Recently, TGJ Editor Tom Coyne was joined by longtime friend (and new Sullivan County GC co-owner) Bill Murray for an epic Southeast road trip. The pair started in Charleston, SC, made their way to Old Barnwell in Aiken, then cruised down for two days at Ohoopee Match Club in Georgia. Of course, when one of the finest deadpan comic actors of all time is in the passenger seat, you tend to make a few pit stops. All the world’s a stage, and local gas stations and a Piggly Wiggly become settings for Bill’s brand of curious, good-natured fun. It’s a leisurely drive, with discussions ranging from the 1960s film phenomenon that saved the Coyne family’s cinema business to Bill’s recent Scotland-to-West Palm-to-San Diego golf bender and much more.
Editor’s Note: The fun didn’t quit when the cameras stopped rolling, and Tom’s new essay below captures a whopper of a road trip coda that’s both stranger, and more wonderful, than fiction.
“I love your glasses. Please tell me where you got them.”
The police officer had been standing at our window for twenty seconds, and Bill Murray had identified her soft spot in half that time.
“The cover here is a magnet. I have a bunch of different ones,” she explained, unsnapping her festive red-and-green polka dot rims from their base. “I have Halloween and Christmas and birthday glasses. I can wear a different one every day,” she said, proudly clicking the decorative cover back into place.
“That is so cool. I love that,” he said with a tone of genuine appreciation. “And I’m sorry, it’s my fault the young man was driving too fast. I was talking and brought up a subject that distracted him. I got him upset, I shouldn’t have, and I would like you to give me the ticket, please. If you can write it to me, that would only be fair.”
“Well, I can’t give you the ticket. You weren’t the one driving.”
He thought about it. “Well, then can you just hit me with that stick you have? I deserve at least that much.”
When she didn’t react, I worried for our chances of escaping with a warning. Maybe those Christmas glasses belied a dearth of holiday spirit. Either she had a very dry sense of humor or none at all, and it sounded like the latter when she revealed I’d been doing 72 in a 45.
In my defense—and a point I was quick to make to the officer—I had been on a 65mph road for a good half hour, with my cruise control locked at a reasonable 72. We were driving back country roads from Old Barnwell in Aiken, South Carolina, to the Ohoopee Match Club in Georgia, and though the road had not changed, the speed limit had as I entered what must have been a town, but to this lost Yankee, looked similar to the rest of the world through which we’d been rolling. I saw the spinning lights, I recalled our California license plate, and I braced myself for a very expensive encounter. I thought I’d planned one of the all-time golf road trips, and for that, it seemed, there was a price to pay.
If she’d have pulled us over the day before, she might have gotten me for distracted driving as well. Our loaner BMW had been fitted with five cameras for our drive from Charleston to Old Barnwell, where Bill and I recorded the conversation you can now listen to on The Golfer’s Journal podcast or watch on TGJ’s YouTube. The cameras didn’t block my view nor distract me from my task; no motorists were endangered by our recording. We took plenty of breaks, at a gas station and a Piggly Wiggly where Bill insisted I get a t-shirt, and we completed our first leg of the road trip safely and on time. We played Old Barnwell with its owner, Nick Schreiber, and its Director of Golf, Kitty Nicastro, and Bill appeared to love each new hole more than the last, playing well and leaving with arms full of merch he likely didn’t need.
We retired to the Wilcox Hotel for massages and a meal, where the Southern charm drips from its tall white columns and twirls around its lobby-turned-dining-room, the space alive with piano and singing and dancing couples. Kitty joined us for dinner, and because she claimed to have never tasted caviar, Bill ordered full tins of both menu varieties, at which point I knew that neither I nor Kitty would be paying for dinner (if there was ever any doubt). I later cringed when, at meal’s end, the waitress revealed that Nick had called ahead with his credit card number to pay for our tab. Sorry, Nick! I texted him, adding a teary-eyed smiley face in consolation.
We were rested and well fed with two nights at Ohoopee awaiting us, where we’d be meeting up with Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner (who designed and built it), plus Jason Kelce, who Gil had heard on a recent episode of TGJ’s Mind Game podcast. Gil, Jim and I are all dedicated Eagles fans, so it was only natural for the architect to ask me if I could invite one of the Birds’ best-ever offensive linemen to our meetup at Ohoopee. Jason said he’d love to join us that Tuesday morning, but he’d have to fly directly from Denver following the Monday Night Football halftime show, and would need to record that week’s New Heights podcast after golf. Plans were made, permissions granted, and our table was set for a buddies’ trip to end all others, even if I wasn’t quite comfortable referring to this fivesome as my buddies.
Yet somehow they were. Because, well…because golf. What a generous game we play. For all its cost and difficulty, golf has given me my every friend, and all my favorite places. I used to consider it a game that didn’t love us back, but the truth is that golf often provides us the things we didn’t even know to ask for.
Bill and I were discussing the causes behind one of the downturns in my career (there have been a few) when the lights went loud behind us, so he wasn’t lying when he told the officer that I was momentarily distracted and did not notice the new speed limit. I’d missed it completely, but that seemed like old news as Bill talked about becoming a grandfather again just that morning (his son Luke had a baby girl, and we’d been following delivery room updates via text). The officer took out her phone and handed over her baby pictures while Bill, in turn, handed over his.
All talk of my malfeasance seemed to have gone adrift between the inspection of her eyeglasses and this sharing of family news, but I wondered if this might all still end with a summons. As Bill scrolled through his phone for pictures of his other grandkids, I turned my head and whispered, “Am I getting a ticket?” to which she simply smiled, and the weight of increased insurance payments left my shoulders. She ran my license—no warrants, I was good to leave if I promised to drive more carefully—then I asked if she’d like a picture with my copilot. I was careful to never volunteer Bill for celebrity duty, but I was overcome by the moment’s got-out-of-jail-free joy, and what had started with a rearview mirror pang of panic ended with posed pictures and a day we’d talk about, officer and driver both.
Before we bemoan the privileges of fame, I wasn’t let off with a warning because Bill Murray was in my passenger’s seat. I was let off because Bill Murray was genuinely respectful of the person who pulled us over, and showed an honest interest in her life (her glasses, too). This wasn’t a show for a free pass. I’d seen him treat bartenders and caddies and cooks the same way. He’s naturally curious about the lives of others, and he’ll make the effort to get to know you. If you’re not demanding he be Bill Murray, he’ll be Bill Murray, a sharp and thoughtful (and funny) guy from Chicago.
We should also note that Bill never asked the officer to look the other way; rather, he asked if he could pay the fine for his friend, a fine he acknowledged we deserved. He didn’t play the Bill Murray card, and I’d never seen him play it. He’d rather you treat him like a normal person, it seemed, and I guessed that for well-known faces, normal is an elusive but beautiful thing. And maybe normal consisted of reciting all your kids’ names to a policewoman who had just recited all hers.
Our two days at Ohoopee exceeded high expectations, even if I spent Monday unsure as to whether Jason might actually arrive by morning. As we sat around the bar watching Monday Night Football, I texted his travel manager about his arrival time at the private airport in nearby Vidalia. She said he was scheduled to land at midnight, but it was 10 p.m. and I was struggling with the math (“He’s definitely still in Denver. We’re watching him on TV.”) He got to the club around 2 a.m., and after catching some sleep on the plane, he beat all of us to breakfast. We played golf and Bill joined Jason and Travis Kelce’s podcast that afternoon, taped downstairs in the clubhouse, where Bill told stories about making his movies, answering the kind of questions I avoided but was glad to hear the answers to (as you may have seen online, he really does phone Kelly Lynch’s husband whenever her steamy Road House scene with Patrick Swayze pops up on TNT).
We played more golf together the next morning, and dined on what I contend is the best menu in golf, because it really isn’t a menu. The chef prepares one meal for each service at Ohoopee, no choices or substitutions, yet he invents unexpected platters to please both foodies and the fussy. I usually hate to leave places like Ohoopee, but not on this occasion—I’d managed to stowaway with Jason on his jet for the trip back to Philadelphia (“So, since we’re both flying back to the same city…”) and had been eagerly anticipating my life’s first flight sans TSA. And it turns out Kevin Kisner was right when he said the only drug they don’t have rehab for is flying private. I’d be going cold turkey soon enough.
I checked in with Bill that evening, who was driving the loaner car back to Charleston. The BMW had long since been cleaned of its cameras, and I expected he’d have a nice, quiet drive north, stopping at the Claxton Fruitcake factory and taking his time.
His drive had not gone according to plan; he wasn’t even home yet while I was ready for bed in Philadelphia. First, we’d mistakenly loaded his golf clubs into the shuttle heading to the airport, so he had to stand by for an hour before our driver returned. Then he sprung a flare tire on one of those back country roads. I tried to convey my guilt—I regretted not being there to help, abandoning my copilot for the niceties of luxury travel—but he said the flat tire ended up being a highlight of the trip for him.
Stranded with an unfamiliar car and no phone signal to dial AAA, Bill pondered his circumstance as a car pulled over and a young man approached. He offered to help, and the two got to talking. Bill asked about his life and his family, and in the time it took to find and bolt on the spare, Bill had learned most of his new friend’s story. The man was in his twenties, had two kids and a wife; they’d finally saved up enough money and had just bought a house. This would be his family’s first Christmas together in their own home. Bill relayed this detail to me as if there was magic in it, as wonderful and wondrous as a newborn grandchild, or a golf getaway with architects and an athlete and a movie star, or a kind soul met on the side of the road, all the simple miracles of life there in front of us, if we only thought to look and to ask.
