Minnehaha Country Club in South Dakota, which is said to be south of North Dakota, is the site of this weekend’s Sanford Invitational for the older gentlemen of the Champions Tour.
The name of the club derives, we believe, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Song of Hiawatha,” which is really long and slow-moving and I hardly think you should expect I finished it or even made it to the part where Minnehaha meets her untimely end which I suppose was tragic for her boyfriend Hiawatha but not so much for me because I was tired of her long before that point in the story and I may have even wished for her death just so something would happen, like, die already, please.
Minnehaha has been translated as “laughing water” or, in golf usage, to describe “short putts that miss badly, occasioning laughter.”
There are other associations between golf and this regrettable poem, such as what we say when a buddy shoots well over 100: “You really got your Wadsworth out of that round, dude.”
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