Monthly Archives: January 2010

January 29, 2010 · 4:59 pm

Red Sox Fan Begs to Differ

Wayne Mills writes, “I just came across your blog after reading your GOLF Magazine piece on Fazio/golf architecture. After reading your take on course ratings (I’m a Golfweek rater), I thought I would endeavor to enlighten you about New England’s great golf courses.”

Wayne goes on to list his personal Top 10 New England courses, and I thank him for that. I’ll even concede that his rankings have merit. But I want to make a couple of points before presenting his choices.

Point 1: Wayne admits that he’s a Golfweek rater — i.e., he is a lavishly-compensated minion working for a rival course-ranking outfit.

Point 2: Wayne has, in all likelihood, visited most of the golf courses in his Top 10. (Familiarity with a venue does not disqualify a course rater, but neither can we ignore the obvious temptation to give high scores to a country club or resort that has fed, clothed, and possibly even bathed the critic.) I, on the other hand, have never even heard of the 9-hole Tatnuck Country Club of Worcester, Mass., which is currently T-53 on my list.

Point 3: Wayne won’t reveal where he lives. (I’m sending the longitudes and latitudes of his Top 10 to my Cal Sci consultant, Charles Eppes, but simple triangulation suggests that Wayne lives in Boston’s elegant Beacon Hill neighborhood, probably on Bowdoin Street. And he drives an Escalade.)

That aside, here are Wayne’s choices for Feast of the East, along with his snarky comments:

1  The Country Club (Not top 50??? Please, the place is a museum and a cathedral.)

2  Newport CC (Ever been?)

3  Kittansett (Oceanfront as good as any.)

4  Wannamoisett (Ross at his best.)

5  The Orchards in W Mass (A classic Ross.)

6  Taconic at Williams College (An unbelievably good golf course in a bucolic setting.)

7  Eastward Ho on Cape Cod (Herbert Fowler’s greatest. Classic golf in a glorious waterfront setting.)

8  Crumpin Fox (Roger Rulewich’s masterpiece.)

9  Country Club of Vermont (A modern classic in the Green Mountains.)

10  Belgrade Lakes (Ten times the course that The Ledges is.)

“And many more,” he writes, before parting with a venomous, “Let me know if you ever get up this way and I’ll show you.” [My emphasis.]

Nice try, Wayne. I’ll visit Boston again when Paul Revere rides out on his horse to say it’s safe.

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January 24, 2010 · 4:16 pm

Where’s the Post-Panic Golf Boom?

I’m not often wrong, but I definitely misread this Great Recession thing. “Hot damn!” I told my golf-architect pals last winter. “You’ll be up to your armpits in federal funds! You’ll go down in history for Pinehurst No. 12, Pebble Beach New and Bethpage Mauve!” I even advised one of my designer friends, Bill Amick, to invite New York mayor Michael Bloomberg to Tavern on the Green to discuss a new muni in Central Park. I told Bill, “You could call it The Links at Strawberry Fields!”

My mistake was in assuming that our current financial crisis would lead to a national consensus on stimulus spending and jobs programs. The Great Depression, remember, was good for golf. New Deal programs such as the WPA and CWA spent millions of dollars on ball fields, boat ramps, hiking trails and golf courses, which allowed taxpayer money to trickle down to the likes of legendary golf architect A.W. Tillinghast, who used it to build classic public courses like Long Island’s Bethpage Black (site of the 20002 and 2009 U. S. Opens) and Kansas City’s Swope Memorial (host to the 2005 U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links Championship).*

*For a thorough exploration of the New Deal golf boom, read Jeff Silverman’s terrific article, “Going Public,” in the June 15, 2009 issue of Sports Illustrated Golf Plus.

This time, however, a perfectly good Financial Panic will be wasted. The wimpy $787 billion stimulus package that Congress passed last year explicitly ruled out funding for “basketball courts, tanning salons, swimming pools, wineries, bordellos, puppy mills, sweat shops, cockfight arenas, sidewalks or paved areas within 400 yards of Keith Olbermann, and golf facilities.” Golf, in other words, will not be allowed to benefit from 10% unemployment and trillion-dollar deficits.

I raised this sorry state of affairs a few months ago in North Carolina during my six-courses-in-one-day golf outing with famed golf architect Tom Fazio. “Politically, it’s a different deal,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “You and I would like for this country to be like Ireland and Scotland, where every community has its own golf course. But there’s a lot of people who don’t play golf, and they don’t want that. And they don’t want an art studio, either. They want jobs for the industry that they’re in, or they want ‘economic development.’”

Tom, while searching his bag in vain for a driver that would hit the ball 290 yards with a two-yard draw, came up with an even better reason for our lawmakers’ indifference to golf course development: “The difference between now and the thirties, if you think about it, is we have enough golf courses out there.”

Enough courses? We have sixteen thousand of them, actually, in the U.S. alone. A non-golfer might argue that we have more than enough, given the fact that courses are going out of business, declaring bankruptcy or otherwise giving every indication that they might better serve their communities as dog parks or frisbee fields.*

*I would argue that we suffer from a golf-course shortage. That will become apparent in the spring, when the millions of golfers who normally stay home on weekends to watch Tiger Woods rush, en masse, to the links.

If a municipality really wants a golf course, Tom went on, it can acquire one for far less than it costs to build one. “But where are they going to get the money from? You look at every state and municipal budget — they’re broke! And if they’re not broke, they won’t spend on recreation. They’re shutting down recreation.”

The upside, Tom admitted, is that he can now play golf almost any day of the week. Which is easy to do, since Tom’s winter office in Tequesta, Fla., is right across the highway from the Jupiter Hills Club (No. 10), designed by his tour-player uncle, George Fazio.

For more of Tom Fazio on the plight of the golf industry, check out my feature, “Back to the Drawing Board,” in the February 2010 issue of GOLF Magazine. Or simply click here, saving yourself a few bucks and pushing my former employers that much closer to insolvency.

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January 21, 2010 · 6:46 pm

Jack Nicklaus Is 70 at the Turn

I can’t let the day go by without noting that Jack Nicklaus has turned 70 — making it 69 years, exactly, since he hit No. 1 on the Nicklaus Family Top 10. Jack has two mountain courses in my current Top 50 — The TPC at Snoqualmie Ridge, No. 23, and Castle Pines Golf Club, No. 33 — and four flatter and thus easier courses on GOLF Magazine’s Top 100 Courses in the U.S., including PGA Tour venues Muirfield Village (Dublin, Ohio) and Harbour Town Golf Links (Hilton Head, S.C.).

“I’m a very fortunate guy in that golf course design is something that kept me in the game of golf,” Jack told Reuters. “It’s a lasting thing that will remain long after my golf game and lifetime.”

Asked last fall to name his favorite course by a dead architect, Jack went for a Donald Ross masterpiece in the sand hills of North Carolina. “From a design perspective, it’s Pinehurst No. 2. It’s a totally tree-lined course where a tree doesn’t come into play and water hazards are non-existent.” Jack could have added that the Carolina Hotel has a terrific breakfast buffet, but for reasons of his own he chose not to.

Intrigued by Jack’s choice, I’m going to put on my Golf Ghost hat to ask the very late Donald Ross to name his favorite course by a living architect. When I get an answer, I’ll let you know. Until then, here’s my interview with Ross’s ghost that ran in the 2006 SI Golf Plus Masters Preview.


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January 17, 2010 · 2:48 pm

New England Courses: Underrated?

A persistent correspondent from the Bay State wants to know why there are no New England courses in my Top 50. My first instinct is to answer in the soothing voice I employ with grandchildren whose grade school teams have lost by more than thirty points (or 8 wickets, if they’re Aussies): “There’s no disgrace in being average, Johnny. George W. Bush was average, and he grew up to be a two-term president of the United States!”

I’ll resist that temptation. The truth is, no fewer than 37 northeastern courses are ranked in my Top 100. It’s just their bad luck that I only publish the Top 50.

For example, three New England courses are currently tied for 53rd place with scores of 8.09. They are: The Country Club (Willie and Alex Campbell, Rees Jones), Brookline, Mass.; The Ledges Golf Club (William Bradley Booth), York, Maine; and the 9-hole Tatnuck Country Club (Donald Ross), Worcester, Mass.

It’s hard to argue against their inclusion. The Country Club is the oldest golf club in the U.S., host to the 1999 Ryder Cup and the site of the 1913 U.S. Open, won by Francis Ouimet.  The Ledges was  GOLF Magazine’s “best new public course in New England” for 1999, and Golf Styles New England calls its 18th hole “the toughest finishing hole in New England.” Tatnuck, according to a reviewer at golflink.com, is “a plush, scenic 9-hole Donald Ross design with tree-lined fairways and nice elevation changes. There are 18 tees … [and] the restaurant is arguably the best in Worcester.”

I’d be surprised, however, if any of these courses move up when the new Top 50 is posted next week.*

*There’s been another delay. The raw data sheets were inadvertently put in the clothes washer, causing them to clump together in a pulpy mass.

I’m basing that on a recent phone conversation with one of my Vermont course raters. “Have you looked out a window lately?” he asked me. “It’s a frickin’ Ice Age out there! All the courses are covered with snow, and I don’t see relief coming until spring, at the earliest.”

He’s an excitable guy, but he knows his golf courses. Sorry, New England! Unless that “global warming” thing pans out, your courses are destined for second-tier status.

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January 13, 2010 · 6:00 pm

Reckless Charge of Bias from Hilton Head Hacker

A comment by David Henson of Hilton Head, S.C., deserves a considered reply. He asks, “Does the site of your most recent (golf) victory, i.e., Palmetto Hall on Hilton Head Island, get a mention??”

Henson is referring to my triumph (with an unnamed partner whose initials are D.H.) in the Contested Handicap Flight of the 2009 Palmetto Hall Plantation Club Member-Guest. And while I appreciate his mention of our five-match blitzkrieg over some of Palmetto Hall’s most-accomplished mid-handicappers, I have to correct the impression he leaves — that my Top 50 course rankings are in some way influenced by subjective criteria. The fact that I was fed and entertained for four days; treated to 60-some-odd holes of free golf; gifted with a dozen logoed golf balls, a designer golf shirt and sundry other golf-related items; and, at tournament’s end, awarded a ceramic champion’s urn of Grecian motif (suitable for displaying one’s ashes after acceptance into the St. Peter’s Golf & Country Club) — none of that can impact the secret Cal Sci algorithm behind the Top 50 rankings.

To refute any claims of bias, I will merely point out that the Robert Cupp course, the more difficult of Palmetto Hall’s two championship layouts, languishes at No. 783 on the most recent JG Top 50. “Too much water, too many trees, and the greens aren’t level,” complains my most experienced course rater. Another evaluator calls the Cupp’s single-cut-of-rough policy “barbaric … The perfectly struck drive, of which I hit many, rolls through the fairway and disappears into 5-inch Bermuda rough. On any other course I would have shot 95 or better, but I stormed off Palmetto Hall without turning in my scorecard.”

Granted, that was 2-½ years ago. When I played Palmetto Hall last September, the rough on both courses was cut at a reasonable height and the surrounding pine forest produced the statistically proper ratio of bounce-backs into the fairway versus balls lost in the woods — i.e., 4 to 1. If it were a restaurant, I would have given the Cupp course 4-½ forks.

Whether design tweaks and storm damage have pushed Palmetto Hall into the Top 50 remains to be seen. Meanwhile, I’ll be checking random variables with the Bomar Brain and re-reading chapters of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach. The tentative release date for my updated Top 50 is January 17.


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January 7, 2010 · 4:58 pm

Kapalua: Don’t Call It a “Sand Trap”

I explained last time that it will take a few days to get the Top 50 operation up and running again.   The ping-pong table in my basement is covered with cartons of office supplies: highlighter pens, fan-fold paper, post-it notes, flashlights and candles, staple guns and legal pads. My granddaughter Megan has installed graphite bearings in the file cabinets, and the furnace man is expected any minute to service the water panels. Unfortunately, a major winter storm has crippled our efforts. With a foot-and-a-half of snow in our driveway and 30-mph winds causing drifts, Team Top 50 can barely summon enough energy to shuffle to the kitchen for a hot chocolate.

It takes little effort, however, to press the buttons on my remote. Two clicks and I’m watching Golf Channel’s first-round coverage of the SBS Championship at the Kapalua Resort on the Hawaiian island of Maui. I have covered this tournament a number of times, and fans of my old Mats Only column may remember the many laudatory paragraphs I’ve bestowed upon the resort’s splendid practice facility and golf academy. The Plantation Course itself, if you’ll check the sidebar, is currently ranked 33rd.*

*Full disclosure: I served as an unpaid consultant to the design team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw during the construction of the Plantation Course, but my contribution was limited to the so-called “Garrity Bunker.” I have played the Plantation Course several times as a guest of management, but only on designated “media days” and only after offering to pay with Sports Illustrated expense-account money.

The sprawling Plantation Course, which tumbles down from the West Maui Mountains to the sea, is more fun than a roller-coaster, but the serious student of golf architecture will focus her attention on the thirteenth hole, a devilish par-4 that runs uphill along the edge of an old lava flow. The thirteenth fairway is where you’ll encounter the infamous “Garrity Bunker,” a sand hazard at cliff’s edge on the left. You haven’t played the Plantation Course until you’ve tried to reach the green from this hell-hole with a 40-mph trade wind in your face and lava grit stinging your ankles.

It is a myth, however, that the bunker got it’s name because my drives always landed in it.*

*You might be thinking of “Ike’s tree” on the 17th hole at Augusta National, so named because some golf-mad president wanted it cut down to afford him a clearer path off the tee.

Here’s the real story. I was playing the nearly completed Plantation Course in February, 1991, with Kapalua’s golf director, Gary Planos. “When we got to the thirteenth, an uphill par-4 of 407 yards” — I’m quoting now from an old Mats Only column —   “Gary didn’t tell me that it was the most difficult hole on the course ….”

… And I hasten to add that the trade winds were not blowing with their customary hurricane force. I drilled my drive up the left side of the fairway, long and straight, and watched the ball disappear over the crest, well to the right of some sinister treetops. “That should be perfect,” Gary said, “unless …”

I found out what he meant by “unless” when we drove up the hill and down to where my ball should have been. There was no ball. I had driven it off a cliff into either the treetops or that thigh-deep grass that Jesper Parnevik was stomping around in all last week. “That’s not right,” Gary said, staring over the edge. “I’ll have to tell Ben about this.” Ben, of course, was Plantation’s co-designer, Ben Crenshaw.

No problem. I dropped a ball, hit it somewhere, and got on with my life.

Almost a decade later, I returned to Kapalua for the 2000 Mercedes Championship to see if Tiger Woods could extend one of his PGA Tour winning streaks to five. (He could.) That’s when tournament media coordinator Linn Nishikawa said, “Oh, you’re the gentleman they built the bunker for!” Intrigued, I found Gary Planos, who cheerfully confirmed that my long drive had literally changed the landscape at Kapalua. “The day we played was a Tuesday,” Gary told me.

“I remember that because I flew the next day to Oahu to talk to Ben, who was playing in the pro-am of the Hawaiian Open at Waialae. I caught up with him on the eighth fairway, and since he was just waiting for the green to clear, I called him over and told him about your drive. He said, ‘You’re kidding me!'”*

*Crenshaw was astonished that the prevailing wind would allow a long hitter to reach the cliff. I’m sure he wasn’t questioning the quality of my game.

“Anyway,” Gary continued, “Ben agreed that we needed to put in a catch bunker, because from the tee you can’t see that your ball disappears. That’s why we now grow three-inch rough there. We’ve even expanded the bunker to ensure that balls that go left don’t all disappear.”

So that’s the story. The rest of the week, Gary kept introducing me as the idiot-savant behind the 13th-hole catch bunker. And ever since, when some reckless pro yanks his drive into my namesake pit, I hit the “mute” button, turn to my wife, and launch a 5-minute soliloquy explaining my role in the pro’s predicament.

There are worse ways to spend a snow day.


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January 4, 2010 · 10:43 pm

Has It Really Been Two Years?

Yes, it has. My last golf course ranking appeared on Golf.com on July 26, 2007. Since then I have taken a golf sabbatical in Ireland, written a book about said sabbatical (Ancestral Links, New American Library), flogged my “best of” collection of golf stories (Tiger 2.0, Sports Illustrated Books), and retired from my full-time job at Sports Illustrated. It is only now, as I settle into life as a well-heeled pensioner, that I have time to resume my role as golf’s most trusted and independent course evaluator.

As before, my Top Fifty will utilize a secret algorithm developed by Cal Sci professor Charles Eppes. I still don’t understand how the algorithm works — it covers five blackboards in Charlie’s garage — but I’m told that NASA engineers are using it to schedule cafeteria hours at their Huntsville, Ala., research facility. I have also made improvements to the basement computer room at Catch Basin, my Kansas City home — including, but not limited to, upgraded software for my laptop and fresh batteries for the Bomar Brain.

I need a few more days to update the list. In the meantime, I have posted the 7-26-09 ranking in the sidebar. Please let me know if any of the listed courses have closed or otherwise lowered their standards.

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