A Special Round With an Old Friend

I decided to visit an old friend recently.

It had been years since we’d seen each other, but we used to have a hell of a good time back in my prime. I happened to be in the neighborhood — Maryland’s Eastern Shore — with several hours to kill, so on a whim, I reached out. My wife and daughter were looking to spend some time at the outlets, and I had no interest in circling the parking lot for 20 minutes, hoping to find a space, then dropping a couple hundred dollars on last year’s big brand releases. So instead, I booked an Uber and decided to travel back in time.

I made a tee time as a single at Rum Pointe Seaside Golf Links in Berlin, Maryland.

Rum Pointe might not mean much to you, even if you are a golf nerd. It’s barely more than a footnote in Pete Dye’s extensive portfolio. He designed it in collaboration with his son, P.B. Dye. It’s one of a handful of courses they worked on together. It doesn’t show up on many lists ranking the best courses in the area. In fact, of the three courses in Maryland that Dye was hired to bring to life, it certainly ranks beneath Bulle Rock and the Links at Perry Cabin.

But 15 years ago, I fell in love with Rum Pointe. It was long before I knew who Pete Dye was. Back then, I could not have described any of his signature features. It’s possible I thought the rail ties in the ground were left behind by accident. I was flummoxed by his strategy, even though I could not have described why certain tee shots made me uncomfortable.

All I knew was that Rum Pointe was where the curtain was raised each year on my annual buddies trip. I loved golf in my 20s, but I mostly wrote about football. Football was America’s religion, and I got good at delivering homilies. I never imagined (back then) that golf writing would be part of my future, but over time, the Dao of the Buddies Trip proved to be an even stronger religion than football. In some ways, I can trace the last five years of my life back to Rum Pointe.

There is nothing particularly menacing about Rum Pointe’s opening hole. It’s a simple dogleg that bends left, and unless you can drive it 330 off the tee, there is no water in play. But for years, that opening tee shot filled me with a mixture of excitement, anxiety, and delirium. It’s where me and seven of my closest golf friends would gather in the wee hours of a weekday morning — a couple of us hung over, most of us lacking sufficient sleep from revelry the night before — to begin a golf tournament that was utterly meaningless, yet deeply important to us.

It might as well be a patch of my personal holy ground.

The first few years, I don’t think any of my friends (myself included) could stand on that tee and break 90. I’ve seen us hit shanks, duck hooks, sad slices, and cold tops. I’ve been so nervous standing over the ball for my first swing of the trip, I was worried I might whiff. But one time I piped a drive down the middle and pounded my chest like an idiot. There is something stupid, yet beautiful about twirling your club on the way to shooting 91, and no one could ever shame me for holding onto that memory.

I’m better at golf these days, at least score-wise, but I’m not sure it will ever be as fun as it was in the beginning, back when I was just discovering how rare it is in adult life to play golf and laugh about it with friends for three days in a row.

There are holes at Rum Pointe I will gush about for reasons that go beyond nostalgia. The eighth is a majestic par 5 that hugs the water of Sinepuxent Bay, and the ruins of an old dock look like an army of skeletons half submerged in the marsh. I also love the 16th, a brawny par 4 with views of the Verrazano Bridge. There are also holes that don’t seem to fit the course aesthetic, like the 11th and 12th, which weave through the forest before the routing reemerges and returns to the sea. But they pass quickly. Every time I play them, I try not to hold a grudge. I don’t know how many balls I lost at Rum Pointe back in my 30s, but I added one more to the tally when I chunked a wedge into the swamp on 11.

It costs a lot of money to play Pete Dye designs these days. Whistling Straits, Harbour Town, the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass, and Kiawah Island’s Ocean Course will each set you back around $700, and that doesn’t include a caddie. Rum Pointe doesn’t have the pedigree of any of those courses, but I paid $100 to walk in the afternoon, and I finished in three hours. I mostly had the course to myself as the sun was setting.

My friends and I have taken our golf trips elsewhere in recent years. We’ve done Bandon Dunes and Sand Valley, Pinehurst, Sweetens Cove and Forest Dunes. All those courses are — as you likely know — exceptional. I’d encourage you to visit every one.

But one year, the management company that owns Rum Pointe let my motley crew rent the three-bedroom apartment that sits above the clubhouse. They told us we had free rein of the course after 5 p.m. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced a better deal in all of golf. We played alternate shot in our bare feet, we drank tumblers of bourbon on the edge of Pete Dye’s bunkers, and when the sun went down, we played a couple holes with glow balls in the dark. I’ll take that any day over Sawgrass.

As I walked to the parking lot, I said a quiet thank you to my old friend. I had no idea, back when we first met, the places he would encourage me to go.