It’s back!
Twenty years later Tatra Press has kindly allowed me to bring back Grounds For Golf now that golf architecture is of more interest to the masses. A new Introduction looks at what’s driven the interest growth and two new chapters I had a blast adding (plus a few edits to keep things up-to-date).
The Amazon purchase page for the book arriving June 15, 2026.
Peter Dixon plays Deal with hickories in uncomfortable clothes and comes away impressed by the golf of yesteryear as well as the club also known as Royal Cinque Ports.
The PGA Tour fines for behavior like this, don't they? From golf.com, Miguel Angel Jimenez after winning the Hong Kong Open. Thanks to reader Christopher for the heads up:
Thanks to reader who spotted this post on The Golf Forum. Apparently a Herald-Sun piece on golf included this list (not available online):
'In one of the centre spreads, [Robert] Allenby lists his top five favourite golf courses'
1 - Royal Melbourne (Sandringham)
2 - Augusta National (Georgia)
3 - St Andrews Links (Fife)
4- The Forest Resort (Creswick)
5 - Riviera Country Club (Pacific Palisades)
I couldn't help but notice the explanatory paragraph for number 4 on the list
"It's in this list because I've just designed it. I based it on Royal Melbourne. I can't wait to play it. I'm hoping to make it for the opening. It's about an hour's drive from Melbourne, near Ballarat, just a lovely part of the world."
I'm constantly astounded by the devotion of these players architects!
Golfweek's November 10th Forecaddie writes that some USGA staffers were at the Ginn sur Mer Classic to check out the grooves of PGA Tour players.
The USGA has spent almost three years collecting data on grooves and some see the testing at Tesoro as the next step in possible rules changes to modify grooves.
The USGA tested roughly 30-40 sets of clubs by making a small plastic mold impression on the face of the irons and wedges. The tests were random and were not supposed to involve the players, although some bristled at the procedure.
"I'm on the putting green and this guy comes up and starts messing with my clubs," said Tour player David Branshaw. "I don't know what they were looking for, but they got that blue stuff [the substance the USGA used to take the mold] all over the grips. Took me an hour to rub all that stuff of."
The USGA must have forgotten the three "don'ts" in life. Don't tug on Superman's cape; don't play money games against someone with a "traveling handicap;" and never, ever touch a Tour player's clubs.
They're such consensus builders!
Way to get players on board with a controversial rule change.
Ken Klavon at the USGA blog reports on the PGA Tour's now-annual excuse to gather everyone in Ponte Vedra to try out the latest MBASpeak they've picked up in Forbes (and yes attendees, I'm still awaiting a transcript in my email box...chop, chop!).
Judging by the tone of Klavon's piece, not much progress was made in improving media access to players. Then again, PGA Tour players are pretty accessible one on one. Dealing with their agents is another story.
More interesting was the context in which Klavon put the decline of newspapers as compared to Internet numbers. Granted, I still wonder if these U.S. Open and PGATour.com page views include those automatic leaderboard refreshes, but even cutting the numbers, the are staggering.
In my humble opinion, online journalism still isn’t being fully embraced. For those of us who have made the transition from traditional media to the digital age, there is an element of credibility that has been brought along. But that wasn’t the crux of the question. It was based on the following: (and this is where I throw dazzling stats at you):
Consider that in 1990 the total U.S. newspaper circulation equated to roughly 60 million readers. Now chew on this: this year that figure is down to 40 million. Why is this significant? Because the advent of the Internet, with its slew of deliverable content platforms over the past 10 or so years, has overtaken this fossil. (And you’re talking to someone who worked in newspapers and continues to hold it dear to his heart).
Last year usopen.com gleaned 265 million page views. The year before the number came in around 112 million. The reach of the Internet seems limitless. Those figures are more than the entire newspaper circulation combined in the United States. Incredible. Yet some still are having a hard time embracing it. Hate to say it but the ship is sailing. Or has it sailed?
To get back on track, few of the panelists except for Bob Harig, a golf writer at ESPN.com, had much in the way of a solution to my question. Keep trying seemed to be the consensus.
Doug Ferguson captures the excitement that the NBC announce crew kept suggesting was almost inevitable: Lorena Ochoa and Trump International's perilous 17th hole:
Despite being the No. 1 player in women's golf, Ochoa has a short history of blowing tournaments, and this would have been a doozy. After blowing away the seven other players who qualified for this 18-hole shootout, she had a four-shot lead with two holes to play.
But she butchered the par-3 17th with an 8-iron over the back of the green, a putt that got hung up in the fluffy rough, and three more putts from 20 feet for a double bogey. Gulbis made a 7-foot birdie putt, narrowing the lead to one shot with one hole to play.
It was about the only drama of the balmy afternoon, certainly more than Ochoa needed.
"It was fun for the fans and for all of you," she said, "but it didn't feel very good."
Ochoa hammered a tee shot over the corner of the lake and the bunker, but it wasn't enough to hop out of the rough, and the ball sank to the bottom of the grass. Gulbis hit first, a hybrid 3-iron that covered the flag and put even more pressure on Ochoa.
"Lorena was spending a lot of time looking at her lie, so I was assuming that the lie was not very good," Gulbis said. "She's the best player in the world, so I thought that at least we'd get kind of an eye-for-an-eye putt at it."
Steve Elling considers Ochoa's 8-win season and offers these incredible numbers along with her place in the game:
Most impressively, she finished in the top 10 in 21 of 25 starts and won five of her past nine starts. It was her eighth victory of the year, or for those who like their news with a lyrical bent, ocho for Ochoa. It has been a long, productive year.
"It's time to go home," Ochoa said.
As further testament to her emergence, the tour is doing likewise with its events. Next year, Ochoa will become the second active player to host her own tournament, one of a trio of events scheduled in Mexico in 2008. In 2004, there were nada.
Not that pesos are the best yardstick of success, since the purses only continue to head north, but Ochoa obliterated the old earnings mark, set by Annika Sorenstam during her 11-win season in 2002, by $1.5 million. She finished the season with $4,364,994, roughly 2½ times what runner-up Suzann Pettersen took home.
"It's been amazing from the start to the end," Ochoa said.
Doug Ferguson seems to be warming to the ADT Championship, which again proved incredibly compelling. It doesn't hurt that Sunday's final 8 chasing $1 million includes Ochoa, Webb, Creamer, Kerr, Gulbis, Mi Hyun Kim, Sarah Lee and the charismatic Christina Kim.
Especially impressive is how well the LPGA seems organized when it comes time for the sudden death playoffs, starting them on the 17th hole as soon as the last group is in.
Another nice touch is the $1 million in cash sitting by the 18th green (pictured, left, courtesy of golf.com).
Kim was asked about it:
As if they needed additional pressure, the LPGA Tour placed $1 million cash -- or what looked like it, anyway -- in a glass case with a big lock and big bodyguard nearby, a reminder of what's at stake.
"I'm not Rain Man, so I wasn't able to calculate whether it was actually $1 million," Kim said. "You always see in the movies they've got the $1 million, and it's a very think briefcase. I don't know. Maybe there's just a lot of air packed in there. It's awesome."
From Steve Elling's write-up of Saturday's wild finish:
In other words, perhaps the most unpredictable event in golf followed the LPGA headquarters' script to the letter. Well, make that the current brass' script, anyway.
You want an eyeful of awful irony? Sophie Gustafson was the poster child for the volatile cruelty of the format, blowing up with a double-bogey and bogey on the last two holes of regulation, forcing her into a four-way playoff for two spots. Her first swing in sudden death went in the water on the 17th and she was officially toast.
The funky format was the brainchild of Gustafson's husband, former LPGA commissioner Ty Votaw, who was on hand to watch the carnage. They must have had a wonderful drive up Interstate 95 to their home in Ponte Vedra Beach, huh?
Unlike the FedEx Cup, which extends playoff drama over four weeks, the ADT Championship compresses it into four days. There are some players -- make that quite a few players -- who don't like the $900,000 difference between first and second place, feeling that is too severe of a punishment for what could be a one-stroke loss. But it is exactly that drama that gives this event its identity.Meanwhile Greg Stoda misses the point of the ADT and laments the entire thing, longing for rewards to those who play well along the way.
While it seems odd that the goal of the first two days is to finish 16th and Saturday's mission is to be no worse that eighth, that's part of the charm of this tournament. And with the quality of the players that advanced, it seems certain that Sunday will be a scintillating shootout for a million bucks.
Mi Hyun Kim probably could have lost the ear muffs for this interview. Where's the LPGA brand team monitoring their own product to prevent fashion boondoggles like this?
Shocking as it may seem, apparently the Brand Lady was not entirely accurate in her Wednesday remarks about control of the ADT Championship's television production. Craig Dolch reports:
Who's calling TV shots?: When LPGA Tour Commissioner Carolyn Bivens said Wednesday that for the first time her tour would be producing all nine hours of television for this week's ADT Championship, that was news to NBC Sports executives. Especially executive producers Tommy Roy and Tom Randolph.
"We are doing the production of everything," Bivens said. "That means we are covering the nine hours of this tournament. We've worked in combination with the Golf Channel and with NBC, but for the first time the LPGA will be guiding what is seen on television."
Jon Miller, executive vice president of NBC sports, said Thursday that's not the case.
"I believe the commisisoner mis-spoke," Miller said. "They are producing some of the below-the-lines aspects of the telecast on site and the LPGA did oversee the productions of some vignettes on some players.
"But clearly the television you see this week, the guys calling the shots and having the final say will be Tom Randolph (Thursday-through-Saturday on Golf Channel) and Tommy Roy (Sunday on NBC). No golf ever goes on air of our 29 golf telecasts without our executive producers doing the producing."
...I'm wondering if you are still able to read this site? I understand that in rapid response to dreadful events from earlier this century, the webmasters have finally gotten around to restricting USGA staff access to MySpace, YouTube videos and some blogs.
While traffic from the greater Far Hills area has remained steady here, I am curious if this web site made the, uh, cut?
Sallie Brady of the New York Times looks at emerging trends in golf course housing development and lists some of the cutting edge communities of note.
Got to love the frank lede:
There's never been anything terribly sexy about living in a golf community. Imagine cookie-cutter spec homes dotting yet another dull par 4 in Myrtle Beach, and you get the picture. Even if you like the game and are in the market for a vacation home, you may never have considered buying in one of these old-style resorts.
Fast forward...
“The classic model of houses ringing a golf course is dying,” said John Kirk, an architect with the New York firm Cooper Robertson & Partners, who designed homes at WaterSound, a beachside golf community in the Florida panhandle. “Instead the golf course is like a big public green,” he said, adding that “people want to be able to walk to the post office or to get their morning coffee.”
Vacation home buyers continue to get younger — a median age of 47 in 2006, down from 52 in 2005, according to a survey by the National Association of Realtors — as more families move in next to the retirees at golf communities. Developers have responded by offering more design options, holiday kids’ clubs and summer camps, and myriad recreational activities beyond the driving range.
But the question is whether there are enough buyers for these new golf retreats. “The long-term demographics are favorable,” said Walter Molony, a spokesman for the National Association of Realtors. “It would not be surprising if we saw the vacation market hold its own while the rest of the market declines.”
Okay, the George O'Grady line about testing Tiger first and if he's clean, why does it matter, was cute. One of those fun comments that seems so clever at the time, and upon further reflection, remarkably short-sighted.
Sadly, Jim Litke of AP (who normally gets it right) takes the bait again in wheeling out the tired argument that pro golfers are God's gift to integrity because they call penalties on themselves, therefore, they would never pop a pill or light up a joint. And furthermore, there really aren't that many benefits to using performance enhancing drugs in golf.
I'm going to get political for a moment, so you know where to send your hate mail.
Climate change. Let's assume cynics are right and it's all a bunch of malarkey. Yet, the only people against adopting cleaner energy to help with the problem and perhaps even make it harder for our friends in Dubai to build another mile long shopping center, are those who stand to benefit from the status quo. To a majority of folks, cleaner energy is both a common sense solution to the problem and simply the right thing to do.
Now, if the folks in professional golf love children as much as they claim, isn't drug testing the right thing to do if you want to deter kids from using potentially harmful performance enhancing drugs, even if everyone on the PGA Tour is clean as a whistle and always has been?
I continue to be amazed that in debating this issue, the notion of discouraging the next generation from harming themselves consistently gets missed.
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
