"It's all about the golf."

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Great to see John Paul Newport filing this excellent look at the return of the golf-only, smaller-scale clubhouse, including some great stuff on the economics of big buildings. There's also a slideshow with the column.

You could see the trend beginning in the early 2000s, just as the golf course building boom was ending, with the opening of such clubs as Dallas National in Texas, The Dye Preserve in Jupiter, Fla., Friar's Head on New York's eastern Long Island, and the Chechessee Creek Club in Okatie, S.C. All of these have relatively small, understated clubhouses, superb golf courses (those at the last two designed by Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore), and no swimming pools or tennis courts. It's all about the golf.

Whisper Rock in Scottsdale, Ariz., which opened in 2004, is another good example. It's expensive, with initiation fees running now at $130,000, and, as an all-male club, politically incorrect. (Women and children are allowed to play golf there several days a week.) But its casual atmosphere (club motto: "It's all about the hang") and two highly ranked courses have attracted an enviable membership that includes something like 40 current or former PGA Tour players, all of whom pay the full initiation fee and regular dues. During a recent lunch visit there, I spotted Paul Casey, Gary McCord and Peter Kostis.

So out of curiousity, what would you all nominate as an ideal clubhouse in golf?

"Do we ever go back to the way things were?"

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John Garrity files a lengthy Golf Magazine story titled "The Gilded age of golf design is dead." The piece is mostly quite productive and focused on talking to productive, interesting folks like Bobby Weed and Chris Monti who are trying to reimagine how the golf course will fit into a future with increased energy and water demands. And then there's Tom Fazio.
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"This groove change was a knee-jerk reaction to distance gains that have mostly leveled off in the past six years, and it takes us into the dangerous territory of making the game more difficult for amateurs."

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It's been way too long since Peter Kostis wrote some non-sensical, credibility-crushing fluff for his friends at Titleist, but the "Golf Products Design Consultant" for the company put together quite possibly the lamest and most inevitable argument one could make about the groove rule change: you're hurting the average man who won't be affected by this rule change anytime soon!
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Rory Crashes Car Into Neighbor's Cabbage Patch: "I didn't have anyone chasing me!"

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Karl MacGinty reports on the young Irishman crashing his Audi A6 (Thank God it wasn't the new Lamborghini!) after an ice patch sent his car sideways.

When the irony of his New Year's Eve mishap is pointed out, the 20-year-old says: "I didn't have anyone chasing me!" Instead, compacted snow had made an ice rink of the driveway at his luxury Co Down home and McIlroy simply span off.

"I was crawling down the driveway," he explains. "There's a sharp left-hand bend and as I braked to turn into it, the car just slid. As it did, I thought to myself, 'I know where this is going' – straight into the hedge. I ended up in the neighbour's cabbage patch." There was one consolation. He had left his spanking new Lamborghini in the garage.

If only all bizarre car accidents could be so innocent. A fan of Woods since he was six and first glimpsed the young Tiger on telly at the 1996 US Amateur Championship, McIlroy admitts he was taken aback by the revelations that followed Tiger's crash that fateful November night in Orlando. "Even I was disappointed when I heard what happened," he says. "Everyone thought 'Aw no'. They were shocked because, obviously, he'd been doing it for a while."