Tag Archives: Pete Dye

June 2, 2012 · 10:18 am

Heartland and Harding Making Moves

A reader from Muskegon, Mich., asks if we change a course’s ranking based upon minor alterations to the design. “Like, say, if they were to chop down the Eisenhower Tree at Augusta National, would that give them a higher or a lower score? Or what if at a certain course in Grand Rapids they fixed a certain tee so that it didn’t point way right when you need to hit it left to stay out of the trees? Would that make a difference?”

Heartland Rebuilding Ross Green

Heartland GC, the only Donald Ross design in Missouri, is restoring the Ross green on its ninth hole. (John Garrity)

I see two points that need correcting in Muskie’s e-mail. The first is the perennial misunderstanding of “higher or lower score” as it pertains to the Top 50 rankings. The Cal Sci algorithm is concentrically weighted around “a perfect 10,” which means that high and low scores are to be avoided, not pursued. Put another way, if Smash star Katharine McPhee scores a 10 on the Carnegie Mellon Feminine Pulchritude Scale (FPS), she’s got no way to go but down. Or up. She can’t do better.

Secondly, it would make no difference if they re-oriented that tee so it pointed straight down the fairway. Muskie would still slice his drive into the trees.

But to the larger point, yes, we take minor alterations of a design into account when we issue our adjusted ratings.* For instance, the 45th-ranked Heartland Golf Club of Kansas City, Mo. (aka Hillcrest Country Club) is restoring Donald Ross’s original ninth green, correcting a 21st-century design blunder. When the green is completed in the fall, Heartland could leap into the Top 40.

* A new Top 50 is posted daily at 2:15 a.m. CDT. We publish hard-copy Mandarin and Portuguese versions on a weekly basis, but only in Africa and the Middle East.

“That’s all well and good,” writes a junior golfer from Sun City, Ariz., “but you can’t possibly know what’s happening at courses around the world. I’ve heard that Pete Dye, just to name one architect, keeps ‘tweaking’ his designs ad infinitum, jumping on a sand pro at the drop of a hat. So your ratings must necessarily be flawed.”

Practice facility, Harding Park

TPC Harding Park’s new short-game practice area will be the perfect place to test the theories in Tour Tempo 2: The Short Game and Beyond. (John Garrity)

Wrong! The Top 50’s vast network of course raters keeps an eye on all the work being done at ranked courses. Last week, for example, workers in San Francisco applied the finishing touches to a new short-game practice area at TPC Harding Park, site of the 2009 Presidents Cup. Positioned between the parking lot and the practice range, the new practice area overlooks beautiful Lake Merced. But it wasn’t overlooked by us! Harding Park jumps three positions to No. 78.*

* If the new grass survives the typically-brutal San Francisco summer, HP will climb even higher.

As for Pete Dye and his constant course-doctoring, give us some credit. We shadow his every movement with unpaid interns.

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but The Memorial Tournament is being played on the immaculate fairways and greens of the 51st-ranked Muirfield Village Golf Club, designed by Jack Nicklaus and the late, great land-form artist, Desmond Muirhead. (Nicklaus is famous for winning 18 major championships. Muirhead is famous for designing golf holes in the shapes of states, stringed instruments and farm animals.)

1 Comment

Filed under golf

Tagged as , , , , ,

May 10, 2012 · 4:24 pm

Z Boaz Was One of “America’s Worst”

In my last post I promised that “tomorrow” I’d reprint a report on 11,237th-ranked Z Boaz Golf Course from my almost-best-seller of 1994, America’s Worst Golf Courses. By “tomorrow,” of course, I meant “next week.” I’ve spent much of that week searching Catch Basin for my file of Z Boaz photographs. When I find them — and after they’ve been digitally enhanced from the drab colors of the last century to glorious black-and-white — I’ll present them in gallery format. Meanwhile, here’s what America’s Worst Golf Courses had to say about Z Boaz:

“Riding on its reputation.”

 

That’s what you hear whenever Z Boaz shows up on the latest list of America’s worst courses. And it’s true — this vintage layout has suffered numerous improvements since its debut as a WPA project in 1937. The spindly trees have grown into impressive oaks; ponds and creeks have filled with water; once-faceless sand bunkers now yawn impressively. It’s a far cry from the hardpan heaven that earned Z Boaz the nickname “Goat Hills New.”

 

Richard Teague, the muni’s current assistant pro, looks out the clubhouse window and shakes his head over the changes. “When I played here, there wasn’t no trees,” he says. “Wasn’t no grass, either, for that matter.”

What Z Boaz has going for it is its legacy. In a memorable article in Sports Illustrated called “The Glory Game at Goat Hills,” writer Dan Jenkins recalled his student days at nearby Texas Christian University, where he and his band of rowdy, bet-happy ne’er-do-wells wasted their afternoons on the parched fairways of the old Worth Hills Golf Course.

 

Overtaken by development — not to mention good taste — Worth Hills went under the bulldozers some years ago, causing SI  to remark that “it was nice to learn that something could take a divot out of those hard fairways.” Z Boaz carries on the tradition as best it can. Every summer, Jenkins invites a touring pro and a bunch of lesser lights to Z Boaz for a one-day tournament, the Dan Jenkins Partnership & Goat Hills Glory Game Reprise. Although not as bleak as Worth Hills in its prime, Z Boaz still offers a pungent contrast to Fort Worth’s elegant Colonial Country Club, some miles away. No clipped hedges and high-dollar homes here — just a stark rectangle of Texas Hill country bounded by a railroad line and three busy streets.

 

The din of traffic, in fact, is an inescapable feature of golf at Z Boaz. The neighborhood is rich with furniture showcases and warehouses, most of which provide a pleasing backdrop to the golfer about to play a shot. Batting cages, miniature golf, and a life-size statue of a giraffe enhance the northern boundary, while empty storefronts and a karate school line the seventh fairway on the east side. And where, save for the finishing holes at Cypress Point, will the golfer find two more natural greensites than Z Boaz’s sixteenth (at the foot of the neon “Checks Cashed” sign) and seventeenth (hard against Long John Silver’s Seafood Shop)?

 

Surely, this is what Robert Louis Stevenson meant when he described Z Boaz as “the most beautiful meeting of land and transmission shops that nature has produced.”

Can such a course really be at death’s door? Will golfers no longer gather on the banks of the Firth of Camp Bowie to ponder its murky depths and weigh the risks of reaching for a muddy ball. Will dog owners and skate boarders defoliate the sacred sward?

Stay tuned for further updates.

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but THE PLAYERS Championship has begun on Pete and Alice Dye’s 51st-ranked TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course in Ponte Vedra, Fla.   Described on a PGA Tour web site as “perhaps the world’s most famous golf course,” it is not. 

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

April 22, 2011 · 4:19 pm

Furyk Mislays Three Decades of Golf Design

Hilton Head, S.C. — I rarely stoop to reportage when I’m rating courses for the Top 50, but Jim Furyk practically bumped my shoulder this afternoon outside the interview room at The Heritage. The former U.S. Open champ had just vaulted up the leader board with a second-round 66, so he was relaxed, affable, and eager to share what, besides the  red-and-white-striped lighthouse, he liked about the 51st-ranked Harbour Town Golf Links.

Askernish 16th Green

Hilton Head resident Dave Henson on No. 16 at Askernish Old. (John Garrity)

Mostly he liked the fact that Pete Dye and Jack Nicklaus wore their high-button shoes when designing Harbour Town. That is, they built skinny, tree-lined fairways, installed waste-bunkers where once there was only waste, let tree limbs encroach on commercial air lanes, pinched the greens until they popped, stocked the ponds with alligators, and bundled everything into a short-by-modern-standards 6,973 yards.

Harbour Town “neutralizes power,” said Furyk, a perennial also-ran in the PGA Tour’s driving-distance category. He added, “I’m not long by any means.” Still adding, he mumbled, “You could argue I’m short.”

We could argue that, but this is a golf-course blog. So I’ll just call your attention to the Furyk statement that really caught my ear. “I’ve always said that if the golf course was built before 1960, there’s a really good chance I’m going to like it. If it was built after 1990, there’s probably a good chance I’m not going to like it.”

Not one reporter in the room asked the obvious follow-up question: How do you prejudge courses built from 1960 to 1990?

Never mind. It just struck me that Furyk has hit upon a fresh way of judging golfing grounds, a method that burns off the morning fog of traditional design variables (turf quality, green speeds, length of rough, etc.), leaving us a single overriding criterion: Birthdate.

Furyk’s method, applied to my own Top 50, doesn’t yield groupings as distinct as his tripartite scheme. It’s clear, however, that the best golf courses are those built in the ‘90s. (No. 1 Askernish Old opened for play in 1891. Second-ranked Carne Golf Links threw open its original portacabin door in the 1990s.) The worst golf courses, meanwhile, were mostly built in 1987.

When I get back to Kansas City, I’ll put the Bomar Brain to the task and come up with a more encyclopedic Furyk Scale ranking. Meanwhile, I’m going find out where Furyk is having dinner and point out to him that Harbour Town actually opened in 1967.

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but Harbour Town won’t hurt your eyes. Next up: Charlotte’s Quail Hollow Golf Club, but not until we’ve endured a week of New Orleans-style gumbo, chargrilled oysters and jambalaya.

1 Comment

Filed under golf

Tagged as , , , , ,

August 14, 2010 · 3:45 pm

Rain Man Tackles Nairn Golf Club

The second stop on our tour of suspected-of-being-overrated Scottish links courses was Nairn, a bustling village just up the road from Castle Stuart, outside Inverness. The Nairn Golf Club will host the 2012 Curtis Cup, so Dave Henson and I were not surprised to find a course groomed to tournament standards. The greens were suspiciously smooth, providing none of the mystifying bumps and bobbles that make small-town golf satisfying, but several of my putts found the hole, leaving me in a forgiving mood. There were a few too many steep-faced bunkers to suit Dave, and I could have done without the 20-inch fescue roughs, but difficulty does not disqualify a course from mention in the Top 50.

My colleague and I did have a piffling disagreement over what constitutes a links course. Midway through our late-afternoon round the holes turned away from the shore and climbed a tree-lined hill, putting us on farmable soil that scarcely resembled the thumpable, sandy underpinning of a true links. The closing holes presented a similar confusion: out-in-the-open, linksy greens requiring long, backward hikes into the woods to new tees that might have been transplanted from Alabama. I argued for a surgical trimming of trees to restore the openness of the closing holes, while Dave — pointing out that it was raining buckets and he was practically coughing up blood, due to his bronchitis — simply shook his head and walked off the course.

That left me to play the last three holes in total isolation, the club members having fled at the first sight of a dark cloud. (So much for the myth of Scottish golfers braving the elements!) As I holed my last putt in a drizzle on the 18th green, Dave came out to greet me, knocking ashes from his pipe, while perhaps a dozen diners cast me admiring glances from the glassed-in warmth of the club dining room.

“So how would you rate Nairn?” Dave asked on the drive back to Inverness.

“Fifty,” I said. “Maybe higher, if they chop down the trees.”

Next Up: Our Fourth of July round having been disrupted by seventy-mile-an-hour winds, we return to Castle Stuart to play a make-up round in seventy-five-mile-an-hour winds.

Whistling Straits Golf Course

Whistling Straits: Are 1,000 bunkers enough? (John Garrity)

Top 50 on TV: The PGA Championship, the fourth and final major of the season, is being played at Whistling Straits in Kohler, Wisc., currently ranked No. 18. (The course, not the state.) Already famous for his island greens and railroad-tie bulkheads, architect Pete Dye gave developer Herb Kohler something no other golf course has: a thousand sand bunkers. Other ideas for Whistling Straits, considered but ultimately rejected, included reversible greens, asphalt tee boxes and torch-lined fairways for night golf.

Leave a comment

Filed under golf

Tagged as , , , ,

June 5, 2010 · 3:16 pm

Tennessee Course Worth Weekend Look

What can be cooler than to look out your window and see Lookout Mountain? Granted, it was foggy this morning, and the mountain resembled a black-and-white graph of recent stock prices. And not to get snippy about it, but Lookout Mountain is just a tree-covered brow of rock that wouldn’t draw a glance in the Rockies. But hey, it’s always great to have a room with a view. Thank you, Fairfield Inn.

Why am I in Chattanooga? Well, I’m here, first of all, to take photographs of the Pete Dye-designed Honors Course, just up the road in Ooltewah. Tennessee’s homage to amateur golf is currently No. 74 on the Top 50, and if certain Confederate Flag-waving members of our staff get their way, it could climb to as high as No. 71. (Don’t read anything political into that last remark. They belong to a Civil War re-enactment troupe.) I’m also here to type a few lines about the NCAA Championship for Sports Illustrated Golf Plus.

Honors Course

The 9th Green of The Honors Course at feeding time. (John Garrity)

Personally, I’d rather do my course photography on a day when the facility is closed. Players and spectators, with their gaudy golf bags and tie-dyed apparel, tend to jazz up the landscape and draw the eye away from a course’s strategic elements. That’s why your high-end, hundred-dollar-a-day course photographers shoot early in the morning and deep into the gloaming — to get that “nobody has set foot on this course since it opened” look. Sometimes I take it even farther and insist that the greenkeeping crew remove all the tee markers, flagsticks and ball-washers and, if possible, refrain from mowing the course for a week.

Needless to say, I didn’t get that kind of cooperation today, with four teams of collegiate golfers duking it out on the Honors Course. But tomorrow, with the University of Oregon and Florida State University sent packing, I’ll have half as many obstacles in front of my lens. And come Monday, the Honors Course will return to its pristine state.

Speaking of turf-trampling interlopers, the Spanish explorer, Hernando DeSoto, is supposed to have paused here on his way to Detroit. I can understand why; the Honors Course has five charming guest houses that can accommodate up to ten foursomes, not counting their horses.

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but I’m personally fond of Jack Nicklaus’s Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio, site of the Memorial. I always remind people that the late Desmond Muirhead, the Salvador Dali of golf, was Jack’s co-designer on this project, and that Muirhead remains a Top 50 fixture for his work on the Mission Hills Tournament Course, No. 44. As for The Memorial’s quest to become the “fifth major” — well, that trial balloon floated down to Ponte Vedra many years ago. “Golf will never have a fifth major,” Gary Player explained back in 1978. “You can’t start up a major today that Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, Ben Hogan and Gene Sarazen never had a chance to win.”

Leave a comment

Filed under golf

Tagged as , , , , ,

May 4, 2010 · 11:38 pm

Island Greens: Time to Drain the Moat?

The debate over island greens has raged for three decades. The argument started in 1982, when Alice Dye unveiled her bulkheads-in-the-swamp design for the par-3 17th at the Tournament Players Club of Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra, Fla. It grew in intensity when Alice’s husband Pete surrounded his own version of sod a l’leau with boulders at the PGA West Stadium Course in La Quinta, Calif. It reached a fever pitch when developer Duane Hagadone and architect Scott Miller planted the 14th green at Club Coeur d’Alene on a 7,500-ton barge and set it adrift on a glassy lake in Idaho.

But now that an oil slick the size of Donald Trump’s ego has hit the Louisiana shore, the debate should end. Island greens are a bad idea.

This will not be news to current or former PGA Tour players, who have suffered the most extreme humiliations trying to land their tee shots on the original island green at Sawgrass. “When I play that hole, I don’t know whether to genuflect or spit,” says Brandel Chamblee, analyzing this week’s Players Championship for the Golf Channel. Chamblee echoes the sentiments of 8-time major champion Tom Watson, who after his first exposure to the TPC of Sawgrass asked, “Is it against the rules to carry a bulldozer in your bag?”

Granted, island greens appeal to the eye. My all-time favorite is — or rather, was — the notorious “Jaws” par-3 7th at Stone Harbor Golf Club in Cape May Court House, New Jersey.* Jaws featured a boat-shaped green flanked by toothy island bunkers, separated from the putting surface by narrow moats. The designer, Desmond Muirhead, said he was inspired by the story of Jason and the Argonauts, with the boat-shaped green representing Jason’s boat and the jagged bunkers representing the blue rocks thrown down by the gods to crush the boat.

*I use the past tense because Stone Harbor’s members — stung, perhaps, by my droll critique of the hole in America’s Worst Golf Courses — destroyed Muirhead’s inspired design and replaced it with a conventional island green.

But aesthetics and playability issues aside, island greens suffer from erosion, mould, wharf rats and bad drainage, require Army-Corps-of-Engineers-scale infrastructure to ferry players and caddies to and from the putting surface, and raise the risk of involuntary baptism by forcing players to chip or putt while balanced on slippery timbers. It’s no coincidence, I think, that the current Top 50 recognizes only one course with an island green.

Downpatrick Head

The island-green 17th at Downpatrick Head, Ireland. (John Garrity)

I must add, however, that I have a soft spot for the island-green 17th on yet another Pete Dye track, the Pete Dye Challenge at Mission Hills Country Club, Rancho Mirage Calif. I registered my only hole-in-three there some years ago, holing out a re-teed range ball after drowning my 8-iron tee shot near the pilings. Fred Couples duplicated my feat during the 1999 Players Championship, gaining greater-than-deserved attention because he covered the same distance with a 9-iron.

I can also appreciate the need for water around the green on the par-5 18th at the adjoining Dinah Shore Tournament Course, No. 44. Without the moat, LPGA players celebrating victory by leaping headfirst off the final green would break their lovely necks.

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but last Saturday was Demo Day at the New Richmond Golf Club, No. 29. A half-dozen equipment reps hawked their wares on New Richmond’s Top 10-quality driving range while I sat at a table and autographed copies of my latest book, Ancestral Links: A Golf Obsession Spanning Generations, in a three-club wind. Space does not permit a full report on “The Augusta National of Small-Town Courses,” but on the basis of my most recent round I will be very surprised if New Richmond doesn’t move up in the next Top 50 ranking. Watch your back, Pacific Dunes!

2 Comments

Filed under golf

Tagged as , , , , , , ,