It’s an interesting life being a Golf Digest course-ranking panelist. The rules and ethos you must uphold resemble those of the military or a fraternity. Break any of them and a dishonorable discharge awaits. The panel, and really the Golf Digest brand, is much bigger than any individual. In fact, we don’t like our panelists’ identities to be public. Terry Inslee was an exception.
Inslee was Golf Digest’s most prolific panelist of all time. He joined the panel in 1975, and as the co-owner of a plastics manufacturing business, could take all the vacation he wanted. And he did, and we were fortunate for it. His trips were the stuff of legend. He and his late buddy, also a Golf Digest panelist, Lee Tuttle, once planned an 86-day trip, driving 11,600 miles across 12 states, playing 104 courses. They were in their mid-70s. That was just a typical summer for Inslee.
Inslee explained his passion for traveling in a profile we did in 1995 in Golf Digest: “A few years ago, two close friends of mine died of cancer in their 50s,” he told our Roger Schiffman at the time. “I decided right then I’m not going to just sit in the office all my life.”
You can read the story from 1995 on Inslee here.
Inslee lived up to his own inspiration up until his passing last week at age 84. I had just talked to him in May, when he was traveling to Myrtle Beach. He then planned on heading up to Wisconsin later in the summer. I know he had slowed down over the past couple of months with some health concerns, but one of our panelists talked to him a couple weeks ago, and Inslee relayed how he was planning to being back on the road soon.
When I say nobody was as prolific as Inslee, I really mean it. Just since our records became digitized in 2000, Inslee had evaluated 1,624 different golf courses for Golf Digest. At a given time, we maintain a list of about 1,900 courses that we consider candidates for our Best in State and America’s 100 Greatest rankings. That means he had nearly played every course that was a candidate for our rankings. That should be impossible. But Inslee made it normal.
As mentioned above, we keep our panelists’ identities private, for a variety of reasons. We don’t like our panelists speaking on behalf of the rest of the panel. So the fact we devoted nearly a full page in the magazine to Inslee, when it’s counter to the entire ethos of being a panelist, tells you how much he was respected by us and his peers. It’ll always be that way.
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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
