“Enjoy the walk” is how Rob Rigg ends every email and newsletter he sends to members of the Walking Golfers Society, and it might as well be its mantra.
“It’s pretty simple, right?” Rigg said.
A devotee of walking from a young age as a caddie growing up in Canada, Rigg founded the society during a rainy Oregon winter in 2009 as a passion project to provide information about the many benefits of walking during golf. It has stayed true to that mission, rating thousands of courses for walkability, organizing member golf trips and advocating for the enjoyment of golf as a walking game – the way the game was intended to be played.
“As soon as I started it, I began getting emails from people telling me how they’d lost 15 pounds from walking,” Rigg said.
The society has grown to more than 2,000 members – there’s no membership fee or annual dues – and created some lasting bonds. Rigg, for instance, began trading emails with member Sean Eidson, and eventually they met to play Bandon Dunes Golf Resort’s Pacific Dunes. They started talking about footwear and decided to launch a company together, True Footwear. (Rigg resigned as company president in 2013, and later worked for TaylorMade-Adidas Golf. He’s currently an executive for a CBD company.)
Then there is Ben Cowan (not to be confused with Ben Cowan-Dewar, CEO of Cabot Links in Nova Scotia), whose parents met when Cowan’s father caddied for his mother and has been swinging a club practically since the day he left the womb. Cowan discovered the society while on vacation in Florida while doing a Google search for walking-friendly courses in the Sunshine State.
“It was everything I believed in. I wanted to help spread it in the Midwest,” said Cowan, who lives north of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and described his role as both second-in-command and as a permanent intern.
Within a year he began hosting events throughout Michigan and beyond. His favorite was a gathering of 24 golfers from 12 states for a Ryder Cup-style competition at walker-friendly courses in Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee. Ballyneal in Colorado, Pine Needles in North Carolina and Pasatiempo in California are among the hosts of national walking gatherings, and celebrated architects such as Mike DeVries, Jim Urbina and Tom Doak have participated and spoken to attendees.
“When we can get our members together, it is really awesome,” Rigg said.
Both Cowan and Rigg are encouraged by the influx of walker-friendly courses. They tabbed it the Bandon Dunes influence, after an era in which course construction was geared towards selling real estate, forcing architects to lay endless ribbons of pavement for golf carts. Those vehicles were deemed an essential source of revenue. These days fewer courses turn away walkers, but still it is a far cry in the United States from the way it is ingrained in the DNA of golfers in countries such as Scotland, Ireland, Australia and elsewhere to pull a trolley or throw a bag on one’s back.
“There are too many people who never have even tried walking, which I just find sad,” Cowan said.
But the global pandemic has motivated some golfers who haven’t walked in years, or never have before, to take to fairways by foot for their golf fix. Rigg wonders, however, if this opportunity to showcase that the game is more enjoyable when walking has been missed.
“I saw some fivesomes playing and they were all in individual carts,” Rigg said. “It made me wish there had been more of a push to get people walking.”
Rigg picked up his appreciation of the walking aspect of the game from his grandparents, who he said, “were walkers until they were in the grave. They loved it.” He fell hard for that certain cadence of walking between shots, the rhythm and flow to the round that is lost when one takes a cart.
Together with an army of members across the country, the Walking Golfers Society has rated thousands of courses on a walkability scale that bears a slight resemblance to Homeland Security’s color-coded terrorism threat advisory scale with green being top-rated followed by yellow, orange, red (the course allows walkers, but you may need a Sherpa) to black (walking not permitted).
“I get emails all the time saying, ‘Hey, I live in Michigan and here are my ratings,’ ” Rigg said.
While work and family responsibilities have taken their toll on the amount of time that Rigg and Cowan can devote to their online resource for fellow walkers and to advocate the health and exercise component of the sport, they still remain committed to their overriding mission: enjoying the walk.