David Michael Miller
A lot of people who don’t play the game have the wrong impression about golf. They think it’s a rich guy’s thing.
But actually most of the rounds played in Madison are played on one of the city’s four municipally owned courses and the players are decidedly middle class. I learned the game at age 8 at the George Hansen course, which is part of Milwaukee County’s publicly owned golf course system. Over the years I played with a lot of factory workers, mechanics and other middle-class kids paying their greens fees with money they earned delivering papers or working at McDonald’s.
Since I moved to Madison almost four decades ago I’ve played our municipal courses with firefighters, cops, teachers, state workers and sales guys. Several years ago I even played a couple of rounds with the late local union leader Dode Lowe, as quintessential a working-class guy as they come.
I’ve also played with kids whose parents buy them a pass to play cheaply all summer long. It’s a great way for kids to be outside, get some exercise, be with their friends and learn a game that requires you to meld and control your body, mind and emotions to achieve a goal. And, of course it’s a game that tests your ability to deal with frustration, an unfortunately common experience in adult life.
Increasingly, I find myself being paired up with young guys who work at Epic. In fact, it has gotten so common that when I get paired with a couple of slightly nerdy looking young men I greet them with, “You guys work for Epic, right?” I’ve only been wrong once. (Note to Judy Faulkner: These rounds are always played after work hours and the guys always speak highly of their employer.)
Also, participation by women, especially younger women, is increasing. Recent press coverage of the women’s high school tournament has been great and will probably inspire more girls to take up the sport. And the First Tee program reaches out to underprivileged young people, many of color, to introduce them to the game. So, yeah, it’s still a sport dominated by white guys, but, like everything else, that’s changing pretty fast.
All of which brings us to Madison’s crisis of golf. The courses are supposed to be self-supporting but they’re running a deficit with a growing backlog of capital projects. To address the problem the city’s Golf Subcommittee has voted to raise fees, but that won’t be enough. So, they’ve developed a menu of stronger options. The two that seem most likely to be adopted are to close either the nine-hole Monona course on Monona Drive or the 36-hole Yahara Hills course on the far east side near the Ho Chunk casino.
As a guy who loves the game and cares about the city and its park system, it’s an easy choice for me: close Yahara.
Much of the Yahara course was built in a swamp. Some of its holes flood every spring or, in a heavy rain, even in years that are otherwise dry. And it sits across the road from the county landfill so that when the wind blows in just the wrong direction, well, let’s just say it detracts from the experience. Moreover, the course layout itself is uninspiring with one long, straight hole after another.
The Monona course, on the other hand, is much beloved. The holes are distinctive, yet it’s not so long and challenging as to be beyond the skills of the average duffer. And it attracts a crowd that is even more proletariat than the others given its location in what has been the more industrial side of town. To help save it the Golf Subcommittee might consider recommending renaming it, “The Course of the People.”
But what to do with a decommissioned Yahara Hills and its 400 acres? The city believes that it has little development potential, but I’m not so sure. It sits close to a major highway intersection and right next door to the casino, which is already a recreation destination. And if it can’t be developed any time soon, the city could let it rewild, maintaining some trails that could be used by hikers, cross-country skiers and mountain bikers. If they wanted to do something more intense with it, it could make for a pretty thrilling facility for the growing sport of cyclocross.
The Golf Subcommittee holds out some thin hope that a cash infusion from the city’s general coffers might save all the courses. But given golf’s profile as a dalliance of the privileged class (though wrong in this case) and given more pressing needs, that just won’t happen. The best choice among a lot of tough ones is to close Yahara Hills.
