Fore!

The driving range of my Long Island youth was replaced long ago by a McDonald’s dispensing trans-fatty fries and by an office building right down the middle of a field where my puny 170-yard drives often landed.

Frank Emmitt’s driving range just off Jericho Turnpike in Syosset, N.Y., 30 miles from Times Square, was a magical place back in the early 1960s. It was run by a crotchety old coot whose occasional bark belied a truly soft heart toward this part-time teenage caddy and anyone else who showed up to smack golf balls off his rubber tees.

I often made my lunch money or paid for those 50-cent buckets of range balls by selling Emmitt used golf balls uncovered in the rough at the nearby country club where I looped weekends and summers ($5 a bag for 18 holes; no tipping save for an occasional free Coke at the turn). He paid a quarter for an unscuffed Titleist, which went on sale immediately for 75 cents, and if you were lucky, Emmitt would give you a free tip on your swing every now and then in between his lessons a few tees down the line.

I thought about Emmitt and his long-gone facility on a recent trip over to the Golf Coast Driving Range in Estero. It’s located on what used to be a tomato farm between a school on one side and several acres of church-owned land on the other. There’s a 40-foot-high screen running down the right side of the range (the better to keep stray shots from conking young soccer players during their afternoon practices), with a sign that reads, "Please aim well left if you tend to slice your golf ball."

In addition to obligatory yardage flags out in the hitting area, golfers also can aim at a huge snowman about 150 yards out, as well as a small billboard with a smiling clown face that earns a free bucket of balls if a shot wedges in the clown’s mouth. There are 32 grass tees, five artificial mats, a sand bunker for blasting, two short-game greens for pitching and chipping and another practice green for putting only.

The best amenity of all, however, is one Cec McFarlane, the 65-year-old proprietor and long-time professional who likes to brag that "the Dead Sea wasn’t even sick when I started teaching golf." He now operates one of only two remaining public driving ranges between Marco Island and Fort Myers in a golf-crazy area that had as many as eight public ranges when McFarlane came to Naples 21 years ago. Most of them—like Emmitt’s place—have since been bulldozed into oblivion to make room for a community here, a strip mall there.

"I don’t think that’s gonna happen any time soon around here," McFarlane says, leaning back in his chair in an office just off his cluttered pro shop, where you can buy new and used clubs and golf balls, arrange for lessons from Cec or three of the pros who teach on the premises or simply sit out on the patio and play checkers. "With the school next door, putting in a housing development would be very difficult. I think we’ll be here for the foreseeable future. I’m looking at least at another five years myself, and then maybe someone else will take over."

McFarlane is a native of Maine who thought one day he’d like to be an NHL player or a professional golfer. Both options evaporated when he hurt his hands in his early 20s hitting a tree root with a golf club, and he’s been teaching the game ever since. In his prime, he says, he often gave more than 2,000 lessons a year working at clubs or ranges in Canada and Florida. He took over the Golf Coast range two years ago, leasing the land from an owner who has told him he has no plans to develop it any time soon.

"I pay him a monthly fee, and everything else is mine," he says. "My biggest job is keeping the grass growing. There’s an old saying in the driving range business that people want to hit off grass, but they don’t want to leave any grass. We seed here every day. I have 19 hitting positions from front to back. We’ll use an area until there’s no grass, then seed it. By the time we get back to that area, it’s grown back in and we start all over again. It’s expensive, but people appreciate it."

His clients pay $6, $8 or $10 a bucket, and he has regulars from all over the area—"doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, you name it, we get ’em here. All these private courses have ranges, but if you’re not a member of that club, where do you go to practice? You come here, that’s where," he says. "And I’ll teach anyone under the sun. It’s difficult to get world-class teaching at a public driving range, but that’s what you get when you come here, too."

Bowen Dillashaw, a retiree from Bonita Springs, is a Golf Coast range regular, hitting balls at least twice a week. "The man runs a nice operation," he says of McFarlane. "The range balls are in decent shape, you get to hit off grass and they just give you good service and treat you right. What else do you need?"

More driving ranges, and even better, more Frank Emmitts and Cec McFarlanes.