A Diamond
in the Dust Bowl
LaFortune Golf Course
Tulsa, Okla.
Greens fee: $30 to ride 18 (afternoon)
Date played: Oct. 13, 2021
A northern Kansas town of 218 people claims to be the lower 48 states’ geographic center. But open a map and draw a straight line from Florida’s southernmost tip to Washington state’s northwestern point, and your pencil travels more through central Oklahoma than northern Kansas.
It wouldn’t be the first time that central Oklahoma hasn’t gotten its due.
My earliest notions of Tulsa were formed shortly after my family moved to Jackson, which was still home to the New York Mets’ Double-A affiliate. The Jackson Mets played in the Texas League, and the Tulsa Drillers were regular visitors to Jackson’s Smith Wills Stadium. One morning, a 7-year-old me looked up from the sports section that my mother had pulled from the newspaper for me. “Is Tulsa in Texas?” I asked. “Oh no,” she said, “it’s in Oklahoma.” To my 7-year-old brain, that sounded even more sprawling and dust-covered than Texas – not that I’d ever been to either. I pictured oil derricks, tumbleweeds, and clapboard-sided buildings.
On LaFortune’s par-3 third hole, a bittersweet kick-in birdie — and an apology to the superintendent.
Not that I knew from experience, then or now. In 40 years, I’d spent a grand total of maybe 30 minutes in Oklahoma, when my sister and I left an Ole Miss bloodbath in Fayetteville in 2002 (Mike Huckabee gave us barbecue sandwiches) and hopped across the Arkansas-Oklahoma state line to grab a Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich combo.
But when the PGA of America moved the 2022 PGA Championship to Southern Hills in Tulsa, I mulled the possibility of covering the tournament. And when a friend invited me to come play Southern Hills, my commitment to informed journalism compelled me.
What I found in Tulsa, though, went beyond dispelling the vision that my 7-year-old imagination had drawn up. For anyone with preconceived notions, Tulsa is full of surprises. And the biggest surprise of all was a scrappy county-owned course in the middle of town: LaFortune.
. . .
Bunkie Perkins pulled up to the hotel, behind the wheel of a black pickup truck. “At some point,” he explained, “I figured that if I’m gonna work in the oil and gas business in Oklahoma, that I should look the part.” He jokingly apologized for my having missed the tornados a few days earlier.
“Oh shit, y’all had tornados?” I asked.
“Nah,” he admitted. “We had maybe one tornado.”
Bunkie (not his real name) had moved to Tulsa a decade earlier, for the same reason that thousands of Americans had rushed here from the east a hundred years ago: oil and gas. Bunkie might have come from Shreveport, La., and spent his college years at Ole Miss – but 10 years, a house, and two kids in Oklahoma makes you an Oklahoman.
No one will ever confuse LaFortune with its famous Tulsa neighbor, Southern Hills. But LaFortune undeniably shares some of Southern Hills’ best qualities, including impressive land movement on the back nine.
But Bunkie couldn’t complain: as it turns out, Tulsa is great. After lunch at a tremendous barbecue spot, Burn Co. (the brisket was sold out, so I “settled” for pulled pork with a massive sausage link on top), Bunkie gave me the full Tulsa tour. “Let’s go see Oral Roberts. I’ll show you the hands,” he said. Oral Roberts University is the evangelical brainchild of television preacher Oral Roberts — who famously buttressed fundraising requests with assurances that God would kill him if donors came up short. From at least a mile away, Bunkie motioned toward three huge, golden high rises on the far end of the campus. “Supposedly if you see them from the air, they look like Noah’s Ark,” he said. At the corner of East 81st and South Lewis, we turned right, and two massive, bronze hands reached 60 feet out of the ground, like a penitent monster climbing out of the earth to fight Godzilla and take Communion. “Holy shit!” I shouted without thinking, then apologized for choice of obscenity.
The tour wasn’t all darkly humorous, though. We swung through Gathering Place, a 100-acre public park built by a local billionaire for the tidy cost of $465 million. On the other side of a playground, Bunkie pointed to a small amphitheater. “I brought my daughter out here to goof around one Saturday, and Lisa Loeb was randomly playing over there,” he said.
Driving around with pulled pork still stuck in my teeth, I was bowled over. The food, the urban development, an NBA franchise just 90 minutes down the road — and yes, the Tulsa Drillers are still a going concern — this was not the image of Tulsa my 7-year-old brain had drawn for me. Bunkie smiled. “It’s the new Austin, baby!” he said.
We kept driving. A minute or two of silence passed, and Bunkie’s voice turned serious. “I’ll show you Black Wall Street. You need to see that,” he said. He wasn’t asking.
Black Wall Street’s real name is the Greenwood District, and in the early 1900s, it was home to 35 acres of prosperous Black-owned businesses on the edge of downtown Tulsa — successful even under the boot heel of Jim Crow. But in 1921, white rioters invaded the district. Over the course of two days, the mob burned and murdered everything and everyone they could. The exact death toll is unknown, but may have been as high as 300. Today, a mural depicts the hellish scene, and a modern-looking historical center opened earlier this year. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” reads a James Baldwin quote on the building’s frontage, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Tulsa’s average annual rainfall is substantially lower than what golfers see in the Deep South (42 inches per year, compared to 54 inches in Jackson, Miss.). But when rain comes, it makes LaFortune play much longer than its yardage — and brings the course’s impressive greenside bunkering into play even more than usual.
We turned back toward my hotel. A half-mile away, Bunkie nodded toward a sprawling municipal golf course on our left — LaFortune Golf Course, with an 18-hole championship course and an 18-hole par-3 track with streetlights scattered throughout for playing at night. “Back when I first moved here, I’d come over here after work, catch nine holes on the championship course, and then play the par-3 course once the lights came on,” he said. My interest was piqued. I’d picked my hotel principally because of its proximity to Southern Hills, but being this close to a curious muni course with half an afternoon unspoken for was a rare possibility. Bunkie dropped me off at the front door. I sucked the last thread of pulled pork from between my teeth. Travel weary or not, I headed upstairs to my room and started rummaging for my golf shoes.
. . .
When you mention LaFortune Golf Course to locals, responses tend toward the snide kindness mostly reserved for municipal courses – flawed, but lovable nonetheless. In most cases, it’s merited: munis are frequently loved in spite of themselves. In LaFortune’s case, though, the tone might be a token gesture. It’s legitimately terrific: affordable ($30 to play 18 in the afternoon, including a cart), accessible (right in the middle of the city), and interesting. No one will ever confuse it with its neighbor, Southern Hills (which is less than three miles away), but LaFortune undeniably borrows a few of Southern Hills’ best qualities: land movement, interesting greens, and holes that demand tee shots toward trouble. At nearly 7,000 yards (6,938 yards from the back tees, and 6,416 yards from the one-up green tees), LaFortune is still long enough to challenge modern hitters despite being more than 60 years old. And after a couple of days of rain, it was playing even longer.
LaFortune’s second hole offers players their first glimpse of bunkering well beyond what municipal golf typically evokes — although their drainage is more reminiscent of municipal golf courses.
As I carefully stepped around goose poop, the first few holes slowly revealed that LaFortune was no afterthought. Like the more famous course down the road, LaFortune frequently goads players to aim tee shots toward hazards and challenges them with bunker-laden greens complexes. For instance, at the short par-4 second hole (334 yards from the back tees, 319 yards from the green tees), tee shots travel uphill and over the fairway’s crest, making the landing area blind; the slightly downhill approach probably invites a running shot when the course is playing firm, but the green’s entrance is guarded in front by a large cloverleaf-shaped bunker to the left and a smaller peanut-shaped trap on the right.
Two more flowing-edged bunkers guard the right side of the green at the par-3 third (171 yards from the back tees, 157 yards from the green tees), calling either for a fade or a safe shot toward the green’s left half. Unable to play either, I hit a soft 5-hybrid that felt awkward for every millisecond of the backswing and strike. “That was terrible,” I muttered at contact — only to watch the ball land a foot from the hole and roll out perhaps another two feet, setting up my only birdie of the day. Low expectations sometimes lead to big surprises. LaFortune is proof of that.
The design isn’t perfect. But then again, Southern Hills’ example of no weak holes is a standard that few courses can meet. The dogleg-right par-4 fourth hole (421 yards from the back tees, 395 yards from the green tees) requires a long, downhill approach to a green guarded in front by a creek — a shot that few municipal golfers can pull off, even from a perfect angle. And the par-3 sixth (189 yards from the back tees, 167 yards from the green tees) would be fine, but for a huge, out-of-place waterfall on the green’s left side.
LaFortune is an excellent golf course, which makes the placement of a bizarre waterfall on the sixth hole an unfortunate candidate for its most lasting impression.
Even when the layout gets out too far on its own skis from tee to green, though, the greens revive LaFortune’s playful personality. At the par-5 ninth hole (529 yards from the back tees, 501 yards from the green tees), the green bends rightward at a 90-degree angle, with a hump running diagonally between the front and back of the green that can roll putts into the green’s back corner. And at the par-4 10th (386 yards from the back tees, 358 yards from the green tees), humps in the green’s back-right and front-left are connected by a subtle ridge that can feed putts in either direction; throw in the backstop at the green’s rear, and hole positions can be reached from several different lines. This playfulness evokes memories of Swope Memorial in Kansas City and Brainerd in Chattanooga, albeit with less dramatic land movement than Swope but better conditioning than Brainerd.
LaFortune’s land movement does exist, though, and is most reminiscent of Southern Hills on the back nine. With my wedge game failing me, and the afternoon sun dipping under the western skyline, my eyes started drifting more toward the par-3 course, where groups of players in untucked polos and t-shirts were beginning to show up. LaFortune’s championship course is worth making time for, but the par-3 course might be where the real party is.
. . .
By the time I reached the par-5 18th hole (550 yards from the back tees, 515 yards from the green tees), the sun had fully dropped from view, and I had nothing but twilight and ambiance from the par-3 course’s streetlights to bring me in. After crushing my drive, I duffed a fairway wood into the pond along the left side, and checked my watch: five minutes after 6, and no one behind me. I was the last player on the course. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d played this late into the afternoon, and I couldn’t finish on that note. So in true Tulsa fashion, I forgot my memories of the first two shots and drove back to the tee; I smashed another drive into the fairway, and pured my do-over fairway wood to within a wedge of the green. I pulled it left. Typical.
. . .
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