How a detour to a rural Wisconsin driving range became so special

We’ve reached that particularly reflective time of year, looking back on everything that’s happened and thinking about what might happen – you know the drill. The USGA reminds us well with the GHIN App Rewind, which tells us how many scores we’ve recorded, how many courses we’ve played, and how our handicap has increased or decreased. (My index dropped by 0.2 beats, wow-wee.)

As I tried to put together a serious index of my 2025 golf season, I found myself thinking a lot less about the courses I played or even the memorable rounds, and a lot more about the special afternoon of May 26. It was Memorial Day and I was driving through rural Wisconsin, from the northern part of the state to Erin Hills, which was ready to host the Women’s US Open.

After a pit stop in Culver halfway through my trip, Google suggested two routes to complete the trip, and on one of them I saw a town I hadn’t thought about in years: Winneconne.

The town of fewer than 2,500 residents is a classic Wisconsin drive-by community with a quirky name (pronounced Win-uh-cah-NO). But it was always one of the few freeway exits in Winneconne that my grandfather used to access Lake Breeze Golf Club, where I first fell in love with golf. I figured it was worth the extra seven minutes to go through Winneconne and see what I could find.

Grandpa Zak was a hardworking man who loved seeing the work ethic in others. He was a traditionalist when it came to how golf courses should be managed: patrons showed up early for tee times, played with pace, wore the right shoes and took good care of the greens. He probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the brotherhood behavior found at public courses on Saturday afternoons, where the premises become a place to drink beer, swing hard and jam to music. But we don’t know for sure because Grandpa Zak passed away in 2015, years before Covid’s popularity of golf.

What Grandpa Zak understood about golf courses was that they are a haven for character. The golf course is of course a place that tests your physical weaknesses, but it also puts your mental weaknesses to the test. It emphasizes patience, self-forgiveness, and honesty, while the daily, tantalizing exam of How good can I become? It’s all a big reason why he took me to Lake Breeze so often, where he worked as a busy infielder. During an eight-hour shift, he did all the work of a starter, a ranger or even an outside staffer: getting the golf carts in order, packing the driving range, washing golf balls and cracking the slower groups.

At least those are the memories I keep, as I was in his orbit for some of those days. My week-long summer visits to stay with my dad’s parents were essentially Golf Camp, where I was free to run around Lake Breeze. Grandpa and I showed up for his shift in the morning and I was able to hit any number of range balls – often aiming at him as he picked the range – squeeze in nine holes during breaks in play, practice putting, and drink an endless supply of lemonade from the clubhouse bar.

Sorry buddy, not a single opening on the tee sheet.

This was it not the Lake Breeze I knew. That is of course a good thing. The Lake Breeze I knew wasn’t the most popular song in the area. It was modest and serviceable, but it was never crowded. There was always space for Grandpa and I – and even my cousins ​​who lived nearby – to sneak away whenever we wanted, on weekends or during the week. But it was buzzing now. The man on the phone was not surprised.

A few minutes later, as I pulled into the parking lot, I was happy to see that Lake Breeze’s popularity seemed to be the only thing that changed. It was an artifact of my golfing history that remained almost exactly as I left it. The signage was the same. The large, black, wooden box on the side of the clubhouse – containing the same yellow range balls – was still there and in use. The 1st hole green was still retained some from its original form – the outline of Wisconsin, a proud point in Lake Breeze.

The clubhouse was seemingly untouched, as was the layout of the small golf shop, which you walk through to get to the bar. There were two men standing behind the counter – one whose voice matched the one from my start time survey – and another was examining the contents of a folder. I introduced myself and asked if either of them knew Tom Zak.

One man pointed to the other: “Well, that was his boss.”

Dave Petrack’s face lit up when he heard my grandfather’s name. Indeed, he was Tom Zak’s boss in the mid-2000s and had served as general manager and director of Golf since 2003. We swapped stories about how tenacious Grandpa was about course management and shared a laugh about how a few sets of rental clubs mysteriously disappeared from the bag room one season… because Grandpa had swiped them for my cousin and me.

Petrack, like many humble people in the golf industry, is the lifeblood of a place like Lake Breeze. Managing a public course isn’t the most glamorous job, especially with Wisconsin’s six-month golf season. And certainly not in the state where everyone now travels to play public golf. The creation of Erin Hills and Sand Valley has only pushed places like Lake Breeze down the public golf food chain. But it doesn’t take long before you see the golf enthusiast that Petrack is, and the love he has for the place. Are place. An unassuming public course, bordered by corn fields, it charges $30 green fees.

This impromptu meeting with Petrack filled my golfing soul, partly because of where we were, but mostly because it always feels good to know someone who knows your someone. I could talk about my father’s father and Petrack knew exactly what I meant. He could make fun of my grandpa’s blind spots and that was okay! It felt amazing to visualize the man who taught me the game so close to where he actually did it. His grave is 20 minutes away in Oshkosh, but his golf essence is at Lake Breeze.

Rather than sit around and hope for a no-show at the start, I paid $6 for a small bucket and retreated to the driving range, the same platform where I used to grind as a teenager, frustrated by how much my 3-wood was cutting. The Lake Breeze range will always hold a special place in my heart, for reasons that are obvious. But I warmed to its aesthetic more generally. The grass was filthy and could use a trim. To the right were a handful of trees and behind them the first gap, with no clear boundary between them. On the left the property boundary and a road that runs along the highway. Everything about this range would offend anyone with a private club membership, but that’s exactly what I love: a place meant for hitting balls, swinging hard, wearing jeans, laughing at your buddy, working that bit into a cut, and aiming for the range selector at 200 yards.

That’s exactly what I did this Memorial Day, chasing and (capturing!) some feelings from my youth As my little bucket of balls shrunk, I pulled out the 3-wood and launched a few, hooking one so far that I watched it bounce off that front road like a rocket. After ten years of missing to the right, I now occasionally launch one to the left. Grandpa would have laughed at the idea, I thought. He would also be excited about this packed tee sheet, knowing he had a golf job to do that day.

The author can be reached at sean.zak@golf.com.