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It sucks to say goodbye.
For more than 27 years, every Saturday morning brought a combination Stableford/Skins game called "The Blitz" to either the Dunes or Lakes Course at Sandridge Golf Club, my home course in Vero Beach, Fla. ever since I moved down in 2014. The first time I visited, I noticed a flier promoting it on a bulletin board in the covered breezeway that divides the modest but cheerful clubhouse. Nervous about being an outsider, it took me a few weeks to get up the courage but I eventually sent an email asking about joining the game. Days later, I was in.
Over the following nine years, The Blitz became my weekend golf sanctuary when not traveling and seeing other courses for my (dream) job. Sandridge is a county-owned facility with no memberships as such, but over time, the time I spent there made me feel as much at home there as anywhere I have ever played. I got to know the pros, the bag shop guys and the starters - all strong strands in the fabric of my golf life. We teed off at or before 8 am, played briskly and I was able to get home not long after noon. Perfect.
The size of the game would drift from between 12 to 16 players each week in the dead of summer to upwards of 32 in prime snowbird season. In recognition of the group's loyalty, the course graciously charged us a few bucks less than the prevailing rate for our green fee. The contribution to the weekly skins and point-quota pot was perfectly sized such that a well-timed birdie or hot round could cover the cost of the day's golf.
Most importantly, what made the Blitz special to me was the people. I came to Florida as a stranger; they immediately accepted me. Golf is a big family like that.
There was no shortage of characters - retired Vietnam War veterans, a former crime reporter, a restaurateur, a professional bowler and more from all walks of life.
There was Jim, a Presbyterian minister in his mid 80s who made me promise to let him know the next time I visited his homeland of Scotland. So I did, and on a cool fall day in 2019, I got to watch his bump-and-run game come alive and gaze out from the top of Gullane Hill at the venerable links No. 1 course.
Then there was the late David Brookreson, a legendary competitive amateur, mid-amateur and senior amateur player in the Philadelphia area who was a member of a private club in Vero but joined the Blitz for several weeks in 2020 when the pandemic kept his courses closed for several months. "Brooke" suffered from a circulatory condition that had slowed his walking and reduced most of his fingers to barely more than nubs, but he could still play, and he still burned to compete. In four rounds with him, I don't think he missed three fairways. He was a walking exaltation to never, ever let go of the game you love.
Brooke and I sat around chatting after every round we played; I lapped up his stories of his tournament exploits, including more than a dozen USGA championship starts. He told me all five of his children were born in the space of seven years, and he actually played better in that time because he knew how precious every minute of those opportunities was. In the months before my daughter was born, that wisdom melted away my own selfish anxieties about how fatherhood might affect my game.
The end of The Blitz
Times changed and The Blitz changed with them - for better, then for worse. The onset of the pandemic and the resulting nervousness about scorecards prompted Sandridge to adopt Golf Genius as the main scorekeeping method. That was a great development because it became easy to see how we'd fared against the field in the Stableford game, and whether or not we'd won any skins.
On the other side of the coin, the fact that groups-within-the-group had formed and clusters of people would play together every week became a source of tension. Never mind that it was a Blitz norm for a quarter century. Murmurs of cheating and excessive gimmes cropped up. I only saw two iffy moments from playing partners over the years - a possible hidden-ball drop to avoid a penalty near the bushes by one player; a fluffing of a buried lie in a bunker by another - but others evidently had different experiences.
In the end, at the beginning of 2023, it was announced that pairings for The Blitz would be fully randomized. Overnight, more than half of the regular players went elsewhere, wanting the certainty of playing together more than the inherent competition. Several members of the game flatly refused to play with one particular golfer who had had run-ins with some people in the past. Numbers dwindled to the point where we struggled to have more than 10 players per week in the winter.
Then, on February 19, a blunt message accompanying the weekly email asking players if they would be playing the following Saturday landed like a 7-iron to the guts:
After careful consideration, we have decided to end the Saturday Blitz. This Saturday, February 24th will be the last Blitz.
I want to thank you for your support of the Blitz over the years.
Thanks and look forward to seeing you in the future.
Unsurprisingly, the final Blitz was better-attended than any in recent months, but it still summoned just 14 players. Not a bang but a whimper.
Whatever efforts had been made to bring new blood into the game, they did not offset the defections in the wake of the pairings policy change. I was upset in the moment of the end of The Blitz, but I do understand that sustaining a game with such low attendance at a prime time of the week stopped making sense for Sandridge, which remains packed in-season and hosts more than 400 rounds across its 36 holes most days. It's a coldly simple fact that the courses will not miss The Blitz half as much as I will miss my Saturday golf staple.
The remaining die-hards were bummed that the game was struggling, but we hadn't considered it might shut down altogether. Most of them, being retirees who play in other groups during the week, took the news in stride.
I took it harder than anyone, and probably harder than I should. I have been back to Sandridge a handful of times since the end of The Blitz, but I can't help but feel a little alien there. The Blitz was bigger than a weekly golf game for me. I work from home and my closest friends are reachable not physically, but by group-text. The Blitz was a precious source of in-person community for a stretch of time that saw me get engaged, married and become a father. It was a constant in the midst of change. Then it was gone.
A new beginning?
It would be fair to tell me to suck it up and remind me that I'm still free to play golf at Sandridge on Saturday mornings, joining the crowd trying to make tee times in the usual way. I've considered it, but it doesn't feel right at this point. The wound is too fresh. Besides, The Blitz taught me something about myself as a golfer: unless a round is at least mildly competitive, I'm just not as into it as I'd otherwise be.
So I've become a weekend golf free agent. I caught wind of a Sunday morning game at Indian Hills Golf Course, the city muni of Fort Pierce. The course is a few minutes farther from my house, the layout is not as interesting as Sandridge's and it's in scruffy condition. Lift-clean-place is the order of the day in the fairways and roughs, but the greens are okay, the price is right and the juice of competition runs through it. The format is familiar - some Stableford, some skins, plus closest-to-the-pin on each par 3. More than 40 players participate every week.
When I showed up as a first-timer last weekend, I felt the same nervousness as that first time at Sandridge. Three and a half hours later, I also felt that same sense of acceptance by the threesome I ended up joining up with. The course's head pro oversees the game, and it's called the Sunday Blitz. Time will tell whether it lives up to the Saturday kind.
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