Jim Hartsell will tell you the best golf course in the world is 4,800 yards and a par 66. He is not being cute about it. He would like you to come after him.
In this episode of The Bag Drop: Untold Stories in Golf, host Matt Considine and co‑host Dr. Kevin Moore (a.k.a. “The Professor”) sit down with Jim Hartsell — architect, three-time Bag Drop guest, and author of A Round of Scottish Courses — for a conversation about what thirty years of returning to the same small Scottish clubs teaches you about why golf places matter, and what a golfer owes a place once he starts telling everyone about it.
The conversation dives into:
- Why Dunaverty — 4,800 yards, par 66 — is his answer to "best course in the world," and why he thinks the question is usually asked wrong
- What choosing eighteen favorites instead of eighteen best freed him to write — and how a chapter actually gets built, including the sheepdog trials that unlocked a lost course on Arran
- The night the Old Course put a flag on the 18th green made from a drawing his nine-year-old son had left on his laptop
- The green-fee trap: why North Berwick and Brora keep going up, and why tour operators refuse to take a £30 course seriously
- Whether writing about Dunaverty, Askernish and Isle of Harris is quietly changing them — and what the members themselves say about that
- Three rules for being a good guest at a Scottish club, including the one about tipping too much
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Chapters
00:00 Cold open: the anticipation is half the fun
00:41 Welcome, and the Professor's new office
02:16 A love letter to the game: who your club introduces you to
03:01 Caddie School for Soldiers and thirty days at the Home of Golf
04:31 Jim Hartsell, third appearance, third book
06:34 Professor's teaching: quiet eye and gaze duration
11:29 Ad read: Titleist T-Series and the three Ds
13:52 Three books, one thread
15:09 The course gets you in the room; a person carries the story
16:32 The high school English teacher who started all this
19:31 Calling Rob Collins with a crazy idea
23:29 Fifty interviews, an outline, and meeting Jim Sitar
26:40 The books that made him: Wind, Bamberger, Morton, MacVicar
31:18 When Revelation Comes, and the notebook that read like a book
35:25 Patric Dickinson's eighteen best, and Jim's eighteen favorite
38:53 Dunaverty is the best course in the world: 4,800 yards, par 66
42:07 Soup, clubhouses, and the whole lived experience
45:40 Sheepdog trials, and when history earns its place in a chapter
49:56 What do you have against the Scottish east coast?
51:44 Frankfurt, a lost day, and a morning inside the R&A
54:33 Dark hours on the Old with a persimmon driver
56:52 The flag on the eighteenth green
1:00:35 Why the most famous place in golf did not have to do that
1:02:21 Does writing about these places change them?
1:06:40 North Berwick, Brora, and being too cheap to be taken seriously
1:07:46 Would the veneer wear off if you moved there?
1:12:14 Three rules for being a good guest (and don't over-tip)
1:14:41 Calendars, course guides, and Jordan's junior program
1:19:27 Close: subscribe, review, and the Titleist T-Series
