[club smacking ball]
- Right down the middle.
- Hang on Jack, hang on.
[clubs smacking balls]
- Oh, nice.
- Oh, right down the pike.
- Very nice. You're on.
- Little bit short.
? ?
- The Yellow Lake Golf Course will never host the U.S. Open
[clinkl]
or any other prestigious tournament.
- Right down the middle.
- Well, we'll try a little 8-iron pitch and run.
[thud]
- Oh, you might have it.
Whoa, whoa.
- Get on, get on.
- All right.
- But this humble course does offer a unique challenge
for even the best golfers.
- Ohhhh, soft sand there.
- The greens are green in name only.
- Looka there.
- Ohhh.
- Well anybody's used to
playing on a regular golf course,
it changes your whole game
'cause your putting, everything changes.
- There's a hard pan underneath the sand,
so sometimes it blows off it a little bit
and you'll have kind of a hard pan.
and then there'll be some thicker sand,
which can slow your ball down and just stop it right there.
- Most golfers are used to raking the sand trap,
not dragging the sand green.
- That way it's smooth
for the next people that are coming behind you.
- For a real par? - For a real par.
- Chuck Anderson says when the course was built in 1928,
sand greens were standard.
- Back in 1928, you didn't have a whole lot of irrigation.
- Over time, most courses installed sprinklers
and converted to grass.
That was Chuck's plan when he bought the course in 1988.
- We're going to change those into grass greens
as fast as we can.
[plink]
- There it is.
- Look at that.
- And then we got up here
and found that everybody was having such a good time...
- Ooooh, hit that rock and jumped up.
- ...and the maintenance was so low,
- Looka there.
- ...we said, "Let's promote the sand greens
and see what happens."
- C'mon Jack.
- John O'Fallon lived next to the course
for more than three decades.
- I don't think I--
I don't remember ever scoring good.
[laughs]
But I have a lot of fun afterwards.
[guffaws]
- This is why it's a friendly place.
If you get thirsty out here,
they bring you out one when they see ya.
- John and Chuck have golfed a lot of rounds
and learned not to take it too seriously.
- There it is!
It's the best shot I've had since I was born.
- This course is for fun.
It's a recreational course.
If you're a good golfer,
you're going to be very frustrated out here.
- Oh, don't get no better.
- That's it.
Look here.
Right over the hole.
- Group: Ooohhhh!
- None of us really worry too much about score,
just out to have a good time, you know.
[grunts, smacks ball]
- There. Give it a little extra boost.
- It's the way golf was meant to play for us duffers.
Because we're never going to be on the pro circuit anyway.
[clink]
So we might as well have fun.
- Over the hill to grandma's house.
- There's always tomorrow neighbor.
- Yup.
- Always tomorrow.