Don Berry writes this about “Fore! Gone.”:

“A real page turner. I kept imagining myself playing these wonderful (and even not so wonderful) courses and wishing I had the chance to play some of these lost gems.”

Thanks, Don!

The back story:

About a month ago, I asked Mr. Berry, the head professional at Edinburgh USA in Brooklyn Park, a 14-time Minnesota Section PGA Player of the Year and Minnesota Golf Hall of Famer, if he would consider reading my book for the possible purpose, if he liked it, of writing a quick endorsement for the book’s back cover.

Berry spent the next few weeks reading the book, and reading greens. He finished fourth in the state senior PGA championship, then second in the state PGA match play (the guy can really play; I am among those who would love to see him take a shot at playing the Champions Tour, though he certainly knows what’s best for his career and life). This morning, he got back to me with an email. It opened:

“I read the whole book, cover to cover – really liked it, easy to read.”

Don added that he can’t wait to see the pictures, and I’m with him on that. Well, I guess I have seen the pictures, but I can’t wait to see how the words and pictures (modern-day photos by Peter Wong, many old photos by those who told me stories about the courses) come together, courtesy of my talented book designer, Tami Dever.

Back to Don’s email … he also offered these comments on “Fore! Gone.”, and I am honored and humbled to relate some of them here, with his permission:

“A morning tee time at Byrn Mawr? How great to play Westwood Hills and look over the fence at MGC! A great day of 36 at Hillcrest and Northwood? I’m in! Oh, how fun it would have been.”

“Reading the book I kept imagining myself playing these wonderful (and even not so wonderful) courses in the ‘20s and ‘30s – a different day, different equipment but how fun!”

A couple of Don’s comments will be melded together, again with his permission, and used as an endorsement on the back cover of “Fore! Gone. Minnesota’s Lost Golf Courses, 1897-1999”. I am deeply grateful for your time and words, Mr. Berry. Now go win a U.S. Senior Open. Or two.

Friday marked Day 3 of the Great, Or Maybe Fair to Middling, Flyer Distribution Tour. Six north-metro courses visited. Would have been seven, except for MNDot’s carefully devised scheme to block off 147 streets and highways in a five-mile-square area and prevent any motorized vehicles from visiting certain neighborhoods in New Brighton, Shoreview and Arden Hills.

I’ll offer few real revelations about the places I visited, just a few ruminations:

Island Lake Golf and Training Center, Shoreview: Great location, within a purely struck 8-iron of the hardpan known as I-694. I’ve hit balls here but never played the course. Fine driving range. This place is best known in my family for the miniature golf course, which my son Nick really enjoys, but where he almost never actually finishes a hole.

Hey, Nick, may I remind you of this little golf technicality, found in the appropriately capitalized Rules of Golf:

3-2. Failure to Hole Out
If a competitor fails to hole out at any hole and does not correct his mistake before he makes a stroke on the next teeing ground or, in the case of the last hole of the round, before he leaves the putting green, he is disqualified.

Columbia Golf Club, Minneapolis: “Columbia Golf Club started as a simple 6-hole, sand green golf course in 1919 and was expanded to 18 holes in 1923,” the Minneapolis Parks website says. That history nugget, the large hardwood trees and the clubhouse with the yellow-rock facing always make me feel like I’m going back in time whenever I visit here — and that’s not a bad thing. Columbia has something of a “Keller” feel around the clubhouse, referencing the great old public course in Maplewood, though it’s tough to place any other Minneapolis or St. Paul muni in the same class as Keller.

Columbia was laid out by William D. Clark, a well-known Twin Cities course architect of the 1920s and ’30s. Little-known fact about Clark: He also designed what was originally a six-hole layout in Chisago City and is now a lost course.

Columbia’s other lost-course connection: It is the longtime home of Mike Rak, a former state senior public links champion who caddied and then played the defunct Hilltop Public Golf Links course two miles up the road in Columbia Heights. Rak is a wonderful gentleman and storyteller who stoked my interest in writing “Fore! Gone.” by spending three hours last July touring the old Hilltop grounds with me and then telling me more about the place at his north Minneapolis home. Rak was part of a contingent of remarkably skilled north Minneapolis and Columbia Heights players who matriculated from Hilltop in the 1930s and ’40s and went on to notable amateur careers at the likes of Columbia and Gross.

Columbia Learning Center and Driving Range: Adjacent to Columbia Golf Club, this is one of the better practice venues in the Twin Cities. It features target greens, a putting greens and pitching areas. (Speaking of pitching, maybe the Minnesota Twins starting rotation could make an offseason road trip here and work on their form.)

I counted 34 bays to hit from, via my Evelyn Wood-counting style. There might be more. It’s a First Tee facility, helping kids to learn the game. And I like the sign at the door. Paraphrasing: “Home to the Augsburg College golf team. Go Auggies!”

Centerbrook Golf Course, Brooklyn Center: Darn it. My photographic timing was a little off on this one. (Hey, no wisecracks about my photos. They were taken with my Android as I was all but running from one course to the next. And I’m a professional photographer like Amanda Bynes is a professional race car driver.) I snapped this about 10 seconds after a woman top-shank-sclaffed a shot 30 yards to the right off the first tee. I didn’t watch after that, but I doubt she subsequently spun a gap wedge to 18 inches and tapped in for par.

Courses like Centerbrook sometimes have to endure catty comments about the simplicity of their layouts, but one should not question for one second their importance to golf. It’s where beginners learn the game, where novices learn to love the game, where calendars don’t have to be used to measure playing time, and where anyone can play without feeling intimidated. I have the utmost respect for places like Centerbrook. It’s a crying shame so many par-3 and executive courses like this have turned into lost courses in the past 15 years.

Gross National Golf Club, Minneapolis (it’s a Minneapolis address, but it looks to me like the course technically is within the confines of the St. Anthony Village borders): Another William D. Clark design, this course opened in 1925. It’s generally considered the best of the Minneapolis city courses, and it hosted the 1964 U.S. Public Links Championship.

Gross wasn’t originally Gross. (Hey, again — no wisecracks.) Like many of the Minneapolis courses, it was renamed. Gross originally was named Armour. The meatpacking company owned the land upon which Armour/Gross was built. The course was renamed after Francis A. Gross, who was known as “Mr. Park Board” and was Minneapolis park commissioner for 32 years. It’s a pretty fair value, at $28 weekdays and $32 weekends.

Les Bolstad Golf Course, Falcon Heights: 16 holes north of Larpenteur Avenue and two holes south of it. Best known as the University of Minnesota golf course, and less well-known as the first golf course on which I played 36 holes in one day — and in brand-new golf shoes, to boot. (The modestly talented Winona State team I played for came up for an invitational meet in the late 1970s, and I forgot my shoes. Had to buy new ones at the course. The shoes and I both made it through all 36 holes. I wonder where those shoes are now. Dang, they were comfy.

( I can’t tell my other WSU/Bolstad story, or I might have my college golf letters retroactively rescinded. I can say it has to do with missing a tee time.)

Bolstad isn’t long enough to support modern-day college meets, but it’s still a fine everyday track, and it has an excellent practice facility designed by ex-Gopher Tom Lehman, a player of some repute. Thankfully, the U regents decided recently not to close down the Bolstad course and make it fodder for “Fore! Gone. Version 2.0.” (Don’t worry. There probably won’t be one of those.)

The hole pictured is No. 14, a short par 4, 280 yards off the white tees. Yes, those are runners on the course grounds. Bolstad is host to the annual Griak Invitational, one of the Midwest’s top college and high school cross country meets. The meets are today, and those runners were training yesterday. I photographed No. 14 so I could boast about having driven the green the last time I played Bolstad.

Yes, I three-putted for par.

Lost-course connections: Bolstad was designed by Tom Vardon, the prolific designer of the 1920s and ’30s who laid out five lost courses that are featured in my book. Also, the course was named for Les Bolstad, the former U of M golf coach who once served as head professional at Westwood Hills, a lost course in St. Louis Park. And before there was the University golf course, the school’s first intercollegiate meet was played at The Minnetonka Club in Deephaven, also known as the Burton Private Course, another lost course I wrote about.

Finally, the latest Kickstarter update: 13 days to go, $2,590 raised, $2,410 to reach goal. Have I mentioned I need pledges? Have I mentioned I can’t get the book into print unless I meet the goal? I have? Four hundred and thirty-one times? 

Fine. Now it’s 432. 

The journalist in me says this would be a good time to back up and cover some of the W’s of lost golf courses. So here goes:

Who: Not a good “W” to start with, but I’ll get to it.

What: As in, “What is a lost golf course?” It’s any piece of land — or concrete, in a handful of instances — that once was a golf course but has been abandoned. That seems self-evident, so maybe it makes sense to detail what, in the case of my book, is not a golf course.
A course that has been redesigned or even rerouted in its original location is not a lost course.
A course that closed after the year 1999 is not a lost golf course, at least for the purposes of my book. I wanted the book to be historical in nature and leave readers saying, “Wow, I never knew there was a golf course there.” I know I did that more than once while researching. (Spring Grove? Mountain Iron? A state prison grounds?) Plus, there are so many lost courses since 1999 — must be at least a dozen just in the Twin Cities area — that I
didn’t want to make my lost-course project any more complicated than it already was.
The distinction between “golf clubs” and “golf courses” also should be noted.  A golf club (no, not the implement used to propel a ball in mostly unintended directions) is an organization. A golf course is a tangible piece of land. A few Minnesota golf clubs still in existence operated what now are lost golf courses. Faribault is a notable example.

Where: All across Minnesota, from Warroad to Tower to Caledonia to Pipestone. Still, that “four corners” reference is a bit misleading. Minnesota’s lost courses weren’t sprinkled throughout the state so much as sprinkled through the north and north-central and “gobbed” in two areas — the Twin Cities metro (25 lost courses) and a swath across the very southern section of the state, from the South Dakota to Wisconsin borders (18 courses). That’s more than half of the state’s lost courses in just those two areas.
In the coming weeks, I’ll provide a link to an interactive map that shows locations of more than 80 Minnesota lost golf courses.

When: 1897 through 1999, hence the book’s subtitle. But there is a clear pattern of courses that were created in the 1920s and disappeared in the 1930s and ’40s.

Why: Two ways to look at that question …
— Why did they disappear? Many reasons, though there is one clear pattern that’s explained at length in the book. Or …
— Why did I write about them? Well, mostly because I found them damn fascinating.
The topic was not my idea. A fellow named Don Rohrer suggested it to the editors of Minnesota Golfer Magazine in 2010, and those editors approached me about writing about lost courses of the Twin Cities, which I did in the summer 2010 MN Golfer issue. I loved the assignment, everything about it. I met a gentleman named Don Dostert who gave me a wonderful motor tour around a lost golf course, Bunker Hills in Mendota Heights (no, that is not a typo. Minnesota’s original Bunker Hills golf course was in the south St. Paul suburb.). The idea bubbled around in my head for two years, until I decided to jump headlong into a book project in July 2012. The result is “Fore! Gone. Minnesota’s Lost Golf Courses, 1897-1999,” which I hope to have in print before the end of 2013.

Back to “Who?”:  My favorite “W” of all, in the case of researching the book. I made hundreds of phone calls — 500 for sure, maybe more — trying to find people who knew about lost golf courses. That always was my main motivation — can I find someone who can tell me about the old double-dogleg at Westwood Hills or someone who lives on the old eighth fairway at Northwood? There were more misses than hits (and fewer misses, missuses and Ms.es than misters), but I struck gold more than once, with wonderful older folks like Mike Rak, an engaging 91-year-old who showed me every square foot of the old Hilltop Public Golf Links in Columbia Heights, then went home and sketched out a detailed, in-scale map of the lost layout.
By the way, that’s a view of the modern-day Hilltop grounds at the top of this post.