The Caddy's Compendium...

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Thanks to reader Bill for this "Caddy's Compendium" by Margaret Erskine Cahill and posted on the Schott's Vocab blog at NYTimes.com. They were mostly new to me!

The jungle means the rough. While a day in the clouds is used to describe working on a hilly course. The Scotchman is the appellation bestowed upon professionals, regardless of country. Big house is the club house. Matinee loopers are so stigmatized because of their habit of reporting for duty late or in the afternoon.

Ice cream caddies are schoolboys who earn spending money through caddying, but who do not depend upon it for a living. A looping fool is a caddy who holds the record for doing the most caddying per day, per week or per season at any particular course.

Golfweek Debuts Top 40 Best New Courses List

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Who knew there were enough courses for a list? Actually, forty may be the entire list of new courses which looks hefty considering next year's will be a much shorter list.

What struck me more than a couple of startling slights was the sheer comedic value of some of the course names. And I'm not referring to the ones named after their developers. In the interest of kindness, I won't name names.

"These guys can thrill thousands with their shot-making -- and don't need to squirt vintage champagne over nightclub revellers to make themselves appear 'interesting'."

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A very nice column by Karl MacGinty makes a simple case that the need for more colorful characters is ultimately not a product of their off-course life, as in Anthony Kim's case, but what happens on the course and how the emotions, strategy and beauty of the game will bring out the color.
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“Next year when we go there, if it's not good, it'll get beat up because the other one was so good."

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Richard Oliver details the textbook PGA Tour move from classy old course near a population base to a new TPC course away from civilization. In this case it's the Champions Tour's 2011 AT&T Championship moving from classy old Oak Hills after this week, in favor of a new Pete Dye design outside of town at the TPC San Antonio. The players are besides themselves, but of course, they'll show up no matter where the suits send them.
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"Wild Green Yonder"

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Thanks to all the readers who emailed the link to Alastair Gordon's WSJ Magazine story on just how far the game has drifted from the kind of golf many of us love. He also touches on the surge in cross-country golf.

As we were starting to get a feel for the raw conditions, the back nine opened with a series of surreal encounters as I climbed over a barbed-wire fence and faced an enormous bull who seemed aggravated that I’d sliced my ball into his paddock. The 12th green was completely hidden within a mysteriously bowl-shaped depression within a hillock (cnoc in Scottish Gaelic) and I had to shoot blindly over a jagged ridge and scamper up to the top of the cnoc, where I found that my ball had landed in this secret little valley and rolled within a few feet of the pin. By this point we had torn up our scorecards in a moment of giddy liberation, and Iain turned to me with a bright expression and said: “This is the only way that golf should ever be played. No status, no fancy pants.” And he was right. We could have played stark naked and putted with stale baguettes and no one would have cared or known.

Gordon also lists some of his favorite remote golf experiences.