When you come to think of it that is the secret of most of the great holes all over the world. They all have some kind of a twist. C.B. MACDONALD
Thanks to reader Bill for Kerry Singe's look at the Trump's possible purchase of Point Lake and Golf Club, a Greg Norman design with a Cape Cod themed clubhouse. Cue the chandeliers!
The club's board of governors invited the Trumps, whose company owns 12 clubs, to consider purchasing the Point more than two years ago.
With a reputation for being lavish and high-end, Trump golf clubs often feature bright, open floor plans, ornate decorations and massive chandeliers. Equally upscale are the prices and fees the clubs charge, say people who have visited the property.
Trump said he and his father share a passion for golf and love building things and shaping land. They are currently building a high-profile and controversial golf project in Scotland.
"We love making things amazing," Trump said.
Reader Tim believes Charlie Rymer confused Thursday's Chevron World Challenge postgame coverage with a Vancouver Canuck's pre-game show from the 80s. I thought it was a coral snake rushing up his chest. Or a psychedelic take on the old San Diego Padres uniform. Either way, a viewer discretion should have been advised.
Speaking of the Chevron, Ron Sirak reports on Tiger's opening 69 that started with a retro-Tiger flash and ended in difficult winds and some bizarre shots from the field.
Sean Martin notes the huge scoring average increase Thursday at Q-School where winds created some wild standings swings and one WD.
As eager as I know most are to read about David Duval's appearance in the finals (as profiled by Brian Wacker), I'm partial to Jim Achenbach's look at old guy Paul Claxton, a native of Claxton, Georgia, married to fruit cake company heiress Paula, father of children Paul and Paula, son to parents Paul and Paula. But no brothers named Larry, Darryl or Darryl.
Reflected Paul the golfer, who is witty enough to double as a comedian:
“We’re pretty simple. You only need to know a couple of names, and you can talk to all of us.”
Things can be a little different in the South. “Everybody thought we were related before we got married, but of course we weren’t,” said Claxton, pondering a confusion of names.
Playing on the 2011 Nationwide Tour, Claxton made 17 cuts in 26 tournaments. He won $140,544 to rank 40th on the final money list.
Back in 2008, he played on the PGA Tour but missed 15 cuts in 23 events. He lost his card and has been fighting ever since to get it back.
“My parents still ask me when I’m going to get a job and be like normal folks,” he said.
Tom Doak, one of the architects applying for the commission to design the Olympic course in Rio, has revealed on GolfClubAtlas.com that eight finalists are to be announced at any moment and is holding an informal contest to select the lucky winners.
Sean Martin reports high winds could make day two of Q-School play a nightmare. So far the scores aren't too horrible, so maybe the lads have been spared.
The PGA Tour's ShotLink folks have put together a dynamite package of year-end stats to pour over and inevitably I gravitated to the driving distance page. In it they share this statistical confirmation that core exercises really are the difference between today's Nicklaus' and Watson's and Nicklaus and Watson.
Really!
I know, the first round of the Chevron World Challenge may not normally be one of your top 5 "Must DVR" rounds of the year, but with weather forecasts calling for 50 m.p.h. Santa Ana winds this could be wild.
Jim Furyk explained in his pre-tournament press conference:
When you think about the weather that's coming in, what makes this golf course difficult is a lot of Jack Nicklaus's golf course designs are built to be played in the air. If you think of Muirfield in Ohio, one of my favorite golf courses, it's a golf course that if you're not bouncing the ball into a lot of greens, you're putting the ball up in the air and stopping on the greens. And it makes it very difficult in the wind. And it's the same with this golf course.
If the conditions are nice and the greens are soft, we can put the ball in the air and stop it and kind of maneuver around or over trouble, and with the winds kicking up and being I'm hearing 25 to 35 with gusts over 50 ‑‑ that's what I read this morning, gusts over 50, this place isn't ‑‑ it won't be playable. So I don't know if that's actually the weather report, but I read that on weather.com this morning. And it was worse last night when I checked. It was 25 to 40 and gusts over 60.
So supposed to start at midnight tonight and last till noon on Friday. So if we get weather like that, gusts over 50, the ball will not stay still on a green here. We have to put the ball in the air to play this golf course, so the wind, we're going to have to be very careful and hitting very solid shots to control the ball when you put it up in the air in a strong wind. I would expect scoring to be high, and I would expect the greens to be quite soft and quite slow.
I mean if you're going to get winds that are actually 35 miles an hour, I don't think you can cut the greens, to be honest with you. Or else it's not going to stay on the green. So it'll be interesting to see what the weather does and how everything plays out. It won't be any fun. I promise you that.
While Royal Melbourne was designed for the wind, I can confirm that Sherwood most definitely is not playable in high winds.
John Maginnes will be at Q-School for Golf Channel and sums up the final stage starting Wednesday at PGA West:
I honestly get a little queasy now just thinking about it and I haven't been to a Q-School in half a dozen years. I will be there this year on course for the Golf Channel and I feel like I will be returning to the scene of the crime that stole a piece of my soul and my youth. In return, I learned more about myself in a week than I have in any single year since.
Sean Martin previews the name players in the field and as always, I feel slightly dirty poring over the names of the souls who will be grinding it out over the next six days. Oh, but go ahead and look, it's not like they are standing in front of Home Depot looking for work. Yet.
Brian Wacker also looks at some of the better known names at Q-school.
Steve DiMeglio takes the William McGirt angle, talking to the heartbreak veteran who for three consecutive years at the second stage faced final hole putts to make it to the finals. You'll have to read the story to see how it turned out.
The PGA Tour's leaderboard is here, and their full coverage page can be accessed here.
I've been a little surprised at some of the reactions I've heard about Royal Melbourne's setup during the Presidents Cup. The complaints and grievances were from people who were speaking up not for the sake of griping, but instead, expressing their disappointment at their sense players could only play defensively due to excessive green speeds and the putting surfaces appearing dead.
There is no question that during Friday's hot, dry wind day the golfers were on defensive, but it would not have mattered what the staff and PGA Tour did to the greens, it was just one of those days. But they never lost control of the course.
As for the rest of the event, I would say we saw the ultimate in strategic golf and that the reaction people have had has more to do with how rarely we get to see the merging of strategic design, setup, and conditions calling on players to think.
First, on the subject of purple greens. A few things to remember:
- Royal Melbourne's bent, unique to the course and not available anywhere else, is a very dark shade of green, almost black, with some purplish blades. I was shocked by it at first sight and was even more shocked to see an iron application Tuesday of tournament week, but that was designed for a number of reasons, including the desire to not hear people say that the greens were purple.
- Television filters skew things. Did you notice the day the teams wore light blue shirts (twice for the Internationals, once for the U.S.)? To some of us the shirts appeared almost purple on television. So just like the yellow waves of Torrey Pines each year, we learn that television cameras and filters alter colors. That may have been the case here too.
- The club also uses a dark sand topdressing which may give hints of purple, while the sand the greens grow out of is a very dark color. But I can say having walked on them all four days, the greens appeared very healthy.
- Royal Melbourne's greens were never close to dying, nor were they prepared at a speed higher than 13 any day of the event. They were in the low 12s during Saturday's rain event. Fast for those contours, but never unmanageable if you were attacking from the proper angle.
And that leaves the "defensive" issue. Longtime readers know there is nothing I hate more than watching golf when players are constantly on the defensive and unable to attack a well-designed course with good thinking and shotmaking. If that was the case at Royal Melbourne, I'd be the first to point it out.
Instead, what I saw repeatedly was incorrect placement in the fairways or a refusal to hit run-up shots, leading to approaches not finishing near the hole. If a player and his caddie considered the hole location, figured out the best angle to approach from, the best shot to use and executed, he was rewarded.
But on many of Royal Melbourne's best holes, the line between best approach angle and a not-so-good angle is so fine that without announcer explanation of the course nuances (eh hem, Johnny!), the golf could look defensive or even goofy. This was definitely not the case at Royal Melbourne. And the positive player reactions would validate this.
After all, if the set-up was over-the-top, you would have heard them say so. Royal Melbourne was brilliant, I only wish we had more golf like we saw there.
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
