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.
A study of what political party fans of various sports tend to associate with. Not surprisingly, golf leans Republican, but who knew wrestling fans were so left leaning?
This chart maps the party identification of sports fans along with their propensity to actually vote. It's based on 218,000 surveys conducted by a GOP media research firm. Wrestling fans: strongly Democratic-leaning, but none of them vote.
It is not actually that weird to think that wrestling and monster truck fans are all bleeding heart commies: their fanbases are primary young people. It looks like they're also young people that Democrats do a really shit job of appealing to and convincing to vote. (If the DNC was smart they would maybe be doing something about telling these slightly interested NBA fans about the upcoming midterms.)
And look, Republicans enjoy golf.
(Making the partisan divide-straddling bubbles as deep in color as the outliers is a bit misleading, GOP research firm, because it looks to us like basically everyone enjoys baseball and football.)
Eat your heart out, tech journalists getting an ipad for review before Saturday's launch. I bet you didn't get one of these:
Good evening,
I hope this e-mail finds all of you well. I’m writing tonight in regards to the Tiger Woods interview on Monday at 2 p.m.
Augusta National has taken great care to reserve space for those accredited Board members of the GWAA and AGW. I’d like to offer each of you a seat in the room, provided you will be here and interested in attending. Other accredited Board members not on this e-mail were likely already tapped by their respective publications to attend or not able to be present.
Please reply to this e-mail with your level of interest at your earliest convenience. It will be a pleasure to see you all very soon.
All the best,
Steve Ethun
Director of Communications
Augusta National Golf Club
2604 Washington Road
Augusta, GA 30904
One can only imagine the hilarious seat chart they've got going right now, with GWAA and AGW board members, the one seat from each outlet and of course, the various riff-raff seat fillers.
It didn't make the story, but another fun trace of the Old Course in the original Augusta National design came on the eleventh hole. It existed for a few years back when the tee was to the right of the tenth green, and when the hole doglegged right. It played much shorter then with a fairway sloped away from the tee. (Long before Hootie made an awful mess of it (right image).)
Jones and MacKenzie planned a 415-yard dogleg right par-4 where drives down the left side were rewarded with a better angle to the green. To inject the ultimate St. Andrewsian touch, Jones insisted on a small, blind pot bunker in the fairway center. He found out on opening day in 1932 that not everyone was enamored with the mystery, vagaries and quirk of the Old Course.
In The Making of The Masters, David Owen shares the story of Jones’s father, Colonel Bob Jones, driving into the bunker while playing with his son and Clifford Roberts.
“When the Colonel found his ball in the sand, he shouted, ‘What goddamned fool put a goddamned bunker right in the goddamned center of the fairway?’ or words to that effect.
One can only imagine how much delight that gave Bobby Jones!
Just when you thought we'd hit rock bottom...was she just waiting for the steady drip of mistresses to come to a halt?
She wants an apology. Get in line!
Sally Jenkins with another hard-hitting Tiger column, this time picking apart the veracity of some of Tiger's recent statements.
The golf industry seems more than willing to collude in this hasty public rehab, whether it's real or not, given that TV ratings without him can fall by as much 55 percent, and sales revenues are off by 11.6 percent. There's an industry behind Woods struggling and writhing to survive -- and willing to do anything to preserve the empire. Woods gave brief five-minute TV interviews to ESPN and the Golf Channel on March 21, apparently in a deliberate attempt to ease back into the public eye. "There's a natural progression of things he's got to do before he tees off," as Jim Furyk put it. It's not good for business if fans decide Woods's "legendary focus" is just compulsion, his "competitive fire" is just epic selfishness, and his "quest for history" is just insatiability.
But the fact is, despite the rush toward the redemption of Woods, there remains a gap between his lip service and his actual honesty. It's a handicapping issue. When it comes to telling the truth in his public statements, the guy is shooting 80.
Filip Bondy of the New York Daily News buried this lede in a column today, perhaps because it was coming from one source. Though it wouldn't surprise me since it would cut down on what figures to be an excessive security tab next week:
Woods is not invited to stay on the course grounds overnight during the tournament, as he apparently had requested, according to a source.
Only amateurs and members - Woods is an honorary member, which only gets him into the champions' locker room - are allowed to stay overnight on the course. The amateurs lodge in a 30x40 foot Crow's Nest above the clubhouse, which sleeps up to five.
The cabin arrangement would have been extremely convenient for Woods, who surely wishes to avoid the hassles of commuting and media exposure.
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
