The journey to the golf course is one of the game’s underrated thrills

I have arrived at golf courses by all the usual means over the years — by foot, bike, bus, train and automobile but never in a new one, at least not one that I owned. I’m a car guy but have never bought a new car and cannot identify a fuelie head, or a Hurst on the floor. But as a freedom machine, you can’t beat a car. How many daydreams, to say nothing of call-of-the-road golf trips, begin with a working car and tank full of 93? 

Your soundtrack is your soundtrack. Often some Bruce on mine. See/hear: Hurst on the floor. (“Racing in the Streets,” first bar.)

For a few years in the 1980s, I lived on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the southeast coast of Massachusetts with six towns and no connecting bridge to the mainland. I had a house on the outskirts of Edgartown and near the 8th tee of the genteel and very excellent nine-hole Edgartown Golf Club course. I’d slip out there at odd, late hours. Nobody seemed to mind. Now and again, I would park my car in a thicket of scrub oaks, for quick, last-story-done golf. A desperate golf bum is blind to consequences.

The car was a VW Bug. Those old four-speed Bugs — this was a ’71 — are not much more than glorified golf carts, and are as fun to drive. A man named Roger Becker, who lived in the woods off Tiahs Cove Road, could fix it with all manner of loose items at hand. He was the MacGyver of West Tisbury, even able get the heat to blow from a metal hose under the driver’s seat. On early-evening winter drives from the Vineyard Gazette in Edgartown to the town hall in Chilmark, the car could be warm, almost too hot, by the time I passed Alley’s General Store, midway into the 15-mile trip.

In summer on the Vineyard, my neighbor was Bart Giamatti, then the president of Yale. We shared a driveway and our modest houses, at the top of a little hill, were separated by 30 feet of crabgrass. I once mentioned to Bart the C.B. Macdonald course at Yale, but golf was not among his many and varied passions. 

Bart would sometimes arrive from New Haven in the back seat of a Lincoln, so he could read as a professional driver handled the wheel and the Bourne Bridge rotary. But as Bart was making his way north in the university hierarchy, he said, he had a VW Bug himself, a yellow one. I think it was a nod to his impishness. Bart once told me he grew up in the “genteel poverty of academia” and he was not a materialist. But after Yale, when he became the president of baseball’s National League, he started eyeing a Mercedes he wanted to buy.

Bart often spent his Sunday afternoons in a beach chair, listening to the Red Sox on a transistor radio while reading Harper’s. He had a fatal heart attack in that house in 1989, at age 51. He was then the MLB commissioner. Eight days earlier, he had banished Pete Rose from baseball, for gambling on the game, baseball’s original sin. (Earlier this year, Rose was reinstated.) Rose, in his prime, drove a Rolls Royce with a license plate that read HITKING. Your car can reveal you just as your golf can. 

Bart liked movies. One night, in my old Bug, we drove from Edgartown to Oak Bluffs to watch The Pope of Greenwich Village, starring Mickey Rourke. He despised it. He viewed it as a clichéd depiction of Italian-American city life. I can still see him gripping the Bug’s off-white plastic strap above the passenger-side door as he extracted himself from the passenger seat. Bart was a big man in every way, loaded with movie-star charisma. The youngest of his three children, Paul, is an actor. Maybe you recall the scene in Sideways in which Paul’s character, Miles Raymond, plays golf with his buddy in the California wine country. A group hits into them and Miles fires back. 

I joined the Gazette in May 1982 with another straight-out-of-college reporter, Jim Kelly. Jim got to know my parents and I his. Jim’s father was a keen golfer and if anybody read my golf typing more closely than my own father it was Jim’s dad, now 97. Jim and his dad and I played together once on the Vineyard, at Farm Neck, a scenic public course in Oak Bluffs. Jim has lived in Honolulu for years and his parents are in Minneapolis, where Jim grew up. “Tell Michael I really liked the piece he did on — well, I can’t remember the guy’s name but he’s the latest star on the Tour and I really enjoyed it,” the senior Kelly told the junior Kelly the other day. That’s good enough for me. More than good enough. When your parents die at an old age, as mine did, you don’t mourn their deaths so much. You just miss them. That’s my experience. I imagine Jim will find the same. His mother is lovely.

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Jim has always been a car guy. He arrived on the island in a 1980 Volkswagen Rabbit with Minneapolis plates. On a summer Sunday, Jim drove his Rabbit over to Scotty Reston’s house, behind the Gazette building. Scotty and his wife, Sally, owned the paper and Scotty (under the byline James Reston) was a political reporter and columnist for The New York Times and the paper’s former executive editor. But this visit was not professional for Jim. His Rabbit needed a wash — there is a lot of dirt-road driving on the Vineyard — and Scotty had a long hose and a working spigot. Scotty was born in Scotland and was the No. 1 golfer at the University of Illinois golf team in the early 1930s. Scotty wanted to become a pro. His mother had other ambitions for him. He won two Pulitzers.

Early in our Vineyard days, Jim fell for a shiny new Camaro on display at Old Colony, the Chevy-Jeep dealer on the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road. This part is from Jim, by email: “Within two payments it was clear I couldn’t afford the car or the insurance. Old Colony wouldn’t buy it back from me even at a steep depreciation discount, so I took the ferry to Cape Cod and sold it for what I owed on it to the Chevy dealer in Hyannis, then hitchhiked back to Woods Hole in a cold, miserable rain, just to punish myself. I walked from the ferry landing in Vineyard Haven home to Oak Bluffs. It was still raining.”

We were making $137 a week, after taxes — something like that.

Jim and I had both had “island cars” at different times. Mine died off-island, proof that it was an island car. Jim’s was a 1972 Plymouth Fury he bought for $400. The ink on the title was still wet when he replaced the starter and radiator. He did the work in the front yard of his house in Oak Bluffs, which he rented from Ernie Garvin, the town’s animal control officer. (Deer, skunks, dogs, the occasional cat.) I put “new” retreads on my Chevy Malibu before foolishly taking the car off-island. She rolled her final mile in Southborough, Mass. I offered to sell it to a mechanic there for $50. He said for $50 he’d take the car off my hands. I hitched to Woods Hole, to the ferry depot.

Last year, I logged many driving miles, reporting trips for a new book. I was also responding to the siren song of the highway. (One of the things that drew me to tournament golf as a teenager was the pro tour as a traveling road show; I wanted to join the circus.) In the early part of 2024, I drove across Arizona, California and Nevada, heading to different tournaments. I was in a Hertz rental, a vehicle that would not stop chirping and was two sizes too big for me. Later, in my own car — a reliable green Mini Cooper — I drove up and down the Eastern Seaboard several times and across Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Also, the east coast of Scotland.

Now and again, on these trips, my mind would wander to old cars and old drives and the rest. Well, not in Scotland. Your mind can’t wander when driving on the wrong side of a narrow road in a six-speed manual on your way to the Senior British Open. I played in its pro-am last year with Gary Player, the legendary South African golfer, closing in on 90 and still at-large in the world. He hooked every shot, even his slice putts. This was at Carnoustie. He’s amazing. He told our group about his new girlfriend. “And she has her own money!” Player said cheerfully. He says everything cheerfully. It’s hard to imagine any athlete ever logging more globetrotting miles than Gary Player.

In our Gazette days, Jim and I were both drawn to the book Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon. It came out in 1982 and was a bestseller. We were trying to get through a winter on the Vineyard, 1982 turning into 1983, and here was Heat-Moon, behind the wheel of his boxy Ford Econoline van going wherever. What Jim and I took from him — and surely others would say the same — was . . . freedom. But not boundless, no-rules freedom. Heat-Moon could go where he wanted to go, but he still needed gas and paved roads and, come nightfall, places to park his sleeper van. 

Those long drives last year, with my clubs in the boot, were sponsored by this sentence by John Updike, from his short story Farrell’s Caddie, set on a Scottish golf course: “This was happiness, on this wasteland between the tracks and the beach, and freedom, of a wild and windy sort.” (I have recycled that sentence often, without apology, and hope to live off it ‘til the last sheep comes home.) You could say that Banker Farrell’s walk and play over firm Scottish linksland is a first cousin to Heat-Moon’s cross-country, back-road drives. Farrell is free on that Caledonian course — to a point. He faces, as all golfers do, the boundaries created by the rule book, by red stakes and white ones, by the social contract of playing-partner propriety.

I played once with Updike and his home course, Myopia Hunt Club, on the Cape Ann peninsula, north of Boston. Few rounds in my life have been more memorable. After a lifetime in the game, Updike had a charming and limited grasp of how to take a drop from a pond, but he knew everything about Jack Fleck’s state of mind in his playoff win over Ben Hogan in the 1955 U.S. Open. The genius novelist with X-ray vision.

Updike once wrote an essay about his Martha’s Vineyard summers, in the fishing village of Menemsha, in Chilmark. He mentioned how his buddy Peter Simon, devoted photographer of the New York Mets and the Grateful Dead, used to play an island course called Mink Meadows in bare feet. No shoes in summer was a kind of freedom for Updike, too, and he describes the “pokey feel of an accelerator on a naked sole” on his own Vineyard drives. I know that feeling and you may, too: all that power and responsibility in the ball of your right foot. Sam Snead liked to practice in bare feet. I once got in trouble (sort of) in a summertime night session at the driving range of my home course, Philadelphia Cricket, for hitting balls without shoes. I mentioned Snead. You can guess the rejoinder.

One night in my first Vineyard summer, I was driving back to Edgartown from Chilmark and ran out of gas. This was in the Malibu, the island car that died off-island. I would like to blame the car’s moody gas gauge, but I know that my own lousy planning was the real culprit. There was a filling station down the road. I hitched a ride there. A car alone is not freedom.

But if there’s gas in the tank (if the engine is charged) and the day is empty, well, that’s another thing. You’re off and running, or you can be. You’re free to roam. Summer’s here and the time is right. You can start a round after supper and still finish, if the sun lingers and you get on with it. And if you don’t finish, who cares?

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.