Shootin’ and Snaggin’ with the Frugal Fisherman
I’m a sporadic disc golfer. My introduction to the sport came over a three year period in the late 90s when I threw an infrequent series of really stoned-out rounds at parks across the greater southeastern United States with a close friend from high school. We played suburban parks in Raleigh, state parks in rural middle Georgia, and even a municipal park located near the Charleston, SC coast. My friend worked a sales job with a corporate client—selling lawn mowers, I thought, until informed years later that it was actually ATM receipts and other printables. Officially, he was “out on a sales call” for all 288 holes we played.
More recently, I have been playing at a nearby place in Keene, KY, on property I’ve helped rent with some friends for the past three years. The course is an excellent compliment to the firepits, berry patches, gardens, canoes, kayaks and hops decks with which we’ve littered the property.
By last summer at Keene, we had built and managed a fairly challenging 22 hole disc golf course that meandered throughout the front half of the property. Though the first 11 holes featured a number of birdie opportunities and could field some low scores, the back 11 was quite tough and grueling, capped off by “420,” a 420-foot final hole that follows the old Rhiney-B Railroad bed as it grades through a semi-honeysuckled limestone cutout. The basket for 420, our only par 4, is a bed of clematis trained around a wild cherry tree. Narnia!
But while quite fun, disc golf courses are like most ventures. They require time, energy and money. This year my friends and I have all had less of each to devote to our place in Keene. A classic case of imperial over-reach, nature has begun to reclaim all but a couple of our 22 holes. Incredibly, I hadn’t played a round there all summer.
But don’t cry for me. With our private course perhaps permanently out of commission, I have begun to throw again at Lexington’s disc golf courses, which are located at several of the city’s public parks. Part of what I re-discovered is hardly earth-shattering: Lexington, a decidedly suburban city, has some fantastic suburban parks.
Shilito Park
I first threw a round at Shilito around five years ago during another manic burst of disc golf playing. At the time, Shilito was considered the easier of Lexington’s two primary disc golf courses, but I always enjoyed it. True, the relatively open course layout limited where and when players could take the required stoner’s walk—into small patches of woods sufficiently out of sight for lighting up—but overall the course utilized trees effectively enough to make for a number of fun and challenging holes.
Last Sunday I met Northrup Center at Shilito for a spirited round of 18. Center, a part-time resident of Lexington well known around Keene for his third-rate disc golf game, biked to Shilito from his temporary home downtown. I was a bit skeptical, but he showed up on-time and said the route was fairly easy.
“If you hit UK from downtown,” Center explained while stretching before Hole 1, “you can angle easily back behind Commonwealth and through the UK Arboretum, where you can link up with the edge of the Southern Heights and Zandale neighborhoods.”
I looked at him blankly.
“Just think of it as using UK, the Arboretum and the neighborhoods behind the Arboretum as a way to travel south parallel to Nicholasville Road, except without the hassle and danger of sprawl traffic. I end up hitting Landsdowne, going under New Circle without waiting on a light, and then turning right at the Mexican Restaurant at Lansdowne and East Reynolds.”
Center deftly moved into his final stretches, a series of scissor-step side sprints.
“East Reynolds takes me across Nicholasville, at a stop light by the mall. I’m only on that main road a short time before turning into Shilito. The route’s fairly simple, allows me to sightsee, takes under 30 minutes, and because I’m playing disc golf and not bocce, I don’t have to tote much with me on the trip. I’ll definitely do it again.”
I’d like to say that Center’s ride to Shilito helped me race ahead to an early lead on the opening holes, but it didn’t happen. Despite shooting an opening birdie to grab the early lead, I couldn’t shake him. After Center showed me the layout for the new Stoner Walk built into the course renovation of several years ago, a sitting log felled in the middle of a rare semi-secluded strip of woods running between holes 11 and 12, we stopped counting strokes.
Not that it mattered much. Unlike the mostly empty private Keene course we had developed, Shilito was alive with people. It was nice to be out playing with the public again.
Suburban or not, Shilito is a much-used park. In addition to the constant flow of disc golfers that day, the new paved path that circumnavigates the park was filled with bikers and walkers, strollers and pets. The several covered pavilions hummed with birthday bashes, sunny Sunday cookouts and scaled-down office get-togethers. It was a festive public carnival, a free of charge accompaniment for our free of charge game of disc golf. I loved every minute of it.
It’s been fun to design and play on my own disc golf course. You can ingest more beer on your own course, after all, and waiting on the tee for others to finish never happens at Keene. But until I got back to Shilito, I forgot about the importance of well-used public spaces of leisure.
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