If you really want to hear about it, the first thing that depresses you about playing golf down in…read moreTampa is the sheer amount of phony Florida golfers that are v anity handicaps the second is the sunshine sticking to everything like warm glue and beating down on you constantly for ten months.
Back home in New York, when I hit a pure 2-iron off the deck, the cold air bites your face a few months out of the year and lets you know you're alive, but out here at Heritage Isles Golf & Country Club, you're just sweating through your shirt before you even tee off.
It kills me, it really does. I carried an 8.7 handicap at the time, not that I like bragging about it, because as soon as you start getting good at something, if you aren't careful, you start showing off, and then you aren't good mentally anymore, yiu can become a jerk, so I figured I'd try to tear this place apart from the back Gold tees at nearly seven thousand yards.
But Florida golf is a different playing experience from the northeast. Half the course is built right over some swampy wetlands, and every single hole has water sitting on it, waiting to swallow up a perfectly struck draw that a little unnoticed invisible wind gust just ate. Water holes are like a godly must here, every hole has some and its depressing and weird.
You hit a tight, beautiful shot right down the fairway, and suddenly it hops off this sticky Bermuda grass and disappears into a ditch where an alligator is probably sitting around pretending to be sleeping, but ready to go full on prehistoric if you get too close.
The par-3s are long as hell, too. You get up to sixteen, playing almost two hundred and thirty yards over water and swamp, and all these old guys in pastel polo shirts are standing by their carts giving each other advice. It's phony as a three-dollar bill. Here's my advice for them "stop talking so much, just grip it 'n rip it".
They've got these wooden footbridges everywhere connecting the fairways over the marshes, and you rumble your cart across and over them feeling like you're on some staged safari tour watching bad golf, instead of playing a serious round.
I ended up shooting a seventy seven, which made me feel pretty depressed because I missed a six-footer for birdie on eighteen after cutting the dogleg over the lake. The green was fast and smooth enough, I'll give them that, but the whole setup just makes me miss northern turf.
If you're a low handicap stuck in Tampa, it'll test your short game and keep you honest, but the endless palm trees and country-club phoniness will make you want to call up somebody and go grab a drink instead.
