"I've never hit a golf ball. I've never set foot on a golf course. Everything I draw is from inside a 6-by-10 prison cell."

Max Adler ghosts Valentino Dixon's lengthy and (so far) extremely compelling July Golf Digest feature.

I say so far because it's a long one and I'm going to savor the rest in print or on the iPad, but here's a sampling from the Attica Correctional Facility resident's story of crime, redemption and terrific golf hole drawings.

Except for that one drawing for the warden, I never copy holes exactly. I use a photograph as a starting point and then morph the image in my own way. Sometimes I'll find a tiny piece of reference material, like a tree on a stamp or mountains on a calendar, and then imagine my own golf course with it. I find the challenge of integrating these visions very rewarding.

The past two years I've drawn more than 130 golf pictures with colored pencils and 6-by-8-inch sheets of paper I order through the mail. We're not allowed to have brushes and paints, but that's all right; I like pencils. When I was little, my mom and grandma used to slap my hand because of the unconventional way I gripped the pencil, until one day my aunt Gwen told them to stop and look at the comics I'd done from the newspaper. My mom didn't believe I'd done it without tracing, so she made me draw them again freehand as she watched.