It’s Never Too Late
to Give It Another Try
Shell Landing Golf Club
Gautier, Miss.
Greens fee: $69
Date played: July 17, 2021
By a child’s fifth birthday, her brain reaches 90 percent of its eventual size. Synapses — the pathways between neurons — form during a child’s first five years at rates never again seen during life. It’s not impossible for adults to change those pathways, but the brain’s ability to change diminishes with age.
In other words, it’s oversimplified to say that people are who they are — but it’s not far from the truth, either. The dominant traits of our personalities sink their hooks into us long before adulthood.
The Clarksdale Press Register (Oct. 20, 1999).
I don’t know when our potentials as golfers get set in stone, but I’m comfortable assuming that it happens sometime before a man’s 40th birthday. Like a personality, there’s room for improvement around the margins. But I’ve concluded that, for the most part, I am the golfer that I am always going to be. There are no club championships in my future. There are no back-nine 29s out there waiting for me. I can get around. When I practice like I should, I can get around competently. But that’s it. I started golf late in life — a sin of omission that rests with my parents. But the sins of fathers are visited upon their sons.
And there is no greater punishment for that sin than watching someone who hasn’t picked up a club in two years go out and put on a stripe show.
. . .
Even by Mississippi’s standard, summertime humidity on the Gulf Coast is borderline apocalyptic: as the sun pours down on the Gulf, water evaporates, and the resulting humidity rolls inland like an occupying force. In such a setting, a marsh ought to be the last place anyone should want to spend four hours — and Davis Love III, of all people, ought to be the last person with any business changing their minds. And yet, there is Shell Landing, 15 miles east of Biloxi, and no more than two miles from the sea — as my Dodge’s chicken biscuit could attest, disintegrating in the steamy Saturday morning air while my partners finished up on the practice range.
Shell Landing’s large fairway bunkers with scalloped edging are reminiscent of those seen at the Mississippi Gulf Coast’s biggest fish, Fallen Oak. But thankfully, Shell Landing lacks the death-march quality of Fallen Oak’s penal design.
One of them needed the reps more than most. He’d played a lot of golf in high school and college — recreationally — but had tailed off since college, even when life took him to the golf-saturated Gulf Coast. By the time his second wedding day rolled around, he hadn’t picked up a club in two years. Even so, golf felt like the sort of thing that couldn’t go forward on a wedding day without bringing along the groom.
He brought his same old janky swing with him, too. It had always been inelegant — more lifting the club than taking it back, then turning his upper body through the ball quickly, without a bit of effort from his feet or knees. When he times it up, somehow it works. But on the range that steamy morning, watching his first golf swings since Grumpy Cat died, the swing was far from timed up. I don’t know much about the mechanics of a golf swing, but I know an airborne golf ball when I see one, and I wasn’t seeing many of them. This is even less promising than his first marriage, I thought.
Unfortunately, getting the ball airborne is a prerequisite for playing Shell Landing — although it might be the only one. Set against the surrounding marshland, Shell Landing feels at times like Sea Island, where Love took up the game. And at barely more than 6,000 yards from the middle tees, Shell Landing shares Sea Island’s aversion to unnecessary length. But Shell Landing has none of Sea Island’s bite: its fairways are wide, and most of its bunkering is little more than decorative. The movement in the greens is not insignificant, but even the occasional greenside bunkers feel more like tokenism than true efforts at defense. Shell Landing exists more for fun than for a challenge. Its one recurring defense is forced carries over inlets from the still-raw marshland that reach into the design. But even those are manageable — provided, again, that the player can get the ball in the air. And standing on the first tee, that seemed anything but certain.
Shell Landing’s opening hole (402 yards from the back tees, 340 yards from the middle blue tees) could stand in as a fairly representative sample of the whole golf course: a short-ish, dogleg-left par-4 with fairway bunkers framing the tee shot but out of play, and a forced carry over a finger of marshland to a green guarded in front by a single bunker. There’s little strategic tension to it: find the fairway off the tee, then take enough club for an approach to carry both the marsh and the sand. But dramatic tension is another story.
Just off Shell Landing’s sixth tee: the real shell landing?
Improbably, though, my partner’s clunky swing put his Rocketballz clubface on the ball — and with a prang! that I hadn’t heard in years, the ball soared into the air toward the middle of the fairway. After I hit my drive, I drove my cart out to find the balls, and I instinctively pulled toward the ball in front — only to see that it wasn’t mine. It was his. What the hell?, I thought. A couple of minutes later, he sent a 7-iron soaring into the heavy Mississippi morning, before it settled no more than 20 feet from the hole.
Golf is a game of coming and going, I guess. No matter how long you’re away, it’s always there when you return.
And there is joy in returning — optimism, unwarranted perhaps, but palpable. At the par-5 third hole (559 yards from the back tees, 498 yards from the middle tees), my resurgent partner’s third shot missed long and embedded deep into the rearside bunkers, leaving him with a downhill shot from a fried-egg lie toward water. “This used to be France, you know,” he remarked casually. I think he made it out in three. It didn’t matter. It never does.
Although some of Shell Landing’s holes tend toward forgettable, the par-3s aren’t among them. They range from short to long, downhill to uphill, with greens that pose challenges beyond simply hitting the right yardage. The eighth hole (220 yards from the back tees, 178 yards from the middle tees) plays slightly uphill with most of its trouble on its left. After pulling his tee shot dangerously close to it, my friend shrugged. “Not the worst decision I’ve ever made,” he said, with his second wedding only a few hours away.
Outside the par-3s, the course resists its own lack of length with doglegs and other design techniques that require balancing risk versus reward. For instance, the sixth hole (401 yards from the back tees, 305 yards from the middle tees) is, for anyone playing the middle tees, the shortest par-4 on the course. But it requires navigating two forced carries over marshland: one on the tee shot, and another that a massive tee shot can find less than a hundred yards from the green. Hitting less than driver off the tee is the safest option, but for a small green surrounded on three sides by marsh, approaching with a wedge or short iron is a lot more appetizing than something longer. The sharp dogleg-right at the par-4 10th (375 yards from the back tees, 334 yards from the middle tees) is the more common example though: plenty of room to land something straightforward in the fairway, with huge pine trees guarding the line straight at the green. While I played over the trees (I cleared them but didn’t make it all the way to the green), the bridegroom-elect took a more conservative line, then pulled his approach badly left of the green. But then, with a near-certain reversion to the mean hanging in the air, he chipped a 6-iron onto the green from 50 feet, and it tracked perfectly into the hole. We all cheered: the shot of the day, from a guy who hadn’t picked up a club in nearly a thousand of them.
. . .
By the time we reached Shell Landing’s most memorable hole, the downhill par-3 17th (201 yards from the back tees, 161 yards from the middle tees), the bridegroom-elect’s wheels had fallen off a bit. By that point, it didn’t matter. The golf gods had made their point: it’s never too late to try again. Even when you give up the game, whether consciously or inadvertently, the game never gives up on you. From the tee box, I ripped a 5-hybrid toward the right side of the green; it cleared the marsh separating us from the hole, then skipped just over the putting surface. From a downhill lie on the back fringe, a delicate putt left me a kick-in par.
Shell Landing’s memorable 17th hole: a downhill par-3 with a long, forced carry over raw marshland.
There’s a temptation to think of golf as a linear experience — a series of days, all linked together by a self-imposed quest for improvement. Did my handicap go down today? Am I hitting my driver as far as I did last month? And when linear progression fails, we deem the experience a failure.
That strikes me as a miserable way to take in one of life’s joys.
I’d rather see golf not as a series of mandates, but as opportunities for renewal: chances at new beginnings. I’ll probably never break 80, but every day is a new chance to try. Every front-nine 51 is a chance to pull a back-nine 39 out of the fire. And no matter how long we put off the chance to try, it’s always waiting for us whenever we are.
Life might not hand out mulligans, but happiness always offers another chance.
. . .
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