From a rare round at Augusta National, home of the Masters, to a mini-golf tour of Myrtle Beach — the good, the bad and the laughable.
by Tommy Tomlinson
illustration by Gary Palmer

This time of year provides one of the great pleasures in life: the golf nap.

I’m not much of a fan of watching golf on TV. I’m a huge fan of falling asleep in the middle of the final round of the Zero Turn Radius Lawn Mower Open or whatever the PGA Tour happens to be running on a given weekend. 

The long stretches of quiet… the reverent tones of the announcers… the polite applause from the crowd… they’re better than melatonin washed down with warm milk. When I go down for a golf nap, sometimes I dream of my real-life golf adventures. Not that I was a good golfer. Never broke 100 in my life. But I do have a few stories. 

I’m just going to come right out and say this, even though it will sting every real golf lover like a chest-hair wax: I played Augusta National, home of the Masters. 

If you are not a golf fan, this is sort of like saying I stowed away in an Apollo capsule and walked around on the moon. Mortals are not supposed to do such things. You basically don’t get to play Augusta National unless you are: 1. a pro golfer; 2. a billionaire; or 3. if you know a 1 or a 2.

Except… every year the club has a media day — or used to — where the shlubs who cover the tournament get to play. I’m told it’s a lot tougher to get an invitation now. But in the mid-80s, if you worked for the Augusta paper — which I did — you got in. 

Here are the lights, high and low:

• I played with a set of mismatched clubs and wore a pair of Converse high-tops.

• Our playing partners accidentally put their cart into a power slide on a wet patch of grass on No. 10. If the course superintendent had spotted them, we might still be serving time.

• I carded a tidy 13 on No. 12, the short par-3 famously known as one of the thorniest holes in golf. You know one way to make it thorny? Knock four balls into Rae’s Creek. 

• My final score was 118, a tidy 46-over. 

• However! I parred No. 16, the par-3 where Tiger Woods holed his famous chip in 2005. Almost birdied it myself. (I told you there was a highlight.)

Believe it or not, that was not my most stressful day of golf. That occurred a few years later, in 1992, when I followed through on a pitch I made to my editors at the Charlotte Observer: What if I played all the miniature golf courses in Myrtle Beach in one day?

It soon became clear that, barring teleportation, there was no way to play all the courses in the Myrtle Beach area in a day — there were more than 60 back then. So I restricted my playing area to within 10 miles of the old Myrtle Beach Pavilion. That still left 16 sites, some with more than one course. It took 14 hours, which included drive time between the courses, occasional pee breaks, and waiting for two preteen boys who were in front of me at one course, arguing after every single hole. Not that I still think about them or anything.

I played 369 holes in 851 strokes. On the last course I ended up playing with three French tourists. There was no possible way I could explain to them what I was doing.

I had a few other notable moments in my golfing life. I snap-hooked a drive onto a cart path one time and the ball rolled halfway to the next county, a good 500 yards, like that scene in Tin Cup when Don Johnson wins Kevin Costner’s car. I had to shake hands on the first tee of a tournament with a guy who, for reasons too convoluted to go into here, I was pretty sure was going to punch me. (He didn’t.) I watched a friend get so mad he threw his 5-iron up in a tree, then got his 6-iron stuck up there trying to knock it out.

But my playing career ended on a midweek morning at the old Renaissance Park course in Charlotte, now called the Harry L. Jones Sr. Course. I was playing with some friends who were way better than me. Their drives found the fairway. My drives found the rough and the woods and the out-of-bounds markers. At one point I drove my cart across the fairway to track down a wayward shot, and a groundskeeper on a tractor roared over to yell at me for driving off the cart path. (Some courses let you stray from the path, others don’t; I hadn’t known the rules for this course.) He said he had a good mind to throw me out. I have enough stress in my life. I don’t need to get hollered at on a golf course by a guy in a John Deere hat.

A few holes later, I hit my best drive of the day — right down the middle. I don’t think I mentioned that one of the features of this particular course is the large boulders in some of the fairways. My shot hit one of those boulders as square as if I’d aimed it there. The ball rolled halfway back to me. My friends tried, and failed, not to laugh.

In that moment, I could hear the golf gods speaking.

Put down the clubs, they said. Go home and have a nap.  

This article originally appeared in the August 2026 issue of WALTER magazine.