Today I decided to risk injuring a potentially broken hand and hit the links. Crooked Tree seemed like the poetic setting to play with a crooked limb.

Somewhere in the course of the round it occurred to me that I have a particular fondness for many things crooked. Maybe it’s just a love of the word, but I don’t know a better way in the English language to sum up interesting.
Crooked = Character.  

Think about it.
Crooked smiles
Crooked noses
Crooked swings
Crooked Tree

Hopefully, you have already experienced Crooked Tree’s abundance of character for yourself, but chances are you have not.  It can be easy to miss. At times I fear that Crooked Tree assumes the role of forgotten step child in the BOYNE family of golf offerings.

Everything else packages up neatly in verbal umbrellas. Bay Harbor Golf Club is a world-renowned destination and shares it’s name with the regal Inn at Bay Harbor. Boyne Highlands contains four of golf's gems and Boyne Mountain has its’ two scrappy beauties. Crooked Tree sort of stands on its’ own, even though it is right across the street from the Inn at Bay Harbor on bluffs high above Bay Harbor Golf Club and Lake Michigan. From a marketing perspective it would be convenient to rename the course the Bluffs of Bay Harbor.

But then it would lose all that cool crookedness.

Not that all that character just comes from a name.
Crooked Tree has a lot of other features that make it what it is. Numerous dog legs, forced carries, imaginatively sculpted greens (including a double green #9 and #18), mind blowing views of Lake Michigan, large dramatic gulleys that the course plays along, through, around and over. Throw in cool bay breezes and you have the ultimate high-summer pleaser.  It’s the closest thing you’ll find to an air conditioned course. Sometimes I swear it feels just like it used to when I was a kid and would run inside on a hot summer day and open the freezer door which was over my head....ahhh.

In this case the name has historical character as well.
For many years the village that is now Petoskey was a gathering place for the native tribes.  They traveled Lake Michigan by canoe and looked for a large crooked pine that hung out off a bluff above Little Traverse Bay. They called it “Waganawkezee” (It is Bent). For many years the entire region from Mackinac to the south shore of Little Traverse Bay was referred to as L’Arbre Croche (Crooked Tree) by the French fur traders and missionaries.

So for all these reasons Crooked Tree remains a crooked peg in a family of round holes.
How perfectly imperfect.

Often times, the things that stick out a little are the things you remember most. Do yourself a favor and check it out.
When you do, tell Paulo I said “hi”.

-JJ