Monthly Archives: October 2011

October 27, 2011 · 3:57 pm

Top 50 Author Debuts at No. 1

A worried reader asks,“Is this a golf course blog? A week or so ago, you popped up on Golf Channel’s Champions Tour Learning Center with some snake-oil swing remedy. This morning I caught you dispensing tips on bunker play on “Teed Off,” Brian Katrek’s PGA Tour Network program. Now I’m in my dentist’s waiting room, and here’s your byline on an SI Golf Plus rant about Tiger Woods’s screwed-up tempo. What gives? Have you forsaken course rating for the Hollywood allure of swing-guru celebrity?”

John Novosel Jr. on "Learning Center"

John Novosel Jr. explained Tour Tempo to a Golf Channel crew at the TPC of San Antonio. (John Garrity)

Fear not, Worried Reader. I just spent a working weekend in the Atlantic time zone, checking up on our two Canadian courses (24th-ranked Cabot Links and No. 31 Highlands Links) and I’m already packing for a trip to Oregon’s Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, where I’ll tee it up and trade rants with Tom Doak, designer of Pacific Dunes, No. 26. And just to forestall confusion, the Top 50 is not “a golf course blog.” It is the golf course blog.

However, like the late Steve Jobs, I take pride in revolutionizing whole industries. To that end, I co-authored the best-selling golf instructional, Tour Tempo: Golf’s Last Secret Finally Revealed, now in its 11th printing by Doubleday. And now John Novosel and I are out with an e-book sequel, Tour Tempo 2: The Short Game & Beyond, available on the Amazon Kindle* and Apple iBooks** platforms.

*Tour Tempo 2 debuted at No. 1 on Amazon’s golf books list. No surprise, that, since the original Tour Tempo was Amazon’s best-selling sports book of 2004, beating out Leigh Montville’s compelling Ted Williams biography.

**The Apple edition [which also debuted at No. 1 among golf books in the iTunes Store] is “enhanced” with color photography, instructional video clips and the  Tour Tempo short-game training tones. Buyers of the Kindle version can acquire these TT2 extras via a free download from the Web.

Naturally, promoting the new book has kept me from blogging as often as I’d like. But that hasn’t kept our highly-paid Top 50 evaluators from their appointed rounds. Within the past hour, for example, the A.W. Tillinghast-designed Wissahickon course at the Philadelphia Cricket Club jumped from No. 62 to No. 53 upon news of a breakthrough in the European sovereign-debt crisis. At the same time, a perennial Top-50 favorite, Colonial Country Club of Fort Worth, Texas, plummeted from No. 24 to No. 238.*

*Colonial’s fall, a by-product of program trading, was interrupted by a computerized “circuit breaker.” Our IT staff is looking into it.

Tour Tempo 2 Cover Art

TT2 is $9.99 on the iPad and Kindle reader.

How good is Tour Tempo 2?  Sports Illustrated senior writer Michael Bamberger, co-author of the best-selling golf novel, The Swinger, rates it ahead of the collected output of every last golf guru of the past half-century. “Since Eisenhower took to the links,” Bamberger writes in his latest blurb, “there have been two important golf instruction books: Five Fundamentals, by Ben Hogan and Herbert Warren Wind, and Tour Tempo, with John Novosel playing the Hogan role and John Garrity as Herb. TT2 is clearer yet. It’s like a wonder drug.”

Coming from Bamberger, a master of understatement, this is high praise. But let’s talk value. For a mere $9.99, you get the aforementioned color photography, the short-game tones, and the instruction videos. And if you order in the next hour, you’ll receive at no extra cost a bonus chapter, “The Force,” from an upcoming e-book by long-drive specialist John Novosel, Jr. Act this very instant and we’ll throw in “The Force” video clip, which will take strokes off your game faster than you can say “Popeil’s Pocket Fisherman!”

As for Worried Reader … stop moping and play some golf before winter sets in. I recommend any of the courses on the adjacent list.

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but Rory McIlroy leads after one round of the Shanghai Masters, which is being played on the Lake Malaren Masters course, a Jack Nicklaus design. Robert Allenby, meanwhile, is the first-round leader at the Asia Pacific Classic, held at The Mines Resort & Golf Club in Selangor Malaysia, a Robert Trent Jones Jr. track. Both courses are “Unrated” pending a review of the Colonial situation.

Leave a comment

Filed under golf

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

October 9, 2011 · 12:49 pm

Carne Chowder: Is It the Best?

No matter how carefully we police the collection of Top 50 data, shills for certain courses keep trying to influence the ratings. There’s “JH”, a Massachusetts businessman, who complains that The Country Club at Brookline deserves a ranking higher than No. 51. There’s a Philadelphia sportswriter — I’ll call him “Kernsie” — who pleads the case for 418th-ranked Stone Harbor Golf Club of Cape May Court House, N.J.  And if you’ll indulge my eye-rolling, there’s a reality-show “developer/statesman” who insists that his golf courses, all of them, are better than Pine Valley, Augusta National or Royal Portrush.

Hackett Lounge

Carneivores share recipes in the Eddie Hackett Lounge. (John Garrity)

And now a once-respected Texas journalist has turned to the dark side, wielding recipes in a sad effort to dislodge Askernish Old from the top spot. His name is Bruce Selcraig*, and his byline appears in all the top magazines. But he moonlights as a golf-course critic. If you’ve got a coastal property bigger than a fairground with dunes on it, Bruce has probably photographed it. If it isn’t fenced, he’s probably played it.

*Full disclosure: He’s a friend.

Anyway, Bruce is an admirer of the Carne Golf Links of Belmullet, Ireland. (As  are we. Carne has held the number-two spot since the Top 50’s inception.) He plays there so often that he’s on a first-name basis with the clubhouse and greenkeeping staff and with many members of the Belmullet Golf Club. It is Bruce’s practice, after a round at Carne, to send us an unsolicited report on the course’s myriad charms, leaning heavily on exclamation points and adjectives such as “dazzling,” “tear-inducing,” and “unparalleled.”

On Tuesday, however, he sent this: “I got rained and winded out of Carne this time, but had a hot chowder with Eamon [Mangan]. I have written him just now, but do you happen to know the recipe or main ingredient of [Carne’s] chowder, which I like far more than the milky white stuff at many courses.” Stymied by his syntax, he added: “???”

Recognizing this as a variant of the “milkshake ploy” — as in, “Castle Pines is the best course west of the Mississippi because of their amazing milkshakes” — I wrote Bruce back, explaining that my usual lunch at Carne was the tasty vegetable soup and brown bread.

He exploded. “You have NOT had the chowder? You elongated girly man from dubious BBQ territory!” Still working the food theme, Bruce provided a link to his freshly-written PostGame blog about the 8th-ranked European Club  in County Wicklow, which led off with the news flash that he had liked the salmon-and-prawn salad at Jack White’s Lounge & Restaurant.

Today, he raised the ante, writing, “This just in from Eamon … good luck,” followed by a document titled Blacksod Bay Seafood Chowder Recipe. The recipe began, “Make fish stock from shellfish shells & white fish bones, e.g. monkfish, cod, etc. Don’t use oily fish. Sweat off 1 diced onion, one head celery, 3 leeks chopped, 2 diced carrots …. And that’s as much as I’ll share, because the recipe was signed by Carne’s head chef (and 2005 Irish Chef of the Year) John Conmy, and I’d rather not have to defend a recipe-infringement suit.

Selcraig knows that. He sent the recipe because he thinks it will tip the clubhouse-food metric in Carne’s favor and put the Mayo links ahead of Scotland’s Askernish. To which I publicly say: “No way.” The Top 50 algorithm treats unsolicited course evaluations as corrupted data —at least until the best minds at Cal Sci figure out how to digitize monkfish-bone scores.

So Carne, even if it rules the chowder rankings, is still the runner-up among courses.

As for that BBQ crack, Bruce knows that Kansas City holds six of the top ten spots in the latest World Barbecue Ranking, while Texas’ top joint limps in at No. 14. And that’s a fact.

CordeValle

CordeValle: Wining, yes. Whining, no. (John Garrity)

Top 50 on TV: They’ve had record crowds this week at the Frys.com Open, thanks to the Top 50. The host venue, the CordeValle Resort Golf Club, debuted at No. 50 in June of 2010, and has since soared to the 49th spot. Lured by our reports of oak-studded foothills, sprawling vineyards and soaring sycamores, Tiger Woods made a rare fall appearance. Was he impressed? Can’t say, but he decided to stay for the weekend.

1 Comment

Filed under golf

Tagged as , , , ,