Golf, Groceries, and Wolves

Top of Mind

The Hottest Golf Accessory at Scioto Started in a Columbus Basement

Golf has always been a sport of tiny obsessions.

The grip. The stance. The wind. The read. The one blade of grass that apparently ruined your entire personality on hole 14.

But for Columbus’ Justin “J” Orlando, one of golf’s smallest details became the whole thing.

Orlando, a local teacher, high school golf coach, father of four, and proud blue-collar maker, turns ball markers into tiny pieces of functional art. Not the plastic circles you grab from the pro shop counter. Not the random quarter you found in your cup holder. Hand-stamped, highly customized, inch-and-a-quarter metal coins that look like something between a keepsake, a lucky charm, and a very small museum exhibit.

The hobby started in 2015, when Orlando’s son, Rocco, met PGA Tour pro Rocco Mediate at a U.S. Open qualifier at Ohio State Golf Club. Mediate invited him to walk along, and a year later, at the U.S. Senior Open at Scioto Country Club, Orlando tracked him down again and handed him a custom ball marker.

Mediate told him he needed to make more.

That was apparently solid advice.

Today, J. Orlando Made markers are used by more than 250 touring professionals and elite golfers, including Justin Thomas, Akshay Bhatia, Jason Day, and former Buckeye Neil Shipley. Adam Sandler and LeBron James have reportedly carried them too, because once your tiny golf coins reach both PGA greens and Happy Gilmore-adjacent celebrity territory, the bit has officially become a business.

Each marker is made by hand in Orlando’s spare time, often at home with a 146-pound anvil, metal stamps, coins, and whatever precise vision a client brings him. The whole process is part craft, part therapy, part hand-eye-coordination gauntlet. Orlando told NBC4 that he has to take a full idea and fit it onto a circle barely bigger than an inch.

Somehow, the demand is much bigger than that.

His waitlist has reportedly grown to more than 5,000 names, which means getting one is less “add to cart” and more “apply for citizenship in a tiny golf kingdom.” But this week, with the U.S. Senior Open at Scioto Country Club, Orlando has been set up inside the merchandise tent making commemorative coins for the championship.

It’s a very Columbus kind of success story: a teacher, a coach, a basement workshop, an anvil, one good piece of advice from a pro golfer, and suddenly something handmade here is showing up on greens all over the world.

Golf may be a game of inches, but in this case, the inch and a quarter is doing most of the talking.

Cincinnati has a lot of public art that makes sense.

Murals. Fountains. War memorials. Park sculptures. The usual civic decoration package.

And then, in Eden Park, there is a bronze statue of a wolf nursing the mythical founders of Rome, sent to Cincinnati during the reign of Benito Mussolini.

Which is a lot to ask from a casual walk near Twin Lakes.

The statue is Cincinnati’s Capitoline Wolf, a replica of the famous Roman sculpture showing the she-wolf who, according to legend, rescued and nursed Romulus and Remus before they went on to found Rome. Cincinnati got one because the city is named for Cincinnatus, the Roman leader celebrated for leaving his farm, saving the republic, and then giving up power to go back to farming.

Mussolini, never one to see Roman imagery and not make it everyone’s problem, used the Capitoline Wolf as part of Italy’s fascist-era branding campaign. His government sent replicas to places with Roman ties, including Cincinnati. The version in Eden Park was presented in 1931, and the base includes the inscription “Anno X,” meaning the tenth year of Italy’s Fascist era. Subtle, it was not.

So for decades, Cincinnati had a very strange little landmark: part ancient mythology, part Italian-American civic history, part fascist propaganda souvenir, all sitting quietly in an Ohio park like that is a normal combination of things.

Then, in June 2022, the story somehow became even more Ohio.

Someone stole the wolf.

Scarlet Letter Trivia

Question: How many professional Golfers are from Columbus, Ohio?
A. 13
B. 9
C. 11
D. 16

Columbus Is Throwing a Party for People Who Still Smell Books

Quick reminder for everyone whose weekend plans could use more books, iced coffee, and financially questionable tote bag behavior: the Columbus Book Festival is back this weekend.

The free two-day festival takes over Main Library and Topiary Park on July 11 and 12, with more than 120 authors, panels, signings, food trucks, Indie Author Alley, local bookstores, vendors, and plenty of opportunities to buy books you absolutely swear you are going to read soon.

Saturday runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. All activities, panels, and author talks are free, though some headliner sessions require free tickets because space is limited.

There is even free event parking in Main Library’s attached garage and nearby surface lots, which may be the most dramatic plot twist of the whole weekend.

Grab a tote. Clear a shelf. Lie gently to yourself about your unread pile.

Kroger is buying Giant Eagle, which feels less like a merger and more like grocery store Pokémon

Columbus grocery shoppers may soon live in a world where Kroger and Giant Eagle are technically rivals in the same way siblings are rivals when one parent owns the house.

Kroger announced last week that it has reached a definitive agreement to buy Giant Eagle in a deal valued at $1.65 billion. That includes $1.25 billion in cash and about $400 million in assumed liabilities, which is corporate-speak for “yes, the grocery aisle just got even more complicated.”

Giant Eagle brings a pretty sizable cart to the checkout line: 197 supermarkets, 11 standalone pharmacies, about $9 billion in annual sales, and a footprint across northern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, and Indiana. Kroger, already the largest traditional supermarket chain in the country, gets a bigger hold on the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic without trying to swallow something as massive as Albertsons again.

For shoppers, the weirdest part may be how normal everything looks at first. Kroger says Giant Eagle stores are expected to keep the Giant Eagle name, so your Market District probably will not wake up one morning wearing a blue Kroger polo. The deal is expected to close in 2027, pending regulatory approval, and Kroger has already said it may divest a limited number of Giant Eagle stores to help get that approval.

Still, for central Ohio, this is a strange little grocery plot twist. Kroger has long been the default Columbus grocery setting, while Giant Eagle carved out its own lane here after Big Bear disappeared from the local landscape. Now two of the area’s most familiar grocery names could end up under one corporate roof.

And no, this does not mean the end of the GetGo conversation. Giant Eagle already sold its GetGo convenience-store business to Couche-Tard, a separate move that included hundreds of fuel and convenience locations across the region.

The big question now is whether this actually means lower prices, better pharmacy access, and smoother operations, as Kroger says, or whether Columbus just gets to watch another beloved regional brand become part of a much larger grocery machine.

Either way, the next time someone says they are “just running to the store,” there may be a decent chance they are technically running to Kroger, no matter what the sign says.

The Wolf, the Dictator, and the Ohio Park

Cincinnati has a lot of public art that makes sense.

Murals. Fountains. War memorials. Park sculptures. The usual civic decoration package.

And then, in Eden Park, there is a bronze statue of a wolf nursing the mythical founders of Rome, sent to Cincinnati during the reign of Benito Mussolini.

Which is a lot to ask from a casual walk near Twin Lakes.

The statue is Cincinnati’s Capitoline Wolf, a replica of the famous Roman sculpture showing the she-wolf who, according to legend, rescued and nursed Romulus and Remus before they went on to found Rome. Cincinnati got one because the city is named for Cincinnatus, the Roman leader celebrated for leaving his farm, saving the republic, and then giving up power to go back to farming.

Mussolini, never one to see Roman imagery and not make it everyone’s problem, used the Capitoline Wolf as part of Italy’s fascist-era branding campaign. His government sent replicas to places with Roman ties, including Cincinnati. The version in Eden Park was presented in 1931, and the base includes the inscription “Anno X,” meaning the tenth year of Italy’s Fascist era. Subtle, it was not.

So for decades, Cincinnati had a very strange little landmark: part ancient mythology, part Italian-American civic history, part fascist propaganda souvenir, all sitting quietly in an Ohio park like that is a normal combination of things.

Then, in June 2022, the story somehow became even more Ohio.

Someone stole the wolf.

Not the twins. Not the base. Just the wolf. The bronze animal was cut off at the paws and taken, leaving Romulus and Remus behind in what may be the most dramatic public-art parenting failure in state history. Cincinnati Police never recovered the original, and officials believed it may have been stolen for scrap.

Cincinnati, to its credit, did not simply shrug and accept a wolf-less Roman origin myth. Cincinnati Parks, the Cincinnati Parks Foundation, and the Order Sons and Daughters of Italy worked to replace it. A new wolf was made near Florence, Italy, using the same mold as the original and incorporating the remaining bronze paws. It returned to Eden Park in 2023.

Which means Cincinnati once again has its Mussolini-era Roman wolf replica overlooking the Ohio River, now with an added theft-and-resurrection subplot.

It is ancient legend, immigrant history, dictator branding, park art, scrap-metal crime, and civic restoration all in one deeply strange statue.

In other words, exactly the kind of Ohio landmark that sounds fake until you are standing in front of it.

C) 11!