Charlottesville
July 8, 2022
McIntire Golf Course. Home of the nine-hole, sand green course in McIntire Park. The City closed the course in 2015 which is a shame because it was truly a fun place to beat the ball around. Out West they would call it pasture golf. I played it several times when I was a kid visiting my grandmother in Greenwood.
Here's a link to report on the history of the McIntire Golf Course:
I thought of the McIntire course today because Lucian sent me this wonderful video about a sand green golf course in Tipton, Kansas:
McIntire Golf Course. Home of the nine-hole, sand green course in McIntire Park. The City closed the course in 2015 which is a shame because it was truly a fun place to beat the ball around. Out West they would call it pasture golf. I played it several times when I was a kid visiting my grandmother in Greenwood.
Here's a link to report on the history of the McIntire Golf Course:
I thought of the McIntire course today because Lucian sent me this wonderful video about a sand green golf course in Tipton, Kansas:
Here's an article from the WSJ about the Tipton golf course:
A Game Lives On in the Great Plains Roll, Putt and Rake on Oiled Sand; Stop Your Chip Dead; $5 a Round. It's Sand-Greens Golf.
By John Paul Newport May 31, 2013 5:36 pm ET Tipton, Kan.
You may have missed the news, but Devon Freeman ran away with the Kansas state high school golf championship last month. On the tricky Tipton Oaks course here, he shot a career-best four-under-par 66, beating the second-place finisher by eight strokes and leading his team, Mankato-Rock Hills, to its third consecutive state title.
He took only 20 putts in the round. Granted, putting totals on sand-greens courses—did I mention this was the sand-greens division of the Kansas high school championships?—are generally lower than on grass green courses, since the greens, or browns, are usually circles no wider than 30 to 40 feet, with the hole permanently planted in the middle. Thus the longest putt one ever has is 20 feet. Still, it was a superb performance.
Once upon a time, sand-greens courses reigned supreme, at least numerically, across parts of the Midwest and the north central U.S. They were common elsewhere, too. The Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina, site of next year's U.S. Open, didn't begin grassing its greens until the 1930s, a quarter century after golf was first played there. In golf's early days in this country, both hearty summer grass strains and irrigation systems were rare.
The main virtue of the sand-greens courses that remain—Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado are strongholds—is cost. They require no watering, no mowing and no chemicals. To keep the sand from blowing away, most courses rake three or four gallons of vegetable oil into each green once or twice a year. (Not too long ago, they used motor oil.) Sand greens are about one-third the speed of grass, but the oil quickens them up a bit, too.
From tee to green, golf on sand-green courses is just like regular golf. On chips and short pitches, however, players can be much more aggressive. Since sand greens are usually dead flat, players fire straight at the hole; most favor low shots that screech to a halt a few feet after reaching the surface.
Putting on sand is an altogether different experience. Next to every green are a roller and a rake. Using the former, players smooth a path from near their ball to the hole, and place their ball in the path to putt, making sure that the distance to the hole is the same as from their original lie. After everyone in a group has putted, one player rakes the green in spiral circles fanning out from the hole.
"There is definitely an art to the roll," Freeman's father, Mike Freeman, told me. "The slower you roll, the faster the putt. You always want to pull the roller at the same pace, so the speed of your putts will be consistent." The elder Freeman played in four state championships himself.
The Tipton Oaks course dates from 1981, when a group of golfers from Tipton (population 206) decided over several pitchers of beer that they were tired of driving 20 miles north to play at the sand-greens course north of Downs (population 898). They vowed to build one of their own.
A year later, they had it. For $21,000, they purchased 42 acres of pasture land on either side of a picturesque creek and, well, that's about it for the cost, since the course was built entirely with volunteer labor. Most of those who bought $100 shares in the new syndicate were farmers, who pitched in with tractors and know-how, especially on the several well-made bridges that cross the creek. For a clubhouse they loaded the abandoned Tipton train depot on skids and installed it behind the first tee. The result—2,466 yards long, par 35—is prettier than you might expect for a course in the middle of generally flat Kansas farmland.
The site was apparently a popular Indian campground until the late 19th century. Scores of towering white oaks line the holes near the creek bottom. As best anyone can remember, the fairways of native buffalo grass have never been fertilized—or ever needed to be. The course pays a local man to mow the fairways every week or so, and once a year to spray for dandelions.
"We'd love to have grass greens, but you need 200 members for that, and we only have 50 or 60," said Bob Becker, a club founder. The membership fees at Tipton Oaks, as at most sand-greens clubs, are low: $125 a year for a family, all the golf you can play, $75 for a single. The walk-up green fee is $5, dropped through a slot in an honesty box.
The population in rural Kansas is shrinking, as family farms give way to industrial-sized farms that require fewer workers. Tipton's high school last year had only 15 students. Other schools are consolidating; that cuts down on the number of schools fielding sand-greens teams. The 36 players in this year's state championship were culled from only 15 schools, at the two regional qualifiers.
"It's a hard living out here. The nearest Wal-Mart, and I guess that's the gauge, is 70 miles away. We educate the kids well, so they can go off to the city or to college and get good jobs, but there's not much work here to bring them back," Becker said. He's proud that a good many have golf skills to take with them. "Our kids can easily hold their own with the city kids. All they have to learn is the grass-green part," Becker said.
Freeman, the state champ, has played only three rounds on regular courses in his life, and did pretty well. He finished fifth in his one grass-green tournament this spring, and aspires to a college golf scholarship, which several sand-greens players from the area have earned. Steve Jones, a former Colorado state sand-greens champion, won the 1996 U.S. Open. "You can't beat the price," said Bill Herold, whose son Collin was playing in the final foursome with Freeman. The elder Herold, from Luray (population 194), plays at least twice a week in season. He said he was looking forward to returning to Tipton the next weekend for a two-man scramble expected to draw up to 100 players.
I found this other video on YouTube about a sand green course in Selby, South Dakota.
Fun articles about sand greens golf courses:
Here's a list of sand greens golf courses in Kansas: