On the road - golfer travels to various golf courses in the U.S

Golf Digest, July, 1999 by Tom Callahan

Looking for America: Whichever beaten track you happen to take, there's sure to be a golf course nearby

Without Charley (either Kurault or John Steinbeck's poodle) but in that same spirit, the idea was to take a small trip (as opposed to all the grand ones), through the middle of the country for a change, playing public golf courses as you go.

Better yet, let the trip take you, not just to see a little of the land but to feel a little of it, in time for the Fourth of July.

The starting and stopping point could only be Chicago, where, legend had it, a golf course was hidden like a Bud Chapman painting betwixt and between the granite and glass skyscrapers of the downtown Loop in the very shadow of the Sears Tower. But the impulse upon renting a car at O'Hare was to head straight out on the highway and save the city and all its lost worlds for last. About 50 miles from the airport, without any urging from the driver, the right side mirror blew away. There was no looking back now.

Not a perfect circle, sort of a deflated basketball, was drawn hap- hazardly on the map, and freedom became the choice between counter and clockwise: Cedar Rapids and Des Moines to the west, or Gary, Lafayette and Peru to the southeast. Cole Porter was born in Peru. Indiana it was.

"It's awful windy where you're going," warned Jeff Fleming of Olney, Ill., a country lawyer with a 12-handicap. "If the wind ever quit, everybody in the north of Indiana would fall over. I knew a golfer up there who kept a string tied to his club and his ball so he wouldn't lose the ball. Hit it in the water once, pulled him straight upstream, clear over a waterfall."

If you're back in Indiana in September, Fleming proposed, the annual Big Whopper Liars Contest is held at the Murphy Auditorium in New Harmony on the third Saturday of the month.

A hundred and twenty miles from Chicago, in the college town of West Lafayette, the first course appeared, the only one Pete Dye ever designed for a dollar.

Dominating The Journal and Courier that morning was a front-page story on the perfect PSAT score of 17-year-old West Lafayette High School senior Yi-Ching Ong. Shining brightly in gold and black, Purdue students darted in and out of stores all over town. The university's new golf course at the Birck Boilermaker complex was built by some 50 of them, including Jon Schirm.

"I hated golf; I thought it was the most asinine sport," said Schirm, a sophomore sitting under a battered baseball cap on top of a tractor in the rough. "I came here to study geology, turf science and horticulture." From 13 on, he had worked at a nursery just up the road in Logansport.

Dye sketched a course and then sprung most of Purdue's agronomy majors from their labs. He turned the course into a lab.

"Basically it was all students," Schirm said. "We learned to operate the machinery. We dredged out the wetlands. We got into the earth-moving, the shaping, everything."

For his buck, Pete first helped the university raise $8 million and then worked every day for 100 days with the kids. "It gives you a little faith in life," said Dye. "They didn't know the difference between Tuesday morning and Sunday afternoon. They just kept working."

Dye carefully oversaw the engineering fundamentals such as drainage. But, esthetically, he gave them their heads. According to Schirm, he'd say, "OK, what are we going to do here? Nope, we can't do that. I'll show you why." Sometimes, he'd just murmur, "Aw, that's great. Let's do it."

Schirm said, "It was 14-hour days, and it was wonderful." Out of his own pocket, Dye chipped in 8,000 trees: poplars and oaks and maples and ornamental pears and crab-apples and sweet something-or-others. The course is long and lovely and unmistakably Dye's, but also theirs. The signature greens have a cosigner: white rocks instead of railroad ties.

The architect's only proviso was that it be affordable ($38.50 on this day) and that the students get a break ($18 for them). Sprinkle in a few premium outings from alumni in Indianapolis and Chicago each year and that should be enough to keep the operating budget flush. Neither Pete nor Alice Dye are alums, by the way. They were inspired to action by a friend along with, of all quintessentially Midwestern things, a Paul Harvey report on the radio.

"And I've started playing golf," Schirm said with a rueful shudder. "I needed to know what the golfer sees." Partly to set the pins, he said, but "mainly to see the vistas. Now the darn game's got me."

Sixty miles further on, at Peru, a course dubbed Rock Hollow called out for nine more holes before the sun went down. It's a lush, marshy place where a gravel pit used to be. Ohio was up ahead. Four hours of oncoming headlights. Then to bed.

At some juncture in every journey, you wonder if you're the one who is moving or if everything is coming to you.

This feeling grew especially strong en route to the Shaker Run course near Cincinnati when, on a leafy residential side street, President Clinton rode by.