I’m not a golf course architecture aficionado by any means but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from 15 years of walking golf courses while covering the pros it’s this: any golf course that has Jack Nicklaus’ name in the slot next to the words “Course Architect” ought to have the following warning posted before the first tee, in the same manner as those ski slopes with the double black diamonds:

“Warning: This golf course was neither conceived nor designed with the thought that anyone actually enjoys playing golf and walking from shot to shot, or from a green to the next tee. If you play this course and do not take a cart, you are an idiot and you deserve any health problems that result from your poor decision-making skills, including your untimely death.”

For the players at this week’s Cap Cana Championship, this was not a problem. This is the Champions Tour, after all; part of the entitlement package of playing on a tour that a colleague of mine (I’ve long since forgotten who, but I wish I could remember) once called “Day Care for Millionaires” is that you get to plop your over-50 year-old bones in a cart as much as you want. But the press is still the press, regardless of the tour we’re following or the course we’re on. Hoofing it on foot would have to do.

Manuel De Los Santos on the driving range followng Saturday's second round.

I didn’t have to go far to get my favorite image of the week, though. Returning to the media center following Saturday’s second round, I found an e-mail from my editor at Sports Illustrated, Miriam Marseu, asking me to try and get some “on course” portraits (that’s golf-photo speak for long-lens, available light, waist-up shots)  of Bernhard Langer for a feature. Play had finished for the day, but I reasoned that those kinds of shots are best found on the driving range, anyway, so I figured I’d stroll the hundred or so yards over to the practice area and see if he was out there.

He wasn’t. And that was a good thing, because what I literally stumbled upon was something that I wouldn’t have believed had I not seen it with my own eyes. Instead, I found Manuel De Los Santos, a 25 year-old former baseball prodigy who took up golf after he lost his left leg in a motorcycle accident at age 18. Standing on one leg and taking full, powerful swings that sounded so pure–those of you who’ve hung around professional golfers practicing know exactly what sound I’m talking about–he muscled shot after shot down the range with a stroke that torqued his entire body from the start of the swing to its finish, taking a brief hop as he made contact, and spinning into his follow-through to finish perfectly balanced on the the tips of his toes in a manner that defied credulity. In between shots I turned my head to see that Corey Pavin had stopped practicing for a minute to watch, and was shaking his head in disbelief.

Golf carts are a staple for players on the Champions Tour, as Fred Couples (and caddie Joe LaCava) can attest...

But you can’t make your game story pictures on the range, and so for the rest of the assignment, a hike was in order. I was able to receive a major assist from Sports Illustrated’s Miguel Saavedra, who flew down to help out. He knew what he was in for; I’d told him that I was two weeks removed from some minor surgery and under doctor’s orders not to carry or lift anything over 20 pounds, so he was going to be doing a lot of schlepping. I should note that the physical outlay for a golf photographer is nothing to sneeze at; walking 18 holes a day (and this on a Nicklaus course–see above) with a load easily in excess of 50 pounds is not exactly a walk in the park, regardless of whether your GPS tells you you’re somewhere in the middle of paradise. But for some reason he thought this sounded like fun and agreed to leave the office for a couple of days and come along. On so many levels beyond the physical help, I was glad he did.

Eventual winner Fred Couples gouges out an approach shot on the third hole.

I know enough Spanish to get by–barely–but I’d never fully appreciated the enormous difference having someone fluent in the language to translate and communicate could be. Let’s start with my favorite subject: food. There was surprisingly little to choose from at our resort/hotel (there, I said it; I won’t sugar coat to make you think we stayed at a Motel 6). But the front desk staff highly recommended a little place called La Yola which, they said, was a 10-minute walk down the road.

(As a brief aside, one thing I did learn last week is that in the Dominican Republic, everything takes ten minutes. How far to the hotel from the airport? Ten minutes. How long until the shuttle gets here? Ten minutes. How far is it to the golf course? Ten minutes. You get the idea.)

Inspired by dreams of fantastic food and a nice leisurely beach-side stroll on a beautiful star-lit evening, Miguel, myself and S.I. writer Damon Hack headed out down the path, as instructed. They don’t mark things very well in Punta Cana, so when, ten minutes later, we arrived at a gated entry way leading to a massive, multi-winged, thatch-roofed edifice with towering floor-to-ceiling windows, dimly glowing lights and soothing music echoing back to the street through the walled-in parking lot, we knew we had arrived. We wandered in, past a couple of parked cars, through an open foyer and into an atrium surrounded by glassed-in rooms and filled with tropical foliage. Walking between the rough-hewn tree trunks that provided frames for the buildings and shade for the walkways, I began to get an uneasy feeling. The place was empty. Were we looking for dinner? Or Colonel Kurtz? I half expected a stoned-out-of-his-gourd Dennis Hopper to greet us with a couple of Nikon F’s hanging around his neck.

And then we walked past the kitchen, on the other side of a wall of windows. It was enormous and pristine, and stocked with every gleaming stainless steel appliance that would make a foodie like myself drool on sight, which is what I started doing. The staff of four or five was busy cleaning away–which I thought odd, considering we had a reservation and all, and that they certainly wouldn’t be closing up for the night.

Miguel must’ve found it odd, too, because he stuck his head in the door and said something to the people inside. I think I saw most of them smile, if not laugh outright, but when he pulled his head out the door he was doing neither.

“Dude,” he said, “this is someone’s house.”

The emphasis he placed on that last word reflected enough incredulity for the three of us.

The kitchen staff was very accommodating and sympathetic to our plight; one of them even gave us a ride to our actual destination. Had we walked it, it would have been–you guessed it–about another ten minutes down the road…

The next day Miguel suggested at breakfast that we ought to try something different. After all, we were in a beautiful location, and as we’d discussed before, the location was the story. And it was Saturday, which meant we still had a full day of shooting on the course to follow tomorrow. Why not take a chance at the ultimate “sense of place” picture and rent a helicopter for half an hour? Why not, indeed. I mean, we’re in a foreign country, it’s Saturday morning, we have no idea where to get a helicopter from, and we need it sometime in the next four hours or so.

Aerial view of the Punta Espada Golf Club, Cap Cana, Dominican Republic.

For Miguel, this meant about 10 minutes of chatting up the hotel concierge, a phone call or two, and an appointment for one o’clock that afternoon. That meant we could still go to the course, shoot a couple of holes of scenics, and be back in time to meet our ride to the helipad. The helicopter ride was as much fun as they ever are; it was a Robinson 44, which is about as close as you can get to putting a couple of lawn chairs under a big propeller and slapping a tail rotor on it, and to tell you the truth I was secretly relieved when we were told that it would take several days and piles of paper work to get the necessary government approval to take the doors off. And it was a good thing they stayed on, too–our pilot, Felipe, practically fell out of his seat when, about 700 feet above the Caribbean, he asked–and we told him–who we were taking pictures for.

As we flew back inland, I listened over the headset as Miguel briefly recounted our previous night’s restaurant hunt to Felipe, and inquired as to the identity of the house’s owner, who’s name he’d gotten from the staff.

Felipe broke into a wide grin. “He’s only the wealthiest man in the country.”

On Sunday, a funny thing happened at what was supposed to be a glorified exhibition of golfers in their golden years out for a walk in the park: a real, bona-fide golf tournament broke out, with a final threesome of Fred Couples, Nick Price, and Corey Pavin slugging it out in a shootout that rivaled anything I’ve ever witnessed on the golf beat. I mean, I was happy enough to have been granted a paid weekend in paradise without a care other than bringing back a couple of nice pictures. Who’d have thought I’d get to witness some quality competition as well?