There is a special kind of audacity involved in paying to get onto a golf course and then allegedly destroying it. Not sneaking in. Not hopping a fence at 2am with a six-pack and bad intentions. Walking up to the pro shop, handing over money, writing your name down like a responsible adult, and then using the cart they rented you to carve the place into modern art.
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What Happened at Honey Creek
On August 7, the superintendent at Honey Creek Resort in Appanoose County, Iowa watched a man tear up the course with a golf cart. Not a slow skid across a soft fairway. Not a rookie blowing off the 90-degree rule. Enough damage that the final estimate came to $44,548, with the 18th hole taking the worst of it.
Police say the man behind the wheel was Isaac Hites, 21, of Ames. He’s been charged with first-degree criminal mischief, a Class C felony in Iowa. A warrant went out on September 3. He was arrested on September 15, booked into the Appanoose County Jail, posted bond, and waived his preliminary hearing.
The Part Where It Gets Stupid
Here’s the detail that lifts this from ordinary vandalism into something closer to folk art: the superintendent knew exactly who to name because Hites had signed in for green fees.
He paid. He wrote his name on the sheet. Then, allegedly, he did forty-four thousand dollars’ worth of donuts.
Investigators didn’t need forensics, a tip line, or a grainy security still. They needed the clipboard by the first tee. It is the golf equivalent of robbing a bank after carefully filling out a deposit slip with your home address on it.
Forty-Four Grand Is a Lot of Grass
For scale: $44,548 is roughly 1,400 dozen premium golf balls. It’s a decent used car. It’s more than plenty of public courses spend on turf maintenance in an entire year. Honey Creek is a state-owned resort course out on Rathbun Lake, which means that repair bill lands somewhere in Iowa’s public accounting, which means every taxpayer in the state quietly chipped in for that 18th hole whether they’ve ever held a club or not.
And greens aren’t something you just patch on a Tuesday. A putting surface is built in layers — drainage rock, sand profile, a specific grass grown to a specific height over a specific number of seasons. Run a cart through that and you’re not laying sod Wednesday and putting on it Thursday. You’re looking at months, a lot of rope, and a temporary green that everybody hates.
Golf Takes Balls. This Took Something Else.
Hites is entitled to his day in court, and a charge isn’t a conviction. But whatever the full story turns out to be, the Honey Creek Resort golf course damage is going to live in Iowa golf folklore for a long time — and not because of the dollar figure. Because of the sign-in sheet.
So if you’re ever seized by the urge to redecorate a fairway with a rented Club Car, consider some alternatives: hit a large bucket, buy a fresh sleeve, throw your 7-iron in a pond like a normal person. All of these are cheaper than a Class C felony.
The course, for what it’s worth, is still open. Just maybe don’t ask to borrow the cart.
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