Summer Reading Guide: Playing from the Rough

Relying on supportive people allowed Jimmie James to experience all of Golf Digest’s America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses in the same year. His vast support network included a golf course maintenance employee he encountered multiple times during a round at Oak Tree National in Edmond, Oklahoma.

Playing as a single on the private course, James struggled finding the second hole until spotting the employee. “He pointed me in the right direction,” James says.

Later in the round, James hit a well-struck shot and noticed the same employee. “And,” James says, “he knew exactly where my ball went.”

Finally, as James stood in the parking lot following the round, the employee appeared again as a solar eclipse emerged. “I said, ‘I wish I could look at that thing,” James remembers. “And he said, ‘I have a pair of glasses for looking at it.’ He pulled out some of his viewing glasses and let me use his viewing glasses to see the eclipse. In addition to making the courses amazing for us to experience, that day one of the grounds crews guys was my guardian angel.”

James encountered hundreds of helpful people while cramming multiple lifetimes of bucket-list golf into one year. He shares his journey in “Playing from the Rough,” a book that brilliantly blends his personal history with glimpses inside elite golf venues.

The golf portion of James’s top-100 journey commenced at Augusta National Golf Club. But his personal journey started in 1959 as the son of Thelma James, a single mother of eight children living in Jim Crow-era Texas. The birth certificate for James in the Walker County Courthouse listed him as “colored” and “illegitimate.” He never knew his father and Thelma raised her children in a shack lacking plumbing and electricity. James became the first person in his family to graduate high school. He then earned an engineering degree from Prairie View A&M University and ascended to an executive position with ExxonMobil.

James started playing golf in his mid-40s and developed an immense passion for the game, which intensified upon his retirement following a three-decade career with ExxonMobil. Through family support — James and his wife, Erika, have two young adult children, Jordan and Alexandra — networking, meticulous planning and flexibility, James went from Augusta National to Wade Hampton Golf Club, with many dreamy in-between stops, in the same year.

“There are two journeys combined: my life’s journey and that golf journey,” James says. “And the challenge was striking the right balance between the two. What I had in mind is that some people will come for the golf and stay for the stories. Others will come for the stories and hopefully be captivated by the game of golf.”

James’s humility surfaces early in the book as he describes his interaction with Hispanic workers tending to the azaleas on Augusta National’s 12th hole. Instead of being immersed in playing one of the game’s most famous holes, James stopped and thanked the workers for their efforts.

“The azaleas are part of the experience of being at Augusta,” he says. “There are people who make those flowers pop. They are so integral to the experiences we have at these courses. I would talk to locker-room attendants, I would talk to the staff in dining rooms, and show them my appreciation and let them know the whole experience is made possible by the work that they do.”

A few of James’s interactions with club and industry workers were arranged. At Canyata Golf Club, a secluded rural Illinois facility, James was paired with superintendent Michael Boudreau. Turf duty condensed Boudreau’s round. “As things happened, a pump failed and he needed to address that,” James says. The pair played the back nine together. Boudreau went on a birdie binge and James posted a run of pars extended by his partner’s local knowledge. “I had a putt that was a 12- or 15-foot putt to keep my string of pars going and he said, ‘Do you want me to help you with the read?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ He gave me the perfect read and the ball rolled into the cup.”

At The Golf Club at Black Rock, in northwest Idaho, James played consecutive par 3s, Nos. 13 and 14, with course designer Jim Engh. “He told me exactly where to hit the ball,” James says, “and I came so close both times to making aces.”

James has now embarked on playing every course on a world top-100 list. He’s less than 20 courses from accomplishing that global goal. The release of “Playing from the Rough” and continued golf travels are expanding opportunities to share his inspiring story.

“It’s becoming a platform to talk about overcoming adversity and challenges in life,” he says. “Some people get upset that golf is hard, but golf is intended to be hard. It’s a mistake to think it’s not supposed to be hard. It’s the same with life. Life is hard. But you can overcome the challenges you face, just like you can overcome the challenges on a golf course.”

Guy Cipriano is Golf Course Industry’s publisher and editor-in-chief.