Hi, This is Gene Thornton from Nutley, New Jersey, and I play
at Hendricksfield Golf Course. This is Golf Smarter number nine hundred and fifty.
Playing from the rough takes two stories. Both actually have contrasting parameters to them.
One is the story of my life starting in abject poverty, moving into
a world of successful businessman globe triding around the world filled with more privileged than
poverty. There's a parallel story that's told of me playing the top hundred golf
courses. I use that story also to show the contrast in the world of
golf, which for so long was like a standard bearer for segregation. So
you have this black guy who grew up in poverty that's going to all of
the most exclusive golf courses in the country, places where people who look like
me were prohibited from going. The compelling journey to play America's top one hundred
courses in one year with author Jimmy James. This is Golf Smarter, sharing
stories, tips and insights from great golf minds to help you lower your score
and raise your golf IQ. Here's your host, Fred Green. Welcome to
the Golf Smarter podcast. Jimmy. Hello, Fred, happy to be here.
I'm great. How are you today? Doing well? How are you?
I'm doing well too. I'm so excited to talk to you because your
book it comes to me and last week we talked to somebody about, you
know, creating your own bucket list, and then this week I have this
book where you exceeded bucket lists goals. Right. I mean the quote alone
from Rick Riley on your book is so perfect. He says, I'm so
damn jealous of Jimmy James. I only pulled off my dream golf adventure,
but he wrote a book so good. I haven't spoken my laptop in a
week. I love that because he's prolific at the very least he is.
He writes a lot of really good books, has a great sense of humor.
I even quote him in my book and Playing from the Rough when I'm
playing at Augusta on the twelfth hole and he talks about all of the green
jackets that have been lost on the twelfth hole. More green jackets have been
lost on the twelfth hole than at the Augusta dry cleaners. But he has
a way of really getting to the heart of the matter. Yeah, he
really does, but you did too. This book goes in so many directions,
as far as you writing a memoir about your life, but also a
memoir about your golf adventure. Give me a summary, Give that person who's
listening, give them a summary of your book, and then we'll go from
that, all right. Well, Playing from the Rough takes two stories that
both actually have contrasting parameters to them. One is the story of my life
starting in abject poverty and moving into a world of much much different successful businessman
globe triding around the world, more born into a life of poverty, entered
into a world of filled with more privileged than poverty. There's a parallel story
that's told of me playing the top hundred golf courses, and I use that
story also to show the contrast in the world of golf, which for so
long was like a and a bearer for segregation. So you have this black
guy who grew up in poverty that's going to all of the most exclusive golf
courses in the country, places where people who looked like me at one time
were prohibited from going and so a contract were prohibited from from being from playing,
but not from being an employee, not from working here. But so
it's the it's it's really two stories braided together with common themes of progress made
but in need for even more progress to be made exactly exactly, and the
stories are both compelling just as standalone stories. They're both compelling. And as
you mentioned, you played Augusta That, so your goal was to play This
was post retirement from a various successful business career, and we'll get into the
details of that later. But you set a goal for yourself to play the
top one hundred courses in the United States in one year, not just play
them, but to do it in one year, which is quite a bodacious
goal to set for yourself, and you do it by starting at Augusta National,
probably the hardest of all the courses to get onto. What is so
that in itself sounds a little insane, probably probably because it was insane,
making it even more insane, is that my goal was to get on the
all of these courses without ever asking, by just talking about what I was
doing and seeing through kindness and generosity and interest and if I'm able to stir
with it and others that it is a desire to help me achieve a goal
that I've set for myself, and so that makes it even more ridiculous that
I thought I could do something like that. But for the most part,
seventy five percent of the people who hosted me or helped me during the journey
I did not know when I started the journey. Wow, wow, So
how did you get to the first one? You weren't invited as far as
Augusta's let's establish how you got onto Augusta. Then started the journey of having
people invite you. Yeah, so when I actually when I played Augusta,
and I'll tell the story of how I got on too, Augusta. Augusta
was a present, a gift for my wife. Both of us have careers,
dynamic careers, and we traveled a lot in those careers and we moved
a lot, sometimes driven by my career, sometimes driven by her career.
She was a professor and then senior associate dean at the Darton School at the
University of Virginia, and I was with ex On Mobile. We were headquartered
in Fairfax, Virginia at the time, and then the opportunity to become dean
at the Groizwetta School at Business School Embra University came along for her and to
show appreciation her appreciation for my support in her making that move into that job.
She was determined to get me on to Augusta National. So at a
board meeting with her advisory board, she asked if any of her advisory board
members knew anyone from Augusta that would be willing to invite her husband to come
and play at Augusta National. And Lynn Rodgers, an Atlanta businessman, said
he was friends with Danny Yates and the Yates family in Georgia. They're like
royalty such a Charlie as so Danny is Charlie's nephew, so so Charlie's Dan,
Danny's dad Pete. Dan Yates is a cousin. A is a brother
too to Charlie Yates and uh to Charlie Yates Senior. So Charlie hs Junior
and Danny are cousins Solis. Charlie Yates Junior is a friend of a friend
of mine who I'm hoping next year when I come to Atlanta, will I'll
be playing golf with Charlie Yates. So I've played golf with Charlie HS Junior
ourselves, and Charlie and I similar circles. Charlie and I served together on
a committee for an event at East Lake, and we also helped support a
program that Emery University has for exchange program where students from Emory and Georgia Tech
go over to Saint Andrew's for one year program. And so Charlie and I
know each other through that also. So getting back to what we were talking
about earlier, So that's how I ended up on Augusta. It had nothing
to do with playing the top hundred courses in the world. It was my
wife being determined to give me the opportunity to experience what it would be like
to play golf at Augusta National. I totally understand a determined wife who can
break down a lot of walls. Yes, it's a similar situation. Oh,
that's a phenomenal story. So let's just review your round at Augusta.
How did that go well? And walking on starting with walking on the grounds,
not just your golf itself, but what did you go through when you
arrived? You know, it's interesting. So we flew in from Atlanta and
picked up at the Executive Airport and a van driven to Augusta and you drive
down Washington Avenue Washington Street, and it does not prepare you for Augusta Nashville.
It's this four long stretch of land with Neon signs and strip malls.
And then you make a turn and the gates open up, and you're riding
down Magnolia Lane with the over arching branches of the magnolia trees, looking straight
ahead at this antebellum club house with a wrap around port, and then it
hits you. It hit me. I am your breath away, I am
at Augusta National. It's it's surreal, and so you you you have to
catch yourself. So we played. We played the part three first, and
then we had lunch, and then we went to the first tea and I
really don't even remember. My head was so far above the clouds. I
don't even remember how we got from the clubhouse to the first tea. They're
just next to each other, but I really don't remember that walk. And
then I'm really nervous. I don't want to embarrass my host. I don't
want to embarrass myself. And this is a part of where I think back
also to just how did this kid who used to run barefoot down a dirt
road playing baseball with a stick and a doll's head and a bunch of stinky
little kids just like me. Get to the first tea of Augusta National Golf
Club, and so that's all going through my mind and I'm there. I'm
just trying to make a swing, and fortunately my ball ends up in the
fairway, left side of the fairway, a little short of Danny's drive.
He teed off first, and then I followed. Then the other two guys
teed off, and I really couldn't fill my feet when I'm walking down that
fairway thinking about the history and all those Masters champions that had taken that same
walk, the legends, and I'm here, I'm walking down the fairway and
so I'm really trying to breathe. And so I thought, well, let
me talk because I do that easily. That's my comfort zone. And so
I talked to my caddy and get the club and I'm like one hundred and
seventy yards out from the pin. In a good shot lands on the green
and true to Augusta, it rolls off the green, off the right front
of the green. But I'm still thinking, I'm at Augusta. I'm going
to par that first hole. I'm going to make par on my first hole
on the championship course at Augusta National. A chip and three putts later,
I'm walking off the green with the double bogie. So I had more putts
than swings at Augusta Nashville. The hallows and mounds, the undulation of the
greens, which television doesn't do justice to. It's just it's hard to They're
hard to navigate. So eventually I collect myself and on Flowering Crab Apple,
which is you know, as you know, all the holes that Augusta have
names, and so on that fourth hole, after starting with three double bogies,
I hit a high six iron over the bunker to a front pen position.
The ball plops onto the green and I'm feet away from a birdie.
Then I leave it short. But that's how that's my first part Augusta National.
And I calmed down from there and I got bogies and maybe another double
and it's just magical, and you're everything is perfect, and it's this idea
again. I'm coming from a world. I was born into this world that
lacked almost everything, and there I am standing in this world that lacks almost
nothing, where every blade of grassousness, every blade of grass, where every
blade of grass is in its place, where every need that a person probably
could have when they're there is met. And so it's quite the contrast from
from the world I was born into, in the world I found myself in
tracing across these manicured this manicured, neatly manicured law amazing. We're talking to
Jimmy James, whose new book is called Playing from the Rough, a personal
journey through America's one hundred great as golf courses, and we're going to talk
more about it right after this. Jimmy, the way you describe your first
impressions at Augusta as you can't remember how you got to the tee, you
were, you were floating, you were, it was so in your head.
Did you journal as soon as you got off the course or how did
how did you remember so many details of so many rounds of golf? Were
you journaling through that? And well, I'm not going to ask the second
question all to start with that, So I wrote a blog right after I
got home, So while it was still fresh in my mind, I wrote
a blog, and for the first five or so courses, I just remembered
everything, and then we took vacation, came back. We took vacation,
went to Ireland for a week family vacation. We came back and I started
again. And by the time I got to about the tenth course, the
details of every single shot in every single hole started to blend together. So
I started then taking notes during each round so that I could make sure I
never courses during when I wrote a blog about it. So I had notes
and details on every hole, every shot, what every hole, how I
saw every hole, to the to the engineer, to the engineer's minds detail,
and so that that served as a as some hard drive memory for me
and for years, so I could I could meet someone from a different from
a particular course and I could tell them each shot I took on their course.
But as more time has passed, then that that starts to fade.
Well, when you played that many rounds, I mean, had you ever
played one hundred rounds in one year before? I played a hundred rounds in
one year, and that year I played about one hundred and seventy five rounds.
So in addition to playing all oh so an addition to playing and on
some of the courses, some of the top one hundred courses I played more
than one round, but across that year, I played about one hundred and
seventy five rounds of golf. You like retirement, although it doesn't feel like
retirement when you're writing a book. No, that's right, No, you're
absolutely right. My wife published a memoir last June twenty twenty three, or
her memoir, and I had her on the show episode nine hundred to help
promote the book. And so living with somebody as they're writing a memoir takes
years. It is hard work. It takes a lot of mental fortitude and
memory, like jogging your memory, going back finding things, trying to remember
exactly and trying to be accurate as best you can. But here you're all
doing this in a year's time. But then you have your whole life to
talk about it. Yes, and so that's that's one of the One of
the things was while playing that would I would think back, certain things would
spark memories from my life, and I would make a note about that because
it was a part of my experience on that golf course, and I really
wanted to capture the experience of what it felt like to be on the golf
course, and I did a blog, and I wanted the reader of the
blog to feel that they were right there with me on every single swing,
and at the end of that blog they could feel that they had experienced that
course vicariously. And so I wanted to be very detailed so that they could
picture in their mind exactly what I was doing and where the setting, all
those things. So that helped a lot when I started writing the book,
because I could refer back to those blogs and be reminded, and it would
stir sort of the emotions of the moment, and that brings memories back.
So I want to go over like the sequence of events when your wife presented
you with this opportunity to go play as your retirement present, to go play
Augusta. At what point from there did you go, Oh, wait a
minute, I want to now try to get to one hundred courses, the
top one hundred courses in the United States. Where did that fit in?
So first she told me about the gift to Augusta. Then later she gave
me a book by this guy John Sabino. So I had decided I was
going to retire, and I was putting together a plan on what I was
going to do that first year of retirement because I didn't want to flunk retirement.
I'd seen several colleagues flunk retirement. They go back to work. When
you say flunk, do you mean they die or they're just bored out of
their mind, out of their minds and they go back to work. You
have this sense of relevance. You sit at the head of tables, you
manage large businesses and lots of people, and so you have this sense of
relevance, and then all of a sudden, you turn in your badge and
all that's gone. So if that's been your life for thirty five years,
forty years, it takes some adjusting to do. And so I anticipated that
from what I'd observed, and I said, I need a project. I
need a plan. I wanted to spend more time at home because I was
traveling, you know, two hundred, two hundred and fifty thousand miles a
year around the globe, and my kids were in high school. I wanted
to I missed so much of their lives in the years before, in those
really impressionable years of high school. I wanted to be there. I wanted
to be president. So and a lot of people will say, well,
but you went off and played these hundred golf courses. I was home a
whole lot more than I was home when I was working. I was away
eighty eighty two eighty three nights to play those hundred golf courses as opposed to
being as opposed to being away two hundred nights. So so I said,
I'll get I'll reconnect with the country. I used to drive across the country
all the time, meeting with people, stopping and talking with people, really
just engaging people and getting a fill for who we were as a country,
and I missed doing that. So I said, I'm going to travel.
My plan was to travel to all fifty states, take the kids with me
to some of the most intriguing places, and play two rounds of golf in
each state. One with this was the initial was the initial goal. Okay,
one with strangers and one with friends in each stayed so one private course,
one public course. But at Christmas, my wife gave me a book
by John Sabino, this golf writer who had traveled around the world and play
the top hundred courses in the world. So I was just looking at it
from a math standpoint, I'm going to play one hundred courses, why not
play the top hundred? And I bet no one's ever done that in a
year, So why don't I just play all of the top hundred courses in
the US and do it in one year. I had no idea what I
was talking about. I did not understand at the moment at the time how
insane that idea was. But that's always the best way to approach it.
An insane ideas being blind. I've done it multiple times, and I was
blind to it. So a couple of months later, Golf di just there
their Greatest their issue with their one hundred greatest Courses comes out. I look
at the list. I recognize less than half the courses on the list.
There were places I'd never heard of, like Mayacamma, the Valley Club of
the Valley Club of Montecito. Yes, just north of you, in Santa
Rosa it is. So here's my great Mayacamas. I have a great Mayacama
story. A friend of mine, a neighbor of mine, when they were
just about to complete my e comma, he went up there was he was
a real estate genius, and he told them I'll write you a check right
now to get a membership if on one condition, and they're like, great,
what's the one condition? He said that I can be the first t
I get the first round of golf when you open. And they're like,
uh, okay, sure, Why do you want to be the first one
off? He said, I want to hold the club record, even if
it's but for a moment. But he can say just for a moment.
I had that low round in my comma, and so he did take me
up there and play once when I was just starting to play golf, so
I had no appreciation of it whatsoever, but I do remember vaguely how gorgeous
it was. Yeah, that first toll part four uphill. Yeah, it's
it's it's it's, it's it's. Yeah, it's a that my Comma,
Valley Club of Montecito, Eagle Point, just Maidstone, Kenyata. The whole
list of courses i'd never heard of that most people haven't heard of. But
then were they mostly West Coast. Now they're spread across or spread across the
country, So the courses are spread across the country. There in thirty three
states. California has twelve, New York has thirteen, and so twenty five
percent of the private twenty five percent of the courses of the one hundred courses
are in those two states, and then sprinkled everywhere else and sprinkled in thirty
one other states in between. So that's how the idea came to me,
and I said, well, I said, this is what I'm going to
do. So this is what I'm going to I'm going to do, and
I to make it even more challenging. As I said, I said,
I'm going to do this just by meeting people, seeing if they're kind enough,
enthused enough, interested enough, willing enough to help a stranger achieve a
goal, a dream by just talking to people about what I'm doing. And
it was amazing. I would talk to people and I could see their mental
rolodexes going off, and people would do some of the most amazing things to
go out of their way to help. So you went from writing a blog
about these courses, at what point did you go, oh, hey,
I've got a book here, and then decide to incorporate your growing up memoir
part into the book. So I thought about it, the journey and the
contrast. When I finished, I said, you know, this seems like
an amazing story that needs to be told. I think that we see the
challenges, but not as often do we hear about the triumphs and overcoming those
challenges. And so I wanted to write a story that talked about that gave
a real, true perspective of the challenges we face, but how those challenges
could be overcome. And it just seemed like that journey of my life,
the arc of my life, and the arc of that journey across those golf
courses had enough parallels to show the contrast and to inspire anyone who dreams big,
whether it's in life or whether it's in golf, that no matter how
challenging things become, we can overcome it if we work together, and that
at our core we're kind, generous people and we connect, you know.
In writing the book, one of my goals was to write the stories.
There are lots of stories in my life, but how do I pick stories
that I think I can write well out in a way that's compelling and intriguing
and holds the interest of the reader, but also allows the reader to connect
to me, to find a piece of themselves in those stories and realize that
no matter how different we may be no matter how different our backgrounds may be,
how different our lives may be, we can relate to each other.
You know, there there's this, there's this piece of this you stop and
you think about it, for it, there's this piece of this. What's
interesting about some guy going around to the most privileged places in the world,
in the country, hanging out with very privileged people, playing a very privileged
game that in itself, to me isn't interesting or in intriguing nor relatable.
But when it's an everyday man like me. I have no special talents.
I'm not some gifted athlete. I can't sing, I can't dance, I
can't I mean, I'm just any guy you can meet on the street.
And when you look at it from that way, that tells you what is
different about America. That tells you that we really have something here that's worth
fighting for, that's really worth putting forth an effort to keep and to allow
to continue to progress. The aspirations are great, but the only way they
come about is that despite our differences, we find a way to connect to
our common humanity and work together to make it a more perfect union. And
so I write about my experience. It is with people all across the country.
You know, some of the stories as I'm playing golf on these amazing
places and hitting great shots and not so great shots at times playing golf,
playing golf, some of the experiences I had, Like one of the ones
I thought was really intriguing was in a contrast was I was driving from from
Evansville, Indiana, to Columbus, Ohio, and I'm in this huge suv.
It's a rental car Infinity QX eighty or something. The tires on this
thing are humongous, and I'm driving along. I'm talking to an old college
friend about how I'm traveling very differently from the days when I used to pack
everything I own in the back of my nineteen seventy eight Burgundy Chevy Monte Carlo.
The books, the stereo, the little black and white television, and
the clothes. That was it. That was all of my earthly possessions.
And now I'm driving around this huge monstrosity of a vehicle and the light,
the indicator light for low low tire pressure comes on and I pull over along
the side of the interstate and there's the tire. I could hear the air
coming out of the tire, and so there's no way on this It's a
drizzly, dark, drizzly night in the middle of nowhere, and there's no
way I'm going to get out with eighteen wheelers going by at seventy seventy five
miles an hour and change his flat. So I call the roadside service.
Takes about an hour, but this guy shows up in a tow truck and
he starts to back up toward my vehicle, starts to let the bed down
like he's gonna toe. I get out and I go over and talk to
him. I try to light in a moment with him, because he seems
pretty angry after I tell him that I don't need a toe, just a
flat changed, and that really seemed to tick him off. And so finally
I just say to the guy I'd ask him his name, told him my
name. His name is George. I say to George, So, George,
what gives? Why are you so upset about this situation? It was
like, I just drove an hour for ten effing dollars, and I'm like,
that blew me away that this guy was only going to make ten dollars
on this tire change. And so I asked him. How much would you
make if you were towing me? He said, twenty dollars. The difference
to him was huge. And here I am, and George is white.
I could see the tiredness in his eyes, the roughness of his hands when
I shook them. That this was a guy who spent his life working with
his hands and his back and weighed down by the burdens that came with all
of that, and all he's trying to do is make a living. And
here I am, traveling across the country, chasing this frivolous dream, spending
way more money than I'd care to talk about to do this, talking to
this guy for whom ten dollars makes the world of a difference. So I
assured George that my tip to him, I didn't know how much they were
going to pay ab or whatever, but my tip to him would make it
worth his while because to change, to change the tire, because what he
was doing for me was worth a whole lot more than ten bucks or even
twenty bucks. And so at the end, when I gave him the tip,
he smiled, and the anger went out of him just as quickly as
the air had gone out of that tire. And we shook and we took
we shook hands. And the way I thought about it is George went off
to his American and I went off to mine, And it's two different Americas
that contrast that collided along the side of that interstate that night. But it
was a reminder to me that we can never forget that it's the Georges of
the world that make this world work. Without George, I'd been stuck on
that freeway, stuck on that highway that night. So, but there's another
part of America where you had to have some anxiety of being an African American
and in the middle of the night with a big SUV on the side of
the road, you know, the stories that we hear had to be a
little create a little bit of anxiety. Actually, honestly, that night that
there was no anxiety on that I had anxiety. I had. The place
where I had anxiety is when I was driving through Kansas and I got pulled
over for speeding when I knew I wasn't speeding by a coffin, by a
coffin a pickup truck. But that that that that even turned out to be
just my anxiety because it was more at the end of the day, it
was really the small town h collecting money. It was a small town shakedown
as opposed to being stopped for driving while black. It was being stopped for
driving with out state tags. But that that's anxiety, and that's something that,
yeah, you you do feel and that comes. You know, a
lot of people try to say, well, you look at the numbers,
and I'm a numbers guy, so I know that about a thousand people a
year, a thousand people total per year killed by police officers. That's a
thousand obviously too many. About about twenty five or so of those are unarmed.
About a quarter of those are African Americans. And so when you look
at the numbers, it's disproportional, but not vastly disproportional. But that doesn't
tell the whole story. I've been pulled over in my life several times for
driving while black. And when that happens to you and you know they're just
messing with you, your lived experience has become more significant than the numbers.
And so those are the things. And I think we've made a tremendous amount
of progress from when I had a kid's college kids riding through my neighborhood through
the saw Mill quarters in Huntsville, Texas, when I was five, six
seven years old, yelling racial epithets, Uh, we've come a long way.
We've still got progress to make, but we've come a long way and
we've made I think we've made substantial progress, but still have a lot of
work to do. But I still have times. You know, I'm in
I'm in Philadelphia, and I was sitting out in front of a vet's office
next to uh it was it was a there was a bakery. There's a
bakery next to the vet's office. I'm sitting out while the vets taking care
of our dog, you know, doing the the exam, and and I'm
just sitting out there hanging out. This woman passed me, stops and says,
I'm so sorry. I don't have any change with me. I'm like,
excuse me. He says, I can't give you any money. I
said, ma'am, I didn't ask you for any money. Then she goes,
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but there's this assumption.
So I have that. But at the same time, most of the people,
the vast majority of people who helped me gain access to all these courses
were white, and to them I was a stranger. They invited me into
their club, their homes, and their lives. And so we have to
acknowledge that progress that's been made and then continue to work toward making more progress.
You and I are both engineering people, but with very different types of
engineers in our training. But I've always been fascinated by there was there was
a great I think. I don't know it's a bumper stick or a T
shirt, but it said optimisty the world the glass glasses have full pessimiscy.
The glass is half empty, and engineers are wondering why we need a glass
that's twice the size of art. But yeah, but you had a very
successful career working for Exxon Mobile for thirty five years, you said, and
you worked your way up to a prominent position there where you could retire at
a doable age and pursue an amazing and outrageous goal. I'd love to talk
to about more of the golf courses that, even without writing it down,
that would stick in your mind forever. Yeah. So there's this course that
very few people have heard of. It's in southern Illinois, across the border
from Terry Hate Indiana up US Highway one in Marshall, Indiana and Marshall,
Illinois, and it's called kenneyata c A n y A t d A.
It was. It's very private, owned by one guy. There's zero members,
there's no pro staff, there's just the groundskeeper and his crew. And
that day that I played it, I was the only guest for the course.
I had this entire course to myself. No, I mean it was
amazing for me. So when I was a boy, I lived in what
we called the country, the wide open prairies, and I ran barefoot through
the woods and went on all these exploratory trips and just commune with nature,
and I fell at home. And for so I played the front nine by
myself, and the golf course superintendent played with me on the back nine.
But it was just so peaceful, the symphony of the noises from nature.
It was me and those along these de covered fairways where my footprints were the
only footprints in the dew. And I this boy who grew up without a
bed, let alone a room of his own, had a golf course all
to himself. That was an amazing That's an amazing course. That's private course.
Then you've got Cyprus, Cyprus Point, the beauty, the variety of
holes where you can play each hole. Not only are the holes different,
but each hole can be played so many different ways. And then there's this
par three risk. Probably the best risk ward part three in the country is
the sixteenth iconic sixteenth hole, sixteenth hole where you hit you have a choice
of hitting over this cove to the green. It takes about one hundred and
eighty five yards to clear. The hole is longer, but to clear it's
two hundred and ten yards or so. But to clear over the cove,
you've got to hit it about one hundred and eighty five yards and you're going
due west, probably right into the weeds. Yes, it's coming off.
Yeah, so you're and a lot of people will bell out to the left
and chip up and hope that they want put and make par. But I'd
flown three thousand miles across the country and a tube at thirty five thousand feet,
and I said, I'm not going across the whole country to bel out
left on the golf course. I'm going for it, And for one hundred
and eighty two of those one hundred and eighty five yards to clear the cook
the cove and get on the other side of the cliff. My ball looks
splendent sailing through the blue sky, but those last three it never made it.
It plummeted it down toward Davy Jones's locker. But still what an awesome
experience. Then I belt out to the left, chipped up one, put
it for my double bogie, which would have been a part had I not
taken the resk in that your second ballpark. So that's one of my top
five courses that I played. Augusta National one of the top five because it's
such a magical, mystical place. You got Marion, that's in Philadelphia.
What's your Mount Rushmore? Of course, so if you had to pick four,
five, five, I got to go with five. We talked about
Cyprus point Uh. We talked about Augusta, Marion so rich in golf tradition
and so much respect by the membership for the traditions of the game and the
honor of the game. So and then of course that's just spectacular. With
the layout, the holes they say you experience, the first six holes are
like I think are drama, the middle six of comedy, the last six
of tragedy. I felt all of that on the first three holes. I
had comedy, tragedy and drama on the first three holes. But it's a
it's a special place. And then there's Pine Valley, where where there you
go on your shirt, on your shirt, I'm wearing this and it's a
gift from a friend who played there. I did not, but I knew
today I had to wear this shit. Yes, yes, So you have
Pine Valley where you know, in some courses you have what they call let
up holes where the course could be hard, but there's an easy hole here
there at Pine Valley. You don't even have let up shots. Every shot
you have to be on. The slightest of misses gets you in a lot
of trouble that it's hard to recover from the holes. Some of the holes
play extremely long, they play along ravines. They there's a lot of sand,
the rough scraggly. The greens are surrounded by bunkers and scraggly rough.
You've got to really always fly the ball onto the green. It's it's a
it's a challenge to anyone's game. There's the fifth hole is a long part
about two and thirty five and forty five yard par par three, and I
just refused, just on principle, to ever hit anything more than a three
wood off the tea. So it's like, I'm going to hit my three
wood. It's going to go as far as it's going to go, and
I'm gonna play it from there. I'm not going to hit a driver.
There's too much I got too much pride to hit a drive go on a
part three. But it's it's it is. So it's a great experience.
And then when you play the winds like it when you play at Bandoned Dunes
and you get the winds up there, that's a place where you're like,
yeah, I may need a drive run this hole, even though it's one
hundred and forty ards. Yeah, you can have that with the winds coming
off of off the ocean. And then the last one Fisher's Island. The
fifth is Fisher's Island, which is a seth Reiner design with template holes holes
that these holes were holes that cb McDonald discovered when he traveled through the British
Isles and saw holes that he thought both amateur golfers, novice golfers and experts
like. And he came back to the US and designed these courses with him.
In one of his brotegs is Seth Rayner, who also designs, And
so you have this charming island in Long Island Sound around the perimeter. These
holes formed the golf course, charming, beautiful and the template holes. So
those are my five Augusta National no certain order, but Augusta National, Pine
Valley, Marion, Fisher's Island in Cyprus Point. That's a lifetime worth a
golf in most cases just to play one of those. And I played those
five plus ninety five others all in that twelve month period. So it was
it was a mind boggling experience to see all these great courses in such a
short time. Jimmy, I am so honored to me too. After reading
your book book, I closed the book, and I've read numerous golf books
for the podcast and otherwise, but this is the first time I ever closed
the book and said, I want to play golf with this guy. I
want to go out because there's so many things that I felt parallel in my
life with yours, a similar age. But you know, hardships, No,
we can't compare, and I'll never try. But there were so many
parts in the book that I highlighted that i'd love to discuss. We won't
have that time today. The line like I was my mother's fourth live birth,
that just kind of like stopped me in my tracks. But I want
to talk about a court. One of the things he wrote. We just
finished the PGA Championship this past weekend that was played at Valhalla, which you
got to play. But the line you had in there that really kind of
jumped out of me was saying being black conferred a greater sense of powerlessness than
being poor, though poverty was a constant presence in our lives. You also
said relentless reminder of our status as second class citizens. There were still whites
only signs posted on doors and windows around downtown. Yeah, so that was
life in the Jim Crow era in Texas back in the early sixties. We
lived in I was born out. I was born sort of in the backwoods.
We moved to the small town Huntsville, and when I was like three
years old to two years old, three years old, and then we moved
to the Selma quarters. My mother met this guy who became I guess my
step father. But we lived in a shack. It was a ten roof
shack on a dirt road, no plumbing, no electricity, outhouse. And
on Friday nights when the music would die down and the people that would come
to my aunt Eessie Peril's next door for sort of a jute joint night,
when they all went home, this other ritual would start and it would be
the white college kids driving drunk down our dirt road, throwing beer bottles Peril
beer and Long Star beer bottles at us at our houses. We were inside
sleep of course, but awakened by them and yelling racial epithets. And that
was that sense of powerlessness at the time that I was a kid. And
I think that's something of the progress we have made from what life was like
during that time in the early sixties and where we are where we are now.
But sec we were clearly second class citizens, right right, you wrote
me, you wrote in the forward, said history has often been written as
if people like me were voiceless extras in a movie. We were never intended
to see. Right. So my birth certificate, my birth certificate has two
words that were on it that were considered important back in the early nineteen sixties,
and they were that I was illegitimate meaning I did not legally exist and
I was colored. So that is so dehumanizing, demeaning, and I had
to live with that. It gave me this sense of being less than and
so that that's something that I struggled with and had to overcome, and it's
it's challenges. But the thing that I would also say for it here is
I write about my life factually, not to compare the challenges. I make
that point too when I take talk about Frank McCourt's version of the Irish version
of the life that I had. I think everybody has challenges and to each
person their challenge is daunting. To them, their challenge is daunting, and
that our lives are determined at the intersection of adversity and aspirations. When our
biggest hopes and dreams for our lives are threatened by the biggest challenges we face,
what do we do? And for me, because I had a mother
who modeled it, you don't quit, you find a way. And so
even as I look at what we face as a country today, my answer
to all of that is not to quit, not to give up, but
to find a way to work through it, to find a way to get
beyond it to find a way to come together. You know you hear this
just talk and I read about this in the book also, that you're only
as strong a chain, You're only as strong as your weakest link. That
is exactly right for a chain, I can tell you from an engineering standpoint,
when you look at the granular structure of steel and you look at the
front body cubics and front center cubics and you have stress points, and yes,
that chain is only as strong as that weakest link. But a society
isn't a chain. And in a society, we have strengths and weaknesses,
and we can work together to overcome each other's strengths, and we can lift
each other up and be much stronger than we are individual as individual links,
because we are a society. And so in the midst of all of what
we're going through now, rather than looking for what divides us, we got
to find that common humanity. And I talk about that in the sense for
every person, as I mentioned earlier, every person who this book, I
hope in my stories they find a piece of themselves. They find something that
they can relate to, something that reminds them of their lives, and something
that causes them to do what I do from time to time, and that
is get a little nostalgic for the simplicity that life wants offered because at our
core, at our basic simple levels, what I saw at country clubs and
what I saw on the side of the road in Evansville, Indiana eating dinner
at a Golden Corral, where that we have the same hopes and dreams and
aspirations for the ones we love, and the same challenges and we're all trying
to get through it right. So, yes, we all have our own
challenges. Mine are definitely not similar to you. But I did lose both
of my parents when I was seven years old, and I've always lived my
life. I think this is kind of like why I love golf is that
your life isn't defined by what has happened to you. Your life is defined
on how you deal with exactly and how you meet those challenges. And you're
going to have them. You don't need to. It doesn't need to be
the first thing that enters the room in front of you. And remember a
cartoon once, maybe it was a Charlie Brown cartoon, but he was like,
why did you only shine the front of your shoes, and he says,
I only want no people. I want to have a good first impression
so that people don't think of me, you know, poorly. So I
just need to have my shoes clean in the front. And to me,
it's like I want to have the back of my shoes cleaned, right,
No, No, I want when I walk out people go yeah, okay,
yeah, he's met the challenges. And golf is like that. You
know, the first time I hit a golf ball purely and watched it sore
off into the sky, that feeling, that sense of accomplishment, it's just
it's amazing. And now I will tell you how I relate that back to
life. My ancestors were put in the bottom of a ship, scrunched together
like sardines, eating and defecating in the same space. But somehow they survived.
And not only did they survived, they laid They helped build a country,
and they laid a foundation for us. And they endured what they endured.
What we endures nothing compared to what they endured. But yet they found
a way to survive. We ought to be able together to find a way
to make this country a better country and stop taking it from stop taking it
for granted. You know, I played golf. One of the courses I
played golf at was Whispering Pines. Whispering Pines is less than twenty five miles
from the plantation where my ancestors were slaves. They could never have imagined that
one day one one of their descendants would be playing a leisure sport on that
land where they had toiled and been chattel slavery owned by someone. And so
I look at that. We've made a lot of progress in a couple of
hundred years, but we got a lot more progress to make a long way
ago, a lot more progress to make. But we're not going to make
that progress if we don't work together. If we don't come together and work
together and make it happen. It is not up to someone else to make
it happen. It's up to us working together to make it happen. It's
not just about what white's going to do, It's not just about what blacks
are going to do. We all have a responsibility. We got to do
it together. Yes, So, after losing my parents, I was raised
by my grandparents who had to escape the Ukraine, which at the time was
Russia, from the Progroms, where my grandmother who raised me lost all of
her family to the Cossacks and then had to sneak onto a boat from Europe
to the United States while she was pregnant, lost the baby, and they
center back when she got to the United States. So I'm not saying we
have the same story. But as I said to you before, I want
to play golf you because we have a lot of similarities that we can share
the pain and suffering of lives and the successes of life. So I will
say, I will say to you share that the elements of our story may
be different, but we have the same story. We have the human story.
I didn't want to be a soper. We have we have the human
story, the human experience. You know, a lot of people make the
mistake thinking that golf is supposed to be easy. Some people make that mistake.
Golf is not easy, golf is golf is hard. Golf is hard.
Life is not easy. Life is hard. And one of the things
I say in the book too is that people are resils, but life is
tenuous and to go through, to make it through, to overcome the challenges.
We can never take that for granted. It's not a given. And
we have struggled. Blacks have struggled in this country, but we're not the
only ones that have struggled humans throughout human history. We've all struggled, and
those struggles are different, and some of those struggles are brought about by evil
and some are just the natural conditions of life. But as you said earlier,
we're more defined not by the challenges we face, but by the things
we achieve despite those challenges, by the things we overcome. And everybody has
overcome something and we should respect that and appreciate that absolutely. I highly highly
recommend that everybody read this book. If you're a golf fan at all,
you got to read this book. If you're a phantom memoirs, you got
to read this book. It's it's so worth it and so powerful, and
it's such a joyous journey to follow. Congratulations on the book, Congratulations on
your success. The book again is called Playing from the Rough, a Personal
Journey through America's one hundred greatest golf courses DoD DoD Dot by Jimmy James.
Jimmy, we're gonna play golf together. Something. We're going to play golf
together. We'll play golf together, either in California or maybe in Atlanta with
doctor Bob Jones over at Bobby Jones Golf Course. I'm in, or we
could play. We could play. We could play out his at Atlanta Athletic
Club. He's got two courses out there, so we we will play golf
together again. Jimmy's book, Playing from the Rough, published by Simon and
Schuster, will be available for purchase on June eleventh, twenty twenty four.
I'm sure that you can pre order it right now from your favorite bookseller and
get it delivered as soon as it is released. Getting to complete the interview
and being able to deliver this conversation to you before the book's release was actually
quite a coup. I received a press release yesterday from the PR firm saying
that Jimmy will be available for interview starting June seventh, which is a couple
days from now. And I enjoyed this story so much that even after the
interview, I continued to read the book, which doesn't always happen, and
I'm enjoying it immensely. I mentioned the three day civil rights tour through Atlanta,
Georgia, Montgomery, Selma and Birmingham, Alabama, that we went on
this past February. I invite you to stay tuned after this episode because I
want to share with you an episode of Joanne's podcast, Joanne's my wife called
in this story about her reflections on our journey and discovery through the Deep South.
In the story. Podcast is a collection of short micro essays Joanne writes
reflecting on her life and life's adventures. She's got a great voice, is
an excellent writer, and this podcast is very entertaining and enlightening. Please subscribe
and get a new episode every other week. And I know if she's listening,
which rarely happens, but if she is listening, she's like, would
you stop ragging about me? No, my dear, never. But first,
let's talk about playing golf together in September and next spring on our civil
rights tour. As the bus left Atlanta headed for Montgomery, isn't that a
song title? Well, not long after we entered Alabama, passed a sign
that said Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, which I've always wanted to visit and
now that I realized how accessible it is from Atlanta. And then was contacted
by Tara Fox about partnering with TMI golf, about doing golf adventures with the
golf Smarter community, especially our ambassadors. I knew this could be another bucket
list item checked off. But first, what don't you and your partner joined
me and Joanne for an outrageous adventure to Portugal this September fifth through the thirteenth,
twenty twenty four. We've scheduled three rounds of golf, but if you'd
prefer, you can play golf every day. We're on the coast of Villemorra.
There's lots of flexibility in our schedule. Non golfers will experience optional spa
visits, sightseeing and time to relax on the beach. And you'll have time
to yourselves to make this one of the most memorable and romantic trips of your
life. Go ahead, you make the plans. She'll be touched by your
thoughtfulness. Right do we ever make plans other than playing golf? And do
we get hard time for it? Okay? I speaking about myself, So
clear your calendar and let's do this. To get all the information pricing and
download the detailed PDF, please visit tmigolf dot com, slash golf Smarter and
if you have any questions, please write to me directly. I want to
thank this week's Golf Smarter Ambassador, Gene Thornton of Nutley, New Jersey.
Gene wanted to get more out of his rounds at Hendrick's Golf Course, so
he took advantage of getting a free copy of Tony Manzoni's video of the loss
Fundamental. So if you've been listening to our Tony Manzoni series would like to
get Tony's video for free, then all you have to do is create an
intro for an upcoming Golf Smarter episode. But if you'd like to try something
else, it's up to you. Choose between Tony's video, a glove and
clove storage compartment from redroostergolf dot com, the online glove subscription service that has
high quality gloves you get delivered to your door as often as you'd like,
or a box of the premium Flight Path Golf Te's my favorite tea of all
time at above all. So right to Golf Smarter podcast at gmail dot com
and I'll get back to you with some simple instructions on what to do,
what to say, and how to take advantage of your free gift. This
Friday, we'll release the final episode of our Tony Manzoni series for twenty twenty
four. It's a conversation that's never been replayed before. Edit includes one of
my all time favorite stories that Tony has shared. I had met Frank Sinatra
and invited to the house on many occasions with my fiance and one day out
of the Blushet blurted to Frank, Frank, you've got to come over to
the house and I'll we'll cook your dinner. And of course my eyes rolled
back to the back of my head because she was a beautiful girl, but
she could really couldn't boil water. Okay, So when we got in the
car, When we got in the car, I says, that are you
going to serve Frank Sinatra beans and Franks? What are you? Are you
crazy? So I said, and she looked at me with that pretty little
face, and I said, I got this handled. So I called my
mother, who was in santase and I said, Mom, and I didn't
say Frank Sinatra. I just said, I've got some really important people coming
over. Can you make some homemade raviolis and meatballs, put them on dry
ice and fly him. I'll pay for it, fly it from Santa'sday to
Palm Springs. So she said, sure, no problem. So she sent
all this food over dry ice. And I had a good friend of mine
who was a musician, and he wanted to be there when Frank Sinatra was
and he was. He said, I'll help you arrange everything, cook everything.
So we did, and Frank shows up with Jillie Rizzo, who is
his good time friend, and and we sit down and eat and talk.
He said yes, she asked him to come to Oh yeah, he said
he had said yes when at his house when we were having dinner. He
said yes, oh yeah, ok yeah, so that the pressure was on
me. So anyway, so we're sitting there and Frank says to me,
or he says to my fiance Mimi. He said me, me, these
are the best meatballs I've ever had in my life. He said, I
mean, I've eaten all over the world. You got to give me the
recipe. And she started to say something. I said, Frank, I
had the sure ade. It has to be over and I told him the
story that what I did, and he started howling. He couldn't. He
thought that was the funniest thing. He says get your mother on the phone.
So I called my mother and my mother's name was Nina. So I
said, Mom, I said, Frank Sinatra would like to talk to you.
She didn't get the hell out of here, but I said, no,
no, I'm no mom. That's who I said, Frank Sinatra would
like to talk to you. So he gets on the phone. And you
got to remember, at our house, we had a picture of Jesus and
the next time we had a picture of Frank. Okay, So so my
mother says, says hello, mister Sinatra, and he said, Nina,
and he says, I got to tell you something. Those are the best
meatballs I've ever had, blah blah blah blah, and can you send me
the recipe? And my mother said to them, Frank, I'll make you
all the meatballs you want, but you never get my recipe. And he
broke up. He just loved that she denied him. Okay, nobody did
that to Frank Sinatra. Nobody said not. He just loved her for that.
And through the years she used to make Christmas cookies, all homemade,
unbelievable, and she would always send him Christmas cookies every Christmas, and he
was so wonderful. Whenever he appeared in San Francisco or wherever my folks went.
They sat at the Sinoptra table right against the stage. The guy was
just amazing. But he just when Christmas comes, he say, you think
your mom's going to send the cookies? Is a rank you can just call
on on it. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for
upcoming episodes, or need more information and want to discuss our September Portugal adventure,
please write to Golf Smarter podcast at gmail dot com or click on the
Heyfred button when you visit Golfsmarter dot com and now in this story. In
this story a journey to Alabama, I'm joe Anne Green. On vacation,
we travel for rest, relaxation, and adventure. Other times we brace ourselves
and head out into a great unknown to bear witness, to expose ourselves to
the horrors of history, to learn about people and actions that have impacted countless
others for generations, so we don't let it happen again. Visiting the to
Rasienstatt and Auschwitz concentration camps years ago was like that for me, seeing where
the horrors took place and hearing from people who lived it made history come alive
in a very different way. Yes, it was painful, but unlike so
many Jews, including my great uncles, I got to walk out and reboard
the bus. In many ways, my recent civil rights trip to Georgia and
Alabama was like that. When you're face to face with people who were there,
on the very ground where atrocities were committed, you can't pretend that it
didn't happen, and knowing can lead to action. As a child outside of
Boston in the early nineteen sixties, I heard about the Civil rights movement.
Of course, everyone is created equal, I thought, no matter their skin
color. Why then could Hattie, our cleaning woman's daughter come and play at
my house? But I wasn't allowed to visit her. If her neighborhood was
dangerous, as my father warned, why did she live there. The more
I've learned about our country's history, from slavery through Jim Crow, the Great
Migration, the fight for voting rights, police brutality to young black men,
and mass incarceration, the more curious I've been to her personal stories, especially
from those who are on the front lines. As with Holocaust survivors, time
is running out to hear first person testimonies from Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettis
Bridge in Selma and from the park in Birmingham where vicious dogs and high power
water hoses were set on black children. Reading books, listening to podcasts,
and watching films about the arc of African American history is powerful and I believe
essential. To understand race relations in the US requires an understanding of what's taken
place for hundreds of years and what is taking place today. But sitting with
people face to face and hearing how their lives have been defined by the civil
rights movement provides a deeper level of impact. I don't know what it's going
to take to make the world right. I do know that you should not
be sitting waiting for it to happen for somebody else to do it. That's
the voice of joe Anne Bland, a wise, passionate, straight talking seventy
year old black woman from Selma who vividly recalls staring into the window of the
local drug store where only the white kids could order sodas instead of the counter.
We met her in a large dark space filled with artifacts and memorabilia from
her life of activism as a child. She told us the women of her
church were organizing to be able to vote in the upcoming elections. Then Reverend
Martin Luther King Junior came to town and organized a Sunday protest march across the
Edmund Pettis Bridge. Joanne was eleven and she went with her then fifteen year
old sister Linda. When they came up over the high point on the bridge,
they saw sheriff's deputies mounted on horseback blocking their path. Within minutes,
they were being chased and beaten. Linda sustained serious head injuries, but a
few days later stitched up and ready for more. Joeanne's sister went on to
be the youngest person to march all the way from Selma to Montgomery. Joe
Anne Bland is among many featured in an excellent NPR podcast series entitled White Lies,
from which this audio was taken. When you talk about reconciliation, you
have to talk about a way to distribute the power, and nobody wants to
give up be in the power. Anytime there's a minute shift in power from
the people who were holding the power, a battle ensues. I can give
you a perfect example, the signing of the voting rights that in nineteen sixty
five. Tell me one year it has not been on the attack. Come
on, I'm listening. So if voting is not important, why would you
try to keep it away from me? And why would you try to stop
people from boding after they get the right to vote if it wasn't important.
Joe Anne Bland co founded the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma. Her sister
Linda Blackman Lowry's book Turning fifteen on the Road to Freedom, My Story of
the nineteen sixty five Selma Voting Rights March is appropriate for young readers and is
available on Amazon. In Birmingham, Alabama, we have the privilege of spending
an hour with the Bishop Calvin Wallace Woods Senior, perhaps the feistiest, most
passionate ninety year old I'll ever meet. He told us about the march on
Washington in sixty three, what it was like the day the Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church was bombed and those four young girls were killed. Hearing his voice crack
as he shared the pain he and others endured at the hands of Bull Connor,
then Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, was so powerful during the movement.
The Lord brought different songs to us. Sometimes we didn't know what people
gonna sing, but he always taught us to join in with those songs of
heaven. Then he gave us un Let's begin with one we used to sing.
I ain't gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me around. I'm
gonna keep on a walking. I'm gonna keep on a talking. Mark it
up to freedom land go. Let nobody turn me here around, turn me
around, turn me round, Hang on a lit, nobody turn me here
round. I'm gonna keep on a walking, keep on the talking, marching
up the freedom that hang on a lit inju justice, Oh time mere round,
No time me. Our group of twenty six was both white and Jewish,
and it was evident that each of us felt the pain and applauded the
courage of these civil rights heroes. We returned to our homes, changed and
resolved to do more as the battle for voting rights continues. Thanks so much
for listening to in this story my memoir style micro essays. I've written a
full length book by accident, a Memoir of Letting Go, which is now
available in paperback, as an e book and as an audiobook. You can
purchase it online or at your favorite local bookstore. If they don't have it
in stock, they can order it through Publishers Group West, a division of
Ingram Again. It's By Accident, A memoir of letting Go by Joe Anne Green