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Tom Coyne has made a career out of turning golf into a journey — both literal and personal.
In "A Course Called Ireland," he chronicled a four-month trek on foot around the Emerald Isle, stitching together its storied links one step at a time. He later pulled back the curtain on his own ambitions in "Paper Tiger," an honest account of his attempt to earn a PGA Tour card. Coyne has also ventured into fiction with "A Gentleman’s Game," a novel that found a second life on the big screen.
In his newest offering, "A Course Called Home: Adventures of an Accidental Golf Course Owner," Coyne offers a vivid, deeply personal account of stumbling into ownership of a struggling nine-hole relic in New York’s Catskills — and discovering something far more meaningful than a renovation project. What begins as an unlikely leap into golf course stewardship becomes a hands-on effort to revive a fading club, reconnect a fractured community, and redefine what a “golf destination” can be.
The following is an excerpt from Coyne's book, which is available here, in which he details putting together a club championship.
----------------------------------------------------------
I grappled with misgivings about entering a club championship at a course I was running. Sullivan County hadn’t held a championship in three years, and they’d stopped updating the championship board in 2014, where beneath the gold-lettered names a handwritten Post-it note was stuck to the board with a pushpin, listing five years’ worth of winners who got pencil instead of paint. If Sullivan County was going to return to its status as a real golf club, it needed real competitions. I was determined to hold a few tournaments this season, at minimum a championship and a member-guest. We were excelling at a relaxed vibe and friendly welcome — bring your dog, no tee sheet, go ahead and go around again — but our golf club needed some grind.
I hung signs for a club championship to be held in early July, and both local and visiting members added their name to the list. I waffled about whether to add mine. My reluctance wasn’t born of arrogance — we had some players up here with decades more course knowledge than I possessed, even if I knew none of their handicaps because they hadn’t signed up for our GHIN service. It had more to do with resurrecting a tournament and then entering it myself. If I did win, it would be like throwing myself a birthday party, and a championship should be played to celebrate and reward our paying members. I didn’t see a lot of upside to throwing my hat in the ring, other than a chance to cast off my decades-long championship curse.
Then I wrote a check for $20,000 that went from our personal savings into the Sullivan County business account, and I decided I was the paying-est member of all.
Don’t let the account statements fool you — much of our July take wasn’t from tee times and hat sales, but from a bulwark deposit against our spend outpacing our flattening revenue. We’d already made more money than the course had in its previous two years combined, but we’d reached a time in the season when new memberships were going to stall, and we’d hired two part-time helpers for our greens crew — Charlie home for the summer from Virginia Tech, and Mike a high school science teacher on vacation. I’d also continued to make small purchases — a chainsaw for Shaun, a popcorn machine for the shop — and I’d rented a movie screen for an outdoor showing of Happy Gilmore that I hoped would lure more locals and families to the course.
I didn’t anticipate a popcorn machine from Amazon to occupy most of our collective time over the ensuing weeks, but its arrival was met with work-halting consternation. Who would assemble it? Operate it? Be responsible for acquiring the necessary corn-popping provisions? I’d thrown a curveball at our daily routine of greens-fee-in, golfer-out, and the box sat in the shop for a week, an unwelcome interloper, until someone finally summoned the courage to open it.
Hours of study had made Gary a master of the point-of-sale system, and John was a natural greeter with an eye for business and bottom-line, but anything that involved a screwdriver was left to Jimmy, the retired mechanic, so we waited for him to warm up to our addition, which he eventually decided needed a thorough bath.
“I don’t trust these thingamajigs from China,” he said when I found him soaking its every piece in the industrial sink in the kitchen, the one with knobs that turned on in either direction but only stopped at one precise position.
After a complete disinfecting, Jimmy assembled a bright red box that sat on our counter, ready to spill bags of burnt corn for movie night. It took another week of trial-and-error to produce anything but smoking black kernels, which required the expertise of our greens crew to remedy. I watched as four adult men stood around a small machine forged of cheap aluminum and plastic, crossing our fingers that we had finally achieved the proper ratio of corn to oil to temperature, and that our calculations for an ideal kernel agitator speed would prove accurate.
“This is like watching four monkeys fudge a football,” Jimmy noted, and we agreed.
As golden nuggets of goodness leapt from the basket down into the hold, we cheered and clasped hands and hugged. Sullivan County, it seemed, was ready for its miracles.
Club championship weekend wasn’t ten minutes old when I realized why they hadn’t held one in years. We were set for a field of eighteen entrants, a mix of resident and nonresident members, and I’d carefully arranged threesomes and one foursome the previous evening, making out official scorecards and writing names in mediocre script on a real-deal Titleist scoresheet that lent earnestness to our competition. Three of those names didn’t show up, and one of them was already complaining about being paired with Frank.
“I’m not playing with him. You trying to kill me, putting me with him? No way, not that cornholio,” Griff said within clear earshot of Frank, who shook his head and quietly walked over to our fuzzy putting green, the size of a kiddie pool and seeing an unusual amount of action with fifteen hopefuls warming up.
I knew nothing of our Liberty members’ grudges, nor did I know their playing ability, so I’d arranged the groups by a careful generational mix — some old paired with some young, unsure which was more likely to know the rules of golf but hopeful one might. I’d briefed everyone on the practices of tournament golf — keep your competitor’s scorecard, putt everything out, and play the ball down, the last of which was met with protesting groans.
“What if I’m in the tire rut on three? What if my ball’s on a dirt patch?”
I explained that unplayable penalty drops were always an option and got busy making up peaceful pairings. Since no-shows had me reshuffling groups anyway, I put Griff in my ********* and asked Frank to tee off in the first group. He kindly obliged.
Not only had Griff shown up angry about his draw, but he’d parked his truck directly beside the please don’t park on the grass sign again, and when it was time for our group to tee off, I decided to unburden my resentment rather than let it stew for eighteen holes.
As he approached the tee with his driver, I said, “Griff, do you have to park your truck on the grass? There are plenty of spots in the parking lot,” and I could hear my plan backfiring before the words left my mouth.
“Oh, is this how we’re going to start?” he said.
He was a large man in his fifties with heavy hands and wide shoulders, an hour-clocking build that seemed to justify the oversized tires on his mud-splattered four-by-four. He was a longtime member who no doubt had his own ideas about everything we were doing, and he shared them generously.
“If I were you, I’d worry more about there being no ball washers and benches on the course. Where are the trash cans?” he said. “We’ve got one tee marker. Look at this, it’s embarrassing. We can’t afford two tee markers? It’s ridiculous.”
I wasn’t interested in explaining our tee marker system or trends in on-course accoutrements. I could recognize the people who walked the world looking for a fight, and long ago I’d decided to refrain from enabling them. I decided that I’d just had the longest conversation I would ever have with Griff, and I handed him my scorecard and wished him good luck.
Pretending that I wasn’t bubbling with rage wasn’t going to work; I tripled the first hole after flubbing two chips and was quickly three down to two guys who could play. Rather than fake that I wasn’t bothered, I played angry instead of sad. And angry golf, it turned out, got the job done.
We shared three more pars before Griff dumped a ball in the creek on five, then I eagled the par-four sixth with a drive that pulled up two paces short of the cup. I was six shots up after day one, and twelve shots clear when we finished the following day. I had to present myself with the winning trophy — a nice Sullivan County plaque by Squid Designs—that I put back in the shop and sold two weeks later. I’d been waiting for that evidence of a win for decades, but course management had conquered ego, placing our bottom line ahead of pride.
After day one, I had sorted our contestants into three flights. They had produced a diverse collection of numbers — from tallies in the 70s to the 100s — but arranging them into mathematically accessible groups gave everyone something to play for on Sunday. The flight winners were awarded newly arrived Sullivan County Yeti bottles, the Claret Tumblers, and each posed for a proud photograph for the website — even Griff, who collected a red jug for the low senior golfer when his final score bested Dan’s by five. When I announced his name and he stood up to collect his temperature-maintaining trophy, he nearly smiled and said thank you. He left soon after, but first pulled me aside and said that he enjoyed playing with me this weekend, and that he thought that we were doing a good job. And as if to prove he meant it, his tires never touched the grass again.
An approving nod from a demanding member could have been the highlight of Club Championship Weekend, but it wasn’t. Nor was me winning a piece of wood that Allyson would have quickly placed atop a pile of miscellany in my office. Rather, it was the small joys of hosting real golf on our golf course. We got to toil on holes we rarely took too seriously. We got to see our last-place finisher come off the course with a wide grin, delighted to have traveled up from New Jersey to play in his life’s first real tournament. We got to watch local members and golfers from afar crack open beers together and shoot the crap over paper plates of John’s sausages, the grill fired up for a special day, even if John had to cook with a plastic fork because we couldn’t find a spatula.
A twenty-something from Brooklyn commiserated with a retired steamfitter about the water on five, and Dan Yaun sipped an IPA and talked about how much fun the weekend had been. “I really missed this,” he said. “The competition. I’m glad we have it back.” I was worried that our modest gathering of wide-ranging talents vying for water bottles wouldn’t feel like a sincere golf event, but approval from Dan suggested that we’d pulled something off.
I sat down beside a doctor who had driven up from Pennsylvania on a motorcycle with his clubs strapped across the back, and I listened to him talk about how well Henry swung the club. Henry’s name was the first on the sign-up sheet; he came dressed in his best Sullivan County gear and looked both anxious and excited to find his name inked on an official scoresheet that morning. He’d shot two rounds in the 90s but won his flight, and when he took his life’s first golf trophy into his hands and looked at it, for a moment there seemed to be little difference between a Claret Jug and his Claret Tumbler.
I had told Shaun that he had to stick around and show his face at the prize presentations, which I knew was an annoyance after arriving at 5 a.m. on a Sunday to prep the course. But this was the only time we were going to have a collection of members on hand for an official outing, and you didn’t host a club championship without giving the superintendent his due. After the prizes had been awarded, I asked everyone to thank Shaun, who was sitting on the bench over there and who had not only provided a well-conditioned golf course for our championship but was the only reason any of us were here right now. The crowd put down their beers and gave him a standing ovation, plus a few hoots and hollers. Shaun shook his head, then nodded a humble thank you.
I didn’t stay late most afternoons, especially on Sundays when the supermarket and takeout spots closed early, but I filled up on sausages and hung around the Adirondack chairs until the last golfer left. Shaun’s wife Marisol showed up around five to pick him up. They shared one car, and she’d been out with their daughter Adah all day, who was five years old and headed to kindergarten in the fall. I waved hello to Marisol in the driver’s seat. She was soft-spoken around the course, but sometimes we’d talk about her job doing remote IT for a bank, and she’d get excited explaining the problems she’d solved that week. You could tell by the way she looked after Shaun and the way he doted on her that they were partners in the most genuine way. The hours he worked at the course were the only ones they spent apart, and while I spoke to Allyson on the phone every night, there was a sturdiness to their life that a roamer couldn’t help but envy.
I watched as Adah ran out from the other side of their Jeep and bolted up to the patio to hug her dad. She had black hair to her shoulders and shared her mother’s brown eyes and tan complexion. Her sneakers looked like she’d had a good day on the trails with Mom, but she wasn’t finished with her fun yet. She wanted to go for a ride down to the trout stream, so Shaun and his family squeezed into a cart and off they went, down the first fairway until they were over the hill and out of sight. There were no golfers out there to interrupt them, and she’d have free run of the rocks and the water, a girl with a backyard the size of a golf course.
The book, "A Course Called Home: Adventures of an Accidental Golf Course Owner," by author Tom Coyne, is available here.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: How Tom Coyne saved a failing New York golf club: new book
Continue reading...
In "A Course Called Ireland," he chronicled a four-month trek on foot around the Emerald Isle, stitching together its storied links one step at a time. He later pulled back the curtain on his own ambitions in "Paper Tiger," an honest account of his attempt to earn a PGA Tour card. Coyne has also ventured into fiction with "A Gentleman’s Game," a novel that found a second life on the big screen.
In his newest offering, "A Course Called Home: Adventures of an Accidental Golf Course Owner," Coyne offers a vivid, deeply personal account of stumbling into ownership of a struggling nine-hole relic in New York’s Catskills — and discovering something far more meaningful than a renovation project. What begins as an unlikely leap into golf course stewardship becomes a hands-on effort to revive a fading club, reconnect a fractured community, and redefine what a “golf destination” can be.
The following is an excerpt from Coyne's book, which is available here, in which he details putting together a club championship.
----------------------------------------------------------
I grappled with misgivings about entering a club championship at a course I was running. Sullivan County hadn’t held a championship in three years, and they’d stopped updating the championship board in 2014, where beneath the gold-lettered names a handwritten Post-it note was stuck to the board with a pushpin, listing five years’ worth of winners who got pencil instead of paint. If Sullivan County was going to return to its status as a real golf club, it needed real competitions. I was determined to hold a few tournaments this season, at minimum a championship and a member-guest. We were excelling at a relaxed vibe and friendly welcome — bring your dog, no tee sheet, go ahead and go around again — but our golf club needed some grind.
I hung signs for a club championship to be held in early July, and both local and visiting members added their name to the list. I waffled about whether to add mine. My reluctance wasn’t born of arrogance — we had some players up here with decades more course knowledge than I possessed, even if I knew none of their handicaps because they hadn’t signed up for our GHIN service. It had more to do with resurrecting a tournament and then entering it myself. If I did win, it would be like throwing myself a birthday party, and a championship should be played to celebrate and reward our paying members. I didn’t see a lot of upside to throwing my hat in the ring, other than a chance to cast off my decades-long championship curse.
Then I wrote a check for $20,000 that went from our personal savings into the Sullivan County business account, and I decided I was the paying-est member of all.
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Don’t let the account statements fool you — much of our July take wasn’t from tee times and hat sales, but from a bulwark deposit against our spend outpacing our flattening revenue. We’d already made more money than the course had in its previous two years combined, but we’d reached a time in the season when new memberships were going to stall, and we’d hired two part-time helpers for our greens crew — Charlie home for the summer from Virginia Tech, and Mike a high school science teacher on vacation. I’d also continued to make small purchases — a chainsaw for Shaun, a popcorn machine for the shop — and I’d rented a movie screen for an outdoor showing of Happy Gilmore that I hoped would lure more locals and families to the course.
I didn’t anticipate a popcorn machine from Amazon to occupy most of our collective time over the ensuing weeks, but its arrival was met with work-halting consternation. Who would assemble it? Operate it? Be responsible for acquiring the necessary corn-popping provisions? I’d thrown a curveball at our daily routine of greens-fee-in, golfer-out, and the box sat in the shop for a week, an unwelcome interloper, until someone finally summoned the courage to open it.
Hours of study had made Gary a master of the point-of-sale system, and John was a natural greeter with an eye for business and bottom-line, but anything that involved a screwdriver was left to Jimmy, the retired mechanic, so we waited for him to warm up to our addition, which he eventually decided needed a thorough bath.
“I don’t trust these thingamajigs from China,” he said when I found him soaking its every piece in the industrial sink in the kitchen, the one with knobs that turned on in either direction but only stopped at one precise position.
After a complete disinfecting, Jimmy assembled a bright red box that sat on our counter, ready to spill bags of burnt corn for movie night. It took another week of trial-and-error to produce anything but smoking black kernels, which required the expertise of our greens crew to remedy. I watched as four adult men stood around a small machine forged of cheap aluminum and plastic, crossing our fingers that we had finally achieved the proper ratio of corn to oil to temperature, and that our calculations for an ideal kernel agitator speed would prove accurate.
“This is like watching four monkeys fudge a football,” Jimmy noted, and we agreed.
As golden nuggets of goodness leapt from the basket down into the hold, we cheered and clasped hands and hugged. Sullivan County, it seemed, was ready for its miracles.
Club championship weekend wasn’t ten minutes old when I realized why they hadn’t held one in years. We were set for a field of eighteen entrants, a mix of resident and nonresident members, and I’d carefully arranged threesomes and one foursome the previous evening, making out official scorecards and writing names in mediocre script on a real-deal Titleist scoresheet that lent earnestness to our competition. Three of those names didn’t show up, and one of them was already complaining about being paired with Frank.
“I’m not playing with him. You trying to kill me, putting me with him? No way, not that cornholio,” Griff said within clear earshot of Frank, who shook his head and quietly walked over to our fuzzy putting green, the size of a kiddie pool and seeing an unusual amount of action with fifteen hopefuls warming up.
You must be registered for see images attach
I knew nothing of our Liberty members’ grudges, nor did I know their playing ability, so I’d arranged the groups by a careful generational mix — some old paired with some young, unsure which was more likely to know the rules of golf but hopeful one might. I’d briefed everyone on the practices of tournament golf — keep your competitor’s scorecard, putt everything out, and play the ball down, the last of which was met with protesting groans.
“What if I’m in the tire rut on three? What if my ball’s on a dirt patch?”
I explained that unplayable penalty drops were always an option and got busy making up peaceful pairings. Since no-shows had me reshuffling groups anyway, I put Griff in my ********* and asked Frank to tee off in the first group. He kindly obliged.
Not only had Griff shown up angry about his draw, but he’d parked his truck directly beside the please don’t park on the grass sign again, and when it was time for our group to tee off, I decided to unburden my resentment rather than let it stew for eighteen holes.
As he approached the tee with his driver, I said, “Griff, do you have to park your truck on the grass? There are plenty of spots in the parking lot,” and I could hear my plan backfiring before the words left my mouth.
“Oh, is this how we’re going to start?” he said.
He was a large man in his fifties with heavy hands and wide shoulders, an hour-clocking build that seemed to justify the oversized tires on his mud-splattered four-by-four. He was a longtime member who no doubt had his own ideas about everything we were doing, and he shared them generously.
“If I were you, I’d worry more about there being no ball washers and benches on the course. Where are the trash cans?” he said. “We’ve got one tee marker. Look at this, it’s embarrassing. We can’t afford two tee markers? It’s ridiculous.”
I wasn’t interested in explaining our tee marker system or trends in on-course accoutrements. I could recognize the people who walked the world looking for a fight, and long ago I’d decided to refrain from enabling them. I decided that I’d just had the longest conversation I would ever have with Griff, and I handed him my scorecard and wished him good luck.
Pretending that I wasn’t bubbling with rage wasn’t going to work; I tripled the first hole after flubbing two chips and was quickly three down to two guys who could play. Rather than fake that I wasn’t bothered, I played angry instead of sad. And angry golf, it turned out, got the job done.
We shared three more pars before Griff dumped a ball in the creek on five, then I eagled the par-four sixth with a drive that pulled up two paces short of the cup. I was six shots up after day one, and twelve shots clear when we finished the following day. I had to present myself with the winning trophy — a nice Sullivan County plaque by Squid Designs—that I put back in the shop and sold two weeks later. I’d been waiting for that evidence of a win for decades, but course management had conquered ego, placing our bottom line ahead of pride.
After day one, I had sorted our contestants into three flights. They had produced a diverse collection of numbers — from tallies in the 70s to the 100s — but arranging them into mathematically accessible groups gave everyone something to play for on Sunday. The flight winners were awarded newly arrived Sullivan County Yeti bottles, the Claret Tumblers, and each posed for a proud photograph for the website — even Griff, who collected a red jug for the low senior golfer when his final score bested Dan’s by five. When I announced his name and he stood up to collect his temperature-maintaining trophy, he nearly smiled and said thank you. He left soon after, but first pulled me aside and said that he enjoyed playing with me this weekend, and that he thought that we were doing a good job. And as if to prove he meant it, his tires never touched the grass again.
An approving nod from a demanding member could have been the highlight of Club Championship Weekend, but it wasn’t. Nor was me winning a piece of wood that Allyson would have quickly placed atop a pile of miscellany in my office. Rather, it was the small joys of hosting real golf on our golf course. We got to toil on holes we rarely took too seriously. We got to see our last-place finisher come off the course with a wide grin, delighted to have traveled up from New Jersey to play in his life’s first real tournament. We got to watch local members and golfers from afar crack open beers together and shoot the crap over paper plates of John’s sausages, the grill fired up for a special day, even if John had to cook with a plastic fork because we couldn’t find a spatula.
A twenty-something from Brooklyn commiserated with a retired steamfitter about the water on five, and Dan Yaun sipped an IPA and talked about how much fun the weekend had been. “I really missed this,” he said. “The competition. I’m glad we have it back.” I was worried that our modest gathering of wide-ranging talents vying for water bottles wouldn’t feel like a sincere golf event, but approval from Dan suggested that we’d pulled something off.
I sat down beside a doctor who had driven up from Pennsylvania on a motorcycle with his clubs strapped across the back, and I listened to him talk about how well Henry swung the club. Henry’s name was the first on the sign-up sheet; he came dressed in his best Sullivan County gear and looked both anxious and excited to find his name inked on an official scoresheet that morning. He’d shot two rounds in the 90s but won his flight, and when he took his life’s first golf trophy into his hands and looked at it, for a moment there seemed to be little difference between a Claret Jug and his Claret Tumbler.
I had told Shaun that he had to stick around and show his face at the prize presentations, which I knew was an annoyance after arriving at 5 a.m. on a Sunday to prep the course. But this was the only time we were going to have a collection of members on hand for an official outing, and you didn’t host a club championship without giving the superintendent his due. After the prizes had been awarded, I asked everyone to thank Shaun, who was sitting on the bench over there and who had not only provided a well-conditioned golf course for our championship but was the only reason any of us were here right now. The crowd put down their beers and gave him a standing ovation, plus a few hoots and hollers. Shaun shook his head, then nodded a humble thank you.
I didn’t stay late most afternoons, especially on Sundays when the supermarket and takeout spots closed early, but I filled up on sausages and hung around the Adirondack chairs until the last golfer left. Shaun’s wife Marisol showed up around five to pick him up. They shared one car, and she’d been out with their daughter Adah all day, who was five years old and headed to kindergarten in the fall. I waved hello to Marisol in the driver’s seat. She was soft-spoken around the course, but sometimes we’d talk about her job doing remote IT for a bank, and she’d get excited explaining the problems she’d solved that week. You could tell by the way she looked after Shaun and the way he doted on her that they were partners in the most genuine way. The hours he worked at the course were the only ones they spent apart, and while I spoke to Allyson on the phone every night, there was a sturdiness to their life that a roamer couldn’t help but envy.
I watched as Adah ran out from the other side of their Jeep and bolted up to the patio to hug her dad. She had black hair to her shoulders and shared her mother’s brown eyes and tan complexion. Her sneakers looked like she’d had a good day on the trails with Mom, but she wasn’t finished with her fun yet. She wanted to go for a ride down to the trout stream, so Shaun and his family squeezed into a cart and off they went, down the first fairway until they were over the hill and out of sight. There were no golfers out there to interrupt them, and she’d have free run of the rocks and the water, a girl with a backyard the size of a golf course.
The book, "A Course Called Home: Adventures of an Accidental Golf Course Owner," by author Tom Coyne, is available here.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: How Tom Coyne saved a failing New York golf club: new book
Continue reading...
