Growing up a couple of miles from Bob-O-Link Golf Club in Orchard Park, we never really thought of ourselves as golfers. That word felt too formal, too country-club. We were just a handful of kids who always seemed to have golf clubs leaning against the garage wall or tossed in the corner of the basement. My friends and I—three or four of us around the same age—treated those clubs the way other kids treated baseball bats or skateboards. They were simply part of the landscape, as ordinary and necessary as the bikes we rode or the streetlights that came on at dusk.
We didn’t have matching bags. The clubs were mismatched hand-me-downs: wooden-shafted woods with cracked grips, irons with dents from years of garage-sale abuse, a putter that had clearly lived several previous lives. The equipment itself told the story. Golf here wasn’t about status. It was something you did with whatever was lying around.
One of us liked to repeat the old story that golf began in Scotland with people hitting rocks at English soldiers. It’s a great story, even if historians don’t think it’s true. Like a lot of good golf tales, it says more about Scottish humor than Scottish history. We didn’t care either way. We just kept swinging.
The centerpiece of our world was the backyard course we built at my house. It wasn’t fancy. A coffee can, emptied and washed, was sunk into the ground to serve as the cup. Around it we mowed the grass a little shorter so the ball would roll true, or at least true enough for our purposes. We laid out six tees, carefully chosen spots that gave each hole its own personality. Play those six holes three times and you had a full eighteen. On paper it was a par 72. In reality it was whatever the day decided to make it. Because there were no real greens, we played every shot with 9-irons. That single limitation turned the entire course into a short-game laboratory. Every approach became a chip or a soft pitch, and over time it improved our chipping without us ever thinking about it as practice.
The longer holes were defined by the house itself. The house sat squarely in the way, a solid obstacle of aluminum siding and roof. Going over the house was an automatic penalty. That single rule forced every player into a proper dogleg—around the structure instead of across it. You had to shape the shot, keep it low, or accept the stroke and the ribbing that came with it.
“House!”
“No way—that cleared the roof!”
“Penalty.”
We argued about the exact line of the dogleg the way serious golfers argue about preferred lies. Someone would claim the corner of the garage was the edge of the fairway; someone else would insist the imaginary boundary ran closer to the driveway. Those debates could last longer than the round itself. Looking back, the house wasn’t just an obstacle. You learned to work around what was in front of you instead of trying to smash through it. Years later, on real courses, I still catch myself reading a landscape the same way—looking for the angle the obstacle forces you to take.
When the backyard started to feel too small, we crossed the street to the high school. The campus sat right there, open and mostly empty after the last bell. Each of us carried a single 9-iron and a scuffed ball. That was the entire arsenal. The “holes” were whatever solid object presented itself: the thick trunk of a maple, a gray utility box, a telephone pole standing alone in the grass. The winner of the previous hole earned the right to choose the next target.
“Closest to the pole chooses.”
A pure, hard line drive that cracked against the wood or metal counted as a hole-in-one. Anything else required a chip or a pitch to finish. We became specialists with that one club. You learn a lot about trajectory and spin when the only club in your hand is a 9-iron and the target is twenty or thirty yards away. Soft chips, low punches under imaginary branches, high floaters that landed soft—we practiced them all without ever thinking of it as practice. It was just the game. Only later, on a real course, did I realize those evenings had already taught us the short game.
On certain days the ambition grew larger. There was a country club not far away—quiet, private, and, during the middle of the afternoon when the members were thin, largely unguarded. If you timed it right you could slip on and usually get through holes 10 through 17 before anyone paid too much attention. Those holes felt different in the daylight. The fairways were wider than anything we had at home, the greens smoother. We never took anything that didn’t belong to us. No balls from the practice green, no tees from the boxes, nothing. We just played. When you finished the seventeenth you were right back near the road and simply walked out the way you came. The whole thing was pure daytime grift—quiet, quick, and clean.
And then there was Bob-O-Link itself—the real course with the real lights, and the driving range that sat beside it. That was the night place. We always exaggerated how often we played there. In truth it was probably only about ten times across those years, but the nights we did go feel larger than the number. Western New York summers have their own particular weight: heavy humidity that settles in after dark, the steady drone of cicadas, the mixed smell of cut grass and warm asphalt, sometimes the faint distant hum of traffic or the stadium lights glowing from the direction of the old Rich Stadium. We would arrive around ten, when the last of the regular players had gone home and the course belonged to whoever was willing to walk it in the dark. The lights hummed overhead, casting long, soft shadows across the short fairways. The par-3 layout stretched out in front of us, empty and inviting. We played with a few beers, sometimes with other enhancements, talking too loud and laughing at bad shots that somehow still found the green. The driving range sat quiet under the same lights. On nights when we didn’t feel like playing a full round we would just hit balls into the darkness, listening for the soft thump when they landed.
The place felt like it had been waiting for us.
Years later I learned that Bob-O-Link had been built in the early 1960s with those lights as a deliberate feature—so the steelworkers and factory hands coming off the late shift could still get a round in. In Orchard Park, golf wasn’t about blazers and pro shops. It was something guys did after second shift, still smelling of machine oil, under the same sodium lights that guided us. We were just the next generation of after-hours players, carrying the same idea forward without knowing its history. On television the courses were manicured cathedrals. Ours were patched fairways under humming lights and a backyard with an aluminum-siding hazard.
Two or three miles from the house there was even a miniature golf course. At the time it seemed completely ordinary, another place to kill an evening with putters and windmills. Looking back, what strikes me isn’t that we played so much golf. It’s how available it all was. A backyard became a course. A school became another. A municipal driving range stayed open under lights. A miniature golf course sat a few miles away. None of it cost much, and most of it cost nothing. Without realizing it, we had inherited a landscape that made play easy. It was a working-person’s version of abundance.
We weren’t training for anything. There were no lessons, no scorecards that mattered, no parents standing behind us offering swing tips. We were simply filling the long Southtowns days and nights the way kids there knew how: with a 9-iron, a little imagination, a few friends, and the low glow of the lights at Bob-O-Link visible in the distance. The coffee-can greens and the telephone-pole holes and the quiet country-club fairways in the afternoon—all of it added up to something that still feels, years later, like one of the better ways a kid could spend a summer.
Even now, walking onto any course, I can’t help scanning for the backyard dogleg it used to be. And whenever I pass a lit driving range at night, I half-expect to see our younger selves out there, 9-irons in hand, still arguing about the line around the house.