When the pros descend on your home course, it’s humbling as it is thrilling

FLOURTOWN, Pa. — The home game is an odd thing. The circus has crash-landed on the Tillinghast course of the Philadelphia Cricket Club this week, and I would say any of the fellas would sign up for my ringer score here. I don’t know the exact number (best score on each hole, no time limit), but it would be well under 60. It only took me a few hundred rounds and 38 years to get there. Maybe one of the 72 players in this Truist Championship will break 60 in one round. That’s OK. They’re playing a course with which I’m familiar; their games, not so much.

The course, with the tees back, the rough up and the greens fast, looks very challenging to me. The players think the greens are average speed or maybe on the slow side, the rough is benign and the course is short. It really doesn’t matter. I could never break 100 from where they’re playing. Any day a player doesn’t break 70 he’ll be annoyed. It’s all good. Whatever they shoot, they shoot. The R&A officials take that attitude to every British Open. It’s the only sensible one, really.  

Patrick Rodgers is using my locker this week, in a row where Corey Conners and Nick Dunlap have set up shop for the week, among other star golfers with surnames beginning with C and D. Rodgers got in the 72-player field on Tuesday, when Jason Day withdrew. Best I can tell, Rodgers is fitting right in.

He took three flights Tuesday to get to Philadelphia. Rodgers lives in Jupiter, Fla., with his wife and two young children, and had planned to play the opposite-field event in Myrtle Beach this week, but Day’s withdrawal changed his day and his week. Rodgers’ spot in the Myrtle Beach tournament went to Chez Reavie. Just as every shot makes somebody happy, every withdrawal does, too.

Tuesday night, as I was about to leave the course, Rodgers and his caddie, Chad Reynolds, were heading out to play the back nine. (The back nine for member play. The routing for the Truist Championship is entirely different.) It was a windy night and I fell into easy conversation with Rodgers, who will turn 33 next month. He grew up in Bloomington, Ind., went to Stanford (played on two Walker Cup teams as an amateur) and has been a steady PGA Tour player for 10 years. Rodgers loves course architecture, and he knows a lot about A.W. Tillinghast, the designer of the course he was playing.

“We don’t get to play courses like this very often,” Rodgers said. He was using words you never hear Tour players use as he describes features he liked. Charming, for instance. Eighteen, as we play it, is a long dogleg par-4, down a hill, over a creek, to a sloping green that almost abuts a patio connected to the clubhouse, a converted farmhouse.

“What a finishing hole,” he said.

“This is 18 for us, but not for you guys,” I said.

He, of course, knew that.

“I imagine they’re finishing someplace where they can get more grandstands around the green,” Rodgers said.

These guys know a lot about golf, and about tournament golf. The finishing hole for the tournament is our 4th, a long par-4 no matter what tee you play it from. Whenever I make a 5 there, I think of it as a par. In my early years at the Cricket Club it was a par-5. It’s a par-5. For us.

It’s neat, going into the locker room and seeing all the Tour bags and Tour players and Tour caddies there. It’s a spacious locker room, in normal times. This week is not normal time. Our driving range is vast. It looks small and short, with the Tour players and their entourages and gadgets on it. Eighteen is a driver and a slice hybrid for me. It’s a driver and a trap-draw short iron for them. That’s OK. Golf would be way better if they played a ball that maxed-out at 300. Then 7,100 yards would be meaningful again. It will never happen, but the dream will never die.

When I joined the club, in the late 1980s, there was a tree on an enclosed patio with a hole in the roof to accommodate the tree. The caddie master, Joe Smondrowski, drove a black Cadillac and had more money in his front-right pocket than some members had in their checking accounts. He controlled the first tee and a lot more. The course was loaded with trees. Nobody was thinking about the Cricket Club as being a venue for this Truist Championship, a Champions tour event, a USGA championship or anything other than the club championship. Joe moved out. New people with new ideas moved in. Things change. It’s all good.

The course has a little parking lot and nobody except for the players and a few other people are sniffing it this week. There’s valet parking for the caddies. I’ve been parking a half-mile away from the first tee, on a suburban street, and walking in from there. One morning, a caddie stopped to pick me up as I was walking in. It was Danny Sahl, who caddies for Corey Connors, Patrick Rodgers’ locker room neighbor, for the week.

I’m rooting for Rodgers this week. I’m rooting for Conners. I truly don’t care what the winning score is. The lodge brothers are playing a charming old beautiful Tillinghast course this week. It’s more than enough course for me. To give it up for a week brings nothing but joy.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com