"Wild Green Yonder"

Thanks to all the readers who emailed the link to Alastair Gordon's WSJ Magazine story on just how far the game has drifted from the kind of golf many of us love. He also touches on the surge in cross-country golf.

As we were starting to get a feel for the raw conditions, the back nine opened with a series of surreal encounters as I climbed over a barbed-wire fence and faced an enormous bull who seemed aggravated that I’d sliced my ball into his paddock. The 12th green was completely hidden within a mysteriously bowl-shaped depression within a hillock (cnoc in Scottish Gaelic) and I had to shoot blindly over a jagged ridge and scamper up to the top of the cnoc, where I found that my ball had landed in this secret little valley and rolled within a few feet of the pin. By this point we had torn up our scorecards in a moment of giddy liberation, and Iain turned to me with a bright expression and said: “This is the only way that golf should ever be played. No status, no fancy pants.” And he was right. We could have played stark naked and putted with stale baguettes and no one would have cared or known.

Gordon also lists some of his favorite remote golf experiences.