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Lenny Harrington — The Grassy Issue

I grew up playing my parents’ course in the Hudson Valley on weekends. Sedgewood is small and old and unbothered, and for a long time I assumed that was simply what golf was.

Then I spent years in Brooklyn barely playing at all, moved to Austin four years ago, and found the municipal scene. It rearranged things. You can walk on. You can walk the course. The golf is better than the green fee suggests, and the people out on Lions or Hancock on a Tuesday afternoon are not the people I grew up around. I needed both versions to understand either one.

The Grassy Issue started because I could not stop looking at what had grown up around the game while I was away. Small brands making things that look like nothing the category made ten years ago. Makers with an actual point of view getting a platform golf media would never have handed them. Municipal courses that kept their character instead of being renovated into somebody else’s idea of good.

Here is the honest part. I am not much good at leaving things alone. Hand me something I like and my first instinct is to take it apart and work out how it could be better. That instinct is why this site exists, and it is why it did not stay a blog — it has turned into an index of 165 brands, a field guide to Austin golf, and a long-running argument with myself about what deserves your attention.

I care whether the numbers hold up, and I care just as much whether a thing feels right. I have never found those two to be in tension. Cloth that comes from a named mill. A course that survived on its own terms. A brand with a point of view rather than a logo applied to a blank. That is the through-line, and it does not change depending on whether I am writing about a headcover or a nine-hole muni.

None of this is my job. It is nights and weekends, written here, by me.

If you make something and you are wondering whether there is a version of this where we work together, that is written down here.

— Lenny Harrington
Austin, Texas

A golfer at the top of the backswing on a tree-framed tee at the Sedgewood Club
Sedgewood · the Hudson Valley course I grew up on
Lenny Harrington with Erik Anders Lang, founder of Random Golf Club, on the course at Rodeo Dunes
Rodeo Dunes · with Erik Anders Lang of Random Golf Club
A golden mixed lab sitting on the green at the Sedgewood Club while a golfer putts
Stella, holding the green

What’s here

Field Notes covers courses and the people who keep them, weighted toward the Austin municipals — Lions, Hancock, Jimmy Clay, Kizer and Morris Williams.

Drops & Brands covers what the independent side of golf is making, across a roster of 165 brands. Every one has its own page in the index.

News is everything else that moves.

How it works

The writing is all original and all done here. Product photography comes from the brands. Course and travel photography is shot on the ground where noted. Nothing on the site is syndicated or reprinted from a press release.

Picks are made on taste. No brand pays for placement, and no brand sees a piece before it runs. When a link earns a commission, that is spelled out in the affiliate disclosure.

Press

Where the site has been referenced elsewhere.

Get in touch

Tips, corrections, and brands who want to be looked at are all welcome.

Lenny@thegrassyissue.com
@thegrassyissue