You don’t fully understand the pressure, I now believe, until they stood in a prison yard, bordered by 15-foot-high barbed wire fences, in front of a dozen inmates, an officer and a chief inspector, and had to drop a rubbery ball onto a green carpet, about 80 feet away, with a 56-degree wedge.
Make a piece?
Trash talk.
Dilute it?
Trash talk.
Land the ball on the putting surface? Somehow I did that at the end of a pitching game – and still heard about it.
Of course the golf writer wins. I mean, he writes about golf. He better win!
‘I never thought I’d be playing golf, let alone in prison’: Here golf offers a second chance
By means of:
Nick Piastowski
I can’t argue that. And a golf story was the reason I was in Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a minimum-security prison outside Olympia, Washington, in late July. Tim Trasher, the aforementioned superintendent, had started what is called the Cedar Creek Golf Club in the hopes that its members would be rehabilitated by what golf romantics like Thrasher believe is good golf. Whether that is possible will not be known for a while, as CCGC is only a few years old and the process is certainly not linear.
However, it was a lame conversation. And encouragement, which I also heard after being asked to bat during one of the matches. Maybe you hear things like that on your own rounds. Inmates talked about developing a sense of pride when playing golf – which may be no different than how you feel deep inside when you step onto your course.
There was also talk of adhering to the rules. I learned that while playing a round with Thrasher and Brandon, a former CCGC member who has stuck with golf since his release. On the second hole, after a tee shot in the Rough, I put my ball in the grass because – well, because. But as I did so, I heard a sigh behind me. It came from Brandon.
“I can’t believe you’re breaking the rules in front of a cop,” he said.
There was also another round. For those still in Cedar Creek.
As part of my trip, the prison and a nearby course had organized an outing for five CCGC members. There was vocational training. There were lessons. There was a seven-man, four-hole battle. I looked. I listened. One of the prisoners said that at one point he closed his eyes and believed he was free – and was inspired for the day when he would actually return.
“If you are convicted by the judge, that’s it,” one of the prisoners told me afterwards. “Go ahead, you do the time. But if you want me to come back into society a better person, give me all the tools to do that. So what Thrasher is doing is a great thing. A lot of people in the community may not see it that way. But it improves these men. You can see it. The camaraderie, the diversity.”
“Most of us wouldn’t even talk to each other in prison, because of prison politics, they call it. But in golf we do.”
There was also a small gift included.
A few weeks after my visit I received a card in the mail. (It’s pictured at the top of this story.) There were notes. Thanks and all that. And a hand-drawn loofah on the cover.
A loofah?
That was the prize for the pitching contest that I won. (Toiletries are valued in prison.) But I never claimed them. I left it there.
But they still paid the golf writer.
Editor’s Note: Click to watch our YouTube video about Cedar Creek Golf Club here or scroll directly below.
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