How a detour to a rural Wisconsin driving range became so special

We’ve made it to that particularly reflective time of year, looking back on all that happened, thinking about what might come — you know the deal. The USGA pays a good reminder, with its GHIN App Rewind, telling us how many scores we logged, how many courses we played, how our handicap rose or fell. (My index dropped 0.2 strokes, wow-wee.)

As I tried to perform a serious index of my 2025 golf season, I found myself thinking a lot less about the courses I played or even the memorable rounds, and a lot more about the singular afternoon of May 26. It was Memorial Day and I was driving through rural Wisconsin, from the northern reaches of the state down to Erin Hills, which was ready to host the Women’s U.S. Open. 

After a pit-stop halfway on my journey — shoutout Culver’s, a Wisconsin staple — Google suggested two routes to complete the trip, and on one of them I noticed a city I hadn’t considered in years: Winneconne. 

The town of less than 2,500 is your classic, drive-by Wisconsin municipality, fit with a quirky name (pronounced Win-uh-cah-NEE). But it was one of the few Winneconne highway exits that my grandpa used to access Lake Breeze Golf Club, where I first fell in love with golf. I figured it was worth the extra seven minutes to head through Winneconne and see what I could find. 

Grandpa Zak was a hard-working man who liked seeing work ethic in others. He was a traditionalist about how golf courses should be run — patrons showing up early for tee times, playing with pace, wearing the right shoes and tending properly to the greens. He probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the fraternity behavior that can be found on public courses on Saturday afternoons, where the property becomes a place to slug beers, swing hard and jam out to music. But we don’t know for sure because Grandpa Zak passed away in 2015, years before golf’s Covid boom in popularity. 

What Grandpa Zak understood about golf courses was they are sanctuaries for character. The golf course is a place that tests your physical weaknesses, sure, but it strains the hell out of your mental weaknesses, too. It puts a premium on patience, self-forgiveness and honesty, while providing the daily, tantalizing exam of How Good Can I Get? It’s all a big reason why he so frequently brought me to Lake Breeze where he worked as a busy body utility infielder. During any eight-hour shift he was doing all the jobs of a starter, a ranger, or even an outside staffer, getting golf carts in order, picking the driving range, washing golf balls, and cracking on the slower groups.

Those are the memories I hold, at least, since I was in his orbit for some of those days. My week-long summer visits to stay with my dad’s parents were essentially Golf Camp, where I had free run of Lake Breeze. Grandpa and I would show up for his shift in the morning and I could hit unlimited range balls — often aiming them at him as he picked the range — squeeze out nine holes, practice putting and drink an endless amount of lemonade from the clubhouse bar. 

What I wondered as I ripped down Highway 45, on the edge of Winneconne, was if Lake Breeze was anything like its former self, about 20 years since I last visited. I made a phone call to the pro shop, inquiring about tee times, even for a single. I had time to spare — it was mid-afternoon — but the response stunned me.

Sorry pal, not a single opening on the tee sheet. 

This was not the Lake Breeze I knew. Which is obviously a good thing. The Lake Breeze I knew wasn’t the most popular track in the area. It was modest and serviceable, but it was never overcrowded. There was always room for Grandpa and I — and even my cousins who lived nearby — to sneak off whenever we wanted, weekend or weekday. But Lake Breeze was humming now.

A few minutes later, as I pulled into the parking lot, I was pleased to see that Lake Breeze’s popularity seemed to be the only thing that changed. It was an artifact of my golf history that remained almost exactly as I left it. The signage was the same. The large, black, wooden crate off the side of the clubhouse — which stores the same yellow range balls — was still there and in use. The 1st hole green still held some of its original shape — the outline of Wisconsin, a Lake Breeze point of pride. 

The clubhouse was seemingly untouched, as was the layout of its tiny golf shop, which you pass through to get to the bar. Two men stood behind the counter — one whose voice matched that from my tee time inquiry — and another looking over the contents of a binder. I introduced myself and asked if either knew Tom Zak. 

One man pointed to the other: “Well, that was his boss.” 

Dave Petrack’s face lit up hearing my grandpa’s name. He indeed was Tom Zak’s boss back in the mid-2000s, working as the General Manager and Director of Golf since 2003. We swapped stories about how much of a stickler Grandpa was for course management and shared a laugh about how, mysteriously, a couple sets of rental clubs disappeared from the bag room one season … because Grandpa snatched them for my cousin and me. 

Petrack, like many humble people in the golf industry, is the lifeblood of a place like Lake Breeze. It’s not the most charming work managing a public course, certainly not with Wisconsin’s six-month golf season. And certainly not in the state that everyone travels to for public golf now. The creation of Erin Hills and Sand Valley have only lowered places like Lake Breeze down a tier on the public golf food chain. But it doesn’t take long to see the golf lifer that Petrack is, and the love he has for the place. His place. A modest, public course bordered by corn fields that charges $30 greens fees. 

This impromptu meeting with Petrack filled my golfing soul, in part because of where we were, but mostly because it always feels good to know someone who knows your someone. I could talk about my dad’s dad and Petrack knew exactly what I meant. He could joke about my grandpa’s blind spots and that was OK! It felt great to just visualize the man who taught me the game, in such close proximity to the place where he actually did it. His gravesite is 20 minutes away, in Oshkosh, but his golf essence exists at Lake Breeze.

Rather than sit around and hope for a tee time no-show, I paid $6 for a small bucket and retreated to the driving range, the same platform of turf where I grinded as a pre-teen, frustrated by how much my 3-wood sliced. The Lake Breeze range will forever hold a special place in my heart, for reasons that should be obvious. But I was warmed more generally by its aesthetic. The grass was scruffy and could use a trim. Flanking its right side was a handful of trees and, beyond them, the 1st hole, with no clear boundary in between. On its left side the property border and a frontage road that runs along the highway. Everything about this range would offend anyone with a private club membership, but that’s exactly what I adore: a place meant for banging balls, swinging hard, wearing jeans, laughing at your buddy, working that slice into a cut and aiming for the range picker 200 yards away. 

That’s exactly what I did this Memorial Day, pursuing and (capturing!) some feels from my youth. As my small bucket of balls dwindled, I pulled out the 3-wood and launched a few, over-hooking one so much that I saw it bounce like a rocket off that frontage road. After a decade of missing to the right, now I occasionally launch one to the left. Grandpa would have cackled at the idea, I thought. He’d also be excited by this jam-packed tee sheet, knowing he had a golf job to do that day.