"Who is going to want to play golf when they're setting off dynamite and running haul trucks with all that noise and dust?"

Bill Fields looks at the endangered Clearview Golf Course in the wake of course creator Bill Powell's passing.

On a damp winter day, with the American flag still at half-staff two weeks after Powell's passing, his family and friends ought to have been able to mourn in peace. Instead, they were busy trying to rally support against Buckeye Industrial Mining's proposal to mine coal, from sunrise to sunset, within 370 feet of Clearview's 15th hole. "It's a dire threat," says Jeff Brown, who was instrumental in helping the course be listed on the National Register of Historic Places by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 2001. "What they propose -- mining and blasting over a period of five years -- will kill this course economically. Who is going to want to play golf when they're setting off dynamite and running haul trucks with all that noise and dust?"

Powell's daughter, Renee, the second black woman to compete on the LPGA Tour, is urging Clearview supporters to write letters opposing the strip mine, which is awaiting approval from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. State Senator Kirk Schuring has communicated with Kevin Collins, president of Evergreen Energy, Buckeye Mining's parent company, urging him to halt the project. "There doesn't need to be a strip mine here," says Schuring.

He also filed this video report:

"It's all about the golf."

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?