By Dave Kindred and Tom Callahan
Illustrations By Chris O'Riley December 2007

THE IDEA:
Put Callahan and Kindred on the road again. They could get a couple buddies and rent a motor home. It'd be four guys in a Winnebago for 10 days, lost in pursuit of golf.

I asked Tom, "Where do you want to drive to?"

He said, "Somewhere."

That narrowed it down from Everywhere. I narrowed it down to the United States of America. Then I studied the hot golf spots, Florida, California, the Carolinas.

So it remains a mystery to me how we came to be driving a 37-foot motor home the wrong way on a mountain road in South Dakota. We were headed to North Dakota, where we'd make a left into Montana before dropping into Wyoming and crossing over to Nebraska.

"What'd you do," a friend asked, "pick the five most boring states in America?"

Maybe we just wanted to get away from it all. Good place to do that, out there. Not that they'd done anything to deserve such punishment, but Callahan brought along Bill Nack, late of Sports Illustrated, and I dragooned Bud Shaw, the Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist.

We went to Deadwood and Agar, Medora and Hardin, Buffalo and Mullen. We drank Moose Drool in the saloon where Wild Bill Hickok died holding aces and eights. We heard Jon Beartusk's version of how George Custer got his. We hit lob wedges over the tail fins of Cadillacs half-buried nose down in Nebraska's sand. Speaking of noses, we looked into George Washington's nostrils.

Ten days, 2,091 miles.

Nine rounds, 3,213 shots.

"You take us to Wyoming," Callahan told me. "I'll get us back to South Dakota."

I'll start with the RV. You've seen those humongous things so luxurious they're called land yachts. Ours was a land barge. Nothing worked. The refrigerator was warm, the shower cold. The TV antenna wouldn't go up, the cargo doors wouldn't stay down.

Some guys could have fixed that stuff. But we're sportswriters. Our combined mechanical ability extended to knowing which end of a screwdriver to hold, though we had no idea what to do next. Every 13-year-old kid can manipulate MP3s, iPods, PlayStation 3s. Us, it took four days to play "Caddyshack" on the barge's VCR.

First turn out of the RV rental lot, I went up that mountain road instead of down. The road was maybe four inches wider than the motor home. It was steep and twisty with no guardrails to prevent a fiery plunge into the South Dakota wilderness, after which emergency personnel would remark on the foolishness of city folks driving a thing like that on that road.

"Dear God," I murmured, "let no one as dumb as us be coming the other way."

We picked up Shaw at the airport and must have left the terminal at an unusual rate of speed because, as he spun in a swiveling passenger chair, Bud said, "Dave, try keeping all four wheels on the ground." He later compared those early moments to "a bad amusement-park ride going 75 miles an hour."

Against the possibility of calamity, I had brought along dashboard statuettes of Ty Ming and Tem Po, who usually work as The Golf Gods but occasionally stand in for St. Christopher. They delivered us safely into Deadwood, after which we sought out a brothel.

History books told us that Pam's Purple Door was located in the town's Green Door District. Today's negligee'd girls sit coquettishly in second-story windows overlooking Main Street. Only problem is, they're mannequins. Pam closed her purple door in 1980.

So we convened downstairs in what used to be Nuttall & Mann's Saloon No. 10, where drunken Jack McCall shot Hickok in the back of the head. We ordered up Moose Drool beer and discussed a label for the frivolity of the next nine days.

"The Brokeback Mountain Wild West Golf Tour," Callahan said. "Get us some cowboy hats, sheepskin jackets."

As I said, "Uhhhh..." Bud drank deeply of his Moose Drool, and it was then, I believe, that Nack, our literatus, began quoting, in a rich baritone, the more lush passages of Nabokov's Lolita.

The next morning, high in the Black Hills outside Deadwood, we waited for deer to clear the first fairway at Tomahawk Lake Country Club. The opener is a par 5 uphill through a forest of pine trees. The second hole, a 90-degree dogleg right, has fewer pines because a member with a bad swing and a chain saw used the chain saw one night to do what his swing couldn't -- get rid of 200 trees in the dogleg corner.

"Ex-member," said Jon Carter, the course superintendent.