That’s no misprint at the bottom of the Riverside Golf Club scorecard: “Please remember to rake your greens.”
“I started playing here when I was 5 years old, started playing league when I was 12,” he said. “I feel like it’s my own little paradise.”
Matt Nicholas, who grew up playing at this nine-hole course nestled alongside the Platte River in central Nebraska, is almost a scratch golfer on sand. He feels a childhood attachment to the place.
Sand-green courses once were common on the wind-swept plains and in other places it was difficult to maintain grass. Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina had sand greens until 1935. Improved technology in sprinkler systems and more durable strains of turf led many courses to switch to grass greens in the 1950s and ’60s.
The number of these paradises is dwindling.
