It took just over a year, but what began as a definition of terms and followed with further input from the PGA of America, readers like you and lots of shoe-leather reporting from our editors, we’ve now picked four communities that we think represent the ideal of what golf should be.
We dispatched Golf Digest writers Mike Stachura, Joel Beall, Drew Powell and Tod Leonard to spend meaningful time in these towns to get to know the local leaders, the courses, the shops, the schools and driving ranges, and try to understand how they all fit together.
May these four towns serve as models for others. Because golf is best when it embraces its egalitarian side.
BEST LITTLE GOLF TOWNS: Aiken, S.C. / Sioux Center, Iowa / Dupont, Wash. / Cortland, N.Y.
Many of golf’s worldwide organizations have established working groups, think tanks and advisory councils charged with “growing the game,” but there’s no need for them in Cortland, N.Y., where the game is an essential thread in the fabric of the people and their town. While other places wrestle to make golf more accessible, more inclusive, take less time, not be so difficult and not cost so much, Cortland collectively (and literally) says, “Hold my beer,” and then waves you through to the first tee.
HIGH, LOW AND IN BETWEEN: A token at Elm Tree’s new grass range is just three bucks.
Mark Sommerfeld
Ron Marshall stands tall beneath boards that boast his 30 club championships.
Mark Sommerfeld
Cortland, New York. Photographed by Mark Sommerfeld for Golf Digest.
Mark Sommerfeld
Mark Sommerfeld
Limited hazards at Knickerbocker C.C. keep the pace thrumming.
Mark Sommerfeld
Just another American town presumably laid waste by decades of lost manufacturing, you’d likely drive by Cortland. In doing so, you’d miss the rows of 19th century homes standing bravely along wide, leafy avenues and the freshly rebuilt downtown. Both reflect a kind of resilience that’s also positively overflowing at all eight of its golf courses.
In Cortland County, where the views on elevated tees stretch past rolling crops and dairy farms, the only time they cancel league night is for prom night—because the venues are the same.
Cortland golfers grind over their pars same as golfers anywhere, but the prevailing sensation is good humor and laughter that embraces more than bites. Within 20 minutes of Main Street, you’ll find the very fair-priced Cortland Country Club, plus seven courses where a round costs comfortably less than a dozen Pro V1s. Most measure barely 6,000 yards, and the pace of play is such that even outings make the turn in an unheard of two hours. Every course features a women’s league night once a week, several host a regular night just for couples, and several thriving junior programs have been part of the local scene for decades. If you want to play in basketball shorts, crocs and a T-shirt, come as you are.
Golf here is the people’s game not only in how it’s played but also in how it operates. Elm Tree, Willowbrook, Knickerbocker, Stonehedges and Maple Hill are all family-run businesses. The bar and the golf desk where you pay your green fees are often the same place. Community updates are more likely to happen on the first tee than on social media.
Save for later Public Elm Tree Golf Course: Elm Tree Cortland, NY View Course
Knickerbocker, which is nearly 100 years old, was saved from becoming a solar farm by returning son Mike Myers. At 73, instead of lounging in Carmel or Palm Springs or Jupiter after a highly successful business career, he’s parking carts, rebuilding the clubhouse and worrying about the recent rain, all while greeting by name every regular he sees from ages 16 to 100. When he needed to regrade a fairway recently, the local construction guys who play every week not only got him the backhoe, they also did the work for him. “That’s the culture here,” Myers says. “You have fathers and sons and grandsons who’ve been playing here their whole lives.”
At Elm Tree, Bruce Martins has been the owner for nearly 40 years, building an institution while managing a hall-of-fame playing career. He’s proud of his playing record, sure, but he’s more tickled to talk about his new driving range (tokens are just $3) and how his mammoth barbecue grill can handle 250 chickens at once. There’s nary a bunker on the property. As far as Martins is concerned, there never will be. “Nope, can’t have it,” he says. “Why would you? Slows play.” Adding difficulty, building obstacles, creating impediments, both on the course and off it, is not how Cortland goes about its golf. Martins is also a shrewd businessman, who was on the phone selling cart tires the day we visited. “This is the cheapest place in the world to play golf,” he says with unabashed emphasis. “The barriers that exist to the game in a lot of other places just don’t exist here.”
Jensen and Jarrett Pilkington have owned Maple Hill Golf Club since 2017. Jensen is the PGA pro while Jarrett is the course superintendent who maintains the greens locals swear are sweet enough for a major. Regulars grill their own steaks after an outing. Often, an emergency biathlon of field archery and best ball breaks out, with targets set up on the front nine and traditional golf on the back.
DEEP ROOTS: Tammy and Michael Timmerman continue nearly a century of family ownership at Willowbrook G.C.
Mark Sommerfeld
Mark Sommerfeld
Mark Sommerfeld
Former mayor Tom Gallagher has supported the game in many ways across his 87 years.
Mark Sommerfeld
Mark Sommerfeld
That idea of combining multiple kinds of fun might largely have been the motivating factor for the brothers, who each left a job at a good private club to start a business infinitely more frustrating than opening a restaurant—except it isn’t. “It’s hard days with a lot of uncertainty, but this was an opportunity to do what we love around the people that we want to be around,” Jensen says, pausing to take a call from his dad, who’s asking if he needs help in the kitchen. “We wouldn’t be here without our core group who support us. The people make the place, you know.”
That sense of community, or really communion, is vividly on display at Willowbrook, which bounds up and down farm fields just as it has since the Timmerman family took it on in 1931. Now owned and operated by brother and sister, Michael Timmerman manages the blades of grass like they are his children, while Tammy is the Momma Bear of the clubhouse, running outings, leagues and junior clinics with a hand that is equal measure fairy-godmother gentle and saloon-keeper stern. The course has five taps running at an outdoor beer trailer, but the prize for the biggest event of the year is a decidedly temperate apple pie. On a typical Wednesday, Willowbrook feels like “Cheers” with 18 holes, but Tammy prefers to think about it the other way around. “I run a golf course with a bar, not a bar with a golf course,” she says, juggling the three chai lattes she was handed that morning by three different Willowbrook members who knew she’d be too busy to get her own. “It’s tight-knit here. We’re all family because this place is like home.” More than 400 regulars overflowed the clubhouse last month at an impromptu memorial service for the fellow who manned the bar, kitchen and cash register. The only ones really sad, Tammy winked, were those who couldn’t make it.
For Tom Gallagher, the town’s legendary former mayor who’s seen golf in all its manifestations in Cortland for nearly every one of his 87 years, the game is just the framework for relationships. He’s helped get courses built, as well as advised and operated many of the more than 300 outings the town hosts each year, including the annual Chamber of Commerce Golf Bake that fills up with hundreds in minutes, the golfers as excited to play as they are to devour the 10,000 clams at the end of the day. Long before The First Tee, PGA Jr. League or Drive, Chip and Putt, Gallagher was teaching hundreds of kids in free golf clinics “even though I’m not exactly qualified to do so.”
Then again, maybe he is. “I tell these kids that if you learn to play golf and be out here and talk to people, you well might get a job you never expected,” he says. More kids went out for the boys and girls golf teams at the local high school than the football team. Golf stands as a quiet, powerful part of the culture here, and there’s hope in that.
“That’s the thing,” he says. “Most of the world isn’t playing golf at Pebble Beach or doing what you see on TV. Most of the world is playing golf the way we do. Everybody likes everybody here, and golf has a lot to do with it because golf is just how people know people.”
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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
