Welcome to The Golf Scene — Your Weekly Golf Fix.

If this is your first issue, welcome.
If you’ve been following along, thanks — I appreciate it.

This week we visit Mississippi, find out if there is a difference between a road and a cart path, and ask whether your wedge should look like a salad buffet.

And somewhere in there, we’ll help you hit a few better shots.

Let’s get into it.

In This Issue:

How Did I Get Here?: Welcome to Mississippi

Golf Life: Have We Been Here Before?

Equipment Insight: You Clean Your Shoes, Don’t You?

The Mapping Years — Part 2

Welcome to Mississippi

Where the golf courses had to be mapped, and dinner had to be dismantled.

After flying into Jackson, Mississippi, we were greeted at the airport by an employee from the mapping company whose main responsibility, at least at that particular moment, was to make sure a group of slightly confused golf people from various parts of Canada and the United States actually made it to the hotel.

This may sound like a small thing.

It was not.

Because as we drove through the city of Jackson, I remember looking out the window and thinking one very clear thought.

This is the city that time forgot.

I do not mean that in a mean way. I mean it in the way someone might say, “I believe I have accidentally stepped into an episode of The Twilight Zone and gone back in time.”

Coming from Toronto, it felt different. Very different. The buildings, the streets, the pace, the whole feeling of the place. I was not in Toronto anymore. I was not even sure I was in the same decade.

Eventually, we arrived at a hotel near the company’s head office. We were dropped off, handed our luggage, and told someone would pick us up at 8:00 the next morning.

That was it.

Welcome to Mississippi.

I checked into my room, wandered back down to the lobby, tried to figure out what exactly a person was supposed to do for the next several hours, and eventually settled on what I believe was a Subway sandwich and about four hours of television.

Not exactly the glamorous beginning to a national golf course mapping career, but at least nobody had asked me to wear the antenna yet.

That would come the next morning.

At 8:00 sharp, we were picked up and taken to the company’s head office. There were about six of us there for training, from different parts of Canada and the United States, all brought in to learn how to map golf courses and pick up the equipment we would soon be dragging across North America.

That morning was spent in a classroom, trying to understand what the company did, how they did it, and what our role would be in turning actual golf courses into digital maps.

Now, when you hear the phrase “mapping a golf course,” it sounds fairly simple.

Drive around. Look at a few bunkers. Mark where the green is. Maybe nod knowingly at a pond.

That was not exactly how it worked.

Later that day, we went to a local golf course for the on-course portion of the training. I believe it was a course that was either connected to, or still known for, hosting a professional tour event in the Jackson area. And that was where I had my first experience putting on the backpack.

This was not a normal backpack.

This was a special GPS unit with an antenna sticking roughly two feet above my head, which meant I looked less like a golf professional and more like someone trying to communicate with a distant planet.

At that moment, the job became very real.

The basic process was simple enough in theory. You walked around the golf course and recorded the shape and position of everything that mattered.

If the first hole had three tee decks, you would stand at one point on the first tee deck, start recording, and walk the entire perimeter until you got back to where you started. The GPS unit would drop a digital point every second while you walked.

At the end, the computer would not see a solid line.

It would see a series of dots.

If the tee deck was round, the dots looked round. If the tee deck was rectangular, the dots looked rectangular. If the tee deck looked like it had been designed during a committee meeting with no clear leader, the dots would tell that story too.

Then you moved down the hole.

Bunker on the right? Walk around it.

Second bunker? Walk around that one too.

Third bunker? Of course. Why wouldn’t there be a third bunker?

Bunkers on the other side of the fairway? Cross over and walk around those as well.

If there was a creek, pond, river, cart path, dogleg, end of fairway, green, greenside bunker, or anything else that mattered to the final GPS map, it had to be identified, recorded, and understood.

This was not casual golf course sightseeing.

This was golf course archaeology with a backpack antenna.

If the hole was a dogleg, you might have to mark the end of the fairway relative to the tee deck so the software people knew where the fairway actually changed direction. Then you would continue toward the green and start the process again.

Walk the green.
Walk the greenside bunkers.
Mark the water.
Mark the hazards.
Mark whatever else had to be marked.
Then, eventually, walk the full perimeter of the fairway from where it started to where it ended.

And then do it seventeen more times.

Originally, I believe the idea was that the entire course would be walked on foot.

Thankfully, someone eventually realized that walking 18,000 golf holes over six years might be considered excessive, possibly cruel, and likely frowned upon by at least one international human rights organization. So power carts became part of the process when needed.

I remain grateful for that decision.

Of course, the GPS dots were only part of the job.

There was also paperwork.

On each hole, I had to sketch a rough version of what I was mapping. Nothing fancy. Nobody was going to frame it. But it had to show the general layout of the hole, the shape of the fairway, where the bunkers were, where the water was, where the green sat, and how all the pieces fit together.

This mattered because back at the office, the software people would eventually be looking at thousands of digital dots on a computer screen.

Without the sketches, those dots could look like almost anything.

Was that a bunker?

A pond?

A green?

A mistake?

A nervous Canadian walking in circles while wearing an antenna?

The sketches helped them make sense of the data.

Once a golf course was mapped, the job still was not finished. I had to make sure I had a scorecard from the course, and when I got back to the hotel room, I would scan the scorecard, scan every hole sketch, upload all the GPS data, upload all the scanned images, and make sure everything was properly organized and sent back.

So even if I could map a course in about three hours, there was still roughly another hour of scanning, uploading, sorting, checking, and hoping I had not accidentally labelled the eighth hole as the fifteenth.

And remember, I would usually do two courses a day.

Sometimes three.

On occasion, even more.

So yes, I had to be organized.

Very organized.

Beyond the mapping itself, I was also responsible for contacting the golf courses, arranging permission to map them, booking my own hotels or motels, arranging rental vehicles when needed, arranging flights when needed, and figuring out how to get from one assignment to the next.

In essence, once I was out there, I was a one-man travelling golf course mapping department.

Yes, I had support from head office, and yes, they would sometimes let me know if certain golf courses had specifically requested to be mapped and needed to move up the priority list. But for the most part, when I was on the road, I had to make everything happen.

The planning.
The driving.
The scheduling.
The mapping.
The scanning.
The uploading.
The problem solving.

All of it.

And oddly enough, most golf courses were very cooperative. Out of all the places I visited, only a handful did not want me to map their golf course.

The reasons did not always make sense to me, but they owned the golf course, and that was their call.

After that first full day of classroom training and on-course learning, our boss and a couple of other company employees took us out for what was described as a special Mississippi dinner.

This sounded nice.

It also sounded suspicious.

We went to a lovely restaurant overlooking a small lake, which was beautiful, although I quietly hoped dinner had not been recently removed from that same lake.

The big event was crawfish.

Or crawdads.

Or mudbugs.

Or whatever name people use when they want small aquatic creatures to sound more charming than they actually look.

Up to that point in my life, my main exposure to crawdads had been through movies, which I did not consider formal culinary training.

The locals began discussing what kind we should order. There were options. Apparently, not all crawdads are created equal.

I had no idea what any of it meant.

They may as well have asked me to choose between three regional dialects of Tibetan.

So I did what any sensible Canadian golf professional would do in that situation.

I smiled and said, “You order.”

About ten minutes later, the waitress arrived and placed a platter in front of me.

At first, I assumed it was for the table.

That seemed reasonable. There were a lot of us, and this was a truly ridiculous amount of crawdads. It looked less like dinner and more like someone had dumped a small marine construction project onto a plate.

Then the waitress started putting similar platters in front of everyone else.

That was the moment I realized the mountain of crawdads in front of me was not for the group.

It was mine.

Apparently, in Mississippi, dinner can arrive as an uphill lie.

After a brief explanation of how to eat them, I began the process of dismantling my meal.

And let me say this: there is a surprising amount of work involved in eating something that gives back such a small amount of meat.

Twist this.
Pull that.
Peel this.
Avoid that.
Try not to look confused.
Repeat approximately four hundred times.

It was like eating seafood that came with an instruction manual and a mild upper-body workout.

At one point, I remember thinking that if I had to work this hard for every bite of food, I might finally lose some weight.

Still, I will admit something.

They were actually pretty good.

Messy, yes.

Labour-intensive, absolutely.

But tasty.

So there I was, one day into my new mapping career, sitting in Mississippi with GPS training in my head, crawdad juice on my hands, and the growing realization that this job was going to be unlike anything I had ever done before.

I had flown south to learn how to map golf courses.

I had been driven through a city that felt like it belonged to another time.

I had worn a backpack antenna around a golf course.

I had learned that a tee deck, a bunker, and a green could all become dots on a screen.

And I had discovered that in Mississippi, dinner sometimes stares back at you before you dismantle it.

Not bad for day one.

And I had not even mapped my first real golf course yet.

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Have We Been Here Before?

A True Story

A number of years ago, my wife was heading up to a golf event at Monterra Golf Course in the Blue Mountain resort area about two hours north of Toronto.

Now, before I go any further, I want to be very clear.

I am not saying my wife is directionally challenged.

That would be unfair.

What I am saying is that there have been moments over the years when I have not been entirely sure she could find the bathroom in our own house without favourable weather conditions and a little help from GPS.

On more than one occasion, we have been driving somewhere familiar and she has turned to me and said, “Have we been here before?”

And I am thinking, “Yes. This is Costco. We have been here approximately 428 times.”

So let’s just say her internal compass may not have been factory calibrated.

Anyway, Monterra Golf Course is a little unusual because it is divided by the main road that leads into the Blue Mountain resort area. Some holes are on one side of the road, and some holes are on the other.

That detail becomes important.

As my wife was driving into the resort area, she saw what she believed was the entrance leading toward the clubhouse and pro shop.

So she turned.

Perfectly reasonable.

At first.

After about a minute, she looked over and noticed something strange.

The clubhouse did not seem to be getting closer.

In fact, it appeared to be getting farther away.

Now, a person with a highly tuned sense of direction might see this as a clue.

My wife, being more of a free-range navigator, simply continued driving.

Perhaps this was just one of those long, winding golf course driveways.

Perhaps the parking lot was around the corner.

Perhaps golf courses in resort areas liked to build entrances that gave people time to reflect on their life choices.

Then she noticed some power carts going by.

They seemed awfully close to the road.

Again, another clue.

But not yet enough evidence to stop the investigation.

A short time later, she drove past four golfers preparing to putt on the 17th green.

Not near the 17th green.

On the 17th green.

Or close enough to it that these four golfers suddenly found themselves looking at a full-sized automobile where, historically speaking, full-sized automobiles are not usually part of the putting experience.

Their jaws dropped.

Their eyes widened.

You could almost hear the collective thought:

“That is either a very aggressive golf cart, or someone has made a serious mistake.”

And yes, you guessed it.

My wife had not turned into the driveway.

She had turned onto the cart path.

Not near the cart path.

Not beside the cart path.

Onto the cart path.

She was now driving her car on the golf course.

At some point, a marshal appeared, which was probably for the best before she accidentally played the last two holes as a par five in a sedan.

He stopped her, explained what had happened, and gently directed her back along the cart path on the 18th hole so she could eventually find her way to the actual parking lot.

As she drove past the pro shop, there were three staff members standing at the window, looking out and shaking their heads in disbelief.

And really, what else could they do?

There are days in the golf business when you see a pulled drive, a missed two-footer, a broken umbrella, or someone trying to hit a ball out of a flower bed.

And then there are days when someone drives a car down the cart path beside the 17th green.

The good news is that when my wife eventually made it into the pro shop, nobody seemed to know she was the person behind the wheel.

She does, however, remember hearing staff members talking among themselves about the crazy things you see at a golf course.

Which is fair.

Because golf courses do attract their share of strange moments.

But even by golf course standards, a car casually rolling past the 17th green while four golfers try to putt is not something you see every day.

Unless, of course, my wife is in the field.

Then all bets are off.

Most issues contain at least one thing intended to help your golf game.

Below is this week’s version, which may also be of interest to gardeners everywhere.

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You Clean Your Shoes, Don’t You?

Your clubs cannot do their job wearing half the golf course.

Many years ago, while teaching at an outdoor driving range, I had a new client arrive for a lesson.

As usual, I asked him to start by warming up with a 9-iron.

After a few swings, I moved in beside him and we began the lesson. Almost immediately, I noticed something strange.

The ball was reacting oddly coming off the clubface.

Now, at some outdoor ranges, this is not exactly unusual. If the golf balls look like they were manufactured around the same time the movie Jaws came out, you have to allow for a certain amount of creative ball flight.

Some range balls have lived a very hard life.

But in this case, the balls were actually new.

So I asked to see his 9-iron.

He handed it to me, and I turned the club over to inspect the face.

Mystery solved.

The grooves were not just dirty.

They were packed.

There was dirt, mud, grass, and enough organic material on the clubface to support a small farming operation.

At that point, he was not really hitting the ball with a clean golf club.

He was hitting it with the equivalent of a vegetable garden on the end of a shaft.

So before we talked about grip, posture, backswing, downswing, contact, balance, tempo, or anything else, we had to have a very important conversation.

About cleaning the clubface.

Because the grooves on a golf club are not there for decoration.

They have a job.

When the clubface meets the golf ball, loft helps launch the ball, while friction helps create spin. That backspin is part of what helps the ball climb into the air, fly properly, and react more predictably when it lands.

The grooves help that process by giving grass, dirt, moisture, and other debris somewhere to go.

But if the grooves are already packed with mud and grass, they cannot do their job.

At that point, you no longer have grooves.

You have memories of grooves.

And if you are the type of golfer who enjoys digging trenches — whether they are behind the ball, in front of the ball, or occasionally both during the same swing — then clubface maintenance becomes even more important.

Every divot leaves evidence.

That evidence usually ends up on the clubface.

Yet many golfers will carefully clean their shoes, wipe off their golf bag, polish their driver headcover, and then hit iron shots with a clubface that looks like it was recently used to plant tomatoes.

That makes no sense.

You clean your shoes, don’t you?

Then clean your clubs.

This is especially important with wedges and short irons, because those are the clubs where spin and control matter most.

If the face is covered in mud, grass, and dirt, do not be surprised when the ball comes off low, dead, jumpy, slippery, or just plain strange.

That may not be a swing flaw.

That may be a cleanliness flaw.

There is also a difference between pretending to clean the club and actually cleaning it.

A quick wipe on the grass might help a little.

A towel is better.

A wet towel is better still.

A proper club brush or groove cleaner is better again.

And then there is the classic move where a golfer tilts the club sideways and scrapes the face against the side of their shoe.

That is not graduate-level clubface cleaning.

That is junior kindergarten with a wedge.

It may make you feel like you did something, but if the dirt is still packed into the grooves, the clubface is still wearing half the golf course.

The simple habit is this:

Keep a towel handy. Wet one end if you can. After a shot that takes a divot, wipe the face before you put the club back in the bag. If there is dirt packed into the grooves, use a brush.

You do not have to be obsessive about it. Nobody is asking you to detail your 8-iron between shots with a toothbrush and a headlamp.

But you do need to give the club a fighting chance.

Clean grooves matter.

Healthy grooves matter.

A reasonably clean clubface matters.

Because golf is already hard enough without asking a golf ball to perform correctly after being struck by a garden rake.

So before you blame your swing, the range ball, the weather, your shoes, the alignment of the moon, or the person three stalls over making too much noise, take a quick look at your clubface.

If the clubface looks like it just escaped from a landscaping project, we may have found the first problem.

You clean your shoes, don’t you?

Good.

Now give your clubs the same courtesy.

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Closing

Closing

If you've made it this far...

you may have experienced the salad buffet, compliments of your lob wedge.

This week we’ve learned three important things:

Jackson, Mississippi may be located somewhere near The Twilight Zone.

There is a difference between a road less travelled and a road that makes four golfers question reality on the 17th green.

Cleaning your clubs is not glamorous, but it can be very helpful.

And please...

If you have ever made a wrong turn while driving your car, let me know if you ended up near the 150-yard marker on a golf course.

If you found this useful, or at least mildly entertaining, feel free to share it with:

a friend

a playing partner

or someone whose divots resemble the produce aisle at the grocery store.

And if you're looking to take your game a step further...

👉 I'd be happy to help — in person or online.

David Govan
PGA of Canada Professional

Golf Excellence Academy
Modern Golf Instruction

Creator of the 5C Golf Performance System
👉 GolfExcellence.ca

P.S. Next issue we'll talk about bartender golf, whether a ship can turn over, and whether Arnold got big working in the back shop.

Beyond that, the editorial strategy remains remarkably similar to my golf game:

We have a general direction, but the exact landing area is still unknown.