Two days off, 1,000 courses: Jordan McDonald’s other working week
An assistant professional’s extraordinary golf itinerary runs on red-eyes, discounted rounds and personal connections, with his father sharing the milestone that mattered most.
Christmas Day at Kapalua sounds like the centrepiece of a holiday. For Jordan McDonald, it fitted between flights and a return to work. He flew to Hawai‘i on Christmas Eve 2023, played the following day and left that night, ready for his next shift. A month later, he squeezed three Dubai courses into a 72-hour round trip via Paris. These were ambitious journeys built around a decidedly finite allowance of time.[1]
McDonald, an assistant professional at Victoria Club in Riverside, has reached 1,000 courses while working full-time. The obvious question is how he found the hours. The equally revealing one is how he obtained the tee times. His tally was split almost evenly between public and private courses, with most private-club rounds complimentary and PGA membership reducing his costs at public venues. This was a working golfer’s undertaking, but it did not run on ordinary visitor terms.[1]
The currency of access
Professional standing was only part of the arrangement. McDonald sought help from members and other contacts, accepted non-prime-time slots and made day trips when opportunities arose. He also took advantage of cheap pandemic-era flights, meeting the applicable testing and mask requirements. Roughly a quarter of his first thousand courses were in Southern California: even this far-ranging collection had a substantial local foundation.[1]
The weekly template came from his time at Hidden Valley Golf Club in Norco, where Mondays and Tuesdays were his days off. A Sunday red-eye could deliver two rounds before a Wednesday return to work. McDonald puts his travel frequency at 42 weeks a year for about eight years. An Excel spreadsheet kept the count, including courses from his Washington State upbringing; counting only 18-hole rounds, he reached 600 in 2022 and was adding between 90 and 110 different courses annually.[1]
That machinery eventually served a less numerical purpose. For course No. 1,000, McDonald wanted Cypress Point on the Monterey Peninsula. Victoria Club member Ed Holmes helped arrange the particularly difficult tee time in May 2026. McDonald brought his father, making the milestone a shared round rather than simply the next entry in a file.[1]
His father belonged at that finish because he had been there at the beginning. During their 2017 Pebble Beach trip, McDonald noticed a list of America’s top 100 public courses on a bathroom wall and decided he wanted to play them. The ambition expanded to all 50 states and 14 countries. Returning to the Monterey Peninsula together gave the thousandth course a connection that no ranking could supply.[1]
At home, 186 bag tags, nearly 200 ball markers and about 70 flags give the spreadsheet a physical counterpart. France, Spain and Portugal remain on his list. Four figures was a milestone, not a retirement plan; the next journey still has to fit around the job.[1]
