You are about to become intimately familiar with a previously unknown golf course. For decades, Augusta Municipal Golf Course was the scruffy public track where the locals played. The poor kids from the housing projects next door called it the Patch. A few years ago, Augusta National adopted the course and poured a ton of resources back into it. Next week, the shiny new Patch course will be unveiled to a flood of headlines. But in order to understand where it is today, we must understand the course’s past. For that, Dr. Gregory McCord sat down with host Tom Coyne. McCord was one of those housing-project kids, and he’s written a book about growing up in the Patch. He gives us the real story of life at the course, from stealing golf balls as a kid, to the summer job there that inspired him to better things, to the chance birdie on 16 that put him on a Greyhound to a college scholarship. As the golf world turns to Augusta National, this is the rare time that a story happening outside its gates might be even more interesting.
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