January 23, 2011 · 10:27 am

Askernish: Who Needs Winter Rules?

The key to a January golf trip in Scotland is flexibility. My original itinerary had me right off the plane at Glasgow and down the road to ancient Prestwick for a quick 18, followed on successive days by rounds at Askernish, Castle Stuart, Royal Dornoch, Nairn, Carnoustie, the Old Course at St. Andrews, Kingsbarns, Kinghorn, Crail, Musselburgh Links and Muirfield (same day), Turnberry, Western Gailes and Girvan — with 9 squeezed in at Maybole, if time allowed, on the way back to Glasgow. However, heavy snows across the country convinced me that I should alter my plans and spend the entire two weeks playing top-ranked Askernish Old.

Golfer on Askernish Old course

Postman Paddy Forbes leans into the wind at Askernish Old. (John Garrity)

“Is Askernish even playable?” an American friend asked in an e-mail. “I’ve heard that the Western Isles are brutalized by Atlantic gales this time of year. Plus, you’ve got what, four hours of daylight? And don’t they have cattle and sheep on the fairways?”

Re-reading his words after a fortnight of challenging but delectable golf, I have to laugh. First of all, I don’t think the wind ever got above 60 or 65 miles per hour while I played, and those were gusts, not sustained winds. Twenty or 25 mph was more the norm, and with the average midday temperature topping 40-degrees fahrenheit, four layers of clothing provided a nice balance between comfort and mobility. Squalls sweep in from the Atlantic with some frequency, but the local golfers have taught me how to squat with my back to the gale until the horizontal rain exhausts itself. That generally takes a few minutes, and it is common to see the sun pop out while you are collecting tee markers that have been uprooted and sent tumbling down a dune.

Askernish Old

Askernish Old is a dog-friendly course. (John Garrity)

Neither is the Hebridean day as short as my friend suggests. The sun appears over the hills a little after 9 a.m. and takes a languorous turn across the southern sky, never rising more than thirty-degrees above the horizon, before plunging into the Atlantic a little before four p.m. A four-ball venturing out at noon finishes at twilight, making for an enjoyable 500-yard stroll in the moonlight to the two-room clubhouse.

Askernish does accommodate more livestock than you’ll find on a typical American course, but I’ve never heard a visiting golfer complain because he was able to find his ball in the well-grazed rough. The greens are protected with single-strand fences that give the cattle a tiny shock when the batteries are connected. “They’re not hooked up at the moment, but it doesn’t matter,” one of Askernish’s 18 resident members told me last week. “The cows think they are!”

Fivesome at Askernish

Five members of the regular Friday nine-ball at Askernish. (John Garrity)

Another friend asked me if winter rules were in effect. No, they are not. The fairways at Askernish, an authentic links course, are as sound in January as they are in July, so there is no need to improve one’s lie. The roughs are easier to play from, thinned out as they are by dormancy and grazing. The one local rule of any consequence, involving naturally-applied fertilizers, had an R&A committeeman scouring his decisions book last week, looking for references to “manure” or “cow poop.”

“The rule at Askernish is simple,” club captain Donald MacInnes told him with a smile. “Pick up your ball, lick it, and drop it.”

Golfers at Twilight

Club captain Donald MacInnes drives the 18th by moonlight. (John Garrity)

Tee times are not a problem this time of year. On a given winter’s day, you might see a lone golfer striding up the par-5 sixth, parallel to the beach, with a wool cap pulled over his ears and no shadow in tow. On a god-given winter’s day, such as Friday afternoon was, you’ll encounter a four-ball sunning in the bowl of the multi-tiered 16th green (“Old Tom’s Pulpit”) while a sixsome, accompanied by frolicking dogs and darting lapwings, takes turns firing at the flag from cliff’s edge on the dogleg ninth (“Brochan”).

Askernish is not for everyone, I suppose. Maybe just for golfers.

Anyway, I’m heading home. If you’d like some help planning your own low-season Scottish golf tour, send me your e-mails. I’ll forward them to the proper tourist agencies. And if you don’t get an immediate response, be understanding. Their staff is probably wintering on the Costa del Sol.

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January 13, 2011 · 11:52 am

Courses I Need to Play, Part One

Inspired by “Travelin’ Joe” Passov, I’ve been trying to come up with my own wish list of “Courses I Need to Play.” The fact that I’m having trouble finding ten testifies to how lucky I’ve been over the years. I’ve played Mollymook. I’ve played Formby Ladies. I teed it up in the inaugural event at Medicine Hole. If my current bout with tendonitis were to end my golfing days, I’d have no cause for complaint.

But Joe is right, there are courses — Cypress Point and Pine Valley come to mind — so enticing that you would pay to play them. One of those courses, for me, is the Indian Army 9-Hole Golf Course outside Leh, Ladakh, on the Tibetan plateau. I stumbled upon Indian Army 25 years ago while covering a polo match in Leh. The course was a bit outside town on a dusty road that crossed a moonscape of boulders and rubble punctuated with Buddhist burial markers. A barbed wire fence and gun placements emphasized that it was a private course, but I couldn’t help but stare longingly at the crooked bamboo flagsticks impaled on gravel greens next to coffee-can holes. Not a blade of grass on the property, but, as Gary Player often said, “It’s the finest course of its kind I’ve ever seen.”

Ft. Meade Golf Clubhouse

Golf at Fort Meade: an unrealized dream? (John Garrity)

Even higher on my list, maybe at No. 1, is the Fort Meade City Mobile Home Park Golf Course in Fort Meade, Fla. Fort Meade has finished dead last among the world’s courses in every Top 50 survey, a record not likely to be broken. On the other hand, it is the best 9-hole, par-3, clay-greens course in the South. I’ve walked Ft. Meade on a couple of occasions, taking in the surrounding banyan trees and fire-ant sand hills, but I’ve never gotten the opportunity to play. Just once I’d like to stride up that final fairway with a club in my hand, crossing in front of the tee boxes for the previous eight holes, and stepping onto the profoundly round and flat ninth green, at the foot of the municipal water treatment plant.

Another not-to-miss track that I have toured without playing is the new Machrihanish Dunes course in Machrihanish, Scotland. While not exactly the black sheep of the Kintyre Peninsula, the Dunes course does have black sheep on the property, their job being to keep the marram grass on the dunes to a playable length. At 79 pounds per round in peak season, Machrihanish Dunes is the priciest layout on my must-play list, but I’ll claw back some of that by neglecting to leave any money in the honesty boxes of my other choices.

I’m also pining for the Papa Westray Golf Course in the Orkney Isles of Scotland. Although panned by one critic as “worse than Ronaldsay,” Papa Westray provides tourists with the opportunity to experience the world’s shortest scheduled flight, a less than two minute hop from Kirkwall. But first I have to experience the Lost City Golf Course of Sun City, South Africa — if only to play the famous 13th hole, which is fronted by a stone pit full of hissing crocodiles.

But that’s only five courses, isn’t it? (Seven, if I poach Cape Kidnappers and Hirono from Joe’s list.)

Well, I’ve got time to work on my list after dark — of which I’ve seen plenty this week, my four golf clubs having found their way to top-ranked Askernish Old in the Outer Hebrides. I’ll post my reflections on the world’s best golf course in a day or two, weather permitting.

Top 50 on TV: I’m on an island in the North Atlantic. Ask a friend or check your local listings.

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January 10, 2011 · 1:09 am

Scottish Golf Trip off to Frigid Start

It snows in Scotland? Nobody told me! Flying into Glasgow yesterday, I looked down on a rumpled, white blanket that could have been the Rockies. And when I collected my suitcase and four-club quiver at baggage claim, I noticed that there were no hulking golf-travel bags on the carrousel. Not many bags at all, for that matter. (Or travelers!) One young couple had skis. They were either just back from Switzerland or arriving from the Canary Islands and headed for the ski lifts at Carnoustie.

“Call Prestwick,” I told Gustov, my traveling secretary. “Cancel today’s round.”

I guess I should have talked to my old friend, Joe Passov, before signing up for my “Highlands and Islands Low-Season Golf Package.”  “Travelin’ Joe,” as he is known to the readers of GOLF Magazine and Golf.com, is the world’s foremost authority on golf travel, having played, by his own count, 1,423 courses — only half of which are within twenty miles of his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. A true globetrotter, Joe knows Scotland and Ireland like the back of his hand. He would have warned me about the ice and slush surrounding the Glasgow Marriott.

Speaking of Joe, he penned a Golf.com column last week called “Travelin’ Joe’s Wish List: 10 Courses I Need to Play.” Number 1 on his list was Pete Dye’s “Teeth of the Dog” course at Casa de Campo — which I have not played, either — and Number 10 was Friar’s Head, a Crenshaw-Coore design in Baiting Hollow, N.Y., which I only mention because I love the sound of “Baiting Hollow.”

The surprising thing about Joe’s list? It includes two courses that I have played: Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach, Fla., currently No. 14 in the Top 50, and Prairie Dunes Golf Club in Hutchinson, Ks., No. 6. Here’s Joe on Seminole:

Perhaps the finest routing Donald Ross ever did, this ultra-exclusive Palm Beach-area enclave also features one of the greatest clubhouses in golf. Hogan used to practice here every day for a month leading up to the Masters. I’d just like to do it once.

Ha, ha, Joe! I have done it … once!

Here’s his take on Prairie Dunes:

All that’s missing is an ocean at this linksy-looking layout in landlocked Kansas, which played host to the 2002 U.S. Women’s Open (Juli Inkster) and the 2006 U.S. Senior Open (Allen Doyle). I question if the wind and rough make it unplayable for 10-handicaps.

Having covered both those tournaments for Sports Illustrated (and currently playing to a 10 handicap), I can assure Joe that my favorite mid-continental course is more than kind to second-tier golfers, thanks to fast, flawless greens that practically funnel the ball into the hole. But he’s right about the absent ocean. And it’ll take another thousand years of climate change to fix that.

Anyway, since I can’t play golf this afternoon, I think I’ll sit down with a notepad and a bottle of Diet Irn-Bru and try to compile my own Top-10 list of courses that have eluded my grasp. I’ll post that list from the next stop on my winter golf itinerary: top-ranked Askernish.

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but Jonathan Byrd bagged his second consecutive PGA Tour win at last week’s Hyundai Tournament of Champions, held on Maui’s Plantation Course at Kapalua, No. 34. The AP report of his win makes no mention of snow.

 

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December 26, 2010 · 9:11 pm

Scottish Golf: ‘Tis the Season?

Having opened all my presents and sung all my carols, I’m packing for my next golf trip: a January excursion to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. It will be a solo trip, I’m sorry to say, because both staff and family have been frightened off by press reports of blustery weather in Europe. One correspondent went so far as to send me a photograph of second-ranked Carne Golf Links blanketed with snow.

“Carne,” I reminded my dubious wife, “is in Ireland.”

On the bright side, she’s helping me pack.

Carne Golf Links in Snow
Second-ranked Carne is a winter bargain. (Ask for the holiday discount.)

Winter, I have argued to no avail, is the perfect time for a Scottish golf trip. Low-season hotel rates apply, green fees have been slashed, and you can practically name your tee time. (“Dawn” is a good choice, since the Scots can only squeeze about four hours of daylight into a January day.) These are not second-rate layouts, either. My Highlands-and-Islands itinerary includes Askernish (1), Castle Stuart (9), Royal Dornoch (43) and Nairn (51).

“You might want to e-mail them to see if they’re open,” said Dave Henson, the Hilton Head-based bureaucrat who runs my course-rating division.

“A waste of bandwidth,” I said dismissively. Dave has apparently forgotten our rainswept round at Nairn last July, which preceded our romp around Castle Stuart in 65-mph winds, which led to our being stranded on the island of Skye because an Atlantic gale had shut down ferry service to the Western Isles, where we were subsequently assaulted by sleet and drive-by bagpipers. “The Scots,” I reminded him, “don’t stop playing golf whenever the Heathrow baggage handlers put on mittens.”

Besides, the computer room at our Catch Basin headquarters is closed until the Basement Magic folks finish their work on the southern wall. The Bomar Brain is covered with a big blue tarp, the ping pong table is pushed against the vault door, and the Top 50 leader board is frosted with a layer of white sanding dust.

“Rankings cant change twixt now & e of year,” a Cal Tech liaison just informed me in a text from sunny California. “Go off & play!”

So I’m off to Scotland. But don’t worry, I’ll continue to file Top 50 posts on a close-to-weekly basis.

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but Golf Channel is showing endless re-runs of “Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf,” including a hard-to-forget (no matter how hard you try) match between Jack Nicklaus and a wheels-coming-off Johnny Miller at San Francisco’s Olympic Club (52). Other Shell episodes seem to have been staged on courses built just for the show in exotic corners of Asia and Africa. When the Top 50 is up to speed again, I’ll ask my technicians to prepare a list of “Top 10 Most Eloquent Jack Whitaker Descriptions of Sparsely-Grassed Resort Courses.”

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December 11, 2010 · 11:03 pm

Scottsdale Courses Impress Press Horde at Xona Media Golf Classic

“Your list is crazy,” a shuttle bus driver told me the other day. “Where are the desert courses? Why no love for the sun-kissed layouts where emerald-green turf meets burnished waste, where white-sand bunkers tease your redlands buttes, where … excuse me, Terminal Four! …  Southwest, Delta, Frontier … Please check for personal belongings ….”

The shuttle driver, like most critics of the Top 50, was strong on imagery but weak on evidence. Several of my highest-rated courses are on desert or desert-like sites, including Jim Engh’s Redlands Mesa, No. 27 and Medicine Hole, No. 38,  Desmond Muirhead’s Mission Hills, No. 44, and Schmidt-Curley’s Southern Dunes, No. 50.* If you broaden the definition of “desert” to include other mauvaises terres, you could throw in arid and mountainous Castle Pines, No. 37, and the two prairie courses, Prairie Dunes, No. 6 and Sand Hills, No. 19, where bobcats and bison run wild.

*Several other Top 50 courses are situated in cultural wastelands, but I’m not counting those.

Superstition Mountain Country Club

Superstition Mountain's range gets an A-plus from media golfers. (John Garrity)

Furthermore, my “Seasonally-Adjusted Top 50,” which is available only to pay-service subscribers, is riddled with desert courses. That’s because today, on the 11th of December, Scott Miller’s Cholla Course at We-Ko-Pa Golf Club in Scottsdale, Az., is way, way better than Minnesota’s Interlachen Country Club, which is riding out a blizzard expected to leave a foot of snow on the ground. Similarly, the Prospector Course at Superstition Mountain Golf & Country Club, which has hosted Champions Tour and LPGA events in the past decade, is a far better course at this minute than Donald Ross’s highly-esteemed East Course at Oak Hill Country Club.

I know this to be true because I have just returned from four days of cutthroat competition at the Xona Golf Media Classic in Scottsdale, Ariz. Staged annually by a consortium of desert CVBs, golf clubs and local entrepreneurs, the Media Classic attracts more than a hundred of the game’s top writers and broadcasters to a four-day melee with local club pros, club managers and professional magicians.

Chuck Garbedian

A tip of the Bushwood hat from celeb golfer Chuck Garbedian. (John Garrity)

The intent of the organizers was clear: to promote Scottsdale as “The World’s Premier Golf Destination.” The intent of the invitees was just as clear: to play desert golf by day and to party by night at the Xona Resort Suites, a four-pool facility adjacent to the luxurious Fairmont Scottsdale Princess Resort. While not a celebrity tournament, per se, the Media Classic afforded lucky passersby glimpses of Golf Channel’s Brandel Chamblee, GOLF Magazine’s “Travelin’ Joe” Passov, Sports Illustrated’s Gary Van Sickle (with his touring-pro son, Mike Van Sickle) and legendary Milwaukee broadcaster and college golf coach, Chuck Garbedian.

I’ll relate some anecdotes from this year’s Media Classic in a future post, but first I need to share this offer from the Scottsdale Convention & Visitors Bureau. Clicking on the link will take you to a web page offering three free golf trips for two. The free packages include a three-night stay at the Xona Resort Suites, three rounds of golf at one of Scottsdale’s award-winning courses, two 60-minute spa treatments at the Spa at Four Seasons Resort at Troon North, dinner for two at The Capital Grille, and your choice of one of 7 other tourist attractions, such as the Phoenix Zoo, the Out of Africa Wildlife Park or a hot air balloon ride. For additional details, visit www.scottsdalegolfgetaways.com.

I’d say more, but my laptop is running low on bold-face type.

Stephanie Wie at Kapalua

Bunkered! Stephanie Wie in Kapalua's "Garrity Bunker."

 

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but I recently received this photograph of golf blogger extraordinaire Stephanie Wie in the notorious “Garrity Bunker” on the tk-ranked Plantation Course at the Kapalua Resort, Maui. (Stephanie is the small, white object stranded in the sand.) The photo was taken during the blogger’s recent round with longtime Kapalua golf titan Gary Planos.

The Garrity Bunker, as most readers of the Top 50 know, was added to the Crenshaw-Coore Plantation Course in its rookie year after I struck a formidable tee shot up the left side of the thirteenth fairway during a round with Planos. “Wonderful drive!” Gary burbled at the time, only to eat his words when we discovered that my ball had bounded through the fairway and off a cliff. Thoroughly embarrassed, Gary whipped out his cell phone and called Ben Crenshaw, telling the two-time Masters champ, “You need to take a second look at the thirteenth hole. A big hitter just drove one straight up the fairway and over the edge.”

Stephanie Wie in bunker at Kapalua

Yes, it's Wei. (Note treetops behind Garrity bunker.)

The rest, as they say, is history. Crenshaw installed a big bunker to contain bombers like Tiger Woods, Dustin Johnson and Bubba Watson … a bunker named for yours truly. “We’re going to install a plaque there someday,” Gary tells me every time I return to Kapalua to cover the Hyundai (formerly Mercedes) Tournament of Champions. He adds, “We’re still working on the wording.”

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December 2, 2010 · 10:13 am

Room for Golf Writer in Top 50?

“Has Gary Van Sickle put on a little height?” asks a reader from Normal, Ill., followed quickly by an South African correspondent who suggests that Gary’s diet might contain “a little too much iron.” I didn’t know what to make of these comments until I scrolled down the Top 50 home page and noticed a change to the permanent sidebar photograph of my longtime Sports Illustrated colleague. The photograph still has him gnawing on his putter after a round on the Ailsa Course at Turnberry (No. 4), but Gary appears to be noticeably taller and thinner than before.

Concerned about his health, I called Gary at home and found him to be in good spirits and fighting trim. “I think the photograph has been doctored,” he said, “and by ‘doctored’ I mean digitally manipulated, not ‘subjected to medical treatment by a certified physician.’”

Gary Van Sickle

The original photo. (John Garrity)

No one here at Catch Basin would doctor a photograph, but our security chief — whose name I cannot divulge for security reasons — has traced the corrupted image to WordPress, the outfit that hosts this blog. For legal and proprietary reasons, WordPress has chosen to retire the old Top 50 design and replace it with one that is “similar.” The transition has been relatively smooth, but our photographic link to the Top 50 algorithm has been stretched like taffy, elongating Van Sickle’s image in the process.

Gary isn’t complaining — “Now I can dunk!” — but I have to make some hard decisions. I can ask our IT wizards to purge the distorted photograph and try to replace it with the original, but that could take weeks. Or I can leave the photo as it is, perhaps adding a caption encouraging readers to “imagine Gary 20 inches shorter and 30 pounds heavier.”

I’m willing to consider reader input on this question, but I need your opinions by next Thursday, when I plan to release my annual “Top 50 Resort, Military and Correctional Institution Courses.”

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but I’m paying my second visit of the year to the Grand Cypress Golf Club in Orlando, Fla., site of this week’s LPGA Tour Championship. This event is notable for its “two-cut” format, a laudable process that sends half the field packing after 36 holes and banishes another half after 54, leaving only 30 players to dig up the fairways and trample the greens. It’s a winning strategy for these economically-depressed times.

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November 18, 2010 · 5:27 pm

Golfweek Rankings: Worth a Look?

The basement computer room at our Kansas City headquarters is listed as “unlikely” for the rest of November, due to the removal of the south wall by hydraulic engineers. Consequently, I am devoting most of my energies to paperwork, jigsaw puzzles and Rumpole of the Bailey DVDs.

18th Green at Pebble Beach

Pebble Beach: An obvious choice? (John Garrity)

I did take a few minutes this afternoon to review Golfweek’s “Definitive Guide to the Golf Life,” which dropped through the mail slot and landed on the floor with a resounding thud. Also landing with thuds, I’m sorry to say, are the magazine’s top-100 lists of resort and residential golf courses.

Hey, the Florida-based weekly made a valiant effort. The course photographs are attractive, the spine is well-glued, and it’s evident that the editors sent grownups to rate the various resorts and developments. Nevertheless, Golfweek’s procedures are ridiculously subjective, leaving their rankings open to second-guessing.* Their residential list, for example, cites only two courses from my Top 50, Castle Pines and Redlands Mesa, and totally ignores two perennial Top-50 standouts, Hallbrook C.C. and Medicine Hole G.C.. (It is possible, I admit, that Golfweek did not treat the Badlands course as “residential,” due to the lack of housing on its perimeter.) Even more damning: The magazine lists only 11 courses that I have personally played.

*No ranking can call itself “scientific” if it’s operating without a Bomar Brain.

That said, I won’t quibble with Golfweek’s top three — Mountaintop Golf & Lake Club (Tom Fazio, Cashiers, N.C.), Rock Creek Cattle Company (Tom Doak, Deer Lodge, Mont.), and Wade Hampton Club (Tom Fazio, Cashiers, N.C.) — except to say that cattle companies aren’t “golf courses,” per se. I played both Fazio courses with the architect last fall, along with his Bright’s Creek course in Mill Spring, N.C., No. 36 on the Golfweek list. All three of those courses were good enough to hold down the No. 50 spot on my list last year, if only for a week or so, as is another Fazio housesitter, Briggs Ranch of San Antonio, Texas (No. 28 on the Golfweek list).

Bathroom at CordeValle

CordeValle's plumbing is second to none. (John Garrity)

Golfweek’s resort course ranking is easier to defend, since nine of its courses also appear in my Top 50. That includes three of the magazine’s top-four resorts: Pacific Dunes, Pebble Beach, and Whistling Straits.* I can also endorse the high rankings for Pine Needles Country Club (Donald Ross, Southern Pines, N.C.), Caledonia Golf & Fish Club (Michael Strantz, Pawley’s Island, S.C., and CordeValle Resort (Robert Trent Jones, Jr., San Martin, Calif.), three of my personal favorites.

*I expect Golfweek’s second-ranked course, Old MacDonald (Tom Doak & Jim Urbina, Bandon, Ore.), to crack my Top 20 once we scrape the plaster dust and mould off the mainframe.

Coincidentally, I was about to release my own list of best resort courses when water started spilling out from under our basement baseboards. Needless to say, that list is on hold — although I guess you could describe my call to the foundation company as “a last resort.” Here’s a preview:

50. Dry Basement Company, Kansas City, Mo. (Otto Fleck) 8.17

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November 7, 2010 · 1:46 am

Carne: Ready for the Foam Finger?

My man, Horton, woke me this morning with a whispered “Sir? Sir?” and a gentle shake of my shoulder. Instantly, my eyes sprung open. My head rose from the pillow. The room was dark. The digital clock on the elephant table read 2:07 a.m., but I couldn’t remember if I had set the clock back before retiring.

Still whispering, Horton said, “Your instructions were to waken you –”

“I know what my instructions were,” I said sharply. “What do you have?”

“It’s Carne.” The two words fell from his tongue like leaves from a sugar maple. “I’ve sent for Dr. Eppes.”

That, faithful readers, is how I got the news that the Carne Golf Links of Belmullet, Ireland, had ascended to No. 2 in my Top 50 ranking. I was thrilled to get the news, Carne being perhaps my favorite course in the world.* But I was also annoyed, Horton’s reference to Charlie Eppes reminding me that the creator of our Top 50 algorithm and his bookworm bride have been incommunicado for months, having disappeared into central Europe at the end of his term as a visiting lecturer at Oxford.

*Full disclosure: I am an honorary lifetime member of the Belmullet Golf Club, which gives me playing privileges at Carne. I am also the author of a book — about Carne and other matters — titled Ancestral Links: A Golf Obsession Spanning Generations, available in trade paperback from New American Library.

It got worse after sunrise, when the technician who operates the Bomar Brain in our basement computer room informed me that Carne has actually been the world’s second-best golf course for some three weeks. “Carne passed Augusta National the day you were out buying Halloween candy,” he murmured, staring at his feet. “You, uh …. I mean, I guess nobody noticed. But we posted it right away.”

Exasperated, I went upstairs, opened the hall closet, and screamed. (The winter coats muffle my oaths.)  When I was calm again, I summoned Horton and reluctantly fired him. “Thank you,” I said, “for your 28 years of faithful service.”

“It was an honor, sir.” He gave me one last gracious bow from the waist and departed by the front door, taking a handful of bite-size Butterfingers with him.

Coincidentally, I recently received a digital press release from Sorcha Murray, Carne’s commercial manager. Headlined “Now Golfers Can See What They Are Missing!”, it announces that Carne’s original 18 can now be viewed via “3D Flyover,” a bird’s-eye-view computer simulator similar to those employed on golf telecasts. “The famous Carne Golf Links course on the Belmullet peninsula can now be explored from the sky,” the release continues. “The fascinating character of each hole can be seen winding through the dunes on one of Ireland’s top courses designed by Eddie Hackett, one of his last courses and probably his best.”

Having examined the Flyover on the Carne home page, I have to give it a mixed review. The rugged terrain and spectacular scenery are reduced to computerscapes, the kind of low-resolution imagery you get with home-landscaping software. The dunes, clouds and beaches are generic. The great sandy blowout to the right of the seventeenth fairway is rendered as a grassy ravine such as you’d find on a West Texas course. The inconsequential pot-pond near the third green is depicted in Caribbean blue, as if it were an actual water hazard.

On the other hand, I have always wondered what Carne would look like from the sky, having seen ravens pluck golf balls off its greens and flap off toward the sea. Watching the Flyover again with my bird brain, it looks awesome.

Anyway, congratulations to all my friends at Carne. And if you should someday notice that you’ve vaulted over Askernish Old and taken the top spot, please send me a heads-up. I don’t like being left in the dark.

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October 26, 2010 · 7:27 pm

Whose Mystique Was Greater: Hogan’s or Merion’s?

Miracle at Merion Cover Art

Barrett's new book gets to the roots of Merion bluegrass. (John Garrity)

“Are your rankings influenced by reputation?” asks a reader from Berkeley, Calif. “Do courses get points because they’ve been written about in magazines or photographed for book jackets?”

The answer, as usual, is yes and no. The Cal Sci algorithm is rigorously scientific, so it can’t be “influenced” — if by influence you mean subtle bias in favor of a region, a certain architect or an old college friend who has snapshots of you in a compromising position with donuts. On the other hand, the algorithm recognizes “media exposure over time” as a critical variable in measuring course quality. The par-3 sixteenth hole at Cypress Point has appeared on hundreds of book and magazine covers, while the par-3 ninth at Ft. Meade (Fla.) City Mobile Home Park Golf Course has appeared on none. Maybe that reflects an unavoidable social-class bias, but I still infer from the lopsided coverage that the California course is by far the better track. That’s one reason, but not the only reason, why exclusive Cypress Point is currently our 13th-ranked course.

Similarly, our placement of the equally-private Merion East at No. 36 is supported by David Barrett’s new book, Miracle at Merion: The Inspiring Story of Ben Hogan’s Amazing Comeback and Victory at the 1950 U.S. Open. Most of Barrett’s compelling prose is dedicated to Hogan and his dogged opponents, but the book is nevertheless a must for golf-design nuts or, for that matter, anyone who owns both a wing chair and a persimmon driver.

“Merion has to be in my top three in the world, although I’m not sure I’m good at articulating why” David told me over the phone last week. “I’ve played it only once, and that was in 1981. But Merion West was our home course when I played for Haverford College, so every day during golf season we drove right past the East to get to the West. It was kind of frustrating, to be honest, although the West is a wonderful course in its own right.”

David praised the East course for its “great charm” and heaped the usual encomia on the since-modified Hugh Wilson design, calling the layout “challenging,” “varied,” and “fun. And then you’ve got the quarry holes. Those three great and tough finishing holes really elevate the course.”*

*Merion’s altitude, according to The Rolex World’s Top 1000 Golf Courses, is a mere 351 feet. But David may have been speaking figuratively.

“Among the great courses of the world,” he added, “the East is unusual in that there is a road, Ardmore Avenue, that goes right through it. You may not be able to play Merion, but anybody can drive through it and take a look.”

Ben Hogan, who in the summer of ’50 was still recovering from his near-fatal crash into a Greyhound bus, would have been happy to view the East Course from the road, like a tourist. “The trouble with Merion is that it always has you on the defensive,” he told reporters at his hotel on the morning of the U.S. Open playoff.* “There’s no way you can take the offensive against it.”

*Hogan’s Sunday playoff with George Fazio and Lloyd Mangrum didn’t start until 2 p.m. because of Pennsylvania’s blue laws.

“After the playoff,” David told me, “Hogan said that he only went at the flag one time in 90 holes — and he hit that one into a bunker. As with many Hogan quotes, you have to take that with a grain of salt — he did have some short birdie putts along the way — but the U.S. Open set-up definitely had everybody playing defensively. Seven-over 287 made the playoff.”

Miracle at Merion, from Skyhorse Publishing, is $24.95 at bookstores. Ticket prices for the 2013 U.S. Open at Merion East have not been announced by the USGA, there being no way to predict if there will be another miracle.

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but a tip of the ball cap to Jonathan Byrd for his winning ace on the fourth extra hole of the Justin Timberlake Shriners Hospitals for Children Open in Las Vegas, Nev. (It was right across town, come to think of it, that Chip Beck shot the second-ever Tour 59 in the third round of the 1991 Las Vegas Invitational. Maybe they should change their advertising from “loosest slots” to “loosest greens.”)

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October 15, 2010 · 3:55 pm

True Enough: It’s CordeValle’s Week

“If you work for the Top 50, shouldn’t you be able to count to 50?”

That snipe, from a cowled friar in Hayward, Calif., points out that the Top 50 on TV addendum to my last post reads “Nothing this week” — when, in fact, the Frys.com Open is being held at the CordeValle Resort Golf CLub, No. 49.

“Furthermore,” the monk mutters, “some nimrod hasn’t been taught how to use the SHIFT key on his Remington. Not to get on his case, but ‘upper’ is for the first letter of proper nouns, and ‘lower’ is for the alphabetical rug rats that follow.”

CordeValle Golf

CordeValle: Top-10 resort, Top-50 golf course. (John Garrity)

I could pen an extended rebuttal to Monastery Man’s snide, albeit artfully-phrased, “gotcha.” But that’s not how we do things at the Top 50. CordeValle is, indeed, No. 49. That’s a rung above the 50th-ranking the northern-California resort achieved back in June, when SI senior writer Gary Van Sickle and I played it on our way to flights from San Jose International Airport.

By the end of a three-birdie round at CordeValle, I was a confirmed 49er. The turfed expanse of the RTJ Jr. tournament track wanders through a valley dominated by  exquisite, oak-dappled foothills, providing a golden backdrop for this week’s Golf Channel cameras. The clubhouse and hotel are shaded by ancient sycamores and swathed in trellised roses. If wine-country ambiance is your cup of tea, CordeValle can’t be beat. Or rather, it can be beat by only seven other golf resorts. (CordeValle is No. 8 on my World Golf Resorts list, which will appear here in November.*)

*Contingent upon completion of certain infrastructure projects at our Kansas City headquarters.

As for the charge by our Thomas Merton wannabe that we can’t type, I will patiently explain that CordeValle — pronounced “COR-de-vol” — is spelled with a capital V. (See my privately-published monograph, “What’s with the E in FedEx?”) The documentation for the L in “CLub” seems to have been misplaced, but I’ve got someone looking into it.

There is no listing for Hayward, by the way, in Michelin’s Guide to North American Monasteries.

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