As I stroll into Luxe Golf Bays in Franklin for the first time, I’m thinking of the old saw that golf is a great way to ruin a nice walk. And I’m wondering, how is it without the walk?
Luxe Golf Bays is the local iteration of a relatively new breed of golf entertainment facility, merging a driving range with a golf simulator with, to my surprise, a party. Topgolf is the international market leader in this space, and local entrepreneurs ROC Ventures opened their own spin on it in 2022 (after three years of delays).
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Our bay is one of 57, in the middle of three stories of them. These are essentially party suites – complete with cushy seating, tables and TVs – opening to a net-bordered driving range with nine big bullseyes at various distances. A sophisticated tracking system called Trackman keeps tabs on every ball flying out of the bays – distance, velocity, launch angle, maximum height – rendering every perfect drive and worm-burner alike into a pleasing stripe on some of the bay’s many screens.
If you just want to practice as you would at a traditional driving range, you can, with unlimited balls during your bay reservation ($32-$55 per hour). But c’mon, that’s not why we four occasional-at-best golfers are here.
No, we want to outhit each other, and after some warmup swings (and a couple of misses), we embark on a longest-drive contest. Then, a pair of closest-to-the-pin games turn this range atop an old landfill into a virtual Pebble Beach, Bethpage Black and TPC Sawgrass. The combination of watching your ball in flight and turning to the screen to see where it landed in the virtual course is a huge upgrade over simulators – even if only one of our dozens of tee shots hit the green.
We were struck by the crowd, which was diverse in just about every way except for the lack of serious golfers. In the suites on either side of us, two young women and a family with three kids of various ages were mostly goofing around with their shots or badly mishitting but still having fun. Nobody here was judging our shanks.
Attentive waitstaff kept us in Modelos and IPAs. The food, particularly the crispy-doughy Detroit-style pizza, beat our expectations by being objectively good. The music was lively and loud; as dusk set in, a live DJ took over, bringing wedding reception vibes.
None of this, of course, happens at a real course. My baymates and I all enjoyed the experience – “more fun than real golf,” one said. It was liberating to be our mediocre-to-bad golf selves without worrying about playing too slowly for the group behind us, or about boring stuff like decorum. I also want to go back with a more evenly matched group for some more serious competition.
One thing none of us missed?
The walk.
