You Can Live Like a Golf Pro -- for $9K

In the meantime, TaylorMade staffers work feverishly to assemble your personalized set of sticks for use starting the next morning.

You'll be playing one of Reynolds' four outstanding resort courses, designed by Jack Nicklaus, Tom Fazio, Rees Jones and Bob Cupp. The tour pro will join you for nine holes and then for lunch, where you're free to ask him all the questions you wished the toady network announcers would, but never do. (Suggestion: Don't ask, "What's Tiger Woods really like?" It won't go over well.)

Following lunch, a teaching pro from either the Kingdom or the Reynolds Golf Academy, helmed by the well-respected instructor Charlie King, will give a two-hour group instructional session; afterward, you can opt for more instruction or an afternoon round.

My Kingdom for a Course

The Academy is an impressive place: 18,000-square-foot putting green; excellent short-game area to run through all those niggling little shots; vast practice range that includes places to work on your fairway bunker play as well as every manner of sidehill, uphill and downhill lie.

Or you can decide to go tackle one of the courses you didn't play that morning.

The thing about Tour pros is that once the event is over, they have to leave for the next tournament. You don't. So if that $9,000 hasn't put a crimp in your savings -- and if it has, you may not be the target market -- consider extending your Reynolds stay to a week.

After all, it will still take you a few more days to hit every course. And I'd be remiss if I didn't recommend that you also go off-property, just down the road, to play one of my favorite courses anywhere, Cuscowilla Golf Club. It's a brilliant, flowing Bill Coore-Ben Crenshaw design and, years later, I can still recall every hole.

Even pros need to get away from the game to recharge the batteries, and there are no shortage of options for an extended stay here.

A massage at the Ritz-Carlton's sprawling spa will remove any kinks -- except the ones still in your swing.

Fishing is probably pro golfers' second-favorite pastime, and Lake Oconee is said to have the most fish per acre in Georgia, chockablock with catfish as well as largemouth and striped bass. Canoeing, kayaking and waterskiing are also available, as are tennis courts and handsome walking trails.

Or you just sit and read a golf instruction book by the Ritz's infinity-edged pool, excited about your custom-fitted set of TaylorMade clubs and new swing thoughts -- and thankful that you never have to make a left-to-right downhill knee-knocker to make a cut.

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