Walking, of course, isn’t the only way to play golf. But Rob Rigg believes it’s the best way, all things considered. So, he’s relaunched his passion project — The Walking Golfer — to help his fellow foot soldiers find the best courses in the U.S. and Canada on which to put one foot in front of the other.
The website — WalkingGolfer.com — is an interactive platform that enables users to plug in a city or destination and all the courses that allow walking will appear on a map. Clicking on a course reveals its basic available information — the site in its current form is still collecting details — and whether the course has been rated for walkability. The goal is to have complete profiles of each course and multiple walkability ratings from one to five stars.
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Rigg, who is the director of direct-to-consumer sales for Titleist, created The Walking Golfer in 2009 with nothing more than a spreadsheet and a few contacts with the idea of connecting walking enthusiasts from all parts of the country.
Rigg grew up in Toronto as, quite naturally, a hockey player. But he discovered golf on biennial trips to his mother’s native Ireland, where he would caddy for his grandparents. Some people carried their clubs and others used motorized trolleys, but everyone walked. He was smitten by the game and began to play, often going 36 — or more — holes a day in Ireland.
As he grew older, he caddied during the summers in Toronto and played quite a bit of golf himself. But when he migrated to the U.S. and settled in Portland, Oregon, he found that most people played golf while riding in carts. While there was nothing he could do to change that fact, he thought he could, at least, serve as a proponent for walking on a wider scale.
“I know there are certain times of year and places in the country that it can be challenging to walk. I totally understand that,” Rigg says. “But I think the opportunity, especially with younger golfers, is to encourage them to try walking as opposed to riding around in a cart. It’s fun for kids to ride in a cart and as they get older, you can put some beers in the cart and have fun that way.
“But from an environmental standpoint, just literally interacting with the environment, enjoying courses, from a social standpoint, enjoying the walk with everyone in your group, not just like sitting next to one person, you know, just getting out, walking in nature. Walking is literally the best thing we can do, which is why golf is such a spectacular activity.”
So, during the dark and gloomy Portland winters, Rigg wanted to find a way to rate every course in the U.S. and Canada for walkability. He started by reaching out to a golf architecture website and created a spreadsheet that became the genesis of The Walking Golfer.
He launched the site in 2009 and populated it with walkability ratings of the courses already in his database and wrote some content about the benefits of walking. He started a society of sorts for walkers and organized a couple of trips for enthusiasts at Pasatiempo Golf Club, an Alister Mackenzie masterpiece in Santa Cruz, California, and Ballyneal Golf Club, one of Tom Doak’s finest in eastern Colorado. “Just great places to walk,” Rigg says.
But after a couple of years, work and life got in the way and the website was relegated to Rigg’s back burner. “I basically got really too busy to be able to focus on it,” he says.
It lay dormant for the better part of a decade when it got the attention of Mark and Neil Stewart of Stewart Golf, an English manufacturer of electric trolleys, which in 2015, established a U.S. LLC in 2015. The company was named in 2022 by The Sunday Times (London) as one of the U.K.’s 100 fastest growing private companies after Stewart’s rapid expansion caused the company to triple its size.
The Stewarts approached Rigg about updating and expanding The Walking Golfer and Neil Stewart set to work on the back end of the site. “It’s something I'm really proud of, really excited about,” Rigg says. After a beta version to iron it out, the site is live and ready for walking golfers.
“The goal is to spread the word, get people rating courses and provide as much information as possible,” he says. “Maybe the site helps people plan a golf trip. Hopefully, when the trip is done, they pop in and rate the courses they played, and it just kind of continues to scale organically. There's also obviously potential to do some basic paid social marketing campaigns just to drive awareness and drive traffic.”
Speaking of traffic, Rigg wants everyone to know he isn’t totally anti-cart. Some courses are too difficult to hoof and other courses, including many resorts, simply don’t allow walking; the revenue from cart rental is simply too important to the bottom line.
“I don't feel like we're really trying to fight against something,” he says. “We just want to provide information and encourage people to enjoy the walk.”
