A Course Called America Quotes

“People who don’t play golf pro to envy their golfing neighbors, admiring it as a nifty game you can play to a ripe old age. What they don’t understand is that we don’t keep playing because we can; we play because we don’t know how to stop. It lands in our hands for just a moment before slipping through our fingers, and we grab for it again and again. It’s a shell game, a music man, a three-card monte from which we can’t walk away. Once in a while it glances back at us, and it’s achingly beautiful. A siren? Perhaps. But those sailors at least got the closure of wrecking on the rocks. Golfers find the rocks and just drop another ball.”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called America: Fifty States, Five Thousand Fairways, and the Search for the Great American Golf Course

“down half the trees, and were restoring some of the holes. That all sounded like good news, but what the place was becoming didn’t really matter. For us, it could only ever be what it had been. It existed for me in a sort of radiant stasis in some immutable part of my memory, where it’s always sunny and I’m forever fifteen years old.”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called America: Fifty States, Five Thousand Fairways, and the Search for the Great American Golf Course

“First tees no longer made me nervous, but somehow rangers still did.”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called America: Fifty States, Five Thousand Fairways, and the Search for the Great American Golf Course

“A holed ball was beautiful and final. All it left you were the stories of how it arrived there, powerless I change that plot.”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called America: Fifty States, Five Thousand Fairways, and the Search for the Great American Golf Course

“The land on which this game is played holds memories for a very long time, and once in a while, it lets us come back and walk around in them.”
― Tom Coyne, A Course Called America: Fifty States, Five Thousand Fairways, and the Search for the Great American Golf Course