Golf editor buys Catskills course, tries to save historic nine-hole club

When Tom Coyne first reached Sullivan County Golf & Country Club, the nine-hole layout in Liberty, New York, was buried under ice and snow and the clubhouse was falling apart. The golf editor of The Golfer’s Journal had come to a course that locals feared might not make it to its 100th anniversary.

Sullivan County Golf & Country Club opened in 1925 on about 170 acres in the Catskills, and the club says it was once the highest-elevation course in New York State. Its history reaches beyond golf: a 1931 transatlantic flight to Denmark reportedly left from what is now the 8th fairway, a detail reflected in the club’s logo and part of the mythology that has long surrounded the property.

By 2023, though, the old club’s future looked uncertain. It was unprofitable and up for sale, with leaky roofs, abandoned mowers and mold adding to the sense that a rural institution was slipping away. Dan Yaun, a longtime caddie, said the course had been going downhill and that locals were largely keeping it going themselves. Shaun Smith, then the superintendent and the last greenskeeper, feared the sale could mark the end of the era.

Coyne was drawn in after Smith urged him to visit, and the encounter turned into a yearlong experiment in ownership and rescue. His new book, A Course Called Home: Adventures of an Accidental Golf Course Owner, is scheduled for publication on May 5, 2026, by Avid Reader Press and Simon & Schuster. The book treats the course not as a nostalgic side project, but as a test of whether a small-town golf club can survive when real estate pressure, maintenance costs and changing leisure habits threaten its place in the community.

The answer depended on more than one man. Coyne and his allies rallied golfers around the world to buy memberships for a place many would never play, while companies offered steep discounts on equipment and friends pitched in on the ground. Among those who reportedly helped were Bill Murray, Jason Kelce and Mike Madden. By August 2025, The Golfer’s Journal said the effort had rebuilt the club into what it called the “platonic ideal of small-town municipal golf,” with trees down, new holes in play, firm greens, a new driving range and a putting course. For a club that had once looked headed for closure, the transformation became a case study in how local recreation survives: by labor, improvisation and a stubborn sense that some places are worth saving.