A Fistful of Souvenirs
Southern Hills Country Club
Tulsa, Okla.
Date played: Oct. 14, 2021
For all my efforts at imagining myself as a golf minimalist, the truth is that I’m more of a packrat.
In one corner of my bedroom stand two canvas, single-strap Jones Golf bags – one holding a short set of hickories, and the other with a half-set of old Ping Eye 2s. A couple sleeves of balls and maybe a dozen tees between the two of them. A few years ago, when I put together the hickory set, I imagined myself strolling up and down the hilly fairways of a nearby state park golf course, leisurely walking nine holes on long summer afternoons.
The course closed a few months later.
Then earlier this year, when the set of blue dots fell into my lap, I ordered a new bag – a new chance at proving myself the golf swashbuckler I’d like to be. The Pings got regripped for the first time since the Reagan administration, and I imagined the 80s appearing on scorecards yet to be seen.
Photos of major championships past at Southern Hills show the course’s late-20th century shift toward perfectly smooth bunker edges. When Gil Hanse restored the course in line with Perry Maxwell’s original design in 2018, he disheveled the bunkers, like this one on Southern Hills’ back nine.
I’ve played with them once.
Part of the blame lies with the infrequency of my trips to the golf course: I don’t get to play much anyway, much less with gimmicky setups of decades-old equipment. At some point, though, I realized a bigger reason: I’m really not a minimalist. I like my stuff. I like my full set of 14 clubs. I like my stand bag. I like all the ball markers that I’ve crammed into the pockets over the years. I don’t need two pairs of backup gloves or several dozen tees bought from podcasts and snagged from famous courses, but I like them. “It took me years to get those souvenirs,” as John Prine put it. And I’m not ready for them to slip away from me.
My chance to play Southern Hills had almost slipped away, though. When a Twitter follower offered to host me and a couple of other online ne’er-do-wells in Tulsa, Okla., at the site of the 2022 PGA Championship — not the sort of place I get many chances to play — I nearly fell out of my chair. I immediately accepted. But a day before the trip, Hurricane Ida turned northward out of the Gulf of Mexico, with her eye trained on Mississippi — a literal raincheck that kept me home to batten down the hatches.
I half-asked, half-begged for a second chance. When it came, I packed my bag — the heavy one with the gamers, that is — and headed west for the sort of souvenirs that John Prine was talking about.
. . .
The Spokane, Wash. Spokesman Review (March 1, 1936).
I never intended to start hoarding golf tees. It’s certainly not organized enough to be called “collecting.” But I keep a modest population of pegs from memorable courses and a couple of podcasts. When they break, I make a mental note and remember to use fewer of that species, so it doesn’t go extinct any sooner than it must. There’s no good reason for this, of course. It’s not like my trips to Pinehurst or Mossy Oak are diminished if I suddenly don’t have any more tees with their names printed on them. But they’re a physical, tactile reminder — often used and pulled from the dirt of those places, then dropped back in a pocket to travel home. And seeing the last one snapped is a finality, an end to the physical connection you had with the place — like an ex-girlfriend returning an old t-shirt in the mail.
An afternoon earlier, on a back-nine tee box at LaFortune, I’d spotted a white tee broken off in the dirt with a blue, U-shaped image against an X-shaped background. Twenty-four hours later, as I reached for a few tees at Southern Hills’ starter’s hut, I saw the logo again — proving that LaFortune had even more in common with Southern Hills than I gave it credit for.
Southern Hills itself might defy the notion of too much credit, though. In the years since the Perry Maxwell design hosted the 2001 U.S. Open and the 2007 PGA Championship, Gil Hanse had restored the course to its pre-World War II roots with ragged bunker edges and tree-clearing to open up playing corridors and views of the rest of the course. When the course opened in 1936, Maxwell described it as “the finest I’ve ever done,” and “a test of golfing skill for any man, regardless of his game.” He wasn’t kidding. On a drizzling Thursday afternoon, Southern Hills played every yard on the scorecard (7,481 yards from the championship tees, 6,306 yards from the two-up green tees) — unapologetically tough, but still accommodating enough for my functionally middling partners (Twitter’s Bunkie Perkins, and our host, Tom Morris III) and their less middling third (me).
A broad smattering of bunkers — like this one guarding the right side of Southern Hills’ ninth green — tie together the adjacent ninth and 18th greens.
From the opening tee shot atop the hill where the clubhouse sits, the course demands precision. The elevated drive exaggerates any miss: trees line virtually every fairway, but placed infrequently enough not to be choking. The first hole (472 yards from the championship tees, 422 yards from the green tees) also foretells Southern Hills’ general strategy: play toward the sand traps, but not too close. Similarly, the par-4 second hole (500 yards from the championship tees, 409 yards from the green tees) requires a drive over a creek and, ideally, toward fairway bunkers on the fairway’s right side; the difficult approach requires a middle iron, and anything on the left side of the fairway must carry a tough greenside bunker.
The drizzle turned to light rain — slowly soaking our hats, and dripping off the brims when we bent over to putt on Maxwell’s subtle but difficult greens. The rain had mercifully slowed them down just enough to keep balls from rolling off altogether — but even damp, they were blisteringly fast. “When I was here for the Big 12 championship in 2007,” Bunkie said, “they had the pin on the left side of the 18th green. And if you were above the hole, putting downhill, your ball would roll off 40 yards back into the fairway.” Suddenly a little rain didn’t seem so bad.
But as we reached the par-3 sixth (226 yards from the championship tees, 138 yards from the green tees), the clouds parted both literally and metaphorically — as our fourth, Twitter’s Deep Fried Egg, arrived belatedly after a traffic jam in Oklahoma City. With our three balls already on the green, Deep Fried Egg ran to the tee box, pulled a wedge, indulged himself maybe two practice swings — and chunked it perhaps 30 yards downhill. “Oh come on, hit another one,” Tom Morris III said. The second one finished comfortably within birdie range (Deep Fried Egg, as it turns out, is a stick).
Approach shots are among Southern Hills’ toughest challenge. At the long par-4 12th hole, pick your poison: bunkers to the left, or carry the creek guarding the front right.
It’s strange: I’ve never been much of a Twitter-meetup sort of guy. But I’d known two of these guys less than a day, and our foursome felt like a group of old friends. “So how do you guys all know each other?” asked one of our caddies. “You all go to college together or something?”
I thought for a moment about how to answer that question. “Well, Bunkie and I went to Ole Miss together,” I explained. Another moment of thought. “And the other guys — well, I wish there was a cooler way to say it, but we know each other from Twitter.”
Now, the caddie was the one stuck in the silence of an uncertain reaction. A few seconds passed. “Twitter?”
At the par-4 ninth hole (395 yards from the championship tees, 347 yards from the green tees), Southern Hills introduces the coolest spot on the course: the ninth and 18th greens, immediately adjacent to one another, tied together by a cluster of imposing, front-facing bunkers — all set against the hill from which the round begins. It’s one of the coolest green sites I’ve ever seen — like Bethpage Black’s 18th on steroids. “Holy shit,” I mustered.
Land movement probably isn’t the image most people have of Tulsa, Okla. — but when Perry Maxwell finished the design in 1936, he told reporters that the golf course and its site were natural partners. “It is such a natural lie for a course,” Maxwell said, “that there is little need for bunkers and many of them have been put in just as a touch to add to the beauty.”
If Southern Hills’ front nine is the stirring organ introduction to “Freebird,” then the back nine is the guitar solo. The par-3 11th (173 yards from the championship tees, 150 yards from the green tees) is the shortest hole on the scorecard, but it’s course’s trickiest par-3: a green perched into the left side of a steep hill, and surrounded by bunkers to both sides, in front, and in back (I made par — my only one of the day). The 12th (461 yards from the championship tees, 415 yards from the green tees) is an incredible par-4: a preposterously sharp dogleg left, with a small fairway trap in the dogleg’s crook the only hazard from tee to green; an approach from the left must navigate three greenside bunkers, and one from the right has to carry a short creek. As with so many places at Southern Hills — especially the approach shots — the challenge is straightforward, but with no margin for error.
Somewhere along the back nine, my lower back locked up, and I spent the last few holes hobbling along and topping fairway woods. Even with the abbreviated swing that I had to take on, though, the course still offers options: like at the short par-4 17th (371 yards from the back tees, 315 yards from the green tees), with maniacal bunkering in front of the green, but room to miss in back for anyone forced to club up. Undoubtedly, Southern Hills will favor the PGA Championship’s long hitters, like every golf course does. Shorter hitters still will have a chance — but no one will shoot 65 accidentally. Even at its most playable, Southern Hills demands concentration.
. . .
Daylight chased, on Southern Hills’ 18th green, with the ninth green just behind.
By the 18th hole, I’d more or less quit keeping score. I certainly hadn’t come here to put up a number — but I had come here for the par-4 18th (491 yards from the championship tees, 401 yards from the green tees), an incredible finishing hole that meanders downhill and then back up to the same bunker-laden hillside shared with the ninth. “I don’t usually do this,” I said to Tom Morris III on our way down the fairway, “but could we get a picture out here?” The four of us lined up, arms behind one another’s shoulders like something at a college fraternity party. At the bottom of the hill, a creek runs across before the fairway begins running back up toward the clubhouse. The rain had stopped long before, and the sun that had kept us company most of the afternoon was throwing its last minutes of daylight up against the withering clouds.
On the 18th green, we traded customary handshakes and thanked Tom for having us out. I dipped into the pro shop for a hoodie and a logo ball. In the parking lot, I shook Deep Fried Egg’s hand. “This was a little weird, but in a good way,” I told him. “Yeah,” he said. “I told my wife that I’d been invited to play Southern Hills, and I wound up having to tell her that I have a Twitter account.”
It was dusk now. The parking lot had begun to empty out. I walked back to the starter’s hut, grabbed a fistful of tees, and dropped them in my bag.
. . .
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