I was lost.
The course was right there, shining green through the early-morning haze like a scene from ESPN Films. But the first tee and my buddies, John and Lang, were nowhere in sight. I hadn’t played 18 holes since I was a teenager. Lang plays nearly every week. John plays a little less than that. But none of us are scratch golfers. We’re improving. When I finally wheeled in the parking lot, it all made sense.
This was the first day of play at the Links at Audubon, a highly anticipated day more than a year in the making. But this was early days still and it wasn’t all figured out yet. There was no clubhouse. No pro shop. There was, however, a construction trailer and another trailer for bathrooms. A handful of golfers changed shoes and futzed with golf bags near cars on a shiny new slab of night-sky blacktop. I found John and Lang there.
Beyond that parking lot, an unfinished chainlink corral, and past construction workers hurrying here and there, the brand new Links at Audubon Park shimmered again through the haze and ESPN Films music swelled in my head.
The course closed in November 2022 for a complete overhaul that cost between $8 million and $9 million, depending on what you read. I was not a golfer when the project began. But I was a reporter.
At the time, I thought, “$8 million for another public golf course here?” It sounded absurd. I scoffed when Memphis City Council members Chase Carlisle and Ford Canale, who helped to rework the original plan, said they did it to give more green space for the “non-golfing public.” The golfing public is likely 5 percent (or less) of the total Memphis population, I thought. Why spend so much on them?
Then, the bug bit. I started playing Overton Park 9 in November and haven’t been able to stop. Maybe I still don’t understand why the city spends so much on golf but I can say Memphis courses offer an astonishing array of experiences here. But I turned my mind off to all of that on the first tee and drank it in.
The low green rises, the gentle swales, the steeply sloped greens were manicured to a Mario World precision; squint and you could wonder if it wasn’t all rendered in perfect pixels. A mowed line cut along the fringe of the fairway made it look inset, premium. Long, silver grasses swayed and the bough of old hardwoods hushed in the morning breeze.
We swayed, to yacht rock. We always do when John’s in the group. The music is at a tastefully volume — just loud enough to be heard in the cart — and it’s the perfect soundtrack to the activity. It straddles some line between irony and entertainment, much like my take on golf itself. I’m no country club guy, but here I am, having fun.
That’s something I’ve learned on Memphis golf courses. Nobody’s going to run you down because you’re not an ace shooter. They’ll support the heck out of you. Our day at Audubon was punctuated with a murmured “g’shot,” or a loud “hell yeah,” or “nice” when were weren’t verbally coaxing balls to keep running or stop running.
That’s what golf is all about. That’s what friendship and support is all about. You don’t have to be great to have fun. And I learned that on those Memphis golf courses. I certainly hope (and do think) there’s a Memphis Parks experience out there for everyone in town, to hopefully have that thing I found on our golf courses.
For decades to come, Audubon will remain a place we can all laugh at our own mistakes and continue to believe our next shot will be great, to believe in the future.
