It started out with a simple question:
How can I play more golf?
For those of us who live in a big city, with a demanding career, and perhaps a young family, that question doesn’t have a great answer. Even in a place like Los Angeles – Fescue’s ancestral home – that actually has year-round golf weather.
Our current options look like this:
- Tough it out playing urban public golf
- Join a country club
The first option requires driving to hell and gone to have a worthwhile experience. The second will require the cost of an LA mortgage to join. Well, if you have the right last name, profession, and want to spend time with the people that already belong there…
There had to be a third way. And high-end simulators seemed to fit the bill. I could play in a garage! Problem solved, right? But I’d be sacrificing a lot of what I loved about golf. Having coffee with your playing partners before the round, chatting with the cart attendant, having a drink and some food after… I realized what I actually wanted, beyond playing more golf, was a community. A club (gasp). But where did the golf convenience of a simulator fit into this larger desire for golf community?
Before I knew it, I started to see simulators as more than a modest solution to play more golf. Simulators could help build new 18 hole golf experiences with a fraction of the natural resources, and a fraction of the geographic footprint. We could even improve our individual games faster. They could be a lifeline for the entire sport, its growth, and its culture.
Most importantly, we could build the golf community I yearned for from scratch. And it could be better – more modern, more affordable, more sustainable – than what we think of as a “country club”. Just as important, it could attract members who were looking for those traits.
Bottom line, what started out as a simple, selfish, thought exercise, has evolved into nothing less than trying to reshape the culture of an entire sport. We’re looking for people willing to take on that challenge.
Or maybe just play more golf…
That’s Fescue Golf Club. For the modern golfer.
The Fescue Name
Fescue grass is well known by golfers, though sometimes they hardly notice it. Mostly as the photogenic, but punishing, long hewn rough running along the edges of many golf courses.
But the Fescue we know is so much more than that.
It is the most common native grass found on golf courses around the world. It was there on the banks of Lake Michigan, and on the Firth of Forth, and the rolling hills of Southern California long before golf courses were carved in. And it will be there long after.
It thrives, and it is beautiful. It provides a flowing yellow contrast to impossibly green overseeded rye grass fairways, distinctive eyebrows on ancient pot bunkers, and wild clumps of brownish bangs lining treacherous barrancas.
Maybe it was cheeky to name an indoor golf club after a strain of grass. But Fescue is wild, native, and bound to takeover someday. Just like us.
The Fescue Logo
The California Quail is a bird that anyone who has ever hiked a scrubland trail here will know.
They’re rather small, and tend to scoot and scurry rather than fly. They travel in groups. They don’t require much water, and have evolved to thrive in environments where drought is common, and food can be scarce.
The California Quail is hardy, unique, and undeniably iconic
It also happens to have a distinctive plume on its head that kinda resembles a clubhead. Might’ve been just that, honestly…