Some of the most intriguing golf courses are those found slightly off the beaten path, unheralded, that don’t announce themselves to you by way of their state or national ranking. Not that there’s anything wrong with being ranked. It’s just that what goes into certain course-ranking concoctions is far more than meets the eye.

So pencil me in if you’re playing that municipal course down by the beach where, on occasion, they do have to turn away tourists in flip-flops, where you can spray it off the tee and burnish your recovery shots off hardpan. Same goes for that mountain-pasture track where the screen door slams on the golf shop and the flies buzz in the gauzy light of high summer afternoons. Give me a golf course where the charm quotient is as important as the slope rating and I promise to share its coordinates with only those who can appreciate the same.

I’m the kind of golfer who saves those state and regional maps of daily fee, resort and municipal golf courses — the ones where the little flags are dropped throughout the state — whether the state/region is a car ride or a plane ride away. Someday I’ll use this, I think.

I’m the kind of golfer who believesGolf Digest‘s 100 Greatest Courses is an abstraction, a pipe dream through a beauty-contest looking glass that heaps praise – mostly deserving — on a minuscule minority of intensely groomed, extravagantly manicured courses but does a disservice to dozens, if not hundreds, of superb courses just as beauty pageants raise and distort the expectations placed upon all women. The point of the comparison being, do you think there are beautiful women beyond those who stand on stage at the Miss America Pageant? Of course there are beautiful, smart, sexy women almost everywhere you turn. The beauty is in the eye (and imagination) of the beholder.

So it is with golf courses. There are great tracks all over the country. Each has its own character and history, idiosyncrasies and, yes, ineffable charm. Hey, in the lazy days of July and August, a pastureland course with a Snickers shack at the turn and greens as slow as sand can be far more charming than a too-tough course where you’re $10 down (before you hit your first shot) in tips to the valet, the cart boys and the starter.

I’m the kind of golfer who actually misses Phil "the Scooter" Rizzuto and those stream-of-consciousness meanderings he’d undertake late in Yankees broadcasts that began with, "Wanaque, you know, there’s a golf course out that way. What a great little place…"

(And I’m not even a Yankee fan. On the subject of New York baseball, I’m a strict unilateralist. In other words, when it comes to being a New York baseball fan, there is not and never will be room for multilateralism. When I was a kid, if you were under 12, there were two kinds of fans. Real baseball fans who liked the Mets or the Yankees and, conversely, loathed the crosstown non-opponent — in the era before the arrival of ersatz inter-league play. The second kind of fan was the phony who said he liked both or, worse yet, actually switched allegiances depending on which was playoff-bound.)

What does any of this have to do with golf? The Scooter, it turns out, had this knack for name-dropping golf courses, usually in outlying New Jersey suburbs. It would take some dissecting and posthumous research but it would be fun to know how many golf-course shoutouts he actually gave in his years as a Yankees broadcaster.

And while there are other sites that will tout their local courses, Styled to a Tee sees no reason not to join in the fray, singing the praises of the deserving courses in our neck of the woods: Metropolitan New York-New Jersey and Connecticut. It’s unlikely our loyal readers will come directly for stories about those courses, but those who google the courses will find our notations. We’re not waiting for invitations to Shinnecock/Baltusrol/Winged Foot and Liberty National. Instead, our offering under the heading of Local Knowledge will be a decidedly less selective, more price-sensitive set; one that is far more accessible and, but for the history of hosting professional and major championships and carrying some outrageous slope rating, nearly as interesting. — Robert Lohrer