The Good Fight

There are no ropes, no marshals. Kids and dogs stand within an arm’s (or paw’s) length of barefoot professional golfers with eight figures to their names. The persimmon clubs make a different sound than modern drivers, but they still elicit deafening roars across the property for birdies, hole-outs and aces. There is simply nothing in golf like the Wishbone Brawl.

Held each year around Thanksgiving, at Goat Hill Park in Oceanside, California, the Wishbone is ostensibly a vintage-club exhibition match between teams of pros to raise funds for the North County Junior Golf Association. But it’s really a celebration of some of the game’s greatest virtues: accessibility, charity, camaraderie, tradition and good times. It’s a desperately needed balm for those flagging from headlines about purse increases and hospitality-tent circuses on commercial-larded event telecasts. It’s one of the last places in golf where you can listen to Xander Schauffele happily chat up a group of local kids as they saunter down a fairway together.

Launched in 2017 by the team at Linksoul, the first edition of the Wishbone featured former Tour winner and Southern California local Dean Wilson and San Diego native Schauffele pitted against a pair of Tour winners in Charley Hoffman and Chris Riley. Since then, Geoff Ogilvy, Fred Couples, Mike Weir and even Kelly Slater and Bill Murray have joined in the game’s ultimate low-key, high-vibes spectacle. People out at Goat Hill still talk about Ogilvy’s walk-off ace in 2019, when he jarred one on the par-3, 133-yard ninth to lift himself and Riley over Wilson and Schauffele.

The next time another golf controversy or contrived, made-for-TV event drains your energy, use the following images to remember that the game, and its pros, still has the capability to throw it back to simpler, more enjoyable times.

— The Golfer’s Journal