A Personal Remembrance

Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025. A ballroom at Desert IslandCC in the Coachella Valley pocket of Rancho Mirage. The “Celebration of Life” for my dear friend, my colleague, my collaborator, my playing partner and one of the world’s foremost golf and landscape photographers, John Henebry.

Fifty days prior, while riding his bike on New Year’s Day mere miles from these golf grounds, Johnny was hit by a car and tragically killed. He was 76 years old.

Hundreds have gathered for this remembrance ofJohnny; retellings of his unique life and wanderlust, his laugh, his meditation and yoga practices, his palpable talents behind the camera, his photos seen in magazines, calendars and private collections around the globe and his lens capturing some of SoCal and the world’s most renowned courses, often working in concert with his sister/business partner, Jeannine.

Beside the podium are sterling samples of Johnny’s work; aluminum dye sublimation metal prints of the Grand Tetons and the White Sands National Monument and the LoneCypress at Pebble Beach. Upon the podium, stories, poignant and funny and sad; sequential remembrances of Johnny’s journey from Bohemian teen to his Eastern travelsto his first pro works, shooting in the Himalayas for National Geographic.

At some stage amid the memories, I notice a disco ball hanging from the ceiling, and I silently laugh, thinking Johnny would find something funny in this.

I stood and spoke and was honored to do so.

I recalled all our rounds together on these same Desert Island grounds, and remembered our longtime collaborations, many of which appeared in the pages of FORE. I share a few yarns of our simpatico work approaches and philosophies, specifying a collaboration from a few years’ back at iconic Sunny lands, set across the street from Desert Island. Johnny, never satisfied with decent photos, knocked that project out of the park, going back to the grounds again and again in an effort to find the perfect light.

The honorings have concluded. People gather in a queue for lunch. I take a moment for myself and wander to the large plate glass windows at the room’s rear, beyond which the old school grounds of this Desmond Muirhead design glimmer peak-season electric green while the snow-capped San Jacintos hover in silent sentry.

Golfers, visible from this room and through these windows, try and tame the ninth hole. Desert Island’s namesake play and signature test, the 402-yarder plays to an island fairway surrounded by water.

The hole, as I see it, is different, unique, eccentric, distinctive, while also a little strange and undoubtedly singular. I look out at the ninth and think of these characteristics and tenets; and then turn back to the room and think of my friend John Henebry.