Over the better part of the past 20 years, Tom Coyne has become the narrator of aspirational golfers everywhere — beginning with his 2001 novel A Gentleman’s Game, followed by Paper Tiger in 2006, and two tremendous travel opuses: A Course Called Ireland (2009) and A Course Called Scotland (2018). And as a senior writer for The Golfer’s Journal, Coyne’s podcasts and essays also have become must-listens and must-reads. But his latest project, A Course Called America (coming in 2021), is his most ambitious yet — which is saying something, for a man who literally hiked the circumference of Ireland with a golf bag on his back. Since May, Coyne has been traveling every corner of the United States, jet-setting and road-tripping among some of America’s most well known and least known golf courses, all in an effort to figure out what exactly “American golf” means in the Twenty-First Century.
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LYING FOUR: By this point, you must’ve had a lot of time to reflect on what makes a great golf course. To you, what makes a golf course great?
TOM COYNE: That’s a big question, and it’s one I’m really interested in — obviously because I’ve played in a lot of different places, and because this book is the search for the great American golf course. For my Ireland and Scotland books, I played exclusively links courses. So you get a sense of what a real links course is, what makes them interesting, and what makes them appealing to you personally. So I had a pretty good set of criteria, or a way to feel and react, to golf over there. But it’s so different than the golf that we play in America, and that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to do this book. The book is the search for the great American golf course, and so I have to figure out two things: one is what makes a golf course great, and what does America mean in 2019? That’s probably the bigger and more interesting question to me, actually. I hope it’s a theme that’ll run through the book, because it’s a very interesting time in our country. Golf is sort of helping me tell that story. In terms of what makes a golf course great, though, I always use very subjective factors. I could never be a course rater, because their objective standards — shot values, all those sorts of things, and the way they can come up with numbers and scores for a golf course — that’s very, very far away from how I process golf courses. For me, it’s much more a gut feeling. I guess my test would be that I was going to play somewhere tomorrow, how excited would I be? It’s sort of like the butterfly factor: do you get butterflies in your gut, like “I can’t believe I’m playing Cypress tomorrow”? Or is it sort of like, “Oh cool, it’s a chance to play golf.” A lot goes into that that maybe doesn’t have to do with the golf course itself. Who’d you play with? How’d you play? How was the weather? How was the welcome? How was your lunch? How was your caddie? All those things can add so much to a day of golf. For me, in the stories that I tell, all those things are a huge part of the story, and so I don’t remove them from the experience. I don’t try to make clinical judgments about a course’s quality. I judge them on how I felt leaving the place. David McLay Kidd gave me a pretty good way to measure how good a golf course is: when you get to the 14th hole, do you get this “we’re almost done” feeling, or do you get this feeling of “oh no, it’s coming to an end”? With as much golf as I play and travel as I do, I get tired. So that feeling of getting to No. 14 and thinking, “Man, I wish there was more golf here” — that’s pretty rare for me. But it does happen. And when it happens, I know it’s somewhere really special.
LYING FOUR: What were your expectations for the South? And how did what you find compare to those expectations?
TOM COYNE: Taking Florida out of the equation — which is its own little universe — I had played hardly any golf in the South. So I guess my Yankee expectations were that people were going to be really nice; southern hospitality, right? I was curious if the clubs were going to feel sort of uber-private and sort of like — I don’t know, how can I put this? I guess my impression of the South would be that golf would still be this sort of enclave and hidden-away thing for some antiquated notion of southern gentry; and if golf down there would feel accessible, or if it would feel like we were still back in some long-ago time of some southern caste system, or something like that.
LYING FOUR: It sounds like the word you’re groping for is “segregated.”
TOM COYNE: Well, I didn’t want to use that word [laughs].
LYING FOUR: Oh I’m a civil rights lawyer, so you don’t have to avoid that word with me.
TOM COYNE: And not having spent any time there, I wondered how immediate that history is in the South. Is it a place where it’s gonna feel like golf is everybody’s game, or is it gonna feel like golf is the rich white people’s game? And I’ll tell you what: in the Northeast, it often feels like the rich white people’s game. But I didn’t know if it was going to feel more like that in the South or not.
LYING FOUR: And how’d your experience stack up to what you were expecting?
TOM COYNE: My expectations about that — about a segregated golf experience — were pretty quickly dismissed. When I went to places like the muni in Charleston, that was such a great community golf course — it was so accessible, and you could tell the people really cared so much about it; anyone could play it, and there was a really cool sort of “save the muni” effort underway. I loved everything about that place. There were definitely still some very fancy places, but it wasn’t the sort of over-the-top, behind-the-gates, sort of…I hate to even use the word plantation, but in my imagination, I suppose you look at some of these clubhouses, and they look like something from a long time ago. And I didn’t really experience that. Country Club of Charleston was really welcoming and pretty much felt like the same thing we had up here, besides its really awesome setting. Down in Mississippi, I couldn’t have gotten a better welcome at Old Waverly and Mossy Oak — which is yet another public course. I found some great public golf; I think Mossy Oak is probably the best public golf course that I’ve found on the trip so far.
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LYING FOUR: Oh wow.
TOM COYNE: Yeah, and that was in Mississippi. And also my expectations around going to Mississippi — or what we could call “the Deep South” — up here, you think that these areas are very poor and struggling. And obviously I went to some very nice golf courses, but I also was staying in towns and places in the South where I found that people are doing alright. They’re just beautiful places to visit. I would go back to Mississippi and do a golf trip to Old Waverly and Mossy Oak any day, and bring friends. What a cool area that is, especially with Mississippi State there. I noticed certainly the huge role that universities play in the South, in terms of communities and golf. For whatever reason, I was near a lot of them. At Sewanee, they have an incredible nine-hole golf course. At Mississippi State, they have great golf. And I also learned a little about the importance of football in the South, since I was traveling there during the fall.
LYING FOUR: It is a thing.
TOM COYNE: It’s very important. And as a Notre Dame guy, I definitely appreciated that. I thought we were crazy, but I certainly learned that it’s a little bit different down there. I was having dinner at Old Waverly, and there was a game on that didn’t involve a Mississippi team, but everyone was glued to it because it was an SEC game — something about a coach that came from somewhere that they didn’t like, as the waitress explained to me. Everyone had a dog in the fight, and they were so well informed and invested in college football. That was awesome. I loved that.
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LYING FOUR: How do you handle writing about courses? Do you take notes while you’re playing, or do you go into the writing experience cold?
TOM COYNE: I take a ton of notes while I’m on the road — that’s sort of the process. Every day. I have a journal. I take notes at night and collect the day’s events, dialogues, jokes, characters, places. On this trip, since I’ve had a ton of long drives, I dictate the notes into my Notes, and they come up as words and I just download them. That’s been really handy; I wish I’d been doing that a long time ago. To me, that’s the raw material. I do not write the book until the trip is done. I don’t write page one, at all — because you don’t know what the story is about until it’s finished. I certainly have an idea of what it’s about, but what are the through lines, characters, and themes that will run through the book? Those you don’t know until you’re finished. Once I’m done in December, I’ll sit with it for a while and let it marinate, and then I’ll dive in. And I’ll have that journal, so that I’ll have all the raw material when I need to go back and describe a character or a place, or grab some dialogue. I’ll have it all. You know what else is incredibly helpful, that I didn’t have before? Things like Instagram. I post every day’s happenings and people. Just looking through my Instagram feed, the whole trip comes back. Honestly, if you put them all together, it’d probably be about 100 pages worth of writing. For Ireland, I did a blog; for Scotland, I did a little bit of a blog. But Instagram has sort of replaced that. You can write something of some length and accompany some images with it, so it’s really been useful.
LYING FOUR: The thing I love most about your writing is not just that it’s succinct, but when I find myself editing my writing for succinctness, I find that my sentences are a little heavy. The words can get heavy when you condense a long sentence down to something shorter. Your writing is succinct, but also natural and conversational. Who are some of your writing influences?
TOM COYNE: Well thank you for saying that. In college, I wrote everything — fiction, poetry, news, I had a column, all those sorts of things. I always wrote, but then I went to graduate school for fiction writing. So I was trained as a fiction writer; my first book was a novel, A Gentleman’s Game. So my influences were writers like Raymond Carver, a short story writer; Tim O’Brien, a great Vietnam writer who wrote The Things They Carried; Hemingway probably a little bit, because I guess you would say those writers were influenced by Hemingway. And they would be considered minimalists, in terms of their prose: they wrote in very simple, succinct sentences. The sentences probably don’t have words with more than three syllables in them. But those sentences, they just cut. They shine. They carry such weight because of their precision. That’s the thing that I always admire in writing. I still strive, every day, to find precision. And I try to be playful as well and have fun with language. I think that goes back to being a fiction writer and also loving poetry; playing around with words is always endlessly fun. But you try to do it in a way that’s still accessible to your audience; mine is a golf audience. You also have to give your audience credit, that they’re gonna get it. I hope that mine has. I’m also a teacher of writing; I teach at St. Joe’s University here in Philadelphia. And that precision is always what I’m after my students to find. And that’s hard to beat out of them when they — I don’t beat anything out of my students, actually. It’s hard to dissuade them from overwriting: from being flowery, from abusing their thesaurus. They come into a writing workshop and think, “I have to use big words and fancy words and write complicated sentences.” And from Day 1, what I try to get across to them is that what your reader really wants is precision. And often, precision can often be delivered in very simple words. That’s certainly something that I take from Carver, and that’s why I go back and read his stories: because they had that precision.
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LYING FOUR: One of the things I love about golf is that it’s a window into people’s souls. People show you who they really are on a golf course. You mentioned earlier that your travels are coinciding with this very interesting moment in our country’s history. What have you gleaned from your glimpse into our country’s soul?
TOM COYNE: Honestly, the trip has lifted my spirits about our country. I basically play with six strangers every day: 36 holes per day, playing in a foursome with either a member and two of his buddies or three strangers that I’ve invited through Instagram. So I’m meeting a lot of new people every day. We start off as strangers, and it’s always a little awkward or quiet. But I always know that after 18 holes, we’ll be busting each other’s chops and talking like old friends. Golf just does that. It’s amazing. And it never ceases to do that. The number of friends that I’ve made along the way has been fantastic. But in terms of the overall picture of our country — sitting on the couch in Philadelphia and watching the news is very dispiriting. There’s more than one time that I wondered whether I really could get my Irish citizenship. It just looks like everything’s going to Hell, right? We just don’t get along. People are living in different universes, different countries; we’re so divided. So I got out on the road and started meeting people from all these different places, and I’ll tell you what — people are good. The people in this country are really good people. Everywhere I go, I’m meeting incredible people, and I don’t think that’s just because I’m going to golf courses. I’m meeting great people in restaurants; I’m meeting great people at rest stops and hotels, in towns. People are good. People aren’t walking around on the streets yelling at each other. We just do that on TV. Or we do that on social media. Most people are just going about their day, trying to live their lives and do the best they can for their families. It sounds very obvious and simple, but you sort of lose sight of that; you sort of think, “OK, people down here think this, and people up here think this, and people over there think this.” I’ve found that, everywhere I go, there are people who believe, vote for, and identify themselves as all sorts of different things. And that’s been really wonderful to see. But it’s also been wonderful to see that none of that matters, person to person. When we organize ourselves in groups — yeah, that kinda stinks, because we start to shout; we start to divide. But person to person, there hasn’t been a person that I haven’t enjoyed meeting and getting to know.
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LYING FOUR: That’s encouraging.
TOM COYNE: Yeah. I’ve been very encouraged, to be honest.
LYING FOUR: I still think a lot about something that President Obama used to say, even toward the end of his presidency — that what divides us is not as strong as what unites us. And I hope that’s still true.
TOM COYNE: I think so. Honestly, before the trip, I would have said, “I’m not sure.” But that’s because I watch too much cable news. And now that I’m out on the road, not watching news and just golfing, nobody says a cross word. It’s good. It’s nice. People just live. And even when I’m home for three days and start flipping around the TV and I start getting my back up about things — it’s crazy.
LYING FOUR: I think you’ve found the secret, then. We all need to just turn off the TV and go play golf.
TOM COYNE: Damn right. If we all did that, everything would be fine. That goes for our president, too.
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