Our inside look at East Lake Golf Club and the Tour Championship.

I get a good feeling whenever I’m at East Lake Golf Club.

Not during that one rare occasion when I was invited to play the place, back before I cast off my clubs and was healed from the golfing addiction. The Bermuda rough was as high as a possum’s eye that day, my friend. It was five hours of threshing wheat, while a caddie watched.

Just walking such a simple, uncomplicated golf course is therapy for a world that is tricked up by all the metaphorical railroad-tie walls and waste bunkers of modern life. This is a place that naturally draws one back to the essential pleasure of a nice stroll in the company of the world’s top players each year that the Tour Championship comes home.

You might enjoy the water view near the green of the par-3 sixth. Or relax on the hill behind No. 9, in the shadow of the Tudor club- house where Bobby Jones’ ghost really lives (sorry Augusta National, sorry Atlanta Athletic Club). Or roaming the far reaches of the back nine for a quiet retreat. Wherever, the stories about East Lake’s grimmer past fade into some kind of almost unbelievable urban legend. What’s that they have said about this place? That the Ryder Cup came and went in 1963 and the place soon thereafter began to fray at the edges?

That police back in the 1970s and ’80s used to call the East Lake neighborhood “Little Vietnam,” for its resemblance to a war zone?

That members fled and those who remained ran the risk of having their wallet lifted by a thief rather than by a playing partner with an inflated handicap?

But then Tom Cousins bounded along in 1993 and bought the rundown golf club with the rather grandiose vision of rebuilding it while re- claiming the area around it.

Turning golf from the most exclusionary sport into a tool for community renewal was a radical notion, like trying to convert “Caddyshack’s” Judge Smails into a Peace Corps volunteer. Yet here we are. Mindful of the stories of all the good East Lake generates — the charter school it supports, the mixed-income apartments that have replaced ramshackle public housing, the First Tee program and more — we can have our golf without guilt. The splendors of the week support the good deeds of a year. We soak in the final act of the PGA Tour’s playoffs while traipsing a golf course to feel good about.