A Step Forward
for the RTJ Trail,
But Only a Baby Step
The BackyarD
(Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail)
Birmingham, Ala.
Greens fee: $38.50 to walk nine
Date played: February 18, 2024
The problem, I convinced myself, was that I needed new grips.
I’d woken up alone the Saturday before Memorial Day 2022 with my dog’s wet nose against mine, lying on a mattress on the floor of a one-bedroom apartment. She, I, and the rest of the Bardwell clan found ourselves in real estate Purgatory: we’d sold our house quickly, found a new house slowly, and then had to find a landing spot between closings. My wife and kids, understandably, bolted for her parents’ house in lieu of a three-day weekend crammed into our home sweet shoebox. I’d stayed behind. I love them deeply, and I miss them when we’re apart. I’ve also always found solitude rejuvenating. Solitude has a way of turning quickly to loneliness, of course. I like my weekends alone as I like my golf trips: shorter than I think, and more seldom than I think.
Seldom had become a theme for my life as a golfer, actually.
Six months earlier, I’d taken in one of the best golf experiences of my life: there and back again on an 11-hour drive to Pinehurst, with three nights in a minimalist Airbnb and three days of off-resort golf, followed by an 11-hour return. With the exception of a delightful afternoon at Southern Pines, all of it had been alone. That had been the point. It had been rejuvenating, as solitude is. But the 11-hour drive home got lonely, as solitude and 11-hour drives do.
The Backyard’s fourth hole captures the paradox of its unfulfilled potential: a large punchbowl green, but with rough covering its slopes.
I don’t know whether it’s the loneliness I felt on the back end of a golf pilgrimage I’d hoped for years to make. I don’t know whether it’s the ugliness that bloomed throughout pro golf in 2022, on both sides of the battle between the PGA Tour and a rival Saudi upstart. I don’t know whether it’s the new job I started, which came with buckets of rewarding work but left less time for daydreaming. I don’t know whether it was a newfound fascination with hockey, which does right many of the things that golf does wrong. All of it, probably.
Whatever the reasons, I drifted from golf. By the time I realized that I’d drifted, I was OK with it. I remembered a conversation with Tezira and Lakareber Abe that I’d arranged for a Golfer’s Journal Q&A during the pandemic; Lakareber was playing professionally on the Epson Tour, and Tezira is a brilliant young attorney. They both played elite-level college golf. They are both Black. Tezira had been the first Black woman to play golf at the University of Texas when she enrolled in 2012, as Lakareber had been at Alabama. But by 2020, Tezira said, she no longer felt like she had a home in golf. At the time, I’d been shocked. How could anyone who’d loved golf so much fall out of love? I can’t begin to assume I could ever stand in the shoes of a Black woman in golf’s white-dominated world — but by that Memorial Day morning on the floor of that little apartment, I’d begun to understand a bit, because I felt it too.
At first, the hours I spent thinking about Lying Four didn’t wane. Around that January, I hit a writer’s block on new ideas. Then I hit a wall when the energy spent brainstorming story and podcast ideas became overwhelming. My frustration set in. My depression returned. Each fed the other. It wasn’t purposefully, but I coped by withdrawing. I avoided DMs with story ideas. I ignored e-mails from writers asking whether Lying Four still published guest essays in the Voices series. I felt bad about it every time. But I couldn’t muster the energy to refocus, and I couldn’t muster the courage to pull the plug. So I did neither. Golf had been a source of joy for most of my adult life. Suddenly it felt like a burden, though. Like most of my burdens, I coped by pretending that I wasn’t carrying it after all. (That’s how you wind up with depression, by the way.)
The Backyard’s wide-open footprint allows players to see nearly every nook and cranny of the course from just about anywhere.
Predictably, actually playing golf nearly disappeared from my daydreams. Parents of young children rarely have time to sneak away for four-hour rounds. But even in between all-too-infrequent rounds, I’d always made time for quick trips to a local driving range; just the repetitive act of striking ball after ball, soaking in the good shots and trying to self-diagnose the bad ones, had been for years the closest thing in my life to meditation. But the opportunities, even for brief practice sessions, seem to grow elusive. Eventually, I stopped trying.
By late February that year, more than three months after my minimalist journey to Pinehurst, I hadn’t swung a club since Tobacco Road’s 18th hole. But a Fried Egg event at South Carolina’s Charleston Municipal — a birthday gift from my wife — loomed. I forced myself to the driving range to shake off my rust and to try to reestablish a semblance of putting rhythm. Neither came. The 36-hole Saturday in Charleston was delightful; the company was unforgettable; the golf course was brilliant. But I came home no more eager to resume my meditations slapping range balls.
Ironically, the solitude of golf has always been my favorite part of the game. Playing alone is restorative. But even when playing with friends, you are alone over the ball — alone to try to slip your thumbs into a proper grip, alone with the last thought you think before pulling the club back, alone with the moment when the urge to swing down overwhelms you, and alone with the joy or panic when you see the ball take flight. For the first time in my life as a golfer, though, that solitude felt more like loneliness. So I put that loneliness where I put my golf bag: in a corner, just far enough away to ignore.
On that lonely mattress in that empty apartment, something sparked. Boredom, maybe. Or maybe boredom with the loneliness. It doesn’t matter. But a couple of hours later, I was back at the driving range, trying to wrangle a 6-iron whose face couldn’t decide between open and shut. The problem, I convinced myself, was that I needed new grips.
. . .
The surest sign yet that I verged on reentering golf was my certainty that I was a few equipment purchases from a single-digit handicap.
The Backyard’s excellent seventh hole, as viewed from right of the green. Its imposing greenside bunker challenges players either to cover the course’s largest hazard or to play conservatively toward the green’s left — which a brutal two-putt to follow.
I popped the trunk of my aging Toyota Camry in the parking lot of Nevada Bob’s. The 6-iron wasn’t the only club that needed help. My fingers slipped around the grips of my driver, 3-wood, and 8-iron, too. I bundled them together, slammed the finicky trunk shut, and headed inside for the first time in an age. While an old men sliced off the old grips and glued on some new ones, I wandered around the indoor putting green, giving a new model a stroke or three before nestling it back into place and finding a new one. Maybe my mallet putter is the problem, I thought. Maybe I need more of a blade style, slowly convincing myself that months of inactivity had made me a better putter. The old man worked quicker than I expected and brought back my clubs before I could make an expensive leap. Blisters began to rise off the insides of two fingers, but I resolved to make an afternoon return to the driving range.
The grips helped. My ball flights still leaked rightward more often than I remembered, but nothing like the morning. I concentrated on rolling my wrists over one another, replacing my natural swing thought of don’t let your hands get behind you JESUS DON’T LET YOUR HANDS GET BEHIND YOU. It wasn’t great, but it was better — consistently better.
“I should play,” I thought for the first time in half a year. Back in my shoebox apartment, I wrapped my fingers in my kids’ Aquaman Band-Aids and Googled the phone number for Wolf Hollow. The phone rang. And rang. And rang. After a few more rings, I hung up. I stared at my clubs in the corner, new grips and all. And there in that apartment they stayed. So did I.
. . .
Hockey pulled me in fast, then and now. When I was in high school, Jackson got a minor league team called the Bandits. I’d never thought much about hockey, much less spent time watching it. But there was something about it: the speed, the sound, the brutality, the precision mingled with chaos. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I drove home from Ole Miss as often as I could to catch a game. During the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, a friend and I drove from Oxford to Provo, Utah, to watch a game between the Russian and Chinese women’s national teams; 27 hours there, then three hours to watch the game, and then 27 hours back.
Although the Backyard checks a few mandatory boxes for a short par-3 course, the interiors of its greens are fairly mundane.
But you can imagine how professional hockey fared in Jackson, Mississippi. After a couple seasons of curious interest, attendance fell off. Around the time I graduated from college, the team folded. And with the Bandits went most of my interest in the sport. I turned the Stanley Cup Finals on TV every few years, and I watched the Olympics tournaments religiously. Aside from those dalliances, though, my affair with hockey ended.
A couple of Januarys ago, though, something clicked. While channel-surfing one Sunday afternoon, I stopped long enough on a Red Wings game to explain some of the sport’s basics to my kid. They fight all the time!, I told him. And sometimes when they fight, the referees only make them sit out for five minutes. Imagine getting in a fight at school and only having to go to timeout for five minutes! He was captivated. And for the first time in nearly two decades, so was I.
I fell hard. I started staying up late to stream NHL games on ESPN Plus. I scoured eBay looking at old jerseys. When my wife calendared a few weekend trips to her parents’ house, I cross-referenced the dates against the Dallas Stars and Nashville Predators schedules to see if I could slip away quickly for a game.
Before long, I realized that my rediscovered fascination with hockey was taking up most of the mental bandwidth that normally went to golf. I wasn’t thinking about playing golf on the weekends — I was thinking about driving seven hours, alone, to watch two hockey teams that I didn’t even care about.
The more I thought about it, the more the juxtaposition jarred me: arguably, there are no two sports more different from one another than golf and hockey. One is marked by gentility; in the other, broken noses and split teeth are not uncommon events. One sport is famously slow; the other dramatic and fast. But there’s more to it than that, I think. Hockey, for all the appearance of chaos, is orderly and precise — governed by rules, predictable in its length, and played with technique that is second nature to the most elite of its ranks. Golf, on the other hand, appears to be orderly and curated — but as anyone who has ever played can attest, it is utter chaos: Get your ball from here to there, however you can, no matter how long it takes. No whistle is going to save you. There are rules, but they are obvious and intuitive: other than those, figure it out on your own. Hockey players skate over ice at breathtaking speeds, handling pucks without thought; but in golf, even at the highest level, no one ever truly masters the most fundamental technique of all: the swing.
The Backyard’s artificial-turf teeing grounds are a bit of an eyesore, but they undoubtedly reduce the cost of maintaining tee boxes.
Even among these two sports that struggle for popularity, this difference — the order of hockey, and the chaos of golf — is, I think, at the heart of hockey’s attraction. Fans like speed and brutality, yes; but more than that, human beings crave order. And just under its surface, golf is chaos. Even without the chipped teeth and bloodied faces, golf is pain. Between watching someone earn a broken nose or a Thursday afternoon round at TPC Craig Ranch, which would most people choose? Which would you?
. . .
Nearly all the preceding paragraphs were written that lonely summer in 2022. There was never any reason to publish them — no unifying theme, no happy ending. So they stayed in a corner, gathering dust like those clubs and those grips no longer so new. I’d never intended to stop writing Lying Four. Even as the months went by without any serious efforts, I never considered Lying Four to be a dead letter despite all evidence to the contrary. Most of the time, story ideas didn’t come; when they did, I couldn’t find the energy to chase them. But golf, like God and Waffle House, never locks its doors to you, even if you’ve closed them. And like God and Waffle House, golf famously traffics in tiny miracles.
In late 2023, in spite of my indifference toward the game, two of those little miracles found me. First, I landed a spring tee time at Sweetens Cove. I didn’t know why I even angled for it. But I knew, even then, that Sweetens Cove is one of the few places where I’ve ever felt a religious experience. If Sweetens couldn’t shake me, nothing could. Not long before, after an 11-year dry spell, my name was pulled by the benevolent overlords of the Masters ticket lottery. I’ve only seen Augusta National once with my own eyes; like Sweetens Cove, if there is a God then I felt Him there. Indifferent or not, then, these two holy sites suddenly occupied dates on my calendar. Those days were coming, rusty swing or not. I started glancing more often toward the golf clubs in the corner. They were still gathering dust — but they were still there. One day not long after the calendar turned over to 2024, I took them out of that corner, nestled them back in the trunk of that old Toyota, and ferried them to the nearest driving range.
I’d love to say that my swing was still there, that Joe Biden coasted to a stress-free reelection, and that all the birds and squirrels lived happily ever after. But it was ugly. Most of the time, my clubface couldn’t even stumble into the ball — either nosediving for the turf two inches behind the ball, or altogether leaving the business of contact to my hosel. Frustration came quickly. But something had changed. This time, the chase was on. Despite the admonitions years ago from a golf coach, I pored over YouTube videos. I sent clips of my swing to friends for diagnosis. After a few weeks — and I hesitate to write this, because I believe in jinxes — I was fucking flushing it. Hitting balls at the range became like eating Girl Scout cookies straight from the bag: Just one more…OK, God that was good, last one for real this time…Jesus, how many of these can I finish before my wife comes home?
When you haven’t been to the golf course in a while, sometimes you just have to drop everything and go. And sometimes, even while you’re at the golf course, you just have to drop everything and go.
On a cold, windy afternoon in February, I found myself overswinging and muttering profanities just outside Birmingham at Oxmoor Valley’s driving range — immediately adjacent to the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail’s old short course, which had been converted into a tiny, nine-hole par-3 course: the Backyard. In the back of my mind, I’d arrived with a thought toward ditching the practice range and actually playing. But the cold and the shanks broke away what little confidence I’d mustered; I blew through my bucket of scuffed Srixon practice balls and left. But the next morning, I was back — and, somehow, crushing my irons again. Every 7-iron was cleaner the the last, with each shot rising into the air like a firework, then hanging for an instant before gently parachuting back to Earth. The back of my mind spoke up again: maybe I should play. I kept smoking 7-irons to shut out the voice. A few minutes went by. No shanks; just fireworks. Finally, with another iron shot hanging in the air like an angel, the voice snatched me by the throat and stopped whispering: just fucking do it already.
A few minutes later, I was the only soul on the golf course, standing on a tee box for the first time in nearly two years. I fussed with the pockets of my golf bag, rummaging for tees, ball markers, and other trinkets that I wouldn’t need but allowed me one last delay. Finally, out of excuses, I dropped a ball, found a target, and took my stance. Without really thinking about it, my shoulders started to turn, and the cluhhead ambled back. Oh God, my mind gasped. Oh God, please hit it.
The clubface landed flush.
. . .
When I visited Pinehurst for the first time in 2019, the resort’s heavyweight courses weren’t the ones that made the biggest impression. Walking off the ninth green at the Cradle on a hot July evening left me wondering why every town in America doesn’t have its own version: unintimidating and fun, with a quirky design that’s wide open and lends itself to easy maintenance. In its own way, the Backyard might be the answer to that question, and the answer is unsatisfying. Why doesn’t every town in America have a Cradle? Because capturing the Cradle’s magic is hard. In that goal, the Backyard comes up short. It borrows some of the Cradle’s broad strokes, but its details feel more like the result of compromise than of unrestrained creativity.
Fairness demands acknowledging the Backyard’s successes. In the more than 30 years since Alabama’s Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail debuted, the Backyard (which opened in late 2022) is its first effort at something different than a 1990s-style offering: superbly maintained and built on mostly promising land, but with designs wrapped in indifference. A simple glance at the Backyard’s scorecard shows it is not that: just two sets of tees (Oxmoor Valley’s 18-hole courses have five apiece), with hole lengths ranging from 132 yards (the back tee of the punchbowl fourth) down to just 59 yards (the front tee of the third), and with fairway-length grass occupying most of the course’s playable area. When rough makes an appearance, it’s mostly the golf equivalent of bumpers at a bowling alley: keeping bad shots from getting worse, and framing the holes rather than influencing them. The course is walking-only, and rounds take only an hour. Many of the Backyard’s holes could be played with nothing but a putter, and some demand honest-to-God strategy. And like any short course, the Backyard repeatedly forces players into shot lengths that fall between clubs. If a short course’s defining characteristic is that it defies an automaton, then the Backyard succeeds.
But even the sloth and the lion share some characteristics, and any inspection of the Backyard from less than 30,000 feet shows shortcomings that the Cradle does not. Bunkering is infrequent, and when it’s used at all, it’s often savior bunkering rather than something that makes a player think. Most of the greens are unremarkable navy bean-shaped bingo halls, and the others (with one notable exception) begin with good ideas but don’t finish the job.
For instance, the green at the second hole (82 yards from the back tee, 76 yards from the front) is wide but shallow (by the standards of the Trail, whose trademark quality is huge greens), with a pronounced drop from the leftward upper tier to the rightward lower. Any shot missing the correct tier leaves a difficult two-putt. But the green’s shape itself does nothing to complicate the offering: it’s a navy bean, not a puzzle. Similarly, the fourth hole (132 yards from the back tee, 120 yards from the front) jumps off the page with a punchbowl green, but the slopes of the basin are cloaked in rough — which, of course, defeats the purpose of a punchbowl green. The banal, modestly back-to-front tilted interior of the green leaves a player’s mood as flat as the putting surface itself.
The Backyard’s best hole, by far, is the seventh. Its sod-faced bunker dominates every available decision from the tee.
But this is not to say that the course is uniformly uninspired. The Backyard saves its best for almost last: a terrific seventh hole (102 yards from the back tee, 90 yards from the front) that requires a downhill tee shot to a boomerang green wrapped around the course’s best bunker. The two fit together like puzzle pieces, and any pin on the green’s right side demands that a player choose between a challenging two-putt or potentially short-siding herself in the course’s deepest hazard. It’s a hole that would feature well at any short course — even the Cradle. But it is one of the only moments that lingers on a player’s mind after the round is finished.
. . .
On a course built for camaraderie, though, perhaps green undulations and inspired bunkering are not the only chances for a memory. Aside from an early-round par, my scorecard was populated by bogeys when I reached the Backyard’s ninth (113 yards from the back tee, 101 yards from the front). A 9-iron hung safely above the green’s right edge and settled comfortably on the fringe some 20 yards from the hole. Easy three-putt, I congratulated myself. But another voice spoke up in my mind: Three-putt? Make par here, idiot.
With my historically inconsistent putting touch fried from two years’ disuse, my strategy on the greens had settled into an Obi-Wan Kenobi approach: eye the target, swing without thinking, and trust in the Force. The result ambled uphill from the green’s right edge, leaked a bit offline, and ran out of breath four feet away. Of course it’s a four-footer. I walked up to my ball, then turned around for a look back at the course — and my first round in an age. Not great, but not bad, I thought — both of the round and the Backyard. A few moments later, my putt began on line, kept its pace, and meandered into the hole.
No one who’s been out of the game for two years can credibly claim to be “back” after one outing. But a solid first effort can’t hurt.
. . .
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