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A Course Called... #4
A Course Called Home: Adventures of an Accidental Golf Course Owner
From Tom Coyne, the New York Times bestselling author of A Course Called America, comes a powerful new story five years in the making about a century-old golf course, the heart of a small town, and one man’s journey to bring them both back to life.
Tom Coyne has made a career out of travelling the world and playing golf with a trilogy of bestselling books titled A Course Called Scotland, A Course Called Ireland, and A Course Called America. But after checking every iconic destination off his list, Coyne decided to see what he could find in his own backyard. When he stumbled across the dilapidated Sullivan County Golf Club in New York’s Catskills, he wasn’t looking to buy a golf course—he was just chasing a feeling. But in an unexpected twist, he became the owner of a historic course on the brink of ruin, and with it, the keeper of its past, present, and future.
A Course Called Home is Coyne’s most personal and profound book yet—a heartfelt and often humorous chronicle of restoration, resilience, and finding purpose in unexpected places. It’s a story about digging in—literally and figuratively—as Coyne trades tee times for tractor hours, learning to mow fairways, rake bunkers, and revive a course rich in history but fading from memory.
The community that Coyne has found and cultivated is unlike the pristine, manicured version of the game you see on TV, played by millionaires in matching polos. The course is run by a tight-knit crew of groundskeepers who work long hours, not for prestige, but for pride. It’s played by regulars and first-timers alike who pay in cash and play in jeans, and is a place where visitors quickly become part of the fold.
In the tradition of his beloved golf travel trilogy, Coyne again taps into what makes the game timeless and transformative. But this round, he doesn’t have to travel just down the road from Woodstock, to a scrappy, 9-holer where golf once brought generations together. A Course Called Home delivers the perfect next a love letter to golf, community, and the places that still matter.
Tom Coyne has made a career out of travelling the world and playing golf with a trilogy of bestselling books titled A Course Called Scotland, A Course Called Ireland, and A Course Called America. But after checking every iconic destination off his list, Coyne decided to see what he could find in his own backyard. When he stumbled across the dilapidated Sullivan County Golf Club in New York’s Catskills, he wasn’t looking to buy a golf course—he was just chasing a feeling. But in an unexpected twist, he became the owner of a historic course on the brink of ruin, and with it, the keeper of its past, present, and future.
A Course Called Home is Coyne’s most personal and profound book yet—a heartfelt and often humorous chronicle of restoration, resilience, and finding purpose in unexpected places. It’s a story about digging in—literally and figuratively—as Coyne trades tee times for tractor hours, learning to mow fairways, rake bunkers, and revive a course rich in history but fading from memory.
The community that Coyne has found and cultivated is unlike the pristine, manicured version of the game you see on TV, played by millionaires in matching polos. The course is run by a tight-knit crew of groundskeepers who work long hours, not for prestige, but for pride. It’s played by regulars and first-timers alike who pay in cash and play in jeans, and is a place where visitors quickly become part of the fold.
In the tradition of his beloved golf travel trilogy, Coyne again taps into what makes the game timeless and transformative. But this round, he doesn’t have to travel just down the road from Woodstock, to a scrappy, 9-holer where golf once brought generations together. A Course Called Home delivers the perfect next a love letter to golf, community, and the places that still matter.
- GenresSports
304 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 5, 2026
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May 5, 2026
The Field Under Dew
Tom Coyne’s “A Course Called Home” turns a golfer’s dream into a mud-spattered meditation on care, labor, and the cost of keeping one imperfect place alive.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 5th, 2026
A small blue house, a lone mower, and a quiet red flag turn Tom Coyne’s “A Course Called Home” into an image of care before play begins – the dream of golf-course ownership translated into dew, labor, and first light.
Most golfers think they want the keys to a course. Tom Coyne’s “A Course Called Home” hands over the less embroidered sequel: the mower gets stuck, the reels clog with sucking Catskills mud, and the carts develop the temperament of retired livestock. The ladies’ room ceiling surrenders. A snapping turtle selects the bunker as a maternity ward. Someone has to explain that the strange little boxes on the new carts are not decorative coolers. They are supposed to be full of sand.
That is where Coyne’s clubhouse daydream starts drawing blood. This is not golf as vacation from consequence, not golf as varnished leisure, not golf as the ceremonial procession of famous first tees, though Coyne knows that world well enough to remain susceptible to its spell. “A Course Called Home” is about the fantasy after it has been issued a payroll account, a leaky roof, a broken pump, a municipality of opinions, and rain that seems to have purchased a nonresident membership. It turns the dream of golf-course ownership into a mud-spattered apprenticeship in care: not the glamour of playing famous holes, but the stranger, steadier spell of keeping one imperfect place alive.
Coyne, long a traveler and chronicler of golf, is dragged into that apprenticeship by Shaun, the superintendent of Sullivan County Golf & Country Club in Liberty, New York. The old nine-hole Catskills course is nearing its hundredth anniversary and nearing closure. It is not grand, and not pretending. It is short on functioning equipment, buried in winter, and attached to a clubhouse that remains technically vertical through some alliance of habit, luck, and structural denial.
Coyne goes to see it. He meets Shaun at the New Munson Diner, then tours a property that seems to have been curated by neglect with a sense of humor. The clubhouse is peeling and cold. The kitchen is a threat. The locker room has dungeon ambitions. The cart barn is full of machines in mechanical afterlife. The maintenance shed contains more evidence than equipment. In the attic: a cot, an old Polaroid, a fishing basket, and the leather nunchucks that give Part 1 its title.
The land refuses to support his exit route. From the height of the third fairway, Coyne sees severe, unreasonable, old-fashioned golf: slopes that would bankrupt a modern architect, streams that insist on being crossed, views doing dangerous work on the heart. The course is not polished, but it has character money can reveal but not manufacture. It was found as much as built.
The bargain that follows sounds absurd until one has already said yes. Coyne does not exactly buy the course at first. He takes on the operating burden for a season: payroll, taxes, insurance, staffing, fees, repairs, complaints, weather, all of it. The current owners, Sims Foster and Chris Monello, have kept the property alive but cannot keep absorbing the red ink. Coyne gets a trial year and an option to buy. He also gets a checking account, a lawyer, a collapsing building, a superintendent with almost no resources and fierce devotion, and a membership with its own older operating theology.
That theology is not Coyne’s. He arrives with instincts formed by great courses, handsome scorecards, course ratings, bag tags, merchandise that looks intentional, and the belief that a club ought to know how it appears to strangers. Sullivan has inherited permissions and parking-lot habits, cash customs, a red basket of used balls, carts that may or may not climb the hill, and men who remember when the place was theirs in more than spirit. Every new rule changes someone’s old permission. Raise fees, and someone is angry. Remove ball washers, and someone believes civilization itself has been insulted. Introduce one tee marker per box, and simplicity becomes suspicious.
The story widens here. It is not only a golf memoir, not only a comic restoration story. Its central bind is sharper: can Sullivan be saved without being made glossy enough to forget itself? Shaun’s maintenance-shed commandment – remember what we are – becomes the rule pinned above the whole enterprise. A failing course needs better standards. It needs working carts, clear signs, sharper blades, safer bathrooms, functioning systems, and enough outside money to survive. But its claim on Coyne also lies in its scruffy democracy: locals in jeans, first-timers, cash payers, elderly chippers, teenagers learning the code, Orthodox boys buying Sullivan hats with delighted gravity, a retired mechanic with a flip phone working the counter, and golfers who may not know every ritual but know whether they are being treated as intruders.
The sand boxes on the new carts provide the book’s sharpest small reversal. Coyne is pleased when the carts arrive with containers for divot mix. Jimmy, the pro-shop hire from Staten Island, removes them because they appear to be useless boxes of dirt. Annoyance gives way to recognition. Much of what golf calls etiquette is not instinct. It is education. People do not automatically know why carts should avoid collars, why divot mix matters, why a bunker rake is both tool and treaty, why bags do not belong on greens. Golf’s manners can masquerade as morality when they are often merely a code someone has or has not been taught. For a book so steeped in old golf customs, this is a rebuke to the game’s habit of mistaking ignorance for disrespect.
Coyne is sharpest when upkeep turns slapstick: a mower sulks in the mud, a roof caves in, a turtle complicates the chain of command. The prose runs on elastic legs. Sentences lengthen by accumulation, piling irritation upon irritation until absurdity becomes almost architectural. A toilet-paper holder becomes a governance question. A popcorn machine summons an engineering summit. An eggplant threatens staff harmony. The wit is mock-solemn but rarely cruel. Coyne understands that tiny problems are tiny only when someone else has to solve them.
The language is plainspoken but closely tuned. Coyne knows the vocabulary of golf architecture and agronomy – thatch, reels, slope rating, inputs, mow lines – but he keeps it close to mud, money, and human bodies. Specialized language is usually interrupted by a broken fixture, a missing spatula, or a question that costs more than the answer. Expertise and absurdity share a cart.
The book’s design is slyer than its shaggy surface suggests. Archival clippings run through the narrative, giving Sullivan a past that does not begin when Coyne arrives with fresh ideas and a debit card. We see the 1925 purchase of the Hull farm, early tournaments, fires, land sales, thefts, Otto Hillig’s transatlantic flight, and the Catskills’ long movement through boom, collapse, and partial reinvention. The clippings do not decorate the story. They remind Coyne, and us, that the course had a life before his rescue. Sullivan has already burned, sold, hosted, lost, and restarted. His season is one more wager in a long local habit of risk.
The monthly checking-account snapshots are even better. They sit inside the book like a dry second narrator: terse, immune to romance, and unimpressed by a good view. A golf course may have soul, but it also has subtractions. This is one of Coyne’s best formal choices, because the balance sheet keeps tugging sentiment back down. Love without a bank balance becomes fantasy. A ledger with no reason to keep opening is how places like Sullivan disappear.
The crew is where the book’s overcrowding becomes atmosphere. Shaun, sober, punk-edged, exacting, and allergic to pretension, is the indispensable counterweight to Coyne’s traveling-golfer instincts. Jimmy brings velocity, vegetables, and flip-phone pride. Gary brings calm and order. John brings bluntness, a bad back, local intelligence, a puppy named Ringo, and eventually the Sullivan logo tattooed onto his arm – proof of loyalty so funny and alarming that the business plan itself seems to wince. Bearded Chris, quiet and tireless, embodies the work that keeps places standing without asking to be praised for it. Henry’s first paycheck becomes a Vokey wedge, and with it the club gets a future in miniature. Phil, who mostly wants somewhere to spend two hours chipping and putting, gives it a soul.
Coyne’s family material deepens the title rather than merely sweetening the edges. Allyson’s tolerance for golf nonsense becomes something more active as she imagines the Catskills as a shared family place. The daughters ride carts, explore the creek, and begin to belong before they would ever phrase it that way. Maggie reading “The Outsiders” under a tree is one of the book’s loveliest images: a private transmission unfolding inside a public experiment.
At ninety, Coyne’s father plays Sullivan after a lifetime of golf that began in the Navy and passed through Rolling Green into his son’s childhood. The Catskills stir old memories of Scranton, St. Michael’s School for Boys, his brother Jack, and a white horse from childhood. In that section, “home” is not where the search ends. It is where memory, landscape, father, son, and one more round briefly occupy the same tee time.
Fame wanders in, but the book is better when fame has mud on its shoes. Bill Murray matters less as sparkle than as an amiable deus ex fairway: first arriving in Tractor Supply overalls on a wildfire-hazed day, later calling during a Charles Schwab shoot to say, almost casually, that he is in for half the investment. The moment is cinematic, yes, but Coyne lets it be frightening too. The dream becomes real. Now it can fail with a larger invoice.
What the book most durably does is turn golf from appetite into obligation. Coyne begins as a connoisseur, a collector of courses, trips, logos, and stories. Sullivan turns him into the person who knows where the fairway stays wet, who must tell Teddy to keep his cart away from the green, who has to scold a teenager without becoming the old golf scold he once feared, who visits John in the hospital with bagels, who learns that a course is not fully known until it has annoyed, exhausted, and obligated you. If “Shop Class as Soulcraft” by Matthew B. Crawford argues for the dignity of manual competence, Coyne gives the golf-course version in muddier, funnier form. If “A Walk in the Woods” by Bill Bryson offers comic adventure punctured by discomfort, Coyne’s book goes further: the trail becomes a business, and the blisters come with payroll taxes.
The trouble is that Coyne rarely meets a good anecdote he wants to leave in the cart barn. The eggplant mystery, the mushroom man, the popcorn machine, the Murphys arriving by taxi, the Orthodox cart inquiries, the hole-by-hole strategy, the golf-industry context, the investor meetings, the staff backstories – much of this is delightful, and much of it earns its place. But the book’s appetite is large. At times every good story seems to want a tee time. The result is not dead weight so much as genial looseness: a crowded foursome that occasionally plays a little slowly.
The rough gets thicker where the book turns toward land, faith, class, and money. Coyne sees prejudice, old club divisions, outsider capital, local anxiety, Orthodox and Hasidic communities, and the real-estate gravity tugging at the property. Still, some of these matters stay in the rough rather than the fairway. They are handled through scene and comic observation more than sustained inquiry. The choice preserves the book’s comic ease, but it leaves some of its hardest pressures only partly played.
That pressure matters because the book does not purify its dream. Sullivan may survive only by changing. It needs outside money to remain affordable. It needs higher standards without snobbery. It needs development without surrendering to real estate. It needs visitors without making locals feel displaced. A simpler book would treat restoration as virtue. Coyne treats it as negotiation: fees, homes, visitors, locals, investors, and standards all pulling at once.
The cash drawer makes the larger weather audible. Small shared places are constantly asked to justify themselves in numbers that rarely catch their use. Sullivan is not only a recreational property. It is where Phil gets his two hours, where Henry learns to want a better wedge, where workers become a crew, where local memory has somewhere to sit with a beer. Phil’s two hours do not show up properly on the books, but the books still decide whether the doors open. That is the harsh little knot the book keeps tightening.
By the end, Coyne has not been converted so much as recalibrated. He does not stop loving great courses. He remains susceptible to Monterey, Cypress, fine design, private rituals, and the gleaming temptations of elite golf. The book is more honest for admitting it. Sullivan does not cure taste. It humbles it. By October, the property has not become unrecognizable. The clubhouse is cleaner, the fairways better, the logo brighter, the staff fuller, the bank account less horrifying. The changed thing is his eye. He has learned to see from the maintenance shed outward.
So the closing staff outing lands because it reverses the season’s usual order. The workers finally become players. Bearded Chris walks along. Gary and Jimmy reveal their swings. Shaun plays quickly, as if work is still waiting, because work is always waiting. Coyne considers making a ceremonial speech, but Shaun supplies the better line: whatever happens next, they will always have the year they ran a golf course together. Then he hits his drive into the autumn light.
My rating: 87/100, which corresponds to 4/5 Goodreads stars under the 80–89 range. That feels right for a book whose best passages are funny, tactile, humane, and unexpectedly wise, even if its abundance sometimes outpaces its discipline.
“A Course Called Home” is not a spotless round. It wanders, jokes, remembers, overorders, improvises, and occasionally leaves a tool where someone else will have to find it. But it understands something cleaner books often miss: care arrives before the first golfer and stays to count the carts. It is the field under dew, the mower line held straight, the cracked bridge still bearing weight, and a few men watching one last ball rise against orange October trees.
The earliest layout studies test the image’s central balance: house, mower, flag, and open ground arranged so the scene feels less like a golf view than an accidental home held inside a field.
The cover-born palette is reduced into disciplined washes of muted blue, moss, olive, cream, gray, and one restrained red accent – the emotional vocabulary of the final watercolor before the scene appears.
The underdrawing reveals the image’s quiet architecture: the small house set left of center, the mower figure scaled down by the field, and the course opened into breathing space.
The first transparent washes begin turning structure into atmosphere, letting morning light, damp grass, and the blue house emerge before detail or sentiment can overtake the composition.
The border is worked out as a soft property line, scorecard frame, and field-note edge – a handmade boundary for a book about keeping a place from slipping away.
Small posture studies refine the mower figure’s lean, weight, and scale, making the caretaker feel human and bodily even when nearly swallowed by the openness of the course.
These grass and dew studies test how one cut line can carry the review’s whole argument: care made visible as a dark path through wet morning turf.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Tom Coyne’s “A Course Called Home” turns a golfer’s dream into a mud-spattered meditation on care, labor, and the cost of keeping one imperfect place alive.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 5th, 2026
A small blue house, a lone mower, and a quiet red flag turn Tom Coyne’s “A Course Called Home” into an image of care before play begins – the dream of golf-course ownership translated into dew, labor, and first light.
Most golfers think they want the keys to a course. Tom Coyne’s “A Course Called Home” hands over the less embroidered sequel: the mower gets stuck, the reels clog with sucking Catskills mud, and the carts develop the temperament of retired livestock. The ladies’ room ceiling surrenders. A snapping turtle selects the bunker as a maternity ward. Someone has to explain that the strange little boxes on the new carts are not decorative coolers. They are supposed to be full of sand.
That is where Coyne’s clubhouse daydream starts drawing blood. This is not golf as vacation from consequence, not golf as varnished leisure, not golf as the ceremonial procession of famous first tees, though Coyne knows that world well enough to remain susceptible to its spell. “A Course Called Home” is about the fantasy after it has been issued a payroll account, a leaky roof, a broken pump, a municipality of opinions, and rain that seems to have purchased a nonresident membership. It turns the dream of golf-course ownership into a mud-spattered apprenticeship in care: not the glamour of playing famous holes, but the stranger, steadier spell of keeping one imperfect place alive.
Coyne, long a traveler and chronicler of golf, is dragged into that apprenticeship by Shaun, the superintendent of Sullivan County Golf & Country Club in Liberty, New York. The old nine-hole Catskills course is nearing its hundredth anniversary and nearing closure. It is not grand, and not pretending. It is short on functioning equipment, buried in winter, and attached to a clubhouse that remains technically vertical through some alliance of habit, luck, and structural denial.
Coyne goes to see it. He meets Shaun at the New Munson Diner, then tours a property that seems to have been curated by neglect with a sense of humor. The clubhouse is peeling and cold. The kitchen is a threat. The locker room has dungeon ambitions. The cart barn is full of machines in mechanical afterlife. The maintenance shed contains more evidence than equipment. In the attic: a cot, an old Polaroid, a fishing basket, and the leather nunchucks that give Part 1 its title.
The land refuses to support his exit route. From the height of the third fairway, Coyne sees severe, unreasonable, old-fashioned golf: slopes that would bankrupt a modern architect, streams that insist on being crossed, views doing dangerous work on the heart. The course is not polished, but it has character money can reveal but not manufacture. It was found as much as built.
The bargain that follows sounds absurd until one has already said yes. Coyne does not exactly buy the course at first. He takes on the operating burden for a season: payroll, taxes, insurance, staffing, fees, repairs, complaints, weather, all of it. The current owners, Sims Foster and Chris Monello, have kept the property alive but cannot keep absorbing the red ink. Coyne gets a trial year and an option to buy. He also gets a checking account, a lawyer, a collapsing building, a superintendent with almost no resources and fierce devotion, and a membership with its own older operating theology.
That theology is not Coyne’s. He arrives with instincts formed by great courses, handsome scorecards, course ratings, bag tags, merchandise that looks intentional, and the belief that a club ought to know how it appears to strangers. Sullivan has inherited permissions and parking-lot habits, cash customs, a red basket of used balls, carts that may or may not climb the hill, and men who remember when the place was theirs in more than spirit. Every new rule changes someone’s old permission. Raise fees, and someone is angry. Remove ball washers, and someone believes civilization itself has been insulted. Introduce one tee marker per box, and simplicity becomes suspicious.
The story widens here. It is not only a golf memoir, not only a comic restoration story. Its central bind is sharper: can Sullivan be saved without being made glossy enough to forget itself? Shaun’s maintenance-shed commandment – remember what we are – becomes the rule pinned above the whole enterprise. A failing course needs better standards. It needs working carts, clear signs, sharper blades, safer bathrooms, functioning systems, and enough outside money to survive. But its claim on Coyne also lies in its scruffy democracy: locals in jeans, first-timers, cash payers, elderly chippers, teenagers learning the code, Orthodox boys buying Sullivan hats with delighted gravity, a retired mechanic with a flip phone working the counter, and golfers who may not know every ritual but know whether they are being treated as intruders.
The sand boxes on the new carts provide the book’s sharpest small reversal. Coyne is pleased when the carts arrive with containers for divot mix. Jimmy, the pro-shop hire from Staten Island, removes them because they appear to be useless boxes of dirt. Annoyance gives way to recognition. Much of what golf calls etiquette is not instinct. It is education. People do not automatically know why carts should avoid collars, why divot mix matters, why a bunker rake is both tool and treaty, why bags do not belong on greens. Golf’s manners can masquerade as morality when they are often merely a code someone has or has not been taught. For a book so steeped in old golf customs, this is a rebuke to the game’s habit of mistaking ignorance for disrespect.
Coyne is sharpest when upkeep turns slapstick: a mower sulks in the mud, a roof caves in, a turtle complicates the chain of command. The prose runs on elastic legs. Sentences lengthen by accumulation, piling irritation upon irritation until absurdity becomes almost architectural. A toilet-paper holder becomes a governance question. A popcorn machine summons an engineering summit. An eggplant threatens staff harmony. The wit is mock-solemn but rarely cruel. Coyne understands that tiny problems are tiny only when someone else has to solve them.
The language is plainspoken but closely tuned. Coyne knows the vocabulary of golf architecture and agronomy – thatch, reels, slope rating, inputs, mow lines – but he keeps it close to mud, money, and human bodies. Specialized language is usually interrupted by a broken fixture, a missing spatula, or a question that costs more than the answer. Expertise and absurdity share a cart.
The book’s design is slyer than its shaggy surface suggests. Archival clippings run through the narrative, giving Sullivan a past that does not begin when Coyne arrives with fresh ideas and a debit card. We see the 1925 purchase of the Hull farm, early tournaments, fires, land sales, thefts, Otto Hillig’s transatlantic flight, and the Catskills’ long movement through boom, collapse, and partial reinvention. The clippings do not decorate the story. They remind Coyne, and us, that the course had a life before his rescue. Sullivan has already burned, sold, hosted, lost, and restarted. His season is one more wager in a long local habit of risk.
The monthly checking-account snapshots are even better. They sit inside the book like a dry second narrator: terse, immune to romance, and unimpressed by a good view. A golf course may have soul, but it also has subtractions. This is one of Coyne’s best formal choices, because the balance sheet keeps tugging sentiment back down. Love without a bank balance becomes fantasy. A ledger with no reason to keep opening is how places like Sullivan disappear.
The crew is where the book’s overcrowding becomes atmosphere. Shaun, sober, punk-edged, exacting, and allergic to pretension, is the indispensable counterweight to Coyne’s traveling-golfer instincts. Jimmy brings velocity, vegetables, and flip-phone pride. Gary brings calm and order. John brings bluntness, a bad back, local intelligence, a puppy named Ringo, and eventually the Sullivan logo tattooed onto his arm – proof of loyalty so funny and alarming that the business plan itself seems to wince. Bearded Chris, quiet and tireless, embodies the work that keeps places standing without asking to be praised for it. Henry’s first paycheck becomes a Vokey wedge, and with it the club gets a future in miniature. Phil, who mostly wants somewhere to spend two hours chipping and putting, gives it a soul.
Coyne’s family material deepens the title rather than merely sweetening the edges. Allyson’s tolerance for golf nonsense becomes something more active as she imagines the Catskills as a shared family place. The daughters ride carts, explore the creek, and begin to belong before they would ever phrase it that way. Maggie reading “The Outsiders” under a tree is one of the book’s loveliest images: a private transmission unfolding inside a public experiment.
At ninety, Coyne’s father plays Sullivan after a lifetime of golf that began in the Navy and passed through Rolling Green into his son’s childhood. The Catskills stir old memories of Scranton, St. Michael’s School for Boys, his brother Jack, and a white horse from childhood. In that section, “home” is not where the search ends. It is where memory, landscape, father, son, and one more round briefly occupy the same tee time.
Fame wanders in, but the book is better when fame has mud on its shoes. Bill Murray matters less as sparkle than as an amiable deus ex fairway: first arriving in Tractor Supply overalls on a wildfire-hazed day, later calling during a Charles Schwab shoot to say, almost casually, that he is in for half the investment. The moment is cinematic, yes, but Coyne lets it be frightening too. The dream becomes real. Now it can fail with a larger invoice.
What the book most durably does is turn golf from appetite into obligation. Coyne begins as a connoisseur, a collector of courses, trips, logos, and stories. Sullivan turns him into the person who knows where the fairway stays wet, who must tell Teddy to keep his cart away from the green, who has to scold a teenager without becoming the old golf scold he once feared, who visits John in the hospital with bagels, who learns that a course is not fully known until it has annoyed, exhausted, and obligated you. If “Shop Class as Soulcraft” by Matthew B. Crawford argues for the dignity of manual competence, Coyne gives the golf-course version in muddier, funnier form. If “A Walk in the Woods” by Bill Bryson offers comic adventure punctured by discomfort, Coyne’s book goes further: the trail becomes a business, and the blisters come with payroll taxes.
The trouble is that Coyne rarely meets a good anecdote he wants to leave in the cart barn. The eggplant mystery, the mushroom man, the popcorn machine, the Murphys arriving by taxi, the Orthodox cart inquiries, the hole-by-hole strategy, the golf-industry context, the investor meetings, the staff backstories – much of this is delightful, and much of it earns its place. But the book’s appetite is large. At times every good story seems to want a tee time. The result is not dead weight so much as genial looseness: a crowded foursome that occasionally plays a little slowly.
The rough gets thicker where the book turns toward land, faith, class, and money. Coyne sees prejudice, old club divisions, outsider capital, local anxiety, Orthodox and Hasidic communities, and the real-estate gravity tugging at the property. Still, some of these matters stay in the rough rather than the fairway. They are handled through scene and comic observation more than sustained inquiry. The choice preserves the book’s comic ease, but it leaves some of its hardest pressures only partly played.
That pressure matters because the book does not purify its dream. Sullivan may survive only by changing. It needs outside money to remain affordable. It needs higher standards without snobbery. It needs development without surrendering to real estate. It needs visitors without making locals feel displaced. A simpler book would treat restoration as virtue. Coyne treats it as negotiation: fees, homes, visitors, locals, investors, and standards all pulling at once.
The cash drawer makes the larger weather audible. Small shared places are constantly asked to justify themselves in numbers that rarely catch their use. Sullivan is not only a recreational property. It is where Phil gets his two hours, where Henry learns to want a better wedge, where workers become a crew, where local memory has somewhere to sit with a beer. Phil’s two hours do not show up properly on the books, but the books still decide whether the doors open. That is the harsh little knot the book keeps tightening.
By the end, Coyne has not been converted so much as recalibrated. He does not stop loving great courses. He remains susceptible to Monterey, Cypress, fine design, private rituals, and the gleaming temptations of elite golf. The book is more honest for admitting it. Sullivan does not cure taste. It humbles it. By October, the property has not become unrecognizable. The clubhouse is cleaner, the fairways better, the logo brighter, the staff fuller, the bank account less horrifying. The changed thing is his eye. He has learned to see from the maintenance shed outward.
So the closing staff outing lands because it reverses the season’s usual order. The workers finally become players. Bearded Chris walks along. Gary and Jimmy reveal their swings. Shaun plays quickly, as if work is still waiting, because work is always waiting. Coyne considers making a ceremonial speech, but Shaun supplies the better line: whatever happens next, they will always have the year they ran a golf course together. Then he hits his drive into the autumn light.
My rating: 87/100, which corresponds to 4/5 Goodreads stars under the 80–89 range. That feels right for a book whose best passages are funny, tactile, humane, and unexpectedly wise, even if its abundance sometimes outpaces its discipline.
“A Course Called Home” is not a spotless round. It wanders, jokes, remembers, overorders, improvises, and occasionally leaves a tool where someone else will have to find it. But it understands something cleaner books often miss: care arrives before the first golfer and stays to count the carts. It is the field under dew, the mower line held straight, the cracked bridge still bearing weight, and a few men watching one last ball rise against orange October trees.
The earliest layout studies test the image’s central balance: house, mower, flag, and open ground arranged so the scene feels less like a golf view than an accidental home held inside a field.
The cover-born palette is reduced into disciplined washes of muted blue, moss, olive, cream, gray, and one restrained red accent – the emotional vocabulary of the final watercolor before the scene appears.
The underdrawing reveals the image’s quiet architecture: the small house set left of center, the mower figure scaled down by the field, and the course opened into breathing space.
The first transparent washes begin turning structure into atmosphere, letting morning light, damp grass, and the blue house emerge before detail or sentiment can overtake the composition.
The border is worked out as a soft property line, scorecard frame, and field-note edge – a handmade boundary for a book about keeping a place from slipping away.
Small posture studies refine the mower figure’s lean, weight, and scale, making the caretaker feel human and bodily even when nearly swallowed by the openness of the course.
These grass and dew studies test how one cut line can carry the review’s whole argument: care made visible as a dark path through wet morning turf.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
February 24, 2026
Honored to write the first review on Goodreads! If you love all things golf, as I do, you will be hooked on line one. This is a very specific niche topic, so my 4 rating is for my other golf enthusiasts. I laughed out loud, shook my head, rolled my eyes, and felt every word Tom said. He is a masterful storyteller that weaves in the beauty of golf, and above all, the beauty of grit, teamwork and passion. I know that I could walk into this pro shop and immediately be treated as family. Thank you for this story and taking us on a journey of a lifetime. A must read for a golfer…
Thank you NetGalley for the wonderful opportunity to read in advance!
Thank you NetGalley for the wonderful opportunity to read in advance!
May 7, 2026
Tom Coyne has done it again. This book is wonderful and it's not just about golf. It's about people and life and second chances. It's interesting and heartwarming and Coyne is a master storyteller.
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