I didn’t play from the tips.
The championship tees and the 7,200-yard distance they create at TPC Wisconsin were decidedly not on the menu. This was due to several factors, most of which begin and end with the fact I am not good at golf and my bag only holds so many balls. Regardless, my modest work covering the sport allowed me a sneak preview of the PGA Champions Tour’s newest stop.
My golf game exists in fractions of a second. That space between a well-struck drive and the moment physics catches up to allow it to soar like a broken eagle, tailing hard to the right right before crashing into the woods. It’s the thought I have the proper line on a putt before ripping it 12 feet past the hole. It’s my one good iron shot per round that makes me feel like I might just be improving (I am not).
After ensuring my personal embarrassment would not be a problem for the PGA officials visiting Madison, I grabbed my clubs — a mishmash of the finest irons the 1990s had to offer and some woods picked out from garage sales and secondhand stores — and headed to the course.
The day began with a light breakfast and a couple of question and answer sessions. Club owner Dennis Tiziani touted his commitment to growing women’s golf. He also admitted he’s already dropped $22 million turning a “pretty good” course into a championship caliber one, rebranding the city’s Cherokee Country Club with the TPC name. He estimated there was at least $5 million more to be spent.
A big chunk of that went to working around Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources regulations for a course built on Cherokee Marsh, an active 5,000-acre wetland. Madison takes its green spaces seriously, so anything encroaching on protected land — especially one as resource-needy as a golf course — is going to fall under a massive spotlight of scrutiny. We’d get to see how the club mixed sport and nature soon.
Next up was PGA Tour veteran and local legend Steve Stricker, who lives close enough to the course to drive his custom red Ryder Cup golf cart over and play whenever he’d like. Stricker is here after lipping out a four foot putt to lose the American Family Championship in a playoff the day before. I have never related more to him as a golfer.
Coincidentally, my only round of golf this year came at his old home course. Edgerton Towne Country Club is a lovely public track 40 minutes south of Madison. It can be played for less than $50 on a weekend and hacked through en route to bogey golf and the quiet buzz of five beers on a hot day. It has a 250-yard par four with a steep enough dropoff that no one on the tee quite knows where the hole is and you’re not allowed to play until the group in front of you has rung a large bell signifying they’re off the green. TPC Wisconsin offers none of these things.
What it does promise, per Stricker, is pain. Not in those words exactly, but yeah.
Trees have given way to native wetlands, so instead of losing your ball in the woods you’ll have to scare off a colony of box turtles to look for it. The ground has been turned over and raised so several feet of glacial sand lie under the turf — a sentence that meant nothing to me at the time but promised concrete firm greens despite a spring with enough torrential downpours to turn my backyard into a mushroom farm. Sand traps are everywhere, some of which are so new they don’t show up on the course maps yet, merely waiting to ambush the scramble golfer who hardly ever plays these shots (me. That’s me).
I asked Stricker how he balanced the influence of a national brand (TPC) with his Wisconsin roots and where it shows on the course. Expecting a reference to the incorporation of the wetlands, I instead got the most Wisconsin answer possible.
It’s the final stretch of holes, where families will be able to get together and watch next year’s American Family Insurance Championship with a cold beer. Judging by the tap list inside — not a macro-brew in sight but instead a heavy Badger State bent with brews from New Glarus, Hop Haus, Titletown and Stricker’s own Strick9 pilsner from Stevens Point’s District 1 Brewing (terrible name, pretty good beer) — this is more than mere lip service.
I got the distinct feeling I would need several of those to cope with my hot garbage golf game. Well, onto the course.
Hole 1
I am paired up with two local sports media members who, happily, are taking things as seriously as I am. After we, to a man, blast our tee shots into a marsh, we decide on gentleman’s rules. This roughly translates to “hit as many as you want.” I shank another ball into the fescue, mark down a five and wonder how far away the beer cart is.
Total Balls lost: Two
Hole 3
A proliferation of sand traps — at least three per hole, from what I can tell — means I get to do some real Phil Mickelson stuff with my lob wedge. By this I mean losing bets, as I try to carry a 60 yard gap over water and get maybe halfway there. The next ball is chunked into the junk.
A third hits the green exactly where I’d planned, bounces like it hit concrete and rolls off the back with prejudice. I look for a ball mark and find nothing but a surface hard enough to play pickup basketball on.
This is the allure of a championship course. The greens are like putting on your driveway. My chip back lands at the fringe, then races downhill past the hole for a putt I have zero chance making. I write a frowny face on my scorecard.
Total Balls lost: Five
Hole 4
The thing to realize about a championship course is there’s almost no such thing as a straight fairway. Almost everything runs diagonally, leaving even wide landing zones whittled down to a surgical proposition. When you do come across what appears to be a straightforward hole, Stricker finds unsubtle ways to tell you off for merely being good at golf and not great. The 16th hole, with its fairway bunker dead center at 250 yards, is a wonderful middle finger to one of three good tee shots I hit all day.
This one’s a “no fairway” hole rather than a bunker hole; a deceptively straight start takes a lightning bolt zig-zag right where most folks’ drives would land, making this “land your jet on the aircraft carrier” tough. In theory, this shift right should help me. But after slicing the hell out of my first five drives I blast one dead straight and wind up left next to a water hazard. Several balls dot the shores, unplucked from their shallow graves to remind you rich folks play here.
I reload with a couple lake balls, which come in handy after I assume I’m about to short-arm an approach shot out of that rough and instead send my ball over the green and near a family of sand hill cranes. Take care of my tiny hard egg, bird friends.
Total Balls lost: Six
Hole 7
The upside of rock hard fairways is that on the rare case you hit a solid drive the ball runs as if you’ve cranked one off the cart path in Microsoft Golf. I smash a drive from the 520-yard tees to set up a 210-yard approach to set up an eagle, wistfully realizing I just used up my annual 300-plus yard drive on a day with nothing at stake. This depression overwhelms me as I slice a fairway wood out of bounds to the right and settle for a double bogey.
Total Balls lost: Eight
Hole 9
I connect my phone to the Bluetooth display and play Weezer’s Pinkerton album as I drive up to the tee. I briefly consider whether I am the first man to do this at a TPC, then realize I am surrounded by white dudes in their 40s and understand this cannot possibly be the case.
I need a par here to break 50 (while cheating heavily). I double bogey the hole.
Total Balls lost: Nine
Hole 10
While searching the fescue for my ball, a black water snake slithers out from the shore. Cool, cool. Looks like I’m dropping one.
My playing partner uses this as inspiration and birdies what is easily the finest snake hole outside of Pawnee, Indiana. I write down a six, discounting my score due to amphibious distraction. Just like the pros!
Total Balls lost: 10
Hole 12
One of the staffers who has been helping us along the way jokingly asks if I’m under for the day. Just my blood alcohol content, it turns out. Having failed my way through high school golf with one of Rhode Island’s worst teams (thanks for all the free rounds, Valley Country Club!) I kinda grew to hate golf. But as an adult I realized you could drink six beers on the course and write whatever the hell you wanted on the scorecard, which makes things much more interesting.
Today I only have the latter. And I’m still gonna struggle to break 100. Looks like it’s time for a Strick9 (once the round is over and I’m officially off the clock because I am a valued employee of Gannett and its subsidiaries and of course we would never have a beer while working, thank you for understanding).
Total Balls lost: 10
Hole 14
This long par three is playing at roughly 200 yards, which is just enough to remind me I have two drivers and two three-woods in my hastily assembled bag but nothing to fill the void between them and my four iron. I pick out a rescue wood I’ve never quite known how to hit and proceed to smash my tee shot 250 yards… vertically.
It has all the horizontal distance to clear the ladies tees and that’s it. Sometimes the smart play is to lay up.
I then top my second shot into the hazard.
Total Balls lost: 11
Hole 16
One thing to know about TPC Wisconsin is it’s only two miles from the Dane County Regional Airport. That doubles as the state’s Air National Guard headquarters, so Monday’s round has been dotted with inadvertent flyovers. This sounds like it would be a distraction, but A) the constant hum of jet engines isn’t especially disruptive on a second-to-second basis and B) as long as you don’t have to live underneath their flight path, fighter jets are cool as hell.
I lean in to unintended display of patriotism at 16 and crank one to the left and beyond Stricker’s unofficial “[expletive] you” bunker in the middle of the fairway. I tip my cap to the pilot screaming overhead at 500 miles per hour. He does not recognize my appreciation. Crestfallen, I blast my second shot into a different sand trap to the right of the green.
Total Balls lost: 12
Hole 17
This short par three gives me the opportunity to use the only club in my bag that’s been operating with any consistency. Needless to say, I chunk my wedge and wind up in the dry marsh in front of the green. While looking for my ball I hear the group of golf journalists behind me shout “YOU KNOW THEY SELL THOSE BY THE DOZEN.”
So on top of learning about the course, I’m also getting a lesson on antique golf heckles. Great, helpful, thank you. I slink up to the fringe and finish out my three putt to double par.
Total Balls lost: 13
Hole 18
My final iron of the day is my first good one, as I get the feel, the flight and the line I’d hoped on an eight iron from 140 yards out. It lands at the front of the green and… bounces and rolls 60 feet past the pin.
PGA greens, man.
Total Balls lost: 13
Upon reflection, it appears both my carded score (51-47 for a tidy but unimpressive 98) and number of lost balls are skewed lower than the actual total. But that’s fine, no one here was going to disqualify me for signing the wrong scorecard. This course whipped my butt, but it wasn’t without the rewarding moments that make us keep coming back to golf.
TPC Wisconsin finds ways to punish you for everything. For slicing your shots. For keeping the ball too low. For keeping it too high (the mostly tree-less atmosphere lends to lots of gusty winds).
It stings you for not being long enough off the tee. For being too long — my playing partner crushed his drive on the 16th hole, a short par four where it looked like he had an eagle putt but instead spent two fruitless minutes searching the fescue behind the green. This is a championship course, and anything less than precision leads to a sliding scale of outcomes that get exponentially worse the sloppier you are.
Still, you see the vision behind each hole. You learn how to navigate greens that make you feel like you’re putting on a parking garage even after a rainy weekend. You soak in the native wetlands and the animals that come with it — cranes, snakes, toads and turtles. If you’re lucky, you even get to marvel at F-35s giving you the opening day treatment while you stand wide-eyed like a toddler staring down construction equipment.
I played terrible golf at TPC Wisconsin. I won’t be among this year’s wave of membership applicants. Still, I appreciated the hell out of being there and getting to hear the process and cost behind rising from good to great.
And make no mistake, TPC Wisconsin is a great course. It’s probably a lot more fun when you’re actually good at golf.
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