Cucks With Trucks, And The Trads They (Sometimes) F*ck

Welcome back to Charles Schwab.

In about two months, I’ll have lived in Fort Worth for nine years, which is crazy to even type. I like it and I’ve met good people here, and had some good experiences and some bad ones, but ending up in a random, albeit fast-growing, North Texas city was never something I predicted. Life is weird.

When I moved here, I initially lived over a pedestrian footbridge from the Colonial Country Club. I moved in July ’14, so I missed the 2014 Colonial PGA event, which I think at the time was called “Colonial” and that’s it. In 2015, I “experienced” it for the first time and a lot of people seemed to make it a big deal, including one guy at a bar telling me it was how “Fort Worth showed itself to the world.” I had already just learned that TCU football was a big thing, as was the rodeo. It seemed this place had a lot of things to “show to the world.” During that 2015 PGA tournament, though, CBS did a nice rapid-pan past my apartment balcony. I thought that was cool, and used it as an opportunity to tell random people that I used to work for ESPN and all that.

In the last seven-eight years, I’ve been to Colonial Golf Tournament, now called the Charles Schwab Challenge, maybe 3–4 times. Last year I walked around one day and volunteered at a beer tent one day. A few years ago I walked around in 102-degree heat with my wife and her friend who was eight months pregnant. I felt pretty awful for that one.

Several years I went to this bar on the edge of the same pedestrian footbridge, called Woodshed Smokehouse — that’s the same bar essentially that caused the demise of my first marriage, as a happy note (edit: I caused that demise, of course, but the bar was the simple location) — and found drunk CBS production assistants to give me tickets/passes.

Anyway, it’s an OK time.

The country club, as many county clubs do, abuts two affluent areas, maye three, all of them near TCU. You have “Tanglewood” and “Colonial Hills” and just “Colonial.” I’d say the houses in these areas start around $750,000 for anything above a 2–2 and go up from there. Some of the houses right by the entrance / fourth hole of this course are probably $6M+, if not higher. It’s ritzy, ish, and a mix of old money and new money. The further you get from the actual course but within the boundaries of TCU, it’s newer money. As Kendall Roy says, you need to hold those bills up to the light.

I think we all also know that American wealth is somewhat about the ability to sequester yourself: