Golf Is So Back

The Mitten is feeling the golf renaissance. Golf Digest just named Michigan the second best state in the country for public golf, a testament to the quality and caliber of its unique courses. Online golf groups in Michigan are growing fast, like Metro Detroit Golfers, the “largest golf community in Michigan,” boasting more than 50,000 members across its platforms. Visit any course in Michigan, and you’ll feel the energy; the game is winning so many new converts to the cult of the little white ball that you might even struggle to get a tee time.

Take Mines Golf Club, a public course 10 minutes from downtown Grand Rapids. Designed by renowned Michigan golf architect Mike DeVries, the course is built out of an old gypsum mine. Narrow fairways curve up, down, and around the forested hills, flowing with them. Elevated tee boxes and greens, fairways that rise up above you and then plummet, tall grasses and natural sand bunkers dotting every side.

You’re not playing a game against a human; you’re playing against Michigan, its nature, and its history. The miners carved out these hills over decades, digging through the surface, carting away gypsum and dirt one truckload at a time. They still remain, forested over, filled with grass and sand, and now you get to drink beer and ploddingly drive a cart around the course, chasing a dimpled white ball. Golf is a combat sport with nature itself; a pure manifestation of civilization, of man’s will to impose order on the cosmos. It’s an eternal struggle to keep the grass trimmed, the bunkers raked, and to keep your ball from slicing.