Over the last seven months, Dylan Dethier’s golf experiences have run the gamut. He’s played at PGA Tour venues Pebble Beach and TPC Sawgrass — for free, no less — as well as at Bandon Dunes. But he’s also made the rounds at a 9-hole west Texas course in back of a ranch where cattle felt free to roam just off the less-than-manicured fairways and greens.
Seeing both ends of the spectrum — and anything in between — was part of Dethier’s plan to play golf in each of America’s 48 contiguous states over the course of the 2009-10 school year. Last week, Dethier checked Colorado off his list by playing CommonGround, the Aurora-based golf course that is owned and operated by the CGA and CWGA.
Colorado was the 29th state of his golf odyssey, which he hopes to finish by the end of May in his hometown of Williamstown, Mass., where things started on Sept. 1. Dethier, 18, took a year off between high school and college to complete this dream trip of his.
After his trek through Colorado — which, like every other leg along the way, has been done via his 2002 Subaru Outback — Dethier was asked the most interesting part of his journey to date.
“Seeing the range that golf has to offer, from worst to best,” he replied. “This is not a tour of America’s greatest golf courses by any means.”
But Dethier’s venture has drawn plenty of media attention along the way, particularly in recent months. Even USA Today did a short story in late February.
“I’m not very good at self-promotion,” Dethier said. “But some people I stayed with would talk about what I was doing, and so did the sports information director at Williams College (in Massachusetts, where Dethier will enroll in the fall). It was exciting to be in USA Today. It’s given (the whole quest) some legitimacy. But it’s built on itself. The first months was in anonymity.”
The publicity also has helped keep the toll on Dethier’s wallet to a minimum. With the attention he’s received, he estimates that about a quarter of the 100 or so rounds he’s played in this journey have been “comped,” including those at Pebble Beach, TPC Sawgrass and CommonGround.
“If I want to play a more exceptional or expensive course, a lot of times I’ll write ahead to see if they can cut me a break,” said Dethier, who hasn’t paid more than $55 for any given round. “That’s been mostly successful, but some private courses say that not only are we not going to comp you, but you can’t play here. But there have been a lot of generous people.”
Another way Dethier has kept expenses to a minimum is to sleep in his car roughly 50 percent of his nights on the road. Overall, he hopes to cap the overall cost of his nine-month venture at $6,000.
“I’m not independently wealthy, so I struggle to stay frugal,” he said. “But keeping it to $6,000 would be pretty good considering at least half of that is for gas.”
Overall, Dethier surpassed 25,000 miles for his trip about the same time he departed Colorado. Other than a couple of broken headlights, a broken windshield and a horn that sometimes honks randomly, the car/makeshift motel room has held up well.
And so has Dethier himself. Since Sept. 1, the only time he’s taken a break from his journey is a couple of weeks he spent at home in Massachusetts around Christmastime. (His father is a professor at Williams College, where Dylan’s older brother Evan is a Nordic skier.) On a couple of occasions friends have flown in to join Dylan for a round or two, but for the most part it’s been a solo venture.
“I’m still out here,” he said. “It’s never been in my mind to stop.”
So what was Dethier’s thinking in undertaking this odyssey in the first place?
He said he long entertained the thought of taking off a year before starting college. But especially when he decided to attend Williams College in his hometown of Williamstown, Mass., he decided he “wanted to get out to see something else. It’s a real cool time in life to see other places and travel. I’ve always been fascinated by the U.S. and the diversity state to state. It just came down to how to do it. I kicked around the idea of caddying (on a tour), but I just brainstormed on a way to travel, play golf and do some writing. And it just came together.”
To satisfy the writing part of his quest, Dethier is doing a blog in which he chronicles some of his adventures (www.eighteeninamerica.blogspot.com).
As for his take on the Tom Doak-designed CommonGround layout, Dethier said in a phone interview that “it was a fun course with really cool greens, tough greens. It definitely had some fun holes.”
A 3-handicap, Dethier played high school golf and plans to try out for the Division III-level team at Williams College.
