Outside the Shaftesbury Castle Clubhouse with my friend Mitch Laurance.
On the ‘tale’ end of the 2014 ‘East Coast Golf Journey’ I visited with Mitch Laurance in Myrtle Beach, SC at the Shaftesbury Glen Golf & Fish Club. What a wonderful club but that is another story!
After another restful night in the Ben Hogan Suite in the Castle Clubhouse, I felt inspired to put on my knickers and grab my hickory play set and look for a match. Was it mere coincidence that I met my old (as in long time) Mitch Laurance in the pro shop at Shaftesbury Glen Golf & Fish Club? Or by simple Scottish fate that the golf gods would bring together two lads wearing knickers and brandishing hickory-shafted drivers? No Academy Awards to be given here though the clubs certainly look vintage and deserving like those in The Greatest Game Ever Played. We met and headed to the first tee to put a peg in the ground.
CLICK here for a VIDEO of Hickory Golf played by Mitch & Andy.
Mitch’s gem of a driver, a Jack Whie Sunningdale Special which he drove almost as well as Bobby Jones himself!
Before sailing that feathery down the first fairway courtesy of the Sunningdale Special Express, the voice of hickory golf himself, spoke of his connection to golf history through playing hickory golf. Who can dispute him who yields an authentic 100-year old club created by Jack White same as the driver used by Bobby Jones during his Grand Slam year of 1930.
Sporting my blue and gold checkered knickers I followed the master with a smash of my own. Right down the pretty goes our first tee shots. Hickory golf at its best, two grown men in knickers playing a twosome at Shaftesbury Glen Golf & Fish Club, a.k.a. Hickory Golf Central of the Southeast United States.
I managed to corral the popular golf radio host under a tree for an interrogation of his life, my life and more importantly more insight into Myrtle Beach’s top golfing destinations known simple as the Glens Group—Heather Glen, Glen Dornoch, Shaftesbury Glen Golf & Fish Club and the Glen-less in name only Possum Trot Golf Course.
CLICK here for a VIDEO Interview with Mitch Laurance, Biography & Shaftesbury Style!
Replica and playable MGC Victor gutta percha golf ball.
If you have ever listened to or certainly if you have ever met Mitch Laurance you know him as an interesting guy with a cadre of looks, voice inflections and stories to quickly communicate his love of life and golf, especially hickory golf. His Curriculum Vitae includes Woodstock, working on production of Saturday Night Live the first five years of the show, including filling in on stage when needed, then moving to LA to become an actor, which is what brought him to golf.
With a twin brother and a younger brother growing up on Long Island he played all sports, especially baseball but never golf. An actor friend relentlessly encouraged him to try golf and he finally gave in. His friend said he would pick him up at six-thirty the next day to go golfing and Mitch’s response was to question the time since it would be getting dark at that time. He was immediately hooked by his inability to get the ball up into the air. He learned how to and after playing in the Crosby Pro-Am for 16 years and being a regular on the celebrity golf circuit he brought his game back east. Once an actor, always an actor, even though he was up and early for hickory golf at Shaftesbury Glen.
Quite the tale for Andy’s Golf & Travel Diary!
