By Art Borden & Jackson Burgess
A Virginia basketball court looks and plays the same as one in California. Similarly, visit any football field across the country and you’ll see the same lines. Most games live within strict, rarely changing boundaries.
Golf offers no such luxury.
Every course is its own landscape: tight lies, sidehill stances, greens that never break quite like you expect. Sand, water, and trees—none of it accidental. And even when you return to the same course, you find it’s changed. The same ground that was firm yesterday might run fast and muddy overnight. The course you played in the morning can feel different by the afternoon. It can be infuriating.
You can plan all you like, but as John Lennon once put it, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”
Maybe that’s why golf reflects life more clearly than other sports; by design, neither is played on a perfect surface. Conditions change. Plans fall apart. You catch a bad lie through no fault of your own.
You can fight it. Try to control everything.
Or, over time, you learn to simply take each shot as it comes and keep moving.
In golf, and in life, it’s not about replicability … oftentimes, it’s not even about the score.
It’s about the brisk morning air at your early-morning tee time. The smiles you run into at the pro shop. The friendly banter that picks up right where you left it. It’s about a proud mom scouting a fairway with her daughter. A group of seniors who have been playing—and trash-talking—for decades.
Every day across our beloved Shenandoah Valley, courses get played by golfers every bit as diverse as they are. Adrenaline-chasing racecar drivers rub shoulders with farmer fathers and “Cowboy Golfer” sons. In Southern luncheries and bluegrass hubs, locals swap tales of legends like Sam Snead and Putt Lancaster. Outside mountain cabins, future Ivy Leaguers and city councilpeople practice their drives. And through all of it, despite our unique quirks, we remain united in our passion for this wonderfully infuriating, unplannable game.
So, yes, golf is different. Just like the fairways we play, the putts we sink, the stories we tell. Maybe life isn’t just “what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” Maybe life is what happens when you’re busy golfing in a region you love.