John Charnes GMC Member Profile
I was introduced to golf as a caddie at Northland Country Club (NCC) in Duluth in the 1960s. Caddies were allowed to play early on Monday mornings, so my West End buddies and I would schlep our clubs down to the bus stop and make the half-hour trip to the east end of town where NCC is located. I still like to play golf in the early morning, and one of my favorite recent rounds began just before sunrise at the Streamsong Black course in Florida a couple of years ago.
However, I also recall being chastised at Gross by a grumpy old man who no longer works there for showing up late for a 6:30am tee time I had made on a September day many years ago. Sunrise wasn’t until after 7am, so I thought there was no way we would be allowed to tee off at 6:30. Much to my surprise, there were two groups already out on the course when I arrived in the darkness of the morning. Grumpy told me that those guys would use lighted golf balls for the first few holes, and what the heck was wrong with my group for not doing the same!
While caddying at NCC, I learned the rules of the game and many other important life lessons such as how to play poker with the other loopers in the caddy shack to pass the time before we were assigned to a player. Golf was a fun diversion at the time, but I didn’t consider it a real sport like football. So I played golf sporadically during high school, college, and graduate school. Once I got married and had a kid, I stopped playing completely.
About 15 years later, I took up the game again in Lawrence, Kansas, where I had moved to join the business school faculty at the University of Kansas (KU). One of my colleagues and I began playing on Saturdays. We set out to play every course within 20 miles of Lawrence, and experienced many different tracks. After a couple of years and some improvement to our games, the two of us were recruited by some colleagues to join Lawrence Country Club, which was about a mile from our KU offices. I played there from about 1998 until 2007, when I took a job at Bank of America in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Charlotte has many great courses in and around town, and I played most weekends there with some BofA buddies regularly at about four of them. It was at a course in Monroe, NC where I had what was then my closest completion of a hole in one. I had hit a nice little fade with my 4-hybrid on the 180-yard par three ninth hole.The ball hit the flagstick, then took a funny little bounce and I could see it from the tee right next to the hole. When my group got to the green, two players who were waiting to tee off on the first tee excitedly told me that they had heard the ball hit the stick, then looked over to see it drop into the hole before bouncing off the bottom of the cup and coming to rest an inch from the hole.
For a few years I thought that might be my closest ever to making a hole in one but in January 2017 I hit a nice little push draw with my 5-hybrid 170 yards toward the 4th hole on Raptor Bay GC in Bonita Springs, FL. The ball flew towards the hole, then disappeared. I thought it might be over the green but found it at the bottom of the cup.
I’ve been fortunate over the last thirty years to have had jobs that allowed me to spend many summer months in Minnesota, while living in warmer climes the rest of the year.. I’ve been a member of the University of MN Golf Club for the last six years, and decided this year to join GMC as well. My wife and I have now retired to Miromar Lakes, near Fort Myers, Florida. She was born and raised in Minneapolis, and we intend to spend summers here for many more years.
I plan to remain a member of GMC for a long time. I like the course, and the fact that the scheduled events mesh well with the events at U of M GC.