Tom Coyne, a bestselling author and editor of The Golfer’s Journal, is now an “accidental” golf course owner. He gets to travel to and play some of the most exclusive courses in the world. As he said, “It’s not a bad perk of the job, Lee, I’m not gonna lie to you!”
Coyne has played over a thousand courses, including Augusta National Golf Club, St. Andrews, and Pebble Beach in California. He believes that “There’s all sorts of different places in golf,” adding, “There needs to be all sorts of different places in golf.”
From Top Clubhouses to Upstate New York
Coyne has been invited to the top clubhouses in the world, but now finds himself at a clubhouse in Upstate New York with leaky roofs, abandoned mowers, and mold. The Sullivan County Golf Club is a rural 9-hole course that opened back in 1925 in Liberty, New York. Liberty is a small town about two hours from Manhattan, up in the Catskill Mountains where tourists used to flock during the Borscht Belt resort boom.
The course made headlines in 1931 when a local pilot took off from what was then the 8th fairway for a daring transatlantic flight to Denmark. This event is reflected in the club’s logo, a nod to both its golf and aviation history.
Local Love Keeps the Course Alive
Dan Yaun started caddying at Sullivan County when he was a teenager. His family has been there so long, there’s a street named after them. The club championship board boasts its fair share of the family name, too. As the tourists took their clubs and money to fancier courses, things at Sullivan County were left to the locals to keep up.
“It was going downhill a little bit,” Yaun said. “Basically I think we were maintaining it ourselves.”
Eventually there were more deer than players. In 2023 the unprofitable but still golf-able 170 acres went up for sale.
A Writer Finds a Story, and a Course
The only greenskeeper left, Shaun Smith, feared that would be the end of an era. Smith described himself as a “turf nerd”. “It’s always been the local course on the edge of town; it’s kind of always been for everybody,” he said.
Smith reached out to Coyne, a writer always in search of a good story. The two got to talking about the course, and Coyne came up for a visit.
Coyne said it looked like a place that was ready to close. Still, there was something about it. There were no tee times, no valets, no swimming pools or tennis courts, and there was certainly no attitude.
“We couldn’t be less stuffy,” Coyne said. “We are not fussy. You don’t have to get dressed up. You just show up, bring your dog, and go play golf.”
Purists might argue that’s the way golf ought to be – wild fairways kept like a bad haircut, nothing manicured, but playable and accessible to anyone.