2026年5月1日 / 美国东部时间下午12:17 / 哥伦比亚广播公司新闻
狂热读者出版社
本文中您购买的任何商品，我们可能会获得联盟佣金。
《高尔夫手杂志》编辑汤姆·科因接受了一项挑战：接手纽约卡茨基尔山区一家濒临倒闭的九洞社区高尔夫球场的运营工作。他在《归乡球场：一位意外球场老板的冒险》（将于5月5日由狂热读者出版社出版）一书中记录了自己的经历，以及球场运营中习以为常的种种磨难。
请阅读下文节选，切勿错过李·考恩5月3日在《哥伦比亚广播公司周日早间新闻》中对汤姆·科因的专访！
汤姆·科因《归乡球场》
更愿意收听？Audible 现提供30天免费试用资格。
双手沾满泥浆，指尖被无数细小伤口划破，我的车轮又在空转了。
这是卡茨基尔山区记忆中最潮湿的一个夏天，肖恩曾提醒我，靠近果岭时要放慢车速。我关掉引擎，滑出座椅，重新跪到地上，从割草机的滚筒上撕下一团团湿漉漉的草叶——右侧、中间、左侧，然后是底盘下方难以触及的后部滚筒。要是我们有钱、有时间打磨底刀，我现在恐怕已经丢了一根手指；相反，我在摸索堵塞物、撕扯大块湿土时，指尖的指纹都被磨掉了，就像在疏通排水管里的头发，直到能用手转动每个滚筒为止。这已经是我这次清理滚筒的第九次了，身后的长草区里堆着八堆清理出来的泥土，我原本最爱的晨间工作，眼看也要拖到下午才能完成。
我渐渐相信，高尔夫球手在下场打球前，应该亲身体验一下驾驶割草机、修补球洞或浇灌果岭的工作。这不是惩罚，而是为了更好地了解我们的球场，欣赏那些让一片场地变成竞技舞台的大大小小的细节——比如从底盘上扯下成团的植被。我们不仅会理解作为高尔夫球手的幸运，还能找到长期困扰自己的问题的答案。我们会明白，为什么发球台和球道有圆角（因为割草机有固定的转弯半径），为什么那片山坡上的长草没人修剪（因为割草机在那里会翻倒），以及为什么我们无法拥有电视上看到的那种垂直沙坑壁（因为修剪它们要耗费一整天的人力、燃料和设备，我们既没有这些资源，也负担不起）。
我们会明白，为什么高羊茅很流行（不用修剪，无需打理），为什么我们应该捡起自己的球座（它们会磨钝割草机刀片，重新磨刀要耗费数小时），以及为什么长椅、球车标识和发球台标志是个麻烦（关掉引擎、跳下车、移动它们、重新启动、割草、再移回去——如果你的腿像我一样僵硬，你会巴不得把这些东西从机器后面扔出去）。我们会知道，从来没有人问过果岭维护师，全铺式球道是不是值得追捧的潮流，还会了解到，如果球场设计得更易于维护，或者球员们接受草色偏黄的状态，那么球场的维护预算可以减半。我们可能再也不会留下球痕或光秃秃的草皮了，因为我们会明白，这些看似平常的记分卡要求，无关礼仪甚至击球条件——而是出于对那些种草地的人的基本尊重，也是对他们付出的默默认可。如果你和我一样，你甚至会爱上维护工作的艺术，或许比打高尔夫还要热爱。
这是一份又苦又累的早起工作，在我们这样的球场，薪水也不高。我以前总在想，这些果岭维护师们到底是为了什么？他们可能每年只会在会员邀请赛上得到一次感谢，但大部分时间里，他们都穿着连帽卫衣、踩着厚重的棕色工装靴，在黎明前就开始完成清单上的各项工作。他们是一群独特的人，热爱草坪养护事业，但那些真正投身其中的人往往会坚持下去。和他们共事几个月后，我现在终于明白其中缘由了。对大多数人来说，起床上班就是喝杯咖啡、通勤、刮胡子或化点妆、穿好得体的衣服，然后盯着手机看一个小时。用最少的词句提问和回答，布置任务并转交，或许只会注意一下天气是否晴朗。
但在这里的工作中，天气是你唯一关注的东西——你的一整天都由阳光、季节和每天早上都要检查的雨量计决定。天气预报告诉你什么时候启动割草机，开到哪里去。每个清晨，在大多数人还在删除隔夜邮件的时候，你就已经有机会获得满足感。只有你站在轰鸣的红色机器上，在沾满露珠的田野上划出一道道线条，雾气仍在你的刀片周围萦绕，陪伴你的只有几只鹿，它们看到你时几乎不会抬头。很快，每一簇草都被修剪整齐，你可以用割草留下的线条证明这一点，回头看看自己的成果——这是我今年夏天才体验过的一种工作，有明确的开始和结束，晚饭后不会收到工作信息，这种工作会在你晚上入睡时依然伴随着你，酸痛的骨头诉说着辛劳，但头脑却因完成了当天的任务而清醒。
今天的酸痛和擦伤可能会持续更久。我们通常欢迎降雨，因为我们的球道没有可用的灌溉系统，而我们浇灌果岭的方法更是羞于启齿，更别说使用了。我们有九根花园软管，缠在每个果岭旁的柱子轮毂盖上，作为备用装置，但用来从池塘抽水的水泵老旧不堪，经常出故障，连接各软管的管道是用腻子和胶带拼接起来的红铁管和聚氯乙烯管，现在只有一半还埋在地下。那些穿过溪流或在树林里改变坡度的管道，我们用小小的石塔支撑着，防止它们断裂。由于多处漏水，这些管道只能向软管输送少量的水。在经历了5月和6月的干旱之后，我们一直在祈祷下雨，却忘了诺亚大概也曾祈祷过下点小雨。
我们不仅没有给球场喷水的管道，也没有排水的管道。偶尔我会在球道里发现一个生锈的排水口，那是球场鼎盛时期留下的遗迹，但现在只要一下雨，所有低洼处都会形成水坑——在依山而建的球场里，这样的低洼处多得是。雨水让杂草长得更高，然后在过于松软的草坪上为它们提供了庇护，让原本用来修剪它们的机器无法作业。
我们常常在不该尝试的时候硬着头皮上，这时就会感受到轮胎打滑、陷在湿泥里动弹不得的痛苦。你有没有试过滑动一件旧家具，却被钉子刮花了木地板？感觉差不多就是这样，然后当你猛踩油门时情况会更糟，因为你唯一的出路就是向前开，结果车轮下的球道被碾成了餐盘大小的碎块。下次经过时，你看到自己弄出的烂摊子，会纳闷到底是谁会这么糟蹋高尔夫球场。
有时候你没法硬闯过去，这就是我在八号洞遇到的情况，这个每周都会让我头疼的敌人。它不仅球道很长——一条几乎全是球道的5杆标准杆跑道——而且攻果岭的路线很别扭，当你靠近一个狭窄的凸起果岭时，割草路线会挤成一个狭窄的漏斗，而果岭边缘很难修剪，否则草屑会掉得到处都是。它旁边的长草区里藏着一股泉水，今天我正好踩到了泉眼的位置。我环顾四周，希望能找到一个同伴，但这里只有我和那些鹿。它们整个早上都在看着我陷车，正开心地啃着我没能剪短的草。
留着胡子的克里斯负责用他的文特拉克割草机修剪长草，那是一辆八轮的大家伙，能应付我们最陡峭的斜坡。肖恩负责修剪果岭，有时用手推，有时在三轮割草机能用的时候，就骑在坐骑式割草机上。球道是我的工作，但可能干不了多久了，我想——我已经清理了滚筒，但轮胎已经陷在三英寸厚的泥里了。我挂前进挡、倒挡试了试，都没用。关掉引擎，再重新启动。点火装置坏了，所以我们不得不跨接启动球道割草机，用放在杯架里的扳手把一根电线搭在电池上。还是不行。我掏出手机给肖恩打电话，他当时正在球场另一边修剪果岭。我不知道他是怎么听到或感觉到手机在轰鸣的机器声中震动的，但只要我在球场里工作，他总会接电话。他了解他的员工（总共只有我们两个人），大概也猜到他负责的球道出问题了。
“我陷住了。八号洞的春水区。”
他疲惫地笑了笑：“我这就来。”
我早知道这里有水，本该更小心的，但我当时离完成工作就差那么一点——三百码的球道，来回垂直割草。割草、绕圈、放下刀片、割草、再抬起、绕圈——我没有绕开那股泉水，而是赌了一把，想在这里转弯，结果输了。
我们会调整球道的割草方向，防止草一直朝一个方向倒伏。在维修棚的黑板上，肖恩会画出当天要我遵循的割草路线。先从中间划一条直线，然后用8字形割出半暗半亮的礼服效果，或者用我喜欢的方法，像冰面清洁车那样绕圈直到完成。肖恩不太喜欢这种方法，但比他那样划出完美的中心线要容易——如果没对准中间，你就会留下更多左右两边的草，绕来绕去寻找分界带，直到完全忘了自己已经割到哪里了。我今天走的短而垂直的路线（深色的痕迹就是你刚碾过的；尽量贴近它）能保证割草效果均匀，即使意味着转弯次数更多，花费的刀片作业时间也更长。我最喜欢这份工作的一点是，我现在会用“刀片作业时间”这样的术语，也会说“这次割得不错”，而且感觉自己配得上这些说法。
我等着肖恩完成他正在修剪的那个果岭，舔掉指尖上的泥土，用拇指蹭了蹭，感觉到手指划过底刀时留下的剃刀般的红疹。
陷在泥里，坐在比家得宝卖的任何东西都大三倍的割草机上，在沙利文县卡茨基尔山区的果岭旁等着，有那么一刻，我觉得自己是个外来的冒牌货。我不是果岭维护师。我这个球场经营者的新角色并不是靠本事挣来的，我只是最后的备选方案。当然，自己打打自己设计的球洞，就像做白日梦一样有趣，但我的抽屉里没有写着“经营高尔夫俱乐部”“修剪球道”“筹钱买下高尔夫球场”的遗愿清单。那我到底是怎么落到这步田地的？我是个作家，也是个被宠坏的高尔夫球手——我的职业生涯带我去过世界上一些最棒的球场，我在那里打高尔夫，写几段文字，买件衬衫，然后就去寻找下一个目的地。
但这个地方不卖衬衫。它甚至没有标志。游客也不会用“棒极了”来形容这个九洞球场。这里风景优美，充满运动气息，惹人喜爱，但绝不是值得专程前来报道的景点。这是乡村、本地的社区高尔夫球场，和大多数这类球场一样，它濒临倒闭。如果我们今年夏天不想办法扭转局面，规划出新的发展方向，球场就会被当作土地出售，在迎来百年校庆的两年前关闭。而从我的视角看，我的车轮还在泥里打转，这条新道路却一点也不清晰。
节选自汤姆·科因《归乡球场：一位意外球场老板的冒险》，由狂热读者出版社/西蒙与舒斯特出版。版权所有©2026，保留所有权利。
Book excerpt: “A Course Called Home” by Tom Coyne
May 1, 2026 / 12:17 PM EDT / CBS News
Avid Reader Press
We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article.
Tom Coyne, the editor of The Golfer’s Journal, teed up for a challenge: taking over operations of a failing nine-hole community golf course in New York’s Catskill Mountains. He writes of his experience, and the tribulations that were par for the course, in A Course Called Home: Adventures of an Accidental Golf Course Owner (to be published May 5 by Avid Reader Press).
Read an excerpt below, and don’t miss Lee Cowan’s interview with Tom Coyne on “CBS Sunday Morning” May 3!
*
A Course Called Home by Tom Coyne
Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now.
*
Hands caked with mud, fingertips diced by a thousand tiny cuts, and my wheels were spinning again.
It had been the wettest Catskills summer in memory, and Shaun had warned me to throttle down as I drew closer to the green. I killed the engine and slid out of the seat, got back down on my knees, and ripped clumps of soggy grass from the reels—right, middle, left, then the rear units beneath the chassis that I struggled to reach. If we had the money or time to sharpen our bed knives, I’d have lost a digit by now; instead, I shaved away my fingerprints as I felt for jams and tore chunks of wet earth, pulling hair from a clogged drain, until I could turn each cylinder by hand. This was the ninth time I’d had to clear the reels on this run, eight piles of discharged mud lined up in the rough behind me, and my favorite morning job looked like it would become that afternoon’s job, too.
I’ve come to believe that golfers should know what it’s like to ride a mower or cut a hole or water a green before they play. Not as punishment, but to better know our playing grounds and appreciate the big and small things—like freeing wads of vegetation from an undercarriage—that turn a field into a stage. We’d not only understand our good fortune as golfers, but we’d earn the answers to questions we may have long pondered. We’d know why our tees and fairways have rounded corners (because the mowers turn on a certain radius) and why someone let the rough grow on that hillside (because the mower tips over up there) and why we can’t have those vertical bunker faces we see on TV (because trimming them costs a day’s worth of manpower, fuel, and gear we don’t possess and can’t afford).
We’d know why tall fescue is fashionable (no cut, no work), why we should pick up our tees (they dull mower blades, and resharpening robs hours), and why benches, cart signs, and tee markers are a blight (cut the engine, hop off, move them, restart, mow, move them back—if your legs are as stiff as mine, you daydream about blowing them out the back of your machine). We’d know that nobody asked a greenskeeper whether wall-to-wall fairways was a trend worth pursuing, and we’d learn how a course’s maintenance budget can be halved if the course has been designed for simpler upkeep, or if its players accepted brown as a firmer shade of green. We’d likely never leave a pitch mark or bare divot again, understanding that those banal scorecard requests aren’t about manners or even playing conditions—they’re about simple respect for the people whose job it is to grow grass, and a gentle nod to their existence. And if you’re like me, you’d enjoy the art of upkeep. Maybe even more than your golf.
It’s hard and early work, and at places like ours, it doesn’t pay that well, either. I used to wonder why they do it, the greenskeepers who might get thanked once a year at the member-guest, but who mostly pass by in hooded sweatshirts and heavy brown boots, working through a checklist that started before dawn. They’re a unique breed, the turf types, but those who get it in their blood tend to stick with it, and after a few months among them, I now had some understanding of why. Getting up and going to work for most people is coffee and a commute, shaving or some makeup, dressing appropriately so you can stare at your phone for an hour. Asking and answering questions in as few words as possible, creating tasks and passing them along, and maybe noticing whether the sun is shining or not.
In the work out here, the weather is all you notice—your day is dictated by sun and seasons and a rain gauge that’s inspected every morning. The forecast tells you when to fire up the mowers and where to take them, and each morning is a chance to know satisfaction before most people have finished deleting their overnight emails. It’s just you atop a humming red rig, tracing lines into a field shining with dew, the fog still spinning in your blades, and your only company a few deer who hardly look up when they see you anymore, and soon every tuft is trimmed and you’ve got the mow lines to prove it and can look back and see what you’ve done—it’s a kind of work I’d never known before this summer, work that gives you clear beginnings and endings and doesn’t ping you after dinner, the sort of job you still feel that evening as you fall asleep, bones sore with effort but your mind clear for having answered what the day asked.
This day’s aches and scrapes might last a little longer. We typically welcome the rain because we lack a working irrigation system for our fairways, and our method for dousing the greens is something we try not to discuss, let alone use. We have nine garden hoses wrapped around hubcaps on posts that stand guard beside each green, but the pump meant to send them water from the pond is old and irritable, and the pipes that run to each hose are a patchwork of red iron and PVC held together by putty and tape, and only half of them remain buried anymore. Where they cross streams or change grade in the woods, we built tiny rock towers to support their weight and keep them from snapping, and with so many leaks, they deliver a mere trickle to those hoses. After a bone-dry May and June, we were praying for rain, forgetting that Noah probably prayed for a drizzle, too.
Not only do we lack the pipes to spray water on the golf course, we don’t have pipes to drain water off it, either. Occasionally I’d spot a rusty drain buried in a fairway, relics from our course’s heyday, but when the water comes now, puddles form in all our low spots (at a course beside a mountain, we have plenty of those). Rain pushes the weeds higher, then shelters them on turf too soft for the machines meant to clip them.
We often tried when we shouldn’t have, and that’s when we felt the agony of tires lurching and spinning, stuck dead in a wet patch. Ever try to slide a piece of old furniture and feel a nail gash your wooden floor? It’s close to that, and then it gets worse when you hit the gas hard because your only way out is forward as platter-sized pieces of fairway come loose beneath your wheels. On your next pass, you see the mess you’ve made and wonder what kind of a would do that to a golf course.
Sometimes you can’t motor through it, and that’s where I found myself on number eight, my twice-a-week nemesis. Not only is it big—a runway par-five of almost all fairway—but its approach is an awkward cut, where your lines squeeze into a tight funnel as you approach a narrow, raised plateau with a collar that’s tough to trim without dropping clippings all over the green. It sits beside a hidden spring in the greenside rough, and today I’d found the heart of it. I looked around, hoping to find one of my comrades, but it was just me and the deer. They’d been watching me stall out all morning, happy to nibble the grass I was failing to shorten.
Bearded Chris was responsible for trimming the rough on his Ventrac, an eight-wheeled beast that could handle our most unreasonable slopes. Shaun mowed the greens, sometimes pushing by hand or, when the triplex was working, atop his riding mower. Fairways were my job, but maybe not much longer, I thought—I’d cleaned my reels, but the tires were buried in three inches of soup. I rocked from forward to reverse with no luck. Shut it down, started it back up. The ignition was shot so we had to hotwire our fairway unit, pressing a wire against the battery with a wrench we kept in the cupholder. No joy. I pulled out my phone and called Shaun, who was cutting greens on the other side of the property. I don’t know how he heard or felt his phone vibrating while his machine was roaring, but when I was working the course, he never failed to pick up. He knew his staff (all two of us) and probably suspected that his fairway might be calling.
“I’m stuck. In the spring on eight.”
He laughed a tired chuckle. “On my way.”
I knew the water was there and should have been more careful, but I was so damn close to done—three hundred yards of fairway cut back-and-forth in perpendicular passes. Cut, loop around, drop the blades, cut, lift again, loop back—and rather than steer my way around the spring, I rolled the dice on turning here and lost.
We varied our fairway cuts to keep the grass from getting too comfortable lying in one direction. On the chalkboard in the maintenance shed, Shaun would draw the design he wanted me to follow that day. Start with a stripe down the middle, then mow in a figure eight to get that half-dark, half-light tuxedo look, or, my preferred method, loop around like a Zamboni until you’re done. Shaun didn’t love it, but it was easier than trying to set a perfect center stripe the way he could—miss the middle, and you left yourself with more grass left or right, circling back and hunting for ribbons until you lost all sense of where you’d been. The short, perpendicular paths I was tracing today (the dark track is what you just hit; keep it close) ensured a good cut, even if it meant less blade time with all the turnarounds, and what I liked best about this job was that I now used terms like “blade time” and phrases like “That was a good cut” and felt like I had earned them.
As I waited for Shaun to finish up whatever green he was working, I licked the dirt from my fingertips, rubbed my thumb against them, and felt the razor rash from brushing my fingers over bed knives.
Stuck in the mud atop a lawnmower three times the size of anything they sold at Home Depot, waiting beside a green in the Sullivan County Catskills, for a moment, I felt like a fake from afar. I was not a greenskeeper. My new role as course operator had not been earned; I was a measure of last resort. It would be a daydream sort of fun to play my own golf holes, sure, but there was no bucket list in my drawer with Run a Golf Club or Mow a Fairway or Raise Money and Buy a Golf Course scribbled upon it. So how had I landed here? I was a writer and a spoiled golfer—my career had taken me to first tees at some of the world’s most wonderous places, where I played golf, jotted down a few paragraphs, bought a shirt, and went looking for the next.
But this place didn’t sell shirts. It didn’t even have a logo. And wondrous wasn’t a word a visitor might have used to describe this nine-holer. Sporty and charming with views for days, but not a destination you’d come to write about. This was rural, local, community golf, and as with most golf courses fitting that description, it was failing. If we didn’t find a way to turn that around this summer and plot a new path, the course would be sold for land and closed two years shy of reaching its one hundredth anniversary. And from my viewpoint, my wheels still spinning in the slop, that new path was anything but clear.
Excerpted from “A Course Called Home: Adventures of an Accidental Golf Course Owner” by Tom Coyne. Published by Avid Reader Press/Simon and Schuster. Copyright © 2026. All rights reserved.