Two area golfers map out pretty hectic golf schedule

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Larry Beckey is like a lot of public-course golfers in Western Pennsylvania, always looking for a different place to play. And, because he was retired from his job as a locksmith at UPMC Passavant, he also had plenty of time to play.

So, eight years ago, Beckey, 76, had an idea. He and his buddy, Rick Mattern, would try to play every public course in Western Pennsylvania. And they used as their checklist the two-page golf map that appears every spring in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“We were sitting around and we had had a couple beers and we had that spread sheet from the Post-Gazette,” said Beckey, who lives in Zelienople. “We said, you know, wouldn’t it be something if we could play all these courses.”

So, in 2010, Beckey and Mattern set about to play all 124 courses listed on the golf map, everything within a two-hour radius of Western Pennsylvania. On each visit, they would keep the scorecard, pencil and receipt from each course as proof of their visit.

They started their odyssey on a windy, snowy day at Green Meadows Golf Course in Volant, picking the closest course they could find. Six years later, going everywhere from Carmichaels Golf Course in Greene County to Chestnut Ridge in Blairsville, playing 18hole layouts and nine-hole mom-and-pop properties, they finished the task.

After each round, Beckey would cross the course off the list in the paper with colorcoded markers, each color representing the year in which they played that course. That allowed him to chart how many courses he played in a given year. For example, 24 in 2010, 32 in 2011, 22 in 2012, and so forth. They never played more than one course in a day.

By the time they were done, Beckey and Mattern had played 117 of the 124 courses on the map. The reason they didn’t play all the courses is because some of the smaller ones that were on the list had closed since their journey started. Also, they couldn’t play Bob O’Connor GC in Schenley Park because the course doesn’t have riding carts and “I can’t walk too good,” Beckey said. They skipped two other courses, one of which was Mystic Rock at the Nemacolin Woodlands resort, because, well, the greens fee was too expensive for a retired person’s income.

“That was a little out of our price range,” Beckey said.

To commemorate their feat, Beckey took all the pencils and scorecards he had accumulated from each course and made a display board. The board hangs in Beckey’s game room downstairs, a fond reminder of their six-year trek across Western Pennsylvania fairways.

“We should have kept a log every day where we went and we didn’t do that,” Beckey said. “It was something we wanted to do and we did it. We’re not good golfers by any means. We went to have fun.”

In addition to the pencils and scorecards, Beckey said he and Mattern stock-piled a lot of good memories along the way.

One of his favorites was the time he went to a course — he didn’t want to say which — and the owner told them, “You’re going to love our greens.” When Beckey got out on the course, he said “the greens were about a half-inch long and very slow.”

When Beckey and Mattern went to see the owner after the round, he was gone.

“He took our $30 and we never saw him again,” Beckey said.