2025. It was a year where I explored new places, made some new friends, and vanquished some old enemies. It was a year where I learned how to pace myself better, where I learned a lot about manners and etiquette, and it was the year where I spent more time with friends. It was an awesome year.
I am, of course, entirely talking about my year of golf.
Jokes aside, 2025 was the year I really decided to buckle down and try to get better at golf. I probably played 30 rounds (maybe more?) and progressed from someone who could occasionally drive the ball really far to someone who can occasionally choose his flight path on his 230-yard carry. I think it’s good to have a hobby and something to strive to get better at. Not everyone has that in their life once they finish up high school sports.
I thought it would be fun to take a look at a few of my favorite golf moments of 2025 in the form of one shot from each of the 12 “real” courses I played. This turned out to be a mistake, as it committed me to 3 weeks and over 8,500 words of writing. But it also got me excited for the season to change in 2026 and for golf season to get back into full swing. Sam and I have already played a few rounds this January; I am hitting my irons much, much worse than I did in July, but compared to last January, it’s a night and day difference. I think that’s pretty cool!
So enjoy my 12 favorite shots as 12 different golf clubs. Stick around at the very end to see a brief description of some shots my friends hit that stuck with me as well.
12: Sugar Hills Golf Club, Goodland – August 13
Hole: 13 (par 3, 146 yards)
Shot: 1st
Club: 6 iron
Result: Par
Everybody deserves a golf course. Even Goodland, Kansas. I didn’t know how the economics of a golf course like that work. Even if only 50 people used the course at Sugar Hills on any given weekday, that’d be over 1% of the population of the town of Goodland. And that feels like a large portion of the town!
The course wasn’t completely empty when I arrived on Wednesday, August 13. It was a bright, slightly hazy morning for the 5 minute drive west of town on Old US 24. The course appeared out of an apparition of wheat fields. Two high schools were out on the practice range despite the almost complete absence of anyone else. It was kind of inspiring to watch two kids in the most humble of spots, grinding away at an early hour to try and get a little better.
I paid inside the ancient clubhouse (it reminded me of being in my grandparents’ house when I was a child) and got a key to one of the ancient golf carts. The course was much like you’d expect – a mix of buffalo grass between the fairways and healthy, cabbage-like rough. There was a solid mix of scrubland and trees (I’m a little disappointed that there were a bunch of pines. It makes sense – if you live in Goodland, you’re used to nothing but miles and miles of open prairie everywhere you go. The sky never seems to stop pressing in all around you. But heaven forbid, this is the perfect spot for a links-style course!) and it was also slopier than the notorious flatlands of northwest Kansas had any business being. The greens were shockingly fast given how much morning dew they were holding; I had a few putts with upwards of 20 feet of horizontal break. Meanwhile, one of the biggest hazards I dealt with on the front 9 was the presence of sprinklers.
It was not the best round of golf ever. The front 9 in particular had me in a bad mood with a lot of chunky shots, driver issues, and unbelievable slopes in the green. It wasn’t until the back nine when I started to settle down and string some actual golf shots together and enjoy the round. I’m glad that happened, because Sugar Hills is a unique location! In addition to all of the waste areas, there were low rises that gave sweeping views of the Plains and nearby granaries, the low skyline of downtown Goodland, and fields of sunflowers. In terms of making memories, there are worse ways to go.
The actual golf shot I want to highlight really wasn’t much of a much. It was my tee shot into the par-3 13th, an elevated green with a big hill behind it that was made a little trickier by a steady headwind. As it was, I managed to twist a low 6-iron onto the front of the green, where it embedded deeply into the short grass and skidded to a halt almost immediately. It made for an easy par pickup.
Kind of a forgettable shot, but not a forgettable place to play a round of golf.
11: Westwood, Norman – May 14
Hole: 17 (par 3, 165 yards)
Shot: 2nd
Club: Sand wedge
Result: Par
2025 was a year where my friends and I expanded the idea of “major scrambles”: a round played between Monday and Wednesday on the week of a major where a group of 4 goes all-out to try to score the best round possible under strict golf rules. Since the PGA Championship in 2025 was played at a course that is a little less than universally beloved (Quail Hollow), we thought it would be a funny tribute to play at Norman’s municipal course dominated by a stodgy group of pro shop fossils, Westwood. I put together a squad of ball strikers for this round: Kevin, Max, Sam, and myself. Our goal was to shoot par.
We briefly went over par with a tough bogey as a group on 7, but got it back with a birdie on 8. Otherwise there was a lot of steady par golf and near misses. Late in the evening, our play became a little less dialed in. The group was lucky to escape with an up-and-down par on the par 3 13th. We were even luckier to escape on the 14th to remain at even. On the par 3 15th, nobody hit the green (or even came close), and this par save was a bridge too far. At +1 with 3 holes to go, we had a short par 5 to save ourselves. Kevin piped a drive, Max hit a sublime wood just beyond the frontside bunker, and I chipped off the flagstick to give us a tap-in birdie and get back to even. Just 2 holes remained.
So now we get to the par-3 17th. There’s not much to it: it’s about 165 yards due west into the sunset with a little creek along the way. I tried to hit a lowered down 5-wood to catch the slope in front of the green and ended up with a horrific topped ball. Kevin and Sam had brutal tee shots too. Even Max’s tee shot missed the front right of the green by about 20 yards. The green was shaped like a kidney bean with the concave end facing us and a big incline in the back middle. The pin was on the front at the foot of the incline, and there wasn’t a whole lot of landing space on that tier. So from this angle there was almost no choice but to aim right of the pin and try to feed the ball down.
And lo and behold, that’s exactly what I ended up doing. My sand wedge shot came out nice and soft and landed on the back center of the green maybe 20 feet right of the cup. For a brief moment the ball sat nearly motionless, as if deciding whether it wanted a group of 4 guys to achieve their goal of a par round or not. Then it started to fall to the left, building up speed. Max said “Look at Nolan walking it in like he’s Rory”, which is the first I even realized I was already stomping toward the hole before the ball had even settled 4 feet to my side of the flag. I missed the par putt, but Kevin (who had been chipping close all day while I picked him up on short putts) reversed the script.
We ended up making a slightly disappointing par on 18 after having a great chance to finish in the red. Still, the even score made the 2025 PGA Championship scramble our number to beat going forward.
10: The Links, Norman – May 23
Hole: 1 (par 4, 322 yards)
Shot: 3rd
Club: Sand wedge
Result: Birdie
As much as I played The Links between 2020 and 2023 as a local (and free, when I lived there) course, 2025 saw my friends and I take our golf game elsewhere. Over the whole year, I doubt I played more than 2 or 3 rounds there. That means there wasn’t a lot of competition for the best shot from this course; a double skip off of the pond on 15 with a 3-wood is the only other contender.
On May 23, Sam and I decided to play against each other in a little friendly match play. We lasted 13 holes and then decided to never do that again; things had gotten a wee bit competitive and it took a lot of the fun out of the round. Before all that, though, I had cause to celebrate on the very first hole.
The 1st is one of 4 fairways that are all squished into The Links’ main space behind the clubhouse where there’s really only space for 2 or 3. Each of them is narrow and it doesn’t take a large miss at all to end up on the wrong fairway. I didn’t quite do that on the first, hitting a low line drive duck hook that ended up under a mini pine tree (a lot of trees at The Links were replanted in 2021 after the 2020 ice storm). With maybe 100 yards to go, I caught my wedge shot a little thin but was fortunate to get a soft landing from the outside branches of one of the trees guarding the left side of the green. The pin was on the back left side of the green and my ball was no more than 10 feet away. Sam had taken himself completely out of play with a huge slice and some poor approach play, so a par, bogey, maybe even a double bogey would win the hole.
No use worrying about what could have won it, because I caught a soft little wedge out of the rough. The ball bounced once, bounced twice, started rolling, hit the pin, and flushed. It might have been on pace to roll a couple of feet by, but I didn’t have to worry about that. This was the first (and to this point, only) chip-in of my life.
9: Trosper, OKC – April 1
Hole: 10 (par 4, 314 yards)
Shot: 1st
Club: Driver
Result: Birdie
2024 was the year that I took a step forward from “guy who plays 9 holes with his friends once in a while” to “guy who is trying to actually get better at golf”. By June, I was hitting shots that had never been in the bag before – big lofted wedge shots, the occasional beautiful mid-iron, and smashing my driver. I hoped that progress from 2024 would carry into 2025, especially after a promising birthday round in November.
Well, it didn’t. I spent most of March and April of this year pathetically foundering in most aspects of my game before finally starting to round into form in May, June, and July. It does seem like my swing with an iron is so violent that it helps to have wetter and softer ground, which Oklahoma golf courses just do not offer between November and mid-April when the grass greens up. One place where I can sort of get around that is off the tee.
It was still an extremely inconsistent start there, but on April Fool’s Day I caught a hold of one. Sam and I were playing Trosper for the first (but certainly not the last) time ever that morning before chasing an early-season severe weather risk later that day (there’s a reason I never wrote a blog post about that chase. We ended up following a string of crap storms from I-40 all the way to the Kansas border).
Trosper is one of my favorite courses in the metro. It’s well-laid-out, usually it’s not overrun with people, and there are a variety of holes. Sam and I had a great time playing the front 9, but it had taken me a long while to find any sort of rhythm hitting the ball. That all changed on the 10th. The tee boxes are elevated between the clubhouse and a creek that cuts across the course. The fairway is extremely wide, so there’s no missing it unless you manage to run one all the way up the hill to the green (300ish yards to the west). No doubt my drive was helped by the stiff easterly breeze pushing all of that Gulf moisture northward, but as soon as I finished my swing I knew I’d gotten a hold of that one. A little bullet line drive, the ball skittered a long way off of the still-parched early spring ground. When Sam and I drove the cart up to the green, we found that there’s a little depression left of it with a drain for runoff. My ball had settled on it, level with the pin and 30 feet below it. I took my drop to get off of the drain, made a really nice pitch to 4 feet, and sunk the putt for one of my few honest-to-god birdies this spring.
This was the start of a beautiful relationship with Trosper that led me to bring everyone there from Sam to my my sister and brother-in-law. I had quite a few shots over the year to consider: a slick lag putt on the long par-4 3rd to save a par, an 8-iron that set up Sam for a long scramble birdie on the 5th, a high 5-wood over the giant oak trees on the 13th – but it only seems right to call back to where it all started.
8: Earlywine South, OKC – September 3
Hole: 15 (par 5, 482 yards)
Shot: 2nd
Club: 5 Wood
Result: Birdie
Earlywine South is one of the courses Sam and I had sampled as part of our dabbling into becoming real golfers in 2024. It’s also where we played our first round of 2025 in early February on a gloriously warm evening. The South Course is easier to get onto than the signature North, but it has some of the more memorable hole layouts of the OKC munis. The most famous may be the nearly-drivable par-4 1st, with a large pond protecting the green. The 18th is Sam and my favorite to play at sunset – a drive into a deep valley, then a blind approach uphill to a big sweeping green that makes you feel like you’re walking up the 18th fairway at The Masters when you hit it in the gathering twilight.
This was one of the tougher courses to pick a favorite shot from. I played 9 with Elizabeth, Moriah, and Sam on the 4th of July and had 3 candidates from that day alone: driving the water from the red tees on the 1st, then a majestic 155-yard 7 iron on the 4th that left an impact crater in the green, then a tee shot on the 5th that hit right below the hole and spun back a couple of feet. I planned on writing about the 7-iron, but I think the shot I chose demonstrates some of the growth I experienced in my game late this summer.
The 15th is a par 5 in the very back of Earlywine’s sprawling property. The tee boxes are nestled among some big pines. A few of them get in the way of your tee shot, and if you aim too far down the left side of the fairway there’s a shallow bunker. To the Nolan of many, many years of golf, this would mean trouble once the ball drew further from my starting line down the left side. To the Nolan that was scrambling on this late summer afternoon with Tatiana, this was a chance to show off a new talent I’d been developing: opening up the stance and hitting a gigantic, high sweeping cut. This thing came out beautifully along the cart path, caught the spin, and tumbled right over the fairway to a perfect landing in between the bunkers with about 260 yards to go. Of itself, this was one of my favorite shots of the year, but it had nothing on the follow-up.
I am a terrible ball striker with woods. This probably has something to do with the fact that I started golfing with a persimmon set of woods bequeathed from my dad’s playing days in the ’80s. Even after “upgrading” (stealing Elizabeth’s set of woods), my game with them is tremendously bad. Doesn’t matter the lie, distance, or how good I’m feeling, I’m a stone-cold lock to top the ball. A full season of work had just gotten me to the point where I felt like I could sometimes make decent contact. The conditions on this day were ideal for me – it had rained recently, and the ground was still pretty squishy. That made me more confident I could actually get a wood down onto a low enough plane to loft the ball.
Well, sure enough, I stepped up to the ball and absolutely smoked it. Every once in a while you hear stories of okay chess players who have an epiphany of sorts and suddenly see the game unfolding 10 moves into the future. That’s what this felt like. As the shot knifing through the air in a low arc, I suddenly felt like a good golfer for one shot in an otherwise extremely nondescript round. The ball tailed off slightly left of the fairway and ended up in a mucky zone just short left of the green, which makes it even more impressive that when Tatiana and I drove up toward the green, the ball had somehow worked its way through the muck and was resting 25ish yards away from the pin. A 260-yard shot. After a decent pitch, Tatiana rescued my poor birdie putt with a good one of her own for us to scramble an unlikely birdie.
Will I get better at hitting woods in 2026? Doubtful. But this was a glimpse into a whole other kind of golf that one day I’d like to play.
7: Kickingbird, Edmond – November 17
Hole: 5 (par 4, 400 yards)
Shot: 2rd
Club: 8 iron
Result: Par
What is the nicest fully public course within the OKC metro? It’s hard to answer anything other than Kickingbird Golf Club, Edmond’s municipal course. I use the term municipal lightly, because Kickingbird is considered nice enough that the NCAA uses it for its DII Regional golf tournament every year. Despite that, I didn’t manage to make the trek for most of 2025. It felt like a great way to finish off the season, though, so Sam and I made plans to play an afternoon round on a sunny and warm 28th birthday for me. We were paired with two randoms, Brad (a lovely older gentleman who spent the 4+ hour round chatting with Sam and myself amiably while we all struggled with Kickingbird’s extremely difficult greens) and Don (a terrible person whose primary character trait was cursing himself).
I struggled pretty badly for most of the round. In another life that might be annoying, but letting yourself get mad at golf on your birthday isn’t for enlightened individuals like me; that’s for the Dons of the world. Besides, Sam and I were scrambling and he was playing lights-out golf for most of the day. That’s far from the worst birthday present I’ve ever gotten.
Still, you want to pick your teammate up when he’s playing good golf. After he pretty much solo’d a tap-in par on the par-5 4th, I was especially eager to help going into the 5th hole. At 400 yards (from the white tees!!!), it was one of the longer par 4s I’ve ever played. The tee boxes aimed across a broad creek toward a wide fairway with the crest of a low slope maybe 150 yards out preventing a view of the green altogether. I ripped a monster drive that got well beyond the ridge and carried down the slope to about 100-110 yards out. Unfortunately, the ball settled into a leafy spot underneath the one large tree on the left side of the fairway with branches interfering with the high wedge shot I like to hit from that range. Sam’s shot was 25 yards further back and just right of the cart path, but it had a much cleaner look at the green. It was about 140 yards and playing maybe 20-25 full feet downhill. There’s nothing sweeter than the feeling of puring an 8 iron. For a moment, I wasn’t convinced it was going to get to the green. Fortunately, it hit on the front collar and released up the hill toward the center-right pin location nicely. Give it a little club twirl and wait for Don to go cursing by in his solo golf cart, and Sam and I were going back-to-back on pars on one of the two toughest golf courses I’ve ever played.
6: Earlywine North, OKC- July 1
Hole: 4 (par 3, 127 yards)
Shot: 1st
Club: 8 iron
Result: Par
I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with a great result from Earlywine North this year and honestly struggled quite a bit. I can think of three distinct rounds played there, and none of them were that bad. There just doesn’t seem to have been a signature shot to call back on. With that said, I still put this shot at #6 on the list because I love the course, and July 1 was one of my favorite golf rounds of the year.
It was also the first time Tatiana and I had played the course, which always makes it a little more special. Earlywine’s North Course is their signature course. It’s a little bit tougher than the southern one and requires a wider variety of shot shapes. That makes a good score feel even better. In early July of 2025, I was playing better golf than ever before. After a really shaky 6 weeks of struggling to loft the driver, I was finally finding some semblance of balance off the tee, and it was an honest-to-god pleasure to pick up any club between 5 iron and sand wedge. This list could very easily have included the par-3 6th hole, a nasty 175 yard behemoth that has trees pressing around it in every direction, where a safely-landed 5 iron felt like a true accomplishment. The par-4 5th hole also could have been included, when I dribbled a little chip from well above the cup that looked for all the world like it was going to hole out for birdie until stopping right next to the pin. But let’s go one hole further back to the par-3 4th, a 127-yard affair with a green elevated sharply above a creek. You’re aiming right at the credit union just across the street from the creek, which should seem gross and chintzy but actually has some charm given the amount of huge trees that OKC has managed to plant on the course.
The pace of play was slow on this Tuesday evening. I guess people were trying to enjoy a last couple of rounds while it was only hot and unbearably humid, as opposed to unbearably hot AND unbearably humid. We had to wait to play the hole for long enough that the group behind was pulling up to the tee box before the group ahead had finished putting. That meant an audience, which meant Tatiana was putting her ball into the creek. Part of maturing and becoming a better golfer means dealing with the pressure of knowing some random old guys are judging your swing.
I decided to go with an 8 iron even though 127 uphill really should play closer to a 9 iron or even a full pitching wedge. I remember standing over the ball and just feeling really, really comfortable. That comfortable feeling when you’re about to hit an iron is the best feeling in the world. By the time my follow-through was done, the ball was soaring into the late-evening sky, arcing in a tight little draw and plunking onto the back of the green about 10 feet to the right of the hole. From there, the ball fed even a little closer. It was one of the closest tee shots to the pin I hit all year.
Yes, I missed the birdie putt.
5: Lake Hefner North, OKC – June 9
Hole: 2 (par 3, 123 yards)
Shot: 1st
Club: 9 iron
Result: Birdie
I only played Lake Hefner’s finer course once in 2025. Hopefully 2026 will bring a few more chances to do so, because it’s a nifty track that actually offers a few more views of the lake than the southern course. The one round I did end up playing there was for our US Open scramble with Max, Sam, and Tatiana on June 9th.
Much like the previous major scramble at Westwood, our first goal was par. Since we’d reached par at Westwood, the goal here was to break it, and then see if that score ended up beating the actual winner of the US Open at Oakmont. If we wanted to do that, a bogey on the opening hole was not ideal, but it’s sure what happened after four horrible tee shots (bogeying the first was something that happened in three of four major scrambles this year).
So that immediately brings us to my favorite shot of the round. +1 already through a hole, we needed a spark to get going on an unfamiliar course. The second hole was about as straightforward as it gets – a short par-3 with little elevation gain and a frontside pin location. I took a 9 iron and unintentionally sawed it off just a little bit. It came out lower and a bit shorter than I wanted, but grabbed on a receptive piece of grass just short of the green, then bounced, then rolled right for the pin. Sam had just enough time to exhort “Oh, get in” before the ball took a little fade to the left and rolled to a stop pin-high 3 feet away. Like any good golfer, I tried to play it nonchalantly, but given how those major scrambles go, it was a clutch shot in a big moment.
We spent the next 9 or so holes at par (and a fairly comfortable par, at that. Lots of greens in reg, long birdie chances, easy up and downs from just off the green) before Sam drilled a long birdie putt on the 11th to get us into the red. Just as I was thinking we might pull off another best score in a major scramble, disaster struck on the 14th, and then an even worse one on the scoreable par-5 18th to leave our group at +1. Even with that disappointment, we all had a great day, and I had a great shot to bring home with me.
4: Golf Meggen, Lucerne – October 15
Hole: 2 (par 5, 403 meters)
Shot: 4th
Club: 52 degree wedge
Result: Bogey
Yes, a bogey result is going down as my 4th-favorite golf shot of the year. Sometimes the golf is about the experience, and not the score.
If you’re going to play golf for the experience, you could do far worse than a course set on a bluff high above Lake Lucerne in central Switzerland. I’ll save the course pictures for a blog post that you will probably see in late 2027 if anything, but even with a low cloud deck the scenes at Golf Meggen were stunning. Winston had done a great job getting a tee time for Elizabeth, Pam, myself, and him to play 9 holes, plus getting club rentals. Plus telling the course we’d be a little late when it turned out that Nolan couldn’t hold his potty indefinitely on the drive over from Austria.
The clubs we’d rented were actually quite high-quality. It took me a couple of holes worth of blading everything to figure it out, but the irons snapped into place on the 4th. After that, the golf became much more enjoyable. I still wasn’t putting up great scores, but we were in the Swiss Alps in mid-October. It’s not like the course was in truly incredible shape; I was just amazed that they had it playable at all.
The one club I couldn’t figure out at all was the driver. It turns out that I might be a Big Bertha merchant. Drivers with a smaller club face just don’t seem to work as well if your swing is built for a huge, forgiving knuckle bomb like mine is. That explains why the 6th hole started out with me sending a drive deep into the rough well right of the fairway. Honestly, it seemed like an improvement compared to the hard tops that my first few drives had been (after hard hooking my tee shot on 8, I gave up and used 5-iron off the tee on the par-5 9th). It took a while to even find the ball in a nice patch of cabbage, but the ball was a in a decent enough position to get a pretty good hack at it with an 8-iron. Back on the fairway, and waiting for Elizabeth/Pam to dribble their balls by, I tried to guess the distance in to the elevated pin simply by guessing, since everything was in meters anyway. It seemed like a 7-iron remained with the ball a little above my feet, so I gave it a mighty swing… and topped it down the fairway 60 yards. Nice stuff.
I was not going to get mad. I was not going to get mad. We were having a lovely round in Switzerland of all freaking places. This was a once-in-a-lifetime moment. Therefore, I WAS NOT GOING TO GET MAD. I pulled a wedge out of the bag since this shot was clearly within that range, put that club face underneath the ball, took a deep breath, and took a swing with a lot of emphasis on a spinny follow-through. The ball launched into the cold October afternoon. “Too far”, I muttered in disgust.
Incorrect. The ball dropped much more sharply than I’d thought and hit the flagstick right in the middle with a sharp thwack. It may have been a bit unlucky, because I think the shot was going to bite right behind the cup and leave no more than a few feet. Instead, it leaked toward the front right of the green by maybe 8 feet. Still, you want to have a club-twirl-worthy shot in your first round in a foreign country, and now I did.
I missed the 8-footer for par and had to settle for a bogey. I was not going to get mad.
3: Lake Hefner South, OKC – October 23
Hole: 18 (par 4, 299 yards)
Shot: 1st
Club: Driver
Result: Birdie
A week after that lovely but driver-disastrous round in Lucerne, I was back in Oklahoma trying to enjoy the last vestiges of green grass before the winter curing began to ruin fairways. Tatiana and I were playing Lake Hefner’s South Course, which I think was my third time playing there before – Sam and I went in early May 2024, and again for the earliest round of my life right around the 2025 summer solstice.
It turned out from very early in the round that whatever ball striking issues I’d had with the driver in Switzerland were 100% due to an unfamiliar driver. My tee shot on the first was a high knuckle bomb that Rory McIlroy would approve of. The rest of our game was ok but not amazing through 10 holes – we scrambled a +7 42 on the front 9, and then a double-bogey 6 on the par-4 10th.
That’s when I proceeded to catch fire and play maybe the best golf I did all year. It was the kind of stuff you dream of. A huge, towering pitching wedge into the imposing 11th green to set up an easy par. A stinger-sand wedge combo on the par-4 12th that Tatiana got us up and down from for par. A long save putt on the short par-3 13th. An incredible 3-shot sequence on the par-5 14th that started against a tree and ended with a 25-foot birdie putt dropping. Another solid up-and-down to save par on the 15th. A driver-6 iron combination to get just off the back of the green on the par-5 16th with a slightly disappointing par result. A 9 iron from close to 140 yards on the par-3 17th because by this point I was just feeling it. It was a 7-hole stretch where we scrambled -1.
All of that led to the relatively short par-4 18th. It was playing just under 300 yards in reality, though the scorecard said 360. I didn’t feel comfortable with teeing off while the group in front of us was on the green, but if the scorecard said 360, then what was I waiting for? Tatiana had hit a pretty decent drive and we were already guaranteed to be doing no worse than hitting a wedge in. So I’m not ashamed to say I reared back and let Big Bertha sing a little bit. The ball came out low, with almost no horizontal motion, and unbelievably fast. The late-October ground was not going to slow the ball down to any significant degree, so when it landed on the left side of the fairway maybe 220 yards out, the ball got a little kick right toward the center and kept on trucking. There are frontside bunkers guarding both corners of the green – this drive split the wickets and rolled up the right side of the green. The duo in front of us was still putting and stopped to watch the ball as it skittered by them and came to rest maybe 30 feet behind the pin on an upslope.
Well, ok then! The only thing I could do is laugh. Tatiana was understandably annoyed that her best drive of the day had been eclipsed by that, but, I mean, when you’re running hot, you’re running hot. We drove up to the 18th green to apologize to the group ahead of accidentally sending them a parting shot, and then to read my eagle (!) putt. It was a tough look with a lot of break, and Lake Hefner’s greens tend to be pretty fast. I was disappointed but not surprised to send it 5 feet past the hole. I was even more disappointed to miss the birdie putt, but Tatiana calmly knocked hers home to bring in a -2 finish over the last 8 holes of scramble golf.
The hottest hot streak of my life!
2: Lincoln Park East, OKC – July 28
Hole: 16 (par 4, 335 yards)
Shot: 2nd
Club: Sand Wedge
Result: Par
I love Lincoln Park in OKC. For my money, the east course is one of the nicest public courses you can find. I discovered in May of 2025 and ended up playing it a bunch of times in 2025. It was even the first course that Sam and I played in 2026 on January 2nd. There are a bunch of great holes, the design is excellent, and it’s easy enough that you feel like you can get out there and get a score, especially on the back 9.
There are like 5 or 6 shots that I could easily pick for my favorite one from this course – I drove the ball to 8 feet off the tee on the par-4 14th on the very same day as this post; there was an insane dribbled wedge shot on a huge, slopey, pool-table-fast green on the 15th once; the 8th hole seems like it attracts Nolan birdies as much as any in the OKC area.
But for this one I have to pay homage to my favorite set of clubs throughout the summer and early fall: my high irons and wedges. It was not a great start to the year with them. I can remember flubbing and skulling the hell out of shot after shot well into the month of May. But when they started to dial (seemingly right around the time of the US Open scramble in June), all of a sudden there was nothing I wanted more than to be 100-140 yards from the pin, on the fairway, with a big, violent follow-through. In this round, which I was playing with James (his first-ever full 18), he made a comment at one point that my swing does not include much backswing, but has a heck of a lot of follow-through. That seems to be the best way to avoid coming in too shallow and hitting duck hooks.
It had rained recently and the fairways/greens were still holding moisture nicely, though the conditions themselves were excellent. A little hot and humid, but that’s late July in Oklahoma for you. James turned out to be pretty good at hitting tee shots and far from the worst first-time player at ball striking. He was starting to lose his will to continue the round, which is understandable. The marathon 3.5 hours of a round of golf is something I’ve come to take for granted in the last year, but for someone who doesn’t play, it must seem interminable. Either way, I’m sure he was relieved that he could see the finish line metaphorically from the 16th tee box.
Not literally, though. The 16th tee box is down near a little bowl in the center of the East Course where the 6th, 12th, and 15th greens all converge along a creek. The fairway sweeps uphill toward the train tracks that bisect the course. The ground is normally wet up in the landing zone, which is where my drive put us. The pin was in the back of the green, protected by a fairly deep frontside bunker. That meant we could either try to approach out to the right side of the green and try to lag putt, or try to take it on. Every stick in the bag felt like a potential weapon to me, but especially the sand wedge. From a little over 100 yards, I would need to take a full swing, but that was a positive in my mind. A fuller swing and a fuller follow-through gets the ball up in the air more. Less chance of bringing the bunker into play, and less chance of the ball landing on the short grass and bounding off.
That was not a problem here. I love the feeling you get when you get into your stance and it just feels comfortable. It feels like the ball is about to go where you want it to. I took my normal approach – short backswing, relatively sedate through the ball, violent follow-through – and immediately knew it was exactly the right shot. I’m sure James thought this was an everyday occurrence for me to throw a dart that high in the air from over 100 yards, but as we drove to the green to see where my ball had stuck, I knew better.
How hard did the ball come down and how committed was it to sticking where it sat? The ball created a massive crater pitch mark where it landed. Then it hopped out of its pitch mark, landed, formed another pitch mark, and sat half-embedded in this one.
Now THAT is a golf shot.
1: Winter Creek, Blanchard – July 14
Hole: 4 (par 3, 185 yards)
Shot: 1st
Club: 5 Iron
Result: Par
We have finally arrived at my favorite golf shot of 2025. Not coincidentally, this shot occurred at the nicest golf course I played all year – even nicer than the club in Lucerne, for my money. Winter Creek is a semi-private club nestled over a mile+ of Cross Timbers exurbs and ginormous houses southwest of Blanchard. It was the lead-in to The Open, the final major of 2025. My partners for The Open scramble were Sam and Tatiana. I felt a little nervous to be tackling such a (reportedly) difficult course without a full 4-person team. The first hole showed how right I was to feel that way. I got a hold of a really nice drive onto the fairway, poked an above-average 6-iron, and the ball still got stuck on an awkward downslope which led to bogey. Ouch.
We bounced back with a miraculous par on the 2nd and then I went pin-hunting from 110 yards on the par-4 3rd, setting up a slider for birdie to bring the group back to even. That brought up the par-3 4th, an absolute brute of a hole. I’ll list Winter Creek’s own description:
This is the most difficult par 3 on the course. It plays into a predominate south wind and the diagonal shaped green is guarded on all sides by wide and deep bunkers. Being the #1 handicap hole on the course makes this hole a real challenge.
At 185 yards with a southerly breeze, I wasn’t even sure any of us could reach the green.
Over the prior few weeks (really, since the round at Hefner North for the US Open), I’d been feeling more and more confident in my mid-irons. Still, it was going to take a heck of an effort to even get it up toward the huge frontside bunker. I took aim at the right side of the green to try and get the ball to draw left toward the opening. Look down at the ball, flex the knees, wiggle the club head a little bit… and then I took a much bigger backswing than normal and absolutely hammered through the ball. I followed through straight toward the blue Oklahoma sky so hard that I felt it in my core (by the end of the round, this consistently violent follow-through had me doubled over in pain. Apparently I am out of shape). Instead of the usual dull thunk of an iron crushing flat through the ball, there was hardly any noise on impact. And then I was looking up into the evening sky, trying to locate the ball as it fought through the breeze to a distance that apparently the average PGA tour golfer plans to hit their 5-irons… and then the ball was safely over the bunker and rolling onto the back right side of the green.
It was not particularly close to the pin. It required a distinct effort for Sam to even make a two-putt par over the just-aerated green. But still, given the circumstances, the distance, and the difficulty, that has to be the best golf shot I’ve ever hit. The rest of the round featured some huge ups and some soul-crushing downs, but that one shot reverberated all the way through the year 2025.
Bonus: Best Golf Shots of My 2025 Playing Partners
I’m going to keep this section much briefer than I had originally planned because this post turned from a fun little side project into an 8000-word epic, but I wanted to mention one memorable golf shot from everyone that I played with in 2025. It was a great year to spend time with friends and family on the course; golfing on your own is no fun. Thanks to the people listed below for helping me cultivate my love (and hate) for this sport!
Pam – Hole 8, Golf Meggen
I only played one round with Pam all year and it was in Lucerne. All four of us were playing some golf that would best be described as “offensive to god”, but Pam absolutely killed her tee shot on the par-3 8th to the front fringe! Elizabeth also had a great tee shot (after being talked into playing the hole. She was concerned about making it to Interlaken before it got too dark, which we managed).
Winston – Hole 5, Golf Meggen
Same deal with Winston, who I only played with once in 2025. He and I were both going through it as somewhat “real golfers” trying to deal with unfamiliar clubs and sanded-down fairways. He figured out how to deal with the driver a bit better than me, and I figured out the irons a bit better. But one shot Winston hit that really impressed me that day was a professional flop-out from a frontside bunker on to the beautiful elevated 5th green. I couldn’t possibly tell you what score he got. Most likely, we don’t want to know. But it was well-done.
Elizabeth – Hole Something, Somewhere in Seattle
I only played one or two rounds with Elizabeth in 2025, myself. She now has a pretty set Monday-Friday schedule and I try to play on weekdays to not have to deal with crowds as much. It might be for the best. She doesn’t like feeling rushed, and when you play municipal golf, there’s always someone playing right behind you. But I do miss getting to see my wife crank one off the tee out of nowhere.
I completely missed her best shot of the year and only heard about it via text. We went to Seattle for Thanksgiving (blog posting coming soon, by the way!), but I headed back on Black Friday to make sure I could work the Oklahoma State/Iowa State game while Elizabeth stuck around with her family until Sunday afternoon. Of course her extended family chose to play a round of golf right after I left. Apparently it went well for Elizabeth – she texted me that her drive on a par 5 ended up rolling out to over 200 yards.
Matt – Hole 2, Earlywine South
I only got to play with my grad school buddy Matt once in 2025, when he was in town to deliver his PHD seminar just in time for the Master’s scramble. Matt is the best golfer I’ve ever had the chance to play with more than once. It didn’t stop him from joining Kevin, Sam, and me in a brutal bogey to start our 9-hole round. However, on the second he uncorked one of the most ridiculous short-sided flop shots I’ve ever seen to take an impossible greenside rough line into an easy par putt. A delightful person and an artistic golfer.
Kevin – Hole 14, Westwood
It is not a secret that the PGA Championship scramble that ended even-par was not because of myself. It wasn’t because of Sam either. It was partially because of Max, but mostly because of Kevin, a high school golfer who knows how to make the good shot every single time.
His play on the back 9 that even was exquisite. Every time the four of us ended up in trouble, Kevin was there with a bailout shot to put us back on track to make a par. Nowhere was this more true than on the 14th, when the best drive any of the four of us could boast was Max’s next to a tree and the cart path. It was a long, downhill iron shot. One by one, the other three of us biffed it badly. Kevin stepped up and flipped a low parabola into the evening. It nestled on a little rise just behind the green with about 25 feet of the cup. It was by no means an easy two-putt, but it would have been near-impossible if he hadn’t bailed us out yet again.
Max – Hole 17, Lake Hefner North
Speaking of guys you want to have for consistent golfing in a team format, Max is another one of those players who instinctively knows how to avoid trouble. His work off of the fairways in particular is excellent, such as the famous “bee stinger” shot at Westwood back in May. But I think his best shot of the year that I saw was at Lake Hefner very late into the US Open scramble. We were holding on to an even-par score with 2 holes to go when we reached a fairly long par 3 over an inlet of the lake. Sam splashed down; Tatiana splashed down; I hit an iron that I was extremely happy with that took one bounce off the middle of the shallow green and kept on trucking into the backside rough. Somehow, Max got his tee shot to spin so much that when it landed on the green, it sat right there. Easy to do off the tee when you’re hitting a pitching wedge; not so easy when it’s like a 6-iron.
Tatiana – Hole 16, Earlywine North
My second-most-frequent playing partner in 2025 is also the one who probably improved the most over the course of the year. The two of us were flailing in March but playing something that actually vaguely resembled the sport of golf last summer. With all of that said, it’s a frustrating game where you have a lot of highs and lows. So it was particularly impressive to watch Tatiana get her first par-4 solo par of her life at Earlywine in July by doing the thing she struggles with the most: lagging in a 50-foot uphill putt to within a few feet and making the short par conversion. Putting is not an easy thing for anyone; I’m guessing it felt good for her to exorcise that demon.
Sam: Hole 5, Winter Creek
I have to finish off the post by mentioning my number one playing partner since day 1 – Samuel and I barnstormed the state of Oklahoma in 2025 (and he got quite a few rounds in at Pinehurst as well). Both of us took massive steps forward in our understanding and skills in the game. Sometimes, Sam can be a little optimistic about what he can do, but for one brilliant moment at Winter Creek it paid off.
Right after my incredible 5-iron shot the hole before, we teed off a long par 5 that wound leftward around a lake. My tee shot was the “best”, though it got a little downhill toward the lake for everyone’s liking. Maybe it was in our heads, because 1, 2, 3, our shots all went out of bounds to the right. I was ready to take a drop and pray for a bogey, but Sam somehow found his ball in thigh-high rough, brought his 3-wood into the thick cabbage, hit between a window in large trees, and brought his ball 180 yards to a rest on the front fringe of the green. It’s the best golf shot I’ve ever seen.
