Muni Mule: Where Amateur Golf Mules Take a Swing at Greatness
Hello! I’m Doug and welcome to Muni Mule.
I’m an amateur golf mule who is head over heels for this beautiful, frustrating, and endlessly entertaining game.
Why “mule,” you ask?
This credit goes to Ryan Armour when he famously called himself a PGA Tour mule who grinds through the year to maintain the lifeblood of Tour events without receiving any of the credit.
It only seemed fitting that as Ryan feels he maintains the lifeblood of the PGA Tour, municipal golfers, and weekend warriors are the lifeblood of golf itself.
Most golf courses in the world will never see a PGA Tour event.
They will never know what it’s like to have the game’s elite graze its fairways.
Yet there they are.
Sun up to sun down.
Seven days a week.
Providing a landscape for us amateurs to dream big dreams.
As I start this Muni Mule quest, I have two main goals:
- Play golf in all 50 states. (Right now I sit at 5 and am gearing up for 6 (maybe 7) with a trip to Georgia (to visit Augusta!) this spring.
- Learn as much as I can and meet as many people as I can through golf.
So, what can you expect from Muni Mule?
I’m here to dish out everything I know and everything I learn about the game of golf.
That includes tips and tricks to help you lower your handicap, sharing my favorite golf entertainment, or even my opinions on the world of golf equipment and what can help you play better golf.
My golf story started when I was around eight years old and my brother and I got a Michael Jordan junior golf set for Christmas. (Can’t believe I can still find a picture of this on the internet.)
We promptly went to the driving range for our first real bucket of balls and my brother did the unthinkable.
He threw a club…
Not once, but TWICE!
Safe to say he took the advice of ‘light grip pressure’ a little too seriously.
So that was my last trip to the driving range for a good long while.
I’m talking like a decade-long while.
When I Got the Golf Bug for Real
It wasn’t until I reached college that I started picking up the game again.
My high school friends and I would come home and need something to do as an alternative to getting a summer job.
With our pockets strapped for cash, we would head to our local executive course, fork over the $13 twilight greens fee, and race to finish as many holes as possible before dark.
I still don’t know what the 18th hole actually looks like though I’ve played it more than a dozen times under the ominous eye of darkness.
The best part?
My golf clubs were 20-year-old hand-me-downs from my dad.
And they were blades.
Looking back now, I have no idea how I ever lasted long enough to even enjoy the game, let alone crave it like I do.
Every person who knew anything about anything in golf always gave me a strange look of insanity as I toted those blades around with blissful unawareness.
Maybe it was a good thing I didn’t know any better or I might’ve quit out of embarrassment.
Low and behold those were some of the best summers of my life.
No responsibilities.
Blissful unawareness of what the real world had in store for me.
Just me, friends, and golf.
And I still have a hard time looking down at my irons if they aren’t blades.
But I’ve learned! Hopefully, my journey can help you reach your golf goals too.
Tip number one: don’t learn to play with blades.
Chasing Scratch
The best I ever got at golf highlights two moments in my amateur career.
Number one, it was the first time I ever broke par, but it didn’t count. (Stay tuned…).
Second, it was the first (and only) private course I’ve ever played on to this point.
I was fresh out of college and working for the Cincinnati Reds doing minor league video with their Double-A affiliate, the Pensacola Blue Wahoos.
If you’re scratching your head and wondering, yes that’s the team co-owned by Bubba Watson.
I was lucky enough to meet him AND beat him at ping pong! (He declined when we asked him to join our tee time the next day, though. Maybe I shouldn’t have beaten him so bad.)
Anyway, as you can tell, the owner of our team was greatly adept with golf and baseball players’ addiction to getting in a quick 18 before a night at the ballpark.
And, as luck would have it, they didn’t mind if the lowly video guy tagged along to fill out the foursome.
I was making 1,000 bucks a month, hanging out with professional baseball players, and going to a private golf course. I didn’t care if they made me walk the course carrying all their bags, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
As it relates to my golf journey, this was the catapult I never knew I wanted.
I ended up playing golf 2-4 times a week for the entire summer.
Pensacola is home to the Blue Angels, so we got to play golf with fighter jet flyovers on a regular basis. It was epic!
By the end of that summer, I had gotten pretty good.
This was good considering losers often bought lunch for the group and my paltry $1000 paychecks couldn’t afford to feed me let alone professional athletes.
So I had no choice but to get better.
And better I got.
And then I got a little better.
Then it finally happened.
The Round That Keeps Me Coming Back
The season was just about over and we had nothing more than a few days left in Pensacola.
It was probably going to be our last gasp to play golf for the summer.
And it was an off day from baseball.
What did we decide to do?
Play 36 holes of course!
The first 18 holes was the best round of golf I have ever played to this day.
An astounding 2-over-par 74. With two birdies on the back!
Those birdies become important for what happened to start round two.
I didn’t slow down!
I started the next round and parred the first nine holes.
That’s right, 18 consecutive holes played with a 2-UNDER score of 70.
Now I know what you’re thinking.
“It doesn’t count!”
And I agree.
It doesn’t count.
When people ask me what my lowest round is, I still say 74.
For what it’s worth I also finished the second round with a score of 78 to give me back-to-back sub-80 rounds on the same day.
Making it the single best day of golf I’ve ever played.
And doing it all while still playing with my trusty blades.
Oh, and one last thing:
Thank you for coming on this journey with me.
If you’re still reading this far, you are clearly sucked into this addicting unhealthy relationship with golf just like I am.
It’s the people of relationships golf gives us that make it all worth it.
So thank you for letting me be part of your golf journey and hopefully, I can bring some joy with the sharing of my stories along the way.
On that note, I want to hear your story too!
If you have questions, comments, or golf recommendations you want to share with me, send me an email, at doug@munimule.com.
In the grand game of golf, we’re all just a bunch of lovable, stubborn mules chasing that ever-elusive perfect round.
Thank you for being here!
Happy Golfing!
