Best-Selling Golf Storyteller Tom Coyne Appearing At McLemore On Thursday

While he admits playing golf professionally was always a childhood dream, Tom Coyne recalls having loftier aspirations for his future from his earliest days.

He started caddying at the age of eight at Rolling Green Golf Club, a Golden Age masterpiece outside of Philadelphia that has long lived in the shadows of its iconic neighbors Merion and Aronimink. The golf club became his summer camp, where he would caddie in the mornings and spend his afternoons playing the stately course that hosted the 1976 U.S. Women's Open and the 2016 U.S. Women's Amateur.

But as much as Coyne enjoyed golf, there was another passion burning within him that refused to take a back seat to the gentleman’s game.

“Because I was a pretty bookish young man, my primary dream was to someday go into a bookstore and see something I wrote,” Coyne said. “As many books as I read while growing up, to think someday I could open a book and turn through those pages and see that I'd written those words was a fantasy that seemed beyond reach.”

Little did Coyne realize at the time, but those seemingly divergent paths would one day intersect, marrying those twin obsessions into a career that has birthed five books with golf serving as the backdrop to his masterful storytelling, spending two decades as a creative writing professor at St. Joseph’s University and now serving as the editor of The Golfer’s Journal, a quarterly publication that stands as the holy grail of current long-form golf journalism.

An award-winning and New York Times bestselling author since 2001, Coyne will be making an appearance at Cloudland, McLemore’s mountaintop resort, next Thursday (April 24th). The special evening is open to the public where he will share his personal journeys of playing golf across Scotland, Ireland and America and the personalities that made each of those odysseys uniquely memorable. The schedule begins at 6 p.m. with a book signing and cocktail reception followed by dinner at 7 p.m. and an interactive session moderated by former PGA TOUR player and Golf Channel analyst Charlie Rymer.

Tickets may be purchased at the following link Tom Coyne at McLemore. Proceeds from ticket sales will be given to The Evans Scholars Foundation benefitting caddie education. The Evans Scholarship is a full housing and tuition college scholarship awarded to golf caddies with limited financial means. To learn more, click here.

Having made a previous venture to the Chattanooga area that is documented in his latest book, “A Course Called America”, this will be Coyne’s long-anticipated first visit to McLemore.

“What's exciting is I know very little about McLemore other than some of the images of No. 18 up in the clouds,” said Coyne, referencing the Highlands Course closing hole. “It's one place I have wanted to visit for a long time. It is such a great golf part of the country. I've been fortunate to get down to play Sweetens Cove, The Honors Course and Sewanee. Those are all in my ‘America’ book, and I played Lookout Mountain in fog where you had no idea where the ball was going. I know what a great golf area it is, so I'm excited to get back there.”

Coyne’s path to what he describes as an “accidental golf writer” was forged when pursuing a Master’s of Fine Arts and Fiction Writing at Notre Dame. He was required to write a thesis in order to graduate, and realized he had little to draw from other than his upbringing around golf.

“I’m in a writing program where everyone's trying to write the great American novel, and here I am writing about a golf caddie,” Coyne said. “But I felt like there's been a lot of great literary treatments of sports and golf specifically, so I liked what I was on to. Those stories turned into chapters, and they turned it into a finished thesis which actually became my first book called ‘A Gentleman's Game’. It's about a golf prodigy who caddies at his dad's club, so I definitely drew upon my experiences growing up in golf. It was fun to write fiction about a player who was better than I was.

“I set out with the ambition of being a novelist and wrote a golf novel, which put me in the golf space. Before I knew it, my book was on the golf shelf and a movie was made out of it. With the success of the book and the movie, my editor wanted another golf book, and I was happy enough to oblige.”

That resulted in Coyne’s next book released in 2006, “Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer’s Quest to Play with the Pros”. Those first two works were followed by a popular trifecta of “A Course Called Ireland: A Long Walk in Search of a Country, a Pint, and the Next Tee” in 2009, “A Course Called Scotland: Searching the Home of Golf for the Secret to Its Game” in 2019 and “A Course Called America: Fifty States, Five Thousand Fairways, and the Search for the Great American Golf Course” in 2021.

“Those who join us at McLemore will be taken on a walk through my golf adventures and a somewhat unusual golf life I've been really fortunate to lead,” Coyne said. “Whether that be walking the coast of Ireland for four months with clubs on my back, or playing every links course in Scotland and trying to qualify for the Open Championship, or spending two years trying to play professional golf, or playing golf in all 50 states.

“My books have sent me on all these great quests and adventures that I hope have been fun for readers to sort of live an extravagant golf life vicariously through my adventures. I sort of tell stories from the road and try to take people to places that they haven't been. Hopefully, the overall theme and message that comes out of it is seizing the opportunities that are in front of you, saying ‘yes’ to adventures and unreasonable things that seem unreasonable, but when you're out there doing them, they can become your life in really wonderful ways.”

Coyne’s gifted style of taking on a story focuses more on the characters who have helped shape his adventures rather than mundane details about golf courses and design features. He is reluctant to categorize himself as a golf writer, but instead sees himself as a creative wordsmith who happens to use the personalities he’s encountered in golf as the medium of his artistry.

“I didn't go to journalism school. I went to a creative writing program, so I think that's probably to some extent influenced or flavored my writing,” Coyne said. “I don't run to the interview room and ask golfers 20 questions for my deadline. My storytelling isn't born of a newspaper background. My approach on a subject drives my interest in the big question – ‘Why do people do the things that they did?’ I think that's the foundation of all storytelling. And golf gives you such a great lens through which to observe that and to learn about people that it's been a very happy source of material for me, and it's kept me interested for a while.”

Coyne’s latest venture with The Golfer’s Journal provides a perfect continuation of his accidental marriage of passions. The quarterly book-style delivery features thought-provoking essays on a wide range of topics coupled with unparalleled photography layouts that make each edition a collectible item.

The Golfer’s Journal was the brainchild of publisher Brendon Thomas, who had achieved a loyal following in the surf community with The Surfer’s Journal. Thomas got hooked on golf, and began his newest publication eight years ago, where Coyne initially was a contributing writer.

“There was a space to do something elevated artistically that really honors the soul and spirit of the game, where you could write long, where you wouldn't be bogged down with ads,” Coyne said

Coyne later became a senior writer before eventually assuming his current role as editor of the magazine as well as hosting the podcast, prompting him to walk away from his position at St. Joseph’s.

“I gave up tenure for the security of the magazine business, which not everybody does,” Coyne said. “But it was kind of a no-brainer, because the excitement and the joy of what we get to do at the Journal, which is the freedom to dream up the story and then go and write it and not worry about how long it is. That became the next dream, to make something that people enjoy and collect and care about. I jumped at the chance to take this new role.”

The Golfer’s Journal has also spawned a community of subscribers deemed the Broken Tee Society, a loyal band of followers who participate in more than 40 events around the world at some of golf’s most desired destinations.

“Last week while walking around the Masters, I met a lot of Broken Tee Society members and heard them talk about events they've been to or stories they liked,” Coyne said. “As to the community aspect, I don't think anyone could have anticipated that. It is probably something we hoped for. I met four or five people with broken tees tattooed on their bodies that I would not have predicted. The Broken Tee Society is their golf club, it's their home for golf and they have become like a family.”

Coyne’s event will provide more details for those interested in subscribing to The Golfer’s Journal, with the proceeds being earmarked for the Evans Scholarship, another item on his expansive menu of passions.

“What the Evans is able to offer is four years of free college, and not only that, but a place to live in an Evans house located on these campuses,” Coyne said. “That idea of people on a scholarship, living together, caddying and dedicated to golf, focusing on school, being in that environment, and getting a full ride - that blew my mind. I found it incredibly impressive that I played with a lot of former Evans Scholars who are now members at the club at which they had worked. I met people who were successful and owed it all to the scholarship.”

As a former caddie himself, Coyne is thankful to promote an organization that connects his own life experiences, laying the foundation for his wonderful journey.

“I just have so much gratitude for my caddie experience,” Coyne said. “I learned a lot in school and graduate school, but the best storytellers I was ever around were caddies waiting for a loop, sitting around for three hours, listening to the old guys trying to one-up each other with a crazier story. That's where I learned timing and suspense and drama. That’s why I ended up writing my first book about caddies. Beyond the money I’d get in the summertime, I really feel like I owe my career to my time as a caddie, so anything I can do for caddies I’m fully behind.”

Paul Payne can be emailed at paulpayne6249@gmail.com