The Plan

Nish: 0:01

Every story has an ending. Does our quest to play the top 100 courses in 10 years have a good ending? This is the Top 110 Golf Podcast, episode 2. The Plan. What does every amateur duffer do when presented with a challenge that may be beyond them? They make a plan to convince themselves they can do it, and that’s what I did the very next night. Picture the scene it’s 8pm on a Sunday night, the kids are in bed and my wife has gone to bed early for an early start to work. The natural thing to do for somebody facing a challenge is open a bottle of wine, google the top 100 golf courses in the UK and Ireland and work out how to plot them on a map. It actually turns out. There’s a handy feature on Google Maps to plot all of these courses and create a master list. It enabled me to share it with Chris, which I did that very same night, although a little bit late. I’ll get to what I learnt from plotting all the courses on the map soon, but a shareable list with all the top courses on it, a challenge that is tough but sounds realistic, and it’s something a lot of people would love to do. There’s only one thing for it.

Nish: 1:28

At this point, I do what any self-respecting male would do I start to brag about it. Now, when I say brag, I’m going way over the top, bearing in mind it’s been 24 hours since we’ve actually agreed to do this. I’m sharing this list on Google Maps with all of my golf buddies. I’m sharing it with people that don’t even play golf. I’m sharing it with friends and family, and I just want to find out if any of them A think it’s a good idea, b want to get involved in any of it or all of it, and C just give me a bit of feedback. I just want to hear what they think. I can see already this is becoming an obsession, and I don’t know if that’s possible after only 24 hours and an idea that wasn’t mine, but it seems like I’m heading that way. So I learned three things in my heightened state of bragging. One no one really cares. I mean, I’m getting a lot of supportive messages. I’m getting a lot of people saying, yeah, brilliant, that’s a fantastic thing to do. Is it sincere? I don’t really know, but that’s the first thing. Secondly, I’m actually going to be quite annoying about this. I can see already this is going to start taking up a lot of my time, a lot of my mental space, and I’m going to talk about this to a lot of people. Thirdly, and actually quite surprisingly, a few people have said it is actually a good idea. But it’s a good idea for me. It’s not something they can do, but some people have started saying they want to get involved in some little elements of it, and I’m very much clinging on to that last point. That’s the thing that’s keeping me going. That’s the thing that’s motivating me to get this done and share a journey.

Nish: 3:33

So I promised earlier I’d talk about what I learned from plotting all of these courses on google maps. I can’t imagine many people have gone and done this in the past, so I’ll share that with you. Saves you the effort of doing it, because it took me quite a while. So there aren’t that many near us, and I was quite surprised by that. Um, we happen to be in this little belt of land, um that there isn’t much around. Um, however, there is a little bit of a cluster over towards southport and liverpool, so that gives us a little bit of a potential head start. I was also surprised that yorkshire hardly has any courses in the top 100 and I would have thought that kind of rugged coastline there’d be loads, but you know not really much there. Um, what I also learned was there are loads of golf courses, and I mean mean loads in the top 100 in Scotland.

Nish: 4:33

Now we’re quite handily placed in Manchester to get to Scotland, or certainly we’re not too far away. However, some of them getting up towards Aberdeen Inverness area. We’re looking at six, seven, eight-hour drives to get up there. So we’re going to have to cluster some of these courses. I think there is a huge number around Edinburgh and Dundee, which again surprised me. And then we’re looking at Ireland, and Ireland is a real zigzag challenge. You’ve really got to go backwards and forwards across the island quite a lot. So I think we’re going to cover quite a few miles in our journeys, which I hadn’t really accounted for too much, because you don’t think of that, do you don’t think of the practicalities of driving to places, to getting there. However, I do feel we’re quite centrally located for this challenge. I think if we were down south we might be struggling a little bit and we don’t have to do some really long golf trips, which I think, bearing in mind rule number one, which is we don’t want to impinge on our family life. That might have been a bit tricky.

Nish: 5:51

Um, there are also a hell of a lot of links courses on the coast. Now, I’m probably like your average golfer. I play mostly inland. I play a girl. I’m a member at a golf course called reddish veil. Um, it was designed by dr allister mckenzie and if you’re not familiar with him, he’s actually the guy who designed Augusta National, so pretty well-known designer of golf courses. So our course is quite good as an inland course and I remember that I’ve never really got bored of it. There’s a lot of challenge, a lot of risk and reward. There’s lots of different ways you can play each hole. So, yeah, I feel like we’ve got that as a bit of an advantage.

Nish: 6:32

However, the problem is Link’s courses are like a completely different beast and having played Birkdale a couple of times, I really really appreciated how different that is, how much you’ve got to really think about every single shot, and I remember getting off Birkdale twice being mentally absolutely goosed. It’s not physically that demanding, but you’re always thinking and you’re always trying to look for where your ball’s going. You’re always trying to find it somewhere, and it’s really mentally taxing that. So I think the Lynx courses are going to prove tough for me. I think the Lynx courses are going to prove tough for me. I think Chris is going to do well, because he’s used to playing on Lynx courses. He’s used to playing up on the coast in really, really, really bad weather. So I’m definitely going to have to make sure that all my waterproof gear is waterproof, unlike the Americans at the Ryder Cup, at Celtic Manor. At the Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor, and then also, looking at the map, I think we’re going to have to cluster, but that means we can do a few holidays. Hopefully the kids can get involved in that a little bit and we can get that to slide past the other halves.

Nish: 7:46

Now you might be wondering what I actually did with this Google Maps list, apart from sharing it, apart from bragging about what we were doing. Well, again, what would any amateur duffer do in this situation? You make a spreadsheet. So I popped all these courses on the spreadsheet, with a little bit of help from chat, gpt, and I popped all of the distances from where we are, so we could get a bit of a plan of action, for which ones we might be able to do earlier.

Nish: 8:16

It felt like a good way to do it was to target the courses that are nearest to us, um, initially, so, um, that was the first step. Put a spreadsheet together. Chris in his day job as an accountant, so a spreadsheet was right up his street and me, yeah, I love them as well. I’ve used them for all sorts of things. So, yeah, we were both buzzing a little bit from having those little cells to work at and tweak, but more on that in another episode. For now, all we had to think about was where are we gonna play first? Because that is when the clock starts ticking, that’s when it becomes official, that’s when it goes from being just a dream to we’re actually gonna do do this Next time. On the Top 110 Golf Podcast, we suddenly book the first course. The challenge has started.