Once again, after reading some of the comments on my last blog, I am impressed with the astounding athletic ability of some of you to type with your heads that far up your butts. Man, it must be dark in there.
The point was, as others of you correctly realized, that affordable golf is available in most of the country, and those of you unfortunate enough to live in metropolitan areas will have to travel a bit to find reasonably priced golf. (A phonetic version will be made available for guys like WestAllstar, and the guy who assumed I live in Toronto.)
Just as I get all that affordability stuff off my chest, the postman drops off the new issue of INDEX, a Golf Digest publication aimed at business tycoons and, apparently, impoverished golf writers.
Here is the antithesis of affordable golf. It recommends the SIM2 Grand Cinema C3X 1080 100-inch projector TV for your media room ($32,495), talks about Brad Faxon's new 10,000-square-foot Rhode Island house, and reviews a $1,400 Swiss Army knife with golf attachments.
INDEX also suggests you might need a $12,400 Audemars Piguet watch to keep track of just how slow that foursome in front of you is.
Of course, it also says Alberta Premium is "a rare, 100-per-cent rye whiskey, rare, a real surprise." So I can at least sip the same hootch as those CEOs who read this magazine.
The mention of the rye is just one of several allusions to our country, all of them, surprisingly, positive.
Their list of the world's 50 best golf hotels is split into "United States" and "International." The Lodge at Sea Island in Georgia tops the U.S. list, and The Lodge at Kauri Cliffs in New Zealand is No. 1 in the rest of the world.
But we don't fare too badly: the Fairmont Jasper Park comes in at No. 10, and the Four Seasons Whistler is 11th. The Fairmont Banff Springs is 15th, the Westin Bear Mountain Victoria 16th, the Fairmont Chateau Whistler 19th, and the Fairmont St. Andrews is 22nd. Six out of 25. Not bad at all.
Now the question is how do I get to stay at one of them? In the words of the immortal Walter Hagen, "I don't necessarily want to be a millionaire. I just want to live like one."