This Freeport man has played 903 golf courses, including 93 of nation's top 100
FREEPORT — Johnny Cash sings that he’s been everywhere, including Winnemucca, Buffalo, Tulsa, Fargo, Reno and Chicago.
Cash names 92 cities in his iconic song. Still, he hasn’t been half the places as Steve Young. In fact, Johnny Cash’s traveling boast is barely one-tenth the stops as America’s golfing guest.
The 75-year-old Young, a lifelong Freeport resident, has played 903 golf courses, starting with the Freeport Club at age 7.
“Some people like to win tournaments,” Young said. “I’ve won a few, but my whole thing has always been playing as many golf courses as I can.”
And not just any golf courses. The best courses. When he was young, his dad took him to three highly rated courses in Illinois: Medinah, Bob O’Link and Cog Hill.
Getting help from his wife
Later, his wife, Ann, got him in the door at some of the most exclusive country clubs in the nation. Now, 38 years later, Young has played 93 of the courses currently ranked in Golf Digest’s top 100 in the nation.
“She is the one who got me going on this thing,” he said. “We were looking at a book that listed the top 100 golf courses in America. I didn’t even know there was one of these things. My wife asked, ‘How many have you played?’ I said seven. She said, ‘Well, let’s play the other 93.’ ”
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Young dismissed the idea.
“I don’t have connections,” Young, a former guidance counselor and golf coach at Lanark Eastland High School, said. “I’ve been a school teacher all my life. I’m not wealthy. I’m just an Average Joe kind of guy.”
Young knows he will never get to all 100. For one thing, the list keeps changing and courses that once counted for the top 100, such as Kemper Lakes and Cog Hill, are no longer on the list. For another, he figures he will never play at Augusta National.
“Ann tried to get me on at Augusta,” Young said. “She found a guy who was a big shot in Chicago, but he said, ‘I can’t have him play right now, because I don’t even play the golf course. How about if I send two tickets to the 1987 Masters. That will cost you $85 a piece.’
“That’s as close as I ever got to Augusta.”
But other doors began to open, starting with Cherry Hills in June of 1983. Ann was going on a business trip to Denver and Steve was going along too. His friend Perry Green, the head pro at Freeport Country Club at the time, had connections there. Ten minutes before they left for Denver, Green called and told Young he got him on the course.
Young showed up that day a little nervous, parking his rented Mustang near the kitchen to be less conspicuous, but had a “great, just super” experience.
Ann took over from there.
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When Ann, who managed Garrity Gifts in Freeport, went on a buying trip to Tulsa in 1984, Steve said he wanted to play Southern Hills. Ann looked it up on a map, saw it was near Oral Roberts University and assumed the famous evangelist would be a club member. She made some phone calls and asked if her husband could play with Roberts. A few days later, a secretary from the university called and said Oral couldn’t play, but Steve could play with his cousin, Dr. Ed Roberts, who had Rockford-area connections, having gotten married in Rockton.
Ann kept writing letters and making phone calls whenever Steve was going to be near a great course that he wanted to play. She’d go to the library to look up who might be members. When Steve played Pinehurst in 1985, he played with a member who put up $2 million to help found the club in 1963.
Rating courses for Golf Digest
By 1987, Steve had played 23 of the current top 100 courses. He got a phone call from Phil Weber, a Golf Digest panelist who had played all 100 top courses. Weber told him how to apply to become a rater for Golf Digest.
Six months later, Young got a letter asking him if he wanted to be on the Golf Digest panel.
“May 20, 1988, a date I will always remember,” Young said. “It took me about a second to say yes.”
Ann’s days of letters and phone calls and research were done. Now Steve arranged his own tee times on the nation’s best courses.
“When I became a panelist, that was a door that opened up that I never, ever dreamed of," Young said. "It’s unbelievable what I’ve been able to do with this.”
In his prime, Young would play 25 to 30 of the courses nominated for the Golf Digest list every year.
“I have played every course that’s been a nominee in the state of Illinois,” he said. “That’s something I hold very dear. It’s hard to do when you have courses like Chicago Golf Club and Butler National that are so exclusive.”
This is not a job for Young. Just an opportunity.
“I don’t get paid. I get zero,” he said. “I don’t work for Golf Digest; I am just a panelist. It’s an honorary position for rating golf courses.
“I can’t accept anything, because it could influence your ratings. It costs me a lot of money over the years to go and play because everything is on my nickel, although 95 percent of the time I get my greens fees picked up. A lot of places you have to take a caddie, and that comes out of Steve Young’s pocket, with an average caddie fee of $100 to $110.”
But it is worth every penny. More than worth it.
“It’s every golfer’s dream to play Golf Digest’s top 100 courses — or even 10 of them,” said Lloyd McWilliams, a five-time Rockford City champion who was a high school rival of Young’s and has played a couple of the top 100 courses with him. “And Steve still appreciates it every time he plays a new one.”
Young, now in his 35th year of evaluating golf courses, is the longest tenured panelist in Illinois.
“I can pick what I want to do,” he said. “As long as the magazine is in agreement, I go and play and turn it in.”
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How he rates the golf courses
“We have a base of around 1,900 golf courses the people in Golf Digest have determined are the best we have,” Young said. “I contact a golf course that is a nominee and tell them I would like us to come out and evaluate the course. Then I evaluate it on eight different criteria.
“I give a number between 1 and 10 in each criteria. I can use decimals. I have never given a 10 in my life, because we are not supposed to. And we don’t give 1s either. Basically, the scores range from 4 to 9.5. I punch them in my phone and submit them to Golf Digest. It goes into the database for 10 years. After 10 years, they purge them. A course can get 200 evaluations from 200 different panelists. They average the scores out and compare to the other golf courses. Our ratings come out every two years.”
Criteria include design, fun — “which can be very subjective” — conditioning and “how difficult a course is while still being fair.”
Young went to seminars in 2004 and 2005 and met Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer.
“We had school,” Young said. “They taught us how to be better evaluators of golf courses. But it is still subjective. What you might think is a great golf course, I might think is average. For instance, what makes a golf course fun. I haven’t got a clue — other than I wouldn’t mind going back and playing it again and again and again.”
And yet the course that Young — and almost every golf rating system — says is No. 1 is a course Young is happy to have played only once. He played Pine Valley in New Jersey in his first year as a Golf Digest panelist in 1988 and has never felt an urge to go back.
“I just wanted to get it off the list,” he said. “It’s too difficult, too penal. I couldn’t break 100. That’s not a fun golf course. It’s a demanding golf course. It beats you down.”
Will he ever reach 1,000 courses?
Young, a 1965 graduate of Freeport High School who was a two-time all-conference pick for the Pretzels, was a 2-handicap in his prime but is now “a 12 from the front tees.”
Because Young is not the golfer he used to be, he is skeptical he will reach his former goal of playing 1,000 courses. He rated only about half as many courses last year as he used to in his prime. The 900th course he played was Moraine Country Club in Kettering, Ohio, last year.
But he still loves to golf. He played Wednesday with Park Hills pro Jeff Hartman in Freeport. Young has been a Park Hills season pass holder for 52 years and played in 43 Freeport City tournaments there, winning it once.
“To play 900 golf courses — I never knew it was that many, but I knew he had played a lot,” Hartman said.
Some of Young’s favorite area golf courses include Forest Hills Country Club in Rockford, PrairieView in Byron and the now-defunct Plum Tree National in Harvard. He thinks Canyata in Marshall, Illinois, is the best course “nobody has heard of” and that “Wisconsin is the most underrated state with great golf courses.”
And as much as Young loves playing the world’s greatest golf courses, he also loves teeing it up at Park Hills, the Freeport Club or nearby Wolf Hollow in Lena.
“My favorite course is the one I’m playing today,” he said. “That’s what it’s about; being in the moment.
“I’ve been a member at Park Hills since 1972 and I still enjoy it. I still enjoy the Freeport Club. It’s very challenging. Wolf Hollow isn’t the greatest course, but I have never been bored with going back and playing it. It’s playable. And if you are swinging well, you are going to score well. I don’t know what makes it fun, but it just is fun. It’s hard to pinpoint. It’s just something you know.”
Matt Trowbridge is a Rockford Register Star sports reporter. Email him at mtrowbridge@rrstar.com and follow him on Twitter at @MattTrowbridge. Sign up for the Rockford High School newsletter at rrstar.com.
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Freeport's Steve Young has played 903 golf courses in his life
