what I was going to do that first year of retirement because I didn't want to flunk retirement. I'd seen several colleagues flunk retirement. They go back to work. When you say flunk, do you mean they die or they're just bored out of their mind, out of their minds and they go back to work. You

have this sense of relevance. You sit at the head of tables, you manage large businesses and lots of people, and so you have this sense of relevance, and then all of a sudden, you turn in your badge and all that's gone. So if that's been your life for thirty five years, forty years, it takes some adjusting to do. And so I anticipated that from what I'd observed, and I said, I need a project. I

need a plan. I wanted to spend more time at home because I was traveling, you know, two hundred, two hundred and fifty thousand miles a year around the globe, and my kids were in high school. I wanted to I missed so much of their lives in the years before, in those really impressionable years of high school. I wanted to be there. I wanted to be president. So and a lot of people will say, well, but you went off and played these hundred golf courses. I was home a

whole lot more than I was home when I was working. I was away eighty eighty two eighty three nights to play those hundred golf courses as opposed to being as opposed to being away two hundred nights. So so I said, I'll get I'll reconnect with the country. I used to drive across the country all the time, meeting with people, stopping and talking with people, really just engaging people and getting a fill for who we were as a country, and I missed doing that. So I said, I'm going to travel.

My plan was to travel to all fifty states, take the kids with me to some of the most intriguing places, and play two rounds of golf in each state. One with this was the initial was the initial goal. Okay, one with strangers and one with friends in each stayed so one private course, one public course. But at Christmas, my wife gave me a book by John Sabino, this golf writer who had traveled around the world and play

the top hundred courses in the world. So I was just looking at it from a math standpoint, I'm going to play one hundred courses, why not play the top hundred? And I bet no one's ever done that in a year, So why don't I just play all of the top hundred courses in the US and do it in one year. I had no idea what I was talking about. I did not understand at the moment at the time how insane that idea was. But that's always the best way to approach it.

An insane ideas being blind. I've done it multiple times, and I was blind to it. So a couple of months later, Golf di just there their Greatest their issue with their one hundred greatest Courses comes out. I look at the list. I recognize less than half the courses on the list. There were places I'd never heard of, like Mayacamma, the Valley Club of the Valley Club of Montecito. Yes, just north of you, in Santa Rosa it is. So here's my great Mayacamas. I have a great Mayacama

story. A friend of mine, a neighbor of mine, when they were just about to complete my e comma, he went up there was he was a real estate genius, and he told them I'll write you a check right now to get a membership if on one condition, and they're like, great, what's the one condition? He said that I can be the first t I get the first round of golf when you open. And they're like, uh, okay, sure, Why do you want to be the first one off? He said, I want to hold the club record, even if

it's but for a moment. But he can say just for a moment. I had that low round in my comma, and so he did take me up there and play once when I was just starting to play golf, so I had no appreciation of it whatsoever, but I do remember vaguely how gorgeous it was. Yeah, that first toll part four uphill. Yeah, it's it's it's it's, it's it's. Yeah, it's a that my Comma, Valley Club of Montecito, Eagle Point, just Maidstone, Kenyata. The whole

list of courses i'd never heard of that most people haven't heard of. But then were they mostly West Coast. Now they're spread across or spread across the country, So the courses are spread across the country. There in thirty three states. California has twelve, New York has thirteen, and so twenty five percent of the private twenty five percent of the courses of the one hundred courses are in those two states, and then sprinkled everywhere else and sprinkled in thirty

one other states in between. So that's how the idea came to me, and I said, well, I said, this is what I'm going to do. So this is what I'm going to I'm going to do, and I to make it even more challenging. As I said, I said, I'm going to do this just by meeting people, seeing if they're kind enough, enthused enough, interested enough, willing enough to help a stranger achieve a goal, a dream by just talking to people about what I'm doing. And

it was amazing. I would talk to people and I could see their mental rolodexes going off, and people would do some of the most amazing things to go out of their way to help. So you went from writing a blog about these courses, at what point did you go, oh, hey, I've got a book here, and then decide to incorporate your growing up memoir part into the book. So I thought about it, the journey and the contrast. When I finished, I said, you know, this seems like

an amazing story that needs to be told. I think that we see the challenges, but not as often do we hear about the triumphs and overcoming those challenges. And so I wanted to write a story that talked about that gave a real, true perspective of the challenges we face, but how those challenges

could be overcome. And it just seemed like that journey of my life, the arc of my life, and the arc of that journey across those golf courses had enough parallels to show the contrast and to inspire anyone who dreams big, whether it's in life or whether it's in golf, that no matter how challenging things become, we can overcome it if we work together, and that at our core we're kind, generous people and we connect, you know. In writing the book, one of my goals was to write the stories.

There are lots of stories in my life, but how do I pick stories that I think I can write well out in a way that's compelling and intriguing and holds the interest of the reader, but also allows the reader to connect to me, to find a piece of themselves in those stories and realize that no matter how different we may be no matter how different our backgrounds may be, how different our lives may be, we can relate to each other. You know, there there's this, there's this piece of this you stop and

you think about it, for it, there's this piece of this. What's interesting about some guy going around to the most privileged places in the world, in the country, hanging out with very privileged people, playing a very privileged game that in itself, to me isn't interesting or in intriguing nor relatable. But when it's an everyday man like me. I have no special talents. I'm not some gifted athlete. I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't I mean, I'm just any guy you can meet on the street.

And when you look at it from that way, that tells you what is different about America. That tells you that we really have something here that's worth fighting for, that's really worth putting forth an effort to keep and to allow to continue to progress. The aspirations are great, but the only way they come about is that despite our differences, we find a way to connect to our common humanity and work together to make it a more perfect union. And

so I write about my experience. It is with people all across the country. You know, some of the stories as I'm playing golf on these amazing places and hitting great shots and not so great shots at times playing golf, playing golf, some of the experiences I had, Like one of the ones I thought was really intriguing was in a contrast was I was driving from from Evansville, Indiana, to Columbus, Ohio, and I'm in this huge suv. It's a rental car Infinity QX eighty or something. The tires on this

thing are humongous, and I'm driving along. I'm talking to an old college friend about how I'm traveling very differently from the days when I used to pack everything I own in the back of my nineteen seventy eight Burgundy Chevy Monte Carlo. The books, the stereo, the little black and white television, and the clothes. That was it. That was all of my earthly possessions.

And now I'm driving around this huge monstrosity of a vehicle and the light, the indicator light for low low tire pressure comes on and I pull over along the side of the interstate and there's the tire. I could hear the air coming out of the tire, and so there's no way on this It's a drizzly, dark, drizzly night in the middle of nowhere, and there's no way I'm going to get out with eighteen wheelers going by at seventy seventy five

miles an hour and change his flat. So I call the roadside service. Takes about an hour, but this guy shows up in a tow truck and he starts to back up toward my vehicle, starts to let the bed down like he's gonna toe. I get out and I go over and talk to him. I try to light in a moment with him, because he seems pretty angry after I tell him that I don't need a toe, just a flat changed, and that really seemed to tick him off. And so finally I just say to the guy I'd ask him his name, told him my

name. His name is George. I say to George, So, George, what gives? Why are you so upset about this situation? It was like, I just drove an hour for ten effing dollars, and I'm like, that blew me away that this guy was only going to make ten dollars on this tire change. And so I asked him. How much would you make if you were towing me? He said, twenty dollars. The difference to him was huge. And here I am, and George is white. I could see the tiredness in his eyes, the roughness of his hands when

I shook them. That this was a guy who spent his life working with his hands and his back and weighed down by the burdens that came with all of that, and all he's trying to do is make a living. And here I am, traveling across the country, chasing this frivolous dream, spending way more money than I'd care to talk about to do this, talking to

this guy for whom ten dollars makes the world of a difference. So I assured George that my tip to him, I didn't know how much they were going to pay ab or whatever, but my tip to him would make it worth his while because to change, to change the tire, because what he was doing for me was worth a whole lot more than ten bucks or even twenty bucks. And so at the end, when I gave him the tip, he smiled, and the anger went out of him just as quickly as

the air had gone out of that tire. And we shook and we took we shook hands. And the way I thought about it is George went off to his American and I went off to mine, And it's two different Americas that contrast that collided along the side of that interstate that night. But it was a reminder to me that we can never forget that it's the Georges of the world that make this world work. Without George, I'd been stuck on

that freeway, stuck on that highway that night. So, but there's another part of America where you had to have some anxiety of being an African American and in the middle of the night with a big SUV on the side of the road, you know, the stories that we hear had to be a little create a little bit of anxiety. Actually, honestly, that night that

there was no anxiety on that I had anxiety. I had. The place where I had anxiety is when I was driving through Kansas and I got pulled over for speeding when I knew I wasn't speeding by a coffin, by a coffin a pickup truck. But that that that that even turned out to be just my anxiety because it was more at the end of the day, it was really the small town h collecting money. It was a small town shakedown as opposed to being stopped for driving while black. It was being stopped for

driving with out state tags. But that that's anxiety, and that's something that, yeah, you you do feel and that comes. You know, a lot of people try to say, well, you look at the numbers, and I'm a numbers guy, so I know that about a thousand people a year, a thousand people total per year killed by police officers. That's a thousand obviously too many. About about twenty five or so of those are unarmed. About a quarter of those are African Americans. And so when you look

at the numbers, it's disproportional, but not vastly disproportional. But that doesn't tell the whole story. I've been pulled over in my life several times for driving while black. And when that happens to you and you know they're just messing with you, your lived experience has become more significant than the numbers.

And so those are the things. And I think we've made a tremendous amount of progress from when I had a kid's college kids riding through my neighborhood through the saw Mill quarters in Huntsville, Texas, when I was five, six seven years old, yelling racial epithets, Uh, we've come a long way. We've still got progress to make, but we've come a long way and we've made I think we've made substantial progress, but still have a lot of

work to do. But I still have times. You know, I'm in I'm in Philadelphia, and I was sitting out in front of a vet's office next to uh it was it was a there was a bakery. There's a bakery next to the vet's office. I'm sitting out while the vets taking care of our dog, you know, doing the the exam, and and I'm just sitting out there hanging out. This woman passed me, stops and says, I'm so sorry. I don't have any change with me. I'm like, excuse me. He says, I can't give you any money. I

said, ma'am, I didn't ask you for any money. Then she goes, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but there's this assumption. So I have that. But at the same time, most of the people, the vast majority of people who helped me gain access to all these courses were white, and to them I was a stranger. They invited me into their club, their homes, and their lives. And so we have to acknowledge that progress that's been made and then continue to work toward making more progress.

You and I are both engineering people, but with very different types of engineers in our training. But I've always been fascinated by there was there was a great I think. I don't know it's a bumper stick or a T shirt, but it said optimisty the world the glass glasses have full pessimiscy. The glass is half empty, and engineers are wondering why we need a glass

that's twice the size of art. But yeah, but you had a very successful career working for Exxon Mobile for thirty five years, you said, and you worked your way up to a prominent position there where you could retire at a doable age and pursue an amazing and outrageous goal. I'd love to talk to about more of the golf courses that, even without writing it down,

that would stick in your mind forever. Yeah. So there's this course that very few people have heard of. It's in southern Illinois, across the border from Terry Hate Indiana up US Highway one in Marshall, Indiana and Marshall, Illinois, and it's called kenneyata c A n y A t d A. It was. It's very private, owned by one guy. There's zero members, there's no pro staff, there's just the groundskeeper and his crew. And that day that I played it, I was the only guest for the course.

I had this entire course to myself. No, I mean it was amazing for me. So when I was a boy, I lived in what we called the country, the wide open prairies, and I ran barefoot through the woods and went on all these exploratory trips and just commune with nature, and I fell at home. And for so I played the front nine by myself, and the golf course superintendent played with me on the back nine. But it was just so peaceful, the symphony of the noises from nature.

It was me and those along these de covered fairways where my footprints were the only footprints in the dew. And I this boy who grew up without a bed, let alone a room of his own, had a golf course all to himself. That was an amazing That's an amazing course. That's private course. Then you've got Cyprus, Cyprus Point, the beauty, the variety of holes where you can play each hole. Not only are the holes different, but each hole can be played so many different ways. And then there's this

par three risk. Probably the best risk ward part three in the country is the sixteenth iconic sixteenth hole, sixteenth hole where you hit you have a choice of hitting over this cove to the green. It takes about one hundred and eighty five yards to clear. The hole is longer, but to clear it's two hundred and ten yards or so. But to clear over the cove, you've got to hit it about one hundred and eighty five yards and you're going due west, probably right into the weeds. Yes, it's coming off.

Yeah, so you're and a lot of people will bell out to the left and chip up and hope that they want put and make par. But I'd flown three thousand miles across the country and a tube at thirty five thousand feet, and I said, I'm not going across the whole country to bel out left on the golf course. I'm going for it, And for one hundred and eighty two of those one hundred and eighty five yards to clear the cook

the cove and get on the other side of the cliff. My ball looks splendent sailing through the blue sky, but those last three it never made it. It plummeted it down toward Davy Jones's locker. But still what an awesome experience. Then I belt out to the left, chipped up one, put it for my double bogie, which would have been a part had I not taken the resk in that your second ballpark. So that's one of my top five courses that I played. Augusta National one of the top five because it's

such a magical, mystical place. You got Marion, that's in Philadelphia. What's your Mount Rushmore? Of course, so if you had to pick four, five, five, I got to go with five. We talked about Cyprus point Uh. We talked about Augusta, Marion so rich in golf tradition and so much respect by the membership for the traditions of the game and the

honor of the game. So and then of course that's just spectacular. With the layout, the holes they say you experience, the first six holes are like I think are drama, the middle six of comedy, the last six of tragedy. I felt all of that on the first three holes. I had comedy, tragedy and drama on the first three holes. But it's a it's a special place. And then there's Pine Valley, where where there you go on your shirt, on your shirt, I'm wearing this and it's a

gift from a friend who played there. I did not, but I knew today I had to wear this shit. Yes, yes, So you have Pine Valley where you know, in some courses you have what they call let up holes where the course could be hard, but there's an easy hole here there at Pine Valley. You don't even have let up shots. Every shot you have to be on. The slightest of misses gets you in a lot of trouble that it's hard to recover from the holes. Some of the holes

play extremely long, they play along ravines. They there's a lot of sand, the rough scraggly. The greens are surrounded by bunkers and scraggly rough. You've got to really always fly the ball onto the green. It's it's a it's a challenge to anyone's game. There's the fifth hole is a long part about two and thirty five and forty five yard par par three, and I just refused, just on principle, to ever hit anything more than a three wood off the tea. So it's like, I'm going to hit my three

wood. It's going to go as far as it's going to go, and I'm gonna play it from there. I'm not going to hit a driver. There's too much I got too much pride to hit a drive go on a part three. But it's it's it is. So it's a great experience. And then when you play the winds like it when you play at Bandoned Dunes and you get the winds up there, that's a place where you're like, yeah, I may need a drive run this hole, even though it's one

hundred and forty ards. Yeah, you can have that with the winds coming off of off the ocean. And then the last one Fisher's Island. The fifth is Fisher's Island, which is a seth Reiner design with template holes holes that these holes were holes that cb McDonald discovered when he traveled through the British Isles and saw holes that he thought both amateur golfers, novice golfers and experts like. And he came back to the US and designed these courses with him.

In one of his brotegs is Seth Rayner, who also designs, And so you have this charming island in Long Island Sound around the perimeter. These holes formed the golf course, charming, beautiful and the template holes. So those are my five Augusta National no certain order, but Augusta National, Pine Valley, Marion, Fisher's Island in Cyprus Point. That's a lifetime worth a golf in most cases just to play one of those. And I played those

five plus ninety five others all in that twelve month period. So it was it was a mind boggling experience to see all these great courses in such a short time. Jimmy, I am so honored to me too. After reading your book book, I closed the book, and I've read numerous golf books for the podcast and otherwise, but this is the first time I ever closed the book and said, I want to play golf with this guy. I want to go out because there's so many things that I felt parallel in my

life with yours, a similar age. But you know, hardships, No, we can't compare, and I'll never try. But there were so many parts in the book that I highlighted that i'd love to discuss. We won't have that time today. The line like I was my mother's fourth live birth, that just kind of like stopped me in my tracks. But I want to talk about a court. One of the things he wrote. We just finished the PGA Championship this past weekend that was played at Valhalla, which you

got to play. But the line you had in there that really kind of jumped out of me was saying being black conferred a greater sense of powerlessness than being poor, though poverty was a constant presence in our lives. You also said relentless reminder of our status as second class citizens. There were still whites only signs posted on doors and windows around downtown. Yeah, so that was life in the Jim Crow era in Texas back in the early sixties. We

lived in I was born out. I was born sort of in the backwoods. We moved to the small town Huntsville, and when I was like three years old to two years old, three years old, and then we moved to the Selma quarters. My mother met this guy who became I guess my step father. But we lived in a shack. It was a ten roof

shack on a dirt road, no plumbing, no electricity, outhouse. And on Friday nights when the music would die down and the people that would come to my aunt Eessie Peril's next door for sort of a jute joint night, when they all went home, this other ritual would start and it would be the white college kids driving drunk down our dirt road, throwing beer bottles Peril beer and Long Star beer bottles at us at our houses. We were inside

sleep of course, but awakened by them and yelling racial epithets. And that was that sense of powerlessness at the time that I was a kid. And I think that's something of the progress we have made from what life was like during that time in the early sixties and where we are where we are now. But sec we were clearly second class citizens, right right, you wrote me, you wrote in the forward, said history has often been written as

if people like me were voiceless extras in a movie. We were never intended to see. Right. So my birth certificate, my birth certificate has two words that were on it that were considered important back in the early nineteen sixties, and they were that I was illegitimate meaning I did not legally exist and I was colored. So that is so dehumanizing, demeaning, and I had

to live with that. It gave me this sense of being less than and so that that's something that I struggled with and had to overcome, and it's it's challenges. But the thing that I would also say for it here is I write about my life factually, not to compare the challenges. I make that point too when I take talk about Frank McCourt's version of the Irish version of the life that I had. I think everybody has challenges and to each

person their challenge is daunting. To them, their challenge is daunting, and that our lives are determined at the intersection of adversity and aspirations. When our biggest hopes and dreams for our lives are threatened by the biggest challenges we face, what do we do? And for me, because I had a mother

who modeled it, you don't quit, you find a way. And so even as I look at what we face as a country today, my answer to all of that is not to quit, not to give up, but to find a way to work through it, to find a way to get beyond it to find a way to come together. You know you hear this just talk and I read about this in the book also, that you're only

as strong a chain, You're only as strong as your weakest link. That is exactly right for a chain, I can tell you from an engineering standpoint, when you look at the granular structure of steel and you look at the front body cubics and front center cubics and you have stress points, and yes, that chain is only as strong as that weakest link. But a society

isn't a chain. And in a society, we have strengths and weaknesses, and we can work together to overcome each other's strengths, and we can lift each other up and be much stronger than we are individual as individual links, because we are a society. And so in the midst of all of what we're going through now, rather than looking for what divides us, we got to find that common humanity. And I talk about that in the sense for every person, as I mentioned earlier, every person who this book, I

hope in my stories they find a piece of themselves. They find something that they can relate to, something that reminds them of their lives, and something that causes them to do what I do from time to time, and that is get a little nostalgic for the simplicity that life wants offered because at our core, at our basic simple levels, what I saw at country clubs and what I saw on the side of the road in Evansville, Indiana eating dinner

at a Golden Corral, where that we have the same hopes and dreams and aspirations for the ones we love, and the same challenges and we're all trying to get through it right. So, yes, we all have our own challenges. Mine are definitely not similar to you. But I did lose both of my parents when I was seven years old, and I've always lived my life. I think this is kind of like why I love golf is that your life isn't defined by what has happened to you. Your life is defined

on how you deal with exactly and how you meet those challenges. And you're going to have them. You don't need to. It doesn't need to be the first thing that enters the room in front of you. And remember a cartoon once, maybe it was a Charlie Brown cartoon, but he was like, why did you only shine the front of your shoes, and he says, I only want no people. I want to have a good first impression so that people don't think of me, you know, poorly. So I

just need to have my shoes clean in the front. And to me, it's like I want to have the back of my shoes cleaned, right, No, No, I want when I walk out people go yeah, okay, yeah, he's met the challenges. And golf is like that. You know, the first time I hit a golf ball purely and watched it sore off into the sky, that feeling, that sense of accomplishment, it's just it's amazing. And now I will tell you how I relate that back to

life. My ancestors were put in the bottom of a ship, scrunched together like sardines, eating and defecating in the same space. But somehow they survived. And not only did they survived, they laid They helped build a country, and they laid a foundation for us. And they endured what they endured. What we endures nothing compared to what they endured. But yet they found

a way to survive. We ought to be able together to find a way to make this country a better country and stop taking it from stop taking it for granted. You know, I played golf. One of the courses I played golf at was Whispering Pines. Whispering Pines is less than twenty five miles from the plantation where my ancestors were slaves. They could never have imagined that one day one one of their descendants would be playing a leisure sport on that

land where they had toiled and been chattel slavery owned by someone. And so I look at that. We've made a lot of progress in a couple of hundred years, but we got a lot more progress to make a long way ago, a lot more progress to make. But we're not going to make that progress if we don't work together. If we don't come together and work together and make it happen. It is not up to someone else to make

it happen. It's up to us working together to make it happen. It's not just about what white's going to do, It's not just about what blacks are going to do. We all have a responsibility. We got to do

it together. Yes, So, after losing my parents, I was raised by my grandparents who had to escape the Ukraine, which at the time was Russia, from the Progroms, where my grandmother who raised me lost all of her family to the Cossacks and then had to sneak onto a boat from Europe to the United States while she was pregnant, lost the baby, and they center back when she got to the United States. So I'm not saying we

have the same story. But as I said to you before, I want to play golf you because we have a lot of similarities that we can share the pain and suffering of lives and the successes of life. So I will say, I will say to you share that the elements of our story may be different, but we have the same story. We have the human story. I didn't want to be a soper. We have we have the human story, the human experience. You know, a lot of people make the

mistake thinking that golf is supposed to be easy. Some people make that mistake. Golf is not easy, golf is golf is hard. Golf is hard. Life is not easy. Life is hard. And one of the things I say in the book too is that people are resils, but life is tenuous and to go through, to make it through, to overcome the challenges. We can never take that for granted. It's not a given. And we have struggled. Blacks have struggled in this country, but we're not the

only ones that have struggled humans throughout human history. We've all struggled, and those struggles are different, and some of those struggles are brought about by evil and some are just the natural conditions of life. But as you said earlier, we're more defined not by the challenges we face, but by the things we achieve despite those challenges, by the things we overcome. And everybody has overcome something and we should respect that and appreciate that absolutely. I highly highly

recommend that everybody read this book. If you're a golf fan at all, you got to read this book. If you're a phantom memoirs, you got to read this book. It's it's so worth it and so powerful, and it's such a joyous journey to follow. Congratulations on the book, Congratulations on your success. The book again is called Playing from the Rough, a Personal Journey through America's one hundred greatest golf courses DoD DoD Dot by Jimmy James.

Jimmy, we're gonna play golf together. Something. We're going to play golf together. We'll play golf together, either in California or maybe in Atlanta with doctor Bob Jones over at Bobby Jones Golf Course. I'm in, or we could play. We could play. We could play out his at Atlanta Athletic Club. He's got two courses out there, so we we will play golf

together again. Jimmy's book, Playing from the Rough, published by Simon and Schuster, will be available for purchase on June eleventh, twenty twenty four. I'm sure that you can pre order it right now from your favorite bookseller and get it delivered as soon as it is released. Getting to complete the interview and being able to deliver this conversation to you before the book's release was actually

quite a coup. I received a press release yesterday from the PR firm saying that Jimmy will be available for interview starting June seventh, which is a couple days from now. And I enjoyed this story so much that even after the interview, I continued to read the book, which doesn't always happen, and I'm enjoying it immensely. I mentioned the three day civil rights tour through Atlanta, Georgia, Montgomery, Selma and Birmingham, Alabama, that we went on

this past February. I invite you to stay tuned after this episode because I want to share with you an episode of Joanne's podcast, Joanne's my wife called in this story about her reflections on our journey and discovery through the Deep South. In the story. Podcast is a collection of short micro essays Joanne writes reflecting on her life and life's adventures. She's got a great voice, is an excellent writer, and this podcast is very entertaining and enlightening. Please subscribe

and get a new episode every other week. And I know if she's listening, which rarely happens, but if she is listening, she's like, would you stop ragging about me? No, my dear, never. But first, let's talk about playing golf together in September and next spring on our civil rights tour. As the bus left Atlanta headed for Montgomery, isn't that a song title? Well, not long after we entered Alabama, passed a sign that said Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, which I've always wanted to visit and

now that I realized how accessible it is from Atlanta. And then was contacted by Tara Fox about partnering with TMI golf, about doing golf adventures with the golf Smarter community, especially our ambassadors. I knew this could be another bucket list item checked off. But first, what don't you and your partner joined me and Joanne for an outrageous adventure to Portugal this September fifth through the thirteenth, twenty twenty four. We've scheduled three rounds of golf, but if you'd

prefer, you can play golf every day. We're on the coast of Villemorra. There's lots of flexibility in our schedule. Non golfers will experience optional spa visits, sightseeing and time to relax on the beach. And you'll have time to yourselves to make this one of the most memorable and romantic trips of your life. Go ahead, you make the plans. She'll be touched by your thoughtfulness. Right do we ever make plans other than playing golf? And do

we get hard time for it? Okay? I speaking about myself, So clear your calendar and let's do this. To get all the information pricing and download the detailed PDF, please visit tmigolf dot com, slash golf Smarter and if you have any questions, please write to me directly. I want to thank this week's Golf Smarter Ambassador, Gene Thornton of Nutley, New Jersey.

Gene wanted to get more out of his rounds at Hendrick's Golf Course, so he took advantage of getting a free copy of Tony Manzoni's video of the loss Fundamental. So if you've been listening to our Tony Manzoni series would like to get Tony's video for free, then all you have to do is create an intro for an upcoming Golf Smarter episode. But if you'd like to try something

else, it's up to you. Choose between Tony's video, a glove and clove storage compartment from redroostergolf dot com, the online glove subscription service that has high quality gloves you get delivered to your door as often as you'd like, or a box of the premium Flight Path Golf Te's my favorite tea of all time at above all. So right to Golf Smarter podcast at gmail dot com and I'll get back to you with some simple instructions on what to do,

what to say, and how to take advantage of your free gift. This Friday, we'll release the final episode of our Tony Manzoni series for twenty twenty four. It's a conversation that's never been replayed before. Edit includes one of my all time favorite stories that Tony has shared. I had met Frank Sinatra and invited to the house on many occasions with my fiance and one day out of the Blushet blurted to Frank, Frank, you've got to come over to

the house and I'll we'll cook your dinner. And of course my eyes rolled back to the back of my head because she was a beautiful girl, but she could really couldn't boil water. Okay, So when we got in the car, When we got in the car, I says, that are you going to serve Frank Sinatra beans and Franks? What are you? Are you crazy? So I said, and she looked at me with that pretty little face, and I said, I got this handled. So I called my mother, who was in santase and I said, Mom, and I didn't

say Frank Sinatra. I just said, I've got some really important people coming over. Can you make some homemade raviolis and meatballs, put them on dry ice and fly him. I'll pay for it, fly it from Santa'sday to Palm Springs. So she said, sure, no problem. So she sent all this food over dry ice. And I had a good friend of mine who was a musician, and he wanted to be there when Frank Sinatra was and he was. He said, I'll help you arrange everything, cook everything.

So we did, and Frank shows up with Jillie Rizzo, who is his good time friend, and and we sit down and eat and talk. He said yes, she asked him to come to Oh yeah, he said he had said yes when at his house when we were having dinner. He said yes, oh yeah, ok yeah, so that the pressure was on me. So anyway, so we're sitting there and Frank says to me, or he says to my fiance Mimi. He said me, me, these are the best meatballs I've ever had in my life. He said, I

mean, I've eaten all over the world. You got to give me the recipe. And she started to say something. I said, Frank, I had the sure ade. It has to be over and I told him the story that what I did, and he started howling. He couldn't. He thought that was the funniest thing. He says get your mother on the phone. So I called my mother and my mother's name was Nina. So I said, Mom, I said, Frank Sinatra would like to talk to you. She didn't get the hell out of here, but I said, no,

no, I'm no mom. That's who I said, Frank Sinatra would like to talk to you. So he gets on the phone. And you got to remember, at our house, we had a picture of Jesus and the next time we had a picture of Frank. Okay, So so my mother says, says hello, mister Sinatra, and he said, Nina, and he says, I got to tell you something. Those are the best meatballs I've ever had, blah blah blah blah, and can you send me the recipe? And my mother said to them, Frank, I'll make you

all the meatballs you want, but you never get my recipe. And he broke up. He just loved that she denied him. Okay, nobody did that to Frank Sinatra. Nobody said not. He just loved her for that. And through the years she used to make Christmas cookies, all homemade, unbelievable, and she would always send him Christmas cookies every Christmas, and he was so wonderful. Whenever he appeared in San Francisco or wherever my folks went.

They sat at the Sinoptra table right against the stage. The guy was just amazing. But he just when Christmas comes, he say, you think your mom's going to send the cookies? Is a rank you can just call on on it. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for upcoming episodes, or need more information and want to discuss our September Portugal adventure, please write to Golf Smarter podcast at gmail dot com or click on the

Heyfred button when you visit Golfsmarter dot com and now in this story. In this story a journey to Alabama, I'm joe Anne Green. On vacation, we travel for rest, relaxation, and adventure. Other times we brace ourselves and head out into a great unknown to bear witness, to expose ourselves to the horrors of history, to learn about people and actions that have impacted countless

others for generations, so we don't let it happen again. Visiting the to Rasienstatt and Auschwitz concentration camps years ago was like that for me, seeing where the horrors took place and hearing from people who lived it made history come alive in a very different way. Yes, it was painful, but unlike so many Jews, including my great uncles, I got to walk out and reboard the bus. In many ways, my recent civil rights trip to Georgia and

Alabama was like that. When you're face to face with people who were there, on the very ground where atrocities were committed, you can't pretend that it didn't happen, and knowing can lead to action. As a child outside of Boston in the early nineteen sixties, I heard about the Civil rights movement. Of course, everyone is created equal, I thought, no matter their skin color. Why then could Hattie, our cleaning woman's daughter come and play at

my house? But I wasn't allowed to visit her. If her neighborhood was dangerous, as my father warned, why did she live there. The more I've learned about our country's history, from slavery through Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the fight for voting rights, police brutality to young black men, and mass incarceration, the more curious I've been to her personal stories, especially

from those who are on the front lines. As with Holocaust survivors, time is running out to hear first person testimonies from Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma and from the park in Birmingham where vicious dogs and high power water hoses were set on black children. Reading books, listening to podcasts, and watching films about the arc of African American history is powerful and I believe essential. To understand race relations in the US requires an understanding of what's taken

place for hundreds of years and what is taking place today. But sitting with people face to face and hearing how their lives have been defined by the civil rights movement provides a deeper level of impact. I don't know what it's going to take to make the world right. I do know that you should not

be sitting waiting for it to happen for somebody else to do it. That's the voice of joe Anne Bland, a wise, passionate, straight talking seventy year old black woman from Selma who vividly recalls staring into the window of the local drug store where only the white kids could order sodas instead of the counter. We met her in a large dark space filled with artifacts and memorabilia from her life of activism as a child. She told us the women of her

church were organizing to be able to vote in the upcoming elections. Then Reverend Martin Luther King Junior came to town and organized a Sunday protest march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge. Joanne was eleven and she went with her then fifteen year old sister Linda. When they came up over the high point on the bridge, they saw sheriff's deputies mounted on horseback blocking their path. Within minutes, they were being chased and beaten. Linda sustained serious head injuries, but a

few days later stitched up and ready for more. Joeanne's sister went on to be the youngest person to march all the way from Selma to Montgomery. Joe Anne Bland is among many featured in an excellent NPR podcast series entitled White Lies, from which this audio was taken. When you talk about reconciliation, you have to talk about a way to distribute the power, and nobody wants to give up be in the power. Anytime there's a minute shift in power from

the people who were holding the power, a battle ensues. I can give you a perfect example, the signing of the voting rights that in nineteen sixty five. Tell me one year it has not been on the attack. Come on, I'm listening. So if voting is not important, why would you try to keep it away from me? And why would you try to stop people from boding after they get the right to vote if it wasn't important.

Joe Anne Bland co founded the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma. Her sister Linda Blackman Lowry's book Turning fifteen on the Road to Freedom, My Story of the nineteen sixty five Selma Voting Rights March is appropriate for young readers and is available on Amazon. In Birmingham, Alabama, we have the privilege of spending an hour with the Bishop Calvin Wallace Woods Senior, perhaps the feistiest, most

passionate ninety year old I'll ever meet. He told us about the march on Washington in sixty three, what it was like the day the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed and those four young girls were killed. Hearing his voice crack as he shared the pain he and others endured at the hands of Bull Connor, then Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, was so powerful during the movement.

The Lord brought different songs to us. Sometimes we didn't know what people gonna sing, but he always taught us to join in with those songs of heaven. Then he gave us un Let's begin with one we used to sing. I ain't gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me around. I'm gonna keep on a walking. I'm gonna keep on a talking. Mark it up to freedom land go. Let nobody turn me here around, turn me around, turn me round, Hang on a lit, nobody turn me here

round. I'm gonna keep on a walking, keep on the talking, marching up the freedom that hang on a lit inju justice, Oh time mere round, No time me. Our group of twenty six was both white and Jewish, and it was evident that each of us felt the pain and applauded the courage of these civil rights heroes. We returned to our homes, changed and resolved to do more as the battle for voting rights continues. Thanks so much

for listening to in this story my memoir style micro essays. I've written a full length book by accident, a Memoir of Letting Go, which is now available in paperback, as an e book and as an audiobook. You can purchase it online or at your favorite local bookstore. If they don't have it in stock, they can order it through Publishers Group West, a division of Ingram Again. It's By Accident, A memoir of letting Go by Joe Anne Green