I recently celebrated my 64th birthday last month, well, celebrated may not be the optimum description for getting older so let’s say I tolerated another anniversary of my birth. I care little for BDAY celebrations but my children have a different outlook…especially when some of them have been sheltering at home with me recently.
The kids took it upon themselves to treat me to a festive day of gift giving and Facetime visits with 
those sheltering elsewhere. I give them credit for their efforts as my ever thoughtful and clever daughter took the Beatles classic “When I’m 64” and added her own lyrics to make the song so relevant for me and our lifestyle. A boisterous chorus sung to me by them all with my 18 month old granddaughter strumming the ukulele on Facetime was a moment I’ll treasure.
And gifts…oh the gifts. Junk food to tempt my Keto Diet dedication along with snacks and mementos and cards warmed my heart and widened my waist line.
Among the bounty of loot I packed up that day was a small magazine, McKellar. I thought I had seen or read just about every golf publication out there. But this was a new one to me. My youngest son had done some research and came up with this and he figured I’d like it. He was right.
My golf reading habits have changed over the years and while the internet has almost rendered the printed magazine obsolete I still am thrilled when I open that mailbox to find my subscriptions. Now, the regular, popular magazines are fine and they serve a purpose (mostly to sell equipment and real estate I think) but my tastes have gone beyond the best driver $500 can buy and stories on private courses I’ll never be allowed to play.
My game has matured and so have my reading tastes. The Golfers Journal is more my style now. With a serious book like format and timeless articles. But my new favorite is this tiny, half-size beauty called McKellar.
Believe it or not it was started with donations to a Kickstarter account and it’s headed by two well known names in golf: Lawrence Donegan and Thomas Dunne. If you read any golf at all you’ve read their stuff in the Guardian, Golf Magazine, Golf Week and Golf Digest. So they got that going for them to paraphrase Carl Spackler.
Those two know their stuff and plenty of other writers must think the same as the list of contributors boasts some heavy hitters. Michael Clayton, Lorne Rubenstein, Geoff Schackelford, John Huggan and Derek Duncan are all familiar scribes adding to McKellars’s quality publication.
I found it fascinating for both it’s articles and photography. Maybe it’s because I related to so many of the articles. Rubenstein walks Brora (a course my brother and I loved) without clubs. Dunne profiles a small do it yourself course being built near me. Audrey Gillan profiles Belle Robertson who grew up on Dunaverty, a Kintyre gem where I carded my first Scottish eagle last summer.
Each and every piece was worthwhile and the photography…well….it’s as good as the writing and that is about as good as it gets out there.
In this fast paced world of everyone needing everything in the matter of a few keystrokes, McKellar takes the long view. There is no shelf life to their articles. Ten years from now I could pull this off the shelf and still be intrigued by each and every article.
It’s timeless and that’s a rare find in this world today.
——————————————————————————————
They also have a great podcast that made news recently when Rory McIlroy spoke about Trump.
Related Articles
