One of my favorite nearby disc golf courses is Art Dye Disc Golf Park in American Fork, Utah. It’s a tight, wooded course with plenty of natural OB. You might not find any 1,000-foot holes on the property, but if you’re 10 feet off the fairway, you might as well be 100 feet off the fairway.
Distance isn’t everything: Art Dye is proof of it.
For as great of a course as Art Dye is, my wife and I refer to it as “The Heroin Needle.” There’s trash everywhere. There’s graffiti everywhere. And for some strange, inexplicable reason, there’s metal shrapnel everywhere, too. Looking to contract tetanus? Art Dye can make it happen.
When the Disc Golf Pro Tour heads to Europe, this ISN’T the kind of thing you encounter:
- The PCS Sula Open – In 2022, Norway is the ninth-cleanest country on the planet.
- The European Open – Paul McBeth compared Nokia’s “The Beast” to a video game.
- The Konopiště Open – Though closed, Franz Ferdinand literally had an on-site castle.
And remember: These are just a few of the more well-known tournaments to come out of Europe in recent years – there’s plenty more where that came from in Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, etc.
It’s not just the natural beauty of European disc golf that makes it different, though …
It’s the professionalism. It’s the clean-cut culture. But most impressively, it’s the galleries we can only DREAM about here in the U.S. Seriously, for as big as disc golf is on the West Coast, East Coast and everywhere in-between, we’re a good five to ten years behind Europe’s fandom.
Don’t believe me?
The 2022 European Open starts on Thursday. Tune in to see THOUSANDS following lead- and chase-card action on day one. Come Sunday, the pandemonium will be in full force. And if you think the likes of Paul McBeth and Eagle McMahon will nab all the fanfare, turn up the volume when the continent’s finest take center stage: K.J. Nybo, Seppo Paju, Simon Lizotte, etc.
Japan has Manabu Kajiyama. Australia produced Dude Disc Golf Apparel. Thailand lays claim to Jacky Chen. Canada is just an extension of the U.S. But Europe actually “gets” disc golf.
And that, dear friends, is why it “hits different.”
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