Tag Archives: Gary Van Sickle

January 31, 2011 · 7:34 pm

Merion Tops Van Sickle Bucket List

SI senior writer Gary Van Sickle took an apologetic tone in a recent e-mail. “Forgot to give you my must-play list,” he wrote. Then he shared his list. Then he apologized again. “I’m sure I left out some big course I haven’t played yet, but this was right off the top of my head and, as you know, there isn’t much left up there.”

Castle Stuart 10th Tee

Castle Stuart: Come July, Eurotour will pay the piper.

He continued: “Colonial? I’ve walked it so many times, but I’m not sure if I’ve actually played it. There’s still eight states I haven’t played golf in, but I’m working on it. Amazingly, Kansas is one of them. Also the Dakotas and most of the Pacific northwest, except Washington.”

Gary drew up his list of “great courses I have yet to play” in response to my own bucket list of must-play tracks, which was, in turn, inspired by “Travelin’ Joe” Passov’s wish list on Golf.com. Gary, like Joe, has played more than a thousand golf courses and, like me, he prefers to change his shoes in the parking lot. That may explain why Gary hasn’t gotten invitations from the most exclusive clubs on his list.

Anyway, here’s Gary’s bucket list:

1. East Course, Merion Golf Club, Ardmore, Pa.  (“Covered my first U.S. Open there. David Graham beat George Burns.)

2. Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, Bandon, Ore. (“Haven’t been there yet.”)

3. Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, Bandon, Ore. (“The second course. Or is it the third?”)

4. Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, Bandon, Ore. (“Isn’t there one they sing about in kindergarten?”)

5. Sand Hills Golf Club, Mullen, Neb. (“Haven’t been there either.”)

6. Seminole Golf Club, Juno Beach, Fla. (“If Bob Ford is their pro in the winter, it’s got to be a good club. Hard to believe a course in Florida could be anything special, though. It’s freakin’ Florida.”)

7. National Golf Links of America, Southampton, N.Y.. (“Who doesn’t love windmills? They’re fantastic in miniature golf.”

8. Fishers Island Club, Fishers Island, N.Y. (“Not even sure where it is, but everybody raves about it. I suspect it’s like Tickle Me Elmo. Fantastic when nobody can get one. When the shelves are full of them, it’s just another toy.”)

9. Philadelphia Cricket Club, Philadelphia, Pa. (“Bamberger is a member there. Screw him.”)

10. The Camargo Club, Cincinnati, Ohio. (“Reminds me of my favorite knock-knock joke. Who’s there? ‘Argo.’ Argo who? ‘Arrr, go f— yourself.’”

“That’s my American list,” Gary wrote. “I could start talking about all the great courses I’ve missed in Scotland and Ireland, but there’s too many, and it’s just too sad to think about.” And finally, after thinking about it: “Castle Stuart!”

I have played only one of the courses on Gary’s list — Seminole — but four of his wannaplays are in my Top 50. This proves that courses can’t buy or bribe their way into my rankings.* It’s also a good test of Travelin’ Joe’s theory that a golf writer can shorten his bucket list by publishing a Ten-Courses-I-Need-to-Play column. (An invitation to  play Prairie Dunes has already fallen into Joe’s hopper. Can Cape Kidnappers be far behind?)

*Although I’m always willing to parse the Top 50 over a sandwich and 7up at the halfway house of any course in GOLF Magazine’s Top 100.

I, meanwhile, have heard nothing from Indian Army 9-Hole Golf Course (Ladakh) or any of the other courses on my own wish list, posted a couple of weeks ago. Is it too soon to write my Ten-Most-Overrated-Golf-Courses column?

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but the European Tour has confirmed that Castle Stuart Golf Links of Inverness, Scotland, will the new venue for the Scottish Open. The Eurotour’s decision was almost certainly driven by two-year-old Castle Stuart’s Top-10 ranking in this space. In appreciation, the technical staff at Catch Basin has boosted Castle Stuart two rungs to No. 7, replacing Pebble Beach Golf Links as the world’s best cliffside course. The Cal Sci Algorithm will be jiggered to reflect the change.

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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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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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September 27, 2010 · 2:39 pm

Scottish Courses Survive Careful Audit

To sum up — which is pretty much my only alternative, since subterranean water issues at our Catch Basin headquarters have interrupted my usual stream of posts — the Top 50 rankings have withstood a rigorous audit by yours truly. And as they say in the NFL, “The ruling on the field stands.” My three weeks in Scotland and Ireland, during which I played an unprecedented 14 rounds of golf, convinced me that our Cal Sci algorithm has not lost a step. Every traditional links course on my itinerary met or exceeded my expectations, and several made such a strong impression that they have since advanced in the ranking.

Kingsbarns Golf Links, for example, jumped from No. 51 to No. 40 after I played it with SI colleagues Gary Van Sickle and Alan Shipnuck the week of the Open Championship. Gary, one of our unpaid course raters, leaked the preamble of his Top 50 report to Golf.com. “I had read the glowing reviews of Kingsbarns,” he wrote ….

…. a relatively new course on the ocean a few miles east of St. Andrews, but had no idea just how good it was until I played there …. Kingsbarns combines the rolling terrain and scenic views of Turnberry with the linksy charms of the Old Course …. If you could play just one course in the area, well, it would be a difficult choice. No course in the world has the history or the charm of the Old Course, located between the ocean and the middle of town in St. Andrews, but Kingsbarns’ beauty is striking. You don’t need a camera at the Old Course once you’ve snapped the obligatory first-tee photo with the clubhouse in the background, but at Kingsbarns you need a camera for nearly every hole. You can debate whether it’s the best course in St. Andrews, but it is unquestionably the prettiest.

Alan was similarly smitten, saying, “I would PAY to play Kingsbarns again.” That testimonial alone accounts for .13 of the course’s current score of 11.65.

But Kingsbarns was not the only Scottish course to advance. The Balcomie Links at Crail, just up the road from Kingsbarns, tiptoed from No. 37 to No. 33 (accompanied by Tom & Jerry-style pizzicato strings), while Machrihanish Golf Club, on Scotland’s Atlantic coast, floated from No. 38 to No. 35.

Crail, as most everyone knows, is one of my personal favorites, an Old Tom Morris links course with more quirkiness, charm and natural beauty than a hundred modern designs. I played it at 7 on a Monday morning with p.r. phenom Dove Jones and my buddy Mike Kern of the Philadelphia Daily News, and we zipped around in a little more than three hours. “If I never play another round of golf,” Mike said afterwards, “I’ll be happy to say that my last round was at Crail.”

First Tee at Machrihanish

"Swimmers Beware" -- the first tee at Machrihanish. (John Garrity)

That same afternoon, to everyone’s amazement, I motored clear across Scotland — a good six-hour drive — and checked into a B&B opposite the 18th green at Machrihanish. I don’t usually make golf dates that require commutes lasting longer than a Hollywood marriage, but I couldn’t turn this one down. I was meeting another SI colleague, Michael Bamberger, who just happens to be a longtime Machrihanish member, having joined after falling in love with the course during the writing of his classic, To the Linksland. Michael and I played on Tuesday afternoon, starting our round with the most exhilarating first-tee shot in golf — a gulp-inducing carry over a sandy beach, complete with sunbathers and kite-fliers — to a Cape-style fairway swinging sharply left. The delicious irony was that Michael had to ask me where to aim his tee shots and what trouble to avoid. It turned out he hadn’t been to Machrihanish in 19 years, while I had played it as recently as 2007, while researching Ancestral Links: A Golf Obsession Spanning Generations.

At the end of the round, I couldn’t resist asking him, “So — what do you think of it?”

“I really like it,” Michael replied, smiling like a grade-schooler. He added, “Which is something of a relief, considering all the years I’ve been paying dues.”

He declined, however, to fill out my 64-page course rater’s questionnaire, pleading jet lag. So I’m left with the Bamberger quote from To the Linksland that is painted on the wall above the bar in the Machrihanish clubhouse: “If I were only allowed to play one course for the rest of my life, Machrihanish would be the place.”

Personally, I think they should have used his other quote. (“If I promise to play Machrihanish only one more time as long as I live, will you let me join?”)

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but the top pros from the U.S. and Europe have flown to Wales to face off in the Ryder Cup at the Celtic Manor Resort. The Twenty Ten Course, one of three Celtic Manor tracks, was built specifically for the Ryder Cup and claims to have “six signature holes.” This, of course, is not possible, four being the maximum allowable. (See Oxblood, Rodney, “Fundamentals of Golf Course Marketing,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa.)

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April 29, 2010 · 10:19 pm

Top 50 Critic is All Wet

We get some unusual e-mails here at Top 50 headquarters, but this is the first one that’s dripped on the carpet:

From the desk of:  Aquaman.

Dear Landlubber: I read your latest missive about Aqua-ranges with much regret. The words, they were as jumbled and unintelligible as the thoughts of a Jolothian sea slug (as only I would know–see my Adventures of, #71). I told Aqualad about your piece (he’s not much on reading but boy, can he put down the shrimp scampi) and he agreed. You couldn’t be more wrong if you were King Neptune himself. (Whom I dethroned in a righteous coup, you may recall, in Adventures of, #52.)

A story about Aqua-ranges without a mention of the Atlantis Golf Range & Giant Squid Ranch, a state of the art facility, is worse than insulting. It’s like an hour without water. Unthinkable. (And incredibly painful — Adventures of, # 7, #12, #21-28, #42 — and dangerous — obviously Adventures of, #99 and #100 featuring the lecherous Scallopsface.) Once again, you have missed the submersible boat. The Atlantis Golf Range & Giant Squid Ranch (or AGRGSR, pronounced agger-gasser in dolphin — the official language of Atlantis, as you know) is not only a lock for the top three on any list of Aqua-ranges — any legitimate list — it is clearly the No. 1 Aqua-range of its kind.

You can ask Aqualad, who spends way too much time there, in my opinion. For one thing, he’s 31 and still living at home in the sea cave and borrowing the keys to the Torpedo Car and watching “Stargate: Atlantis” reruns. Plus, what’s with the Aqualad name? He’s grown up. It’s time to become a man. So I’m going to start calling him Ken.

Aqualad was just at AGRGSR last week to pound a whole conch shell of range balls (still only 4 starfish, the best bargain in Atlantis!) and commented again on the exquisite beauty of the undersea dome where it’s located and the quality of the floaters. (Hope you like that clever pun–that’s our nickname for you landlubbers when you go swimming in saltwater, although the mako sharks prefer to think of you as appetizers). Of course, AquaKen mostly pounded drivers to make himself feel like more of a man instead of working on his short game like I told him, the key to golf. He still can’t beat me on his best day because he’s crap around the greens. If only he spent some focused time on AGRGSR’s 54-hole Minerva Putting Course or the Patrick Duffy (he’s with us now) Short Game School, he might have a sea turtle’s chance in a kiln. But no.

It is a 360-degree range and yes, while that does make it a little toasty (but not as toasty as the attempt by the evil Gatorflame to invade my kingdom — Adventures of, #102, available soon), it provides plenty of room for all the minions of the sea to hit balls and work on their swings when they’re not busy doing exactly what I telepathically command them to do.

Your rankings aren’t misguided. They’re not guided at all. I can’t believe a couple of your landlubber gods like Jupiter and Zeus haven’t straightened you out, or at the very least turned you into a pillar of limestone. A tall pillar, in your case, which could be quite a windfall for a nimble mining outfit ready to pounce (like Aquaman Zirconium & Gravel Inc., est. 1994 — we’ve got T-shirts and our own golf outings and everything).

AquaKen was right. You’re about as useful as a titless mermaid with razor sharp fangs. The citizens of Atlantis ask — no, demand — that you revise your lame rankings to represent reality and immediately install AGRGSR as the No. 1 Aqua-range. Don’t make us aqua-kick your ass (check out what’s left of the Chum Master for details — Adventures of, #37). We’ve got a trident here with your name on it, landlubber. I hope we make ourselves clear.

Until such time as you correct your awful mistake, stay out of the water.

Your loving omnipotent undersea master,

Aquaman.

P.S. We love the photo on your website of the god called Van Sickle biting into a shiny moray eel. An amazing feat of power. Let’s hear more about his exploits. We may want to start worshipping a god as powerful as he. Tell him Ken says “howdy!” I am not sure what that means.

Nobody here at Catch Basin takes this note seriously, but in the interest of caution I have turned it over to the Harbor Police. The course rankings, of course, are what they are, and no form of intimidation — up to and including threats of violence — can influence one’s place in the Top 50. (“Bribery might work” our founder used to say with a chuckle. But he was almost surely joking.) If our snide correspondent wants to pursue this further, he can complain to our corporate sponsor, the Red Lobster restaurant chain.

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