Man Cave Gem Up For Auction: Augusta National Entrance Sign

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While my mancave budget would go to the Charles Lees photogravure of Musselburgh that Green Jacket Auctions is offering in their latest sale, I know that arguably the single most dreamy man cave item ever to be sold at auction will be the original Augusta National Golf Club entrance sign that hung in front of Magnolia Lane, circa the 1960s.

From the description:

It was discarded by Augusta National many decades ago, but was (thankfully) saved by an Augusta, Georgia resident. That original owner didn't understand its value to the collecting community until he briefly posted it on eBay six years ago. That auction sent collectors into a flurry (and we would know, we immediately heard about it and had every intention of buying it), but the sign was quickly pulled from auction and quietly sold to a collector that made a substantial offer. Though we missed out on this historic sign in 2010, we are overwhelmed with the opportunity of finally offering it for public auction.

House Q&A, ShackHouse Podcast Episode 1 From The Ringer

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John Ourand at SBJ beat me to the earth-shattering reveal: The Ringer is getting into golf and to host the latest addition to their podcast network they've enlisted longtime Bill Simmons podcast confidante Joe House and yours truly.

You can subscribe by going to the usual spots: Soundcloud, iTunes or if you'are an Overcast app user, just search for ShackHouse. (And I have to say this while I can, the show is current #1 on iTunes in Sports/Recreation and 15th overall.)

Simmons discussed the new podcast at the 33:00 minute mark of this week's Rollin' With House episode and noted the golf podcast world lacking any standout shows. That may be true, but as with most things, golf is late to the podcast game but there are some folks building followings and helping the sport catch up with the times.

As for ShackHouse, 21 episodes are scheduled around most of golf's biggest events, though we won't shy away from tackling topics outside of the pro golf realm. Mostly we just hope to add some fun, informed conversation to your golf media consumption menus.

The best thing so far with the show? All of House's fans getting over the shock that he not only plays golf, but follows golf religiously.

A few questions with House, who kindly answered even though he's enjoying a family vacation in Jamaica.

GS: Why a golf pod for your 1st as co-host?

JH: I have been pestering Simmons for a full decade now to get back into the game so we can tackle middle-age in the most cliched way possible. Aside from a 6 month stint where he caught the bug - and then promptly lost it again - no luck. It's a true fact that we have never played a single round of golf together in our 25 years of being pals. Though I did kick his ass in an epic 36 hole putt-putt match down in Orlando Florida that also included Rembert Browne and David Jacoby (that's a story for another day...) Anyhow, I believe this podcast was his clever way of getting me to shut up and stop bothering him about golf.

GS: You're a big consumer of all things media and golf is going through a similar transition to the digital era that other sports have dealt with. So what do you watch/read? What is different about golf media vs. other sports?

JH: I am an avid and fervent consumer of all golf media. Obviously the Golf Channel is in heavy rotation. I read Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, Golf Illustrated, Golf WRX, Golf World and Golf Playboy. I may be mis-remembering one or two of those. I enjoy very much the Twitter-feed of the dude(s) behind @NoLayingUp. I visit Pat Mayo and Geoff Fienberg's weekly picks:gambling angles and YouTube chat. The Instagram feed of GolfProTracer is a rabbit hole I go down for about an hour a week. And GeoffShackelford.com, duh. One thing I have been on the lookout for - that seems to be easier to find in other sports media - is a person or place that is regularly synthesizing the incredible data on the performance of the pros each week.  And breaking it down into digestible bites for a dummy like me. It's easy to get nuggets on the accuracy of the dudes who win each week, but I'm also interested in some analytics that help explain/provide context for where the guys that didn't win came up short.

GS: Your favorite Course in the DC area?

JH: This is an easy one, there is nothing like the East Potomac Golf Course in East Potomac Park. I wish I could write this up in a way that doesn't sound like I'm shilling for them, but it's one of the two courses where I've bested 80 so lovefest. The facility is owned and maintained by the federal government and situated on a tiny piece of land that juts into the Potomac River barely 10 minutes from downtown DC. There is an 18 hole course and two other 9s (one executive, one par-3) that get up to 90,000 rounds a year according to the folks who run the joint and the whole track sits at or below sea-level so conditions are never what anyone would call pristine. Two things make it special (not including my 78): it is a place where you can potentially play golf with someone from anywhere on planet earth. I have played there with Brits, Germans, Japanese, Australians, Africans and the rarest of all - native Washingtonians. Secondly, the views and experience are pure DC. On no less than 5 holes, the Washington Monument is a good aiming point. The Marine Barracks are across the river so if you are playing at the right time, you can catch the afternoon bugle call. And I have had the President's trio of helicopters pass overhead at least a half-dozen times.

GS: You're a renowned foodie, your best golf course food?

JH: Again, have to rep the DMV here a little bit.  Breakfast is served all day long at the historical Langston Golf Course in NE DC (opened in 1939, first non-segregated course in the DC area) and the breakfast sandwiches are extraordinary. Do not be afraid to ask for jelly on the egg & cheese. I have also had the good fortune to play the golf course at Piedmont Driving Club outside of Atlanta a couple times.  The cup of 'cue at the turn (a Dixie cup filled with five bites of pulled pork) is quite brilliant and quite delicious and I have never been through there with just one cup.

Video: Save Lions Municipal Golf Course

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The University of Texas has plans to bulldoze and develop the historic, important Lions Municipal course in Austin.

With the WGC Match Play set to play out at a lush country club course surrounded by high-end real estate and three-story corporate tents, there's something very unsettling knowing that a historically important muni, urban green space and starting point for Austin golfers is doomed. Especially since UT-Austin has the largest university endowment in America.

Here's a good film on the course. And a reminder, as I noted in the Forward Press, the Criquet gang hosts a fundraiser Friday to help raise money for the fight.

Rejoice! Austin Country Club May Favor No One In Particular

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I can't spot an obvious design bias after getting reacquainted with Austin Country Club. The inward nine features three par-5s that will allow the bombers to attack, but also features some par-4s and 3's that will reward the patient precisionist. And the impeccable putting surfaces look to be about 12 feet and have no shortage of contour, aiding the creative minds at this week's WGC Dell Match Play.

Throw in the matter that the event starts on a Wednesday at a course that only really Jordan Spieth has played extensively, and there seems to be no obvious bias. Phil Mickelson admitted to be a little behind in his course knowledge preparation (Ryan Lavner writes for GolfChannel.com), which is probably a view shared by most of the players and caddies.

All of this is why I revised my bracket tonight and backed down off of my Rory McIlroy win selection. Of course, as Jim McCabe presents at Golfweek.com, unpredictability is the essence of this event.

Not that McIlroy can't dominate the course or handle the greens. It's the wind. The course was exposed to a healthy breeze today and much more is in the forecast. And as much as I love McIlroy in match play making 7-8 birdies a round, I don't love him in strong winds on a short, tight Pete Dye course (yes he won at Kiawah, but he could hit driver there...ACC looks like a 4-5 drives per round course).

Spieth's vaulted into my top spot based on his local knowledge, good karma after suggesting he might turn to reading things printed on paper over social media, clearing the air with his caddie, and his love of match play.

BTW, if you haven't filled out a bracket in our league, you still have time!

A few images from the course this afternoon:

 

 

. @justinprose99 under watchful eye of @truegolfcompany & Mark Fulcher, par-5 14th Austin CC @dellmatchplay @pgatour

A photo posted by Geoff Shackelford (@geoffshac) on Mar 22, 2016 at 4:47pm PDT

 

 

Butch Would Be Happy To Spend A Day With Tiger!

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Matthew Dunn of the Daily Express reports that former Tiger instructor and former Phil instructor Butch Harmon is willing to remain a former Tiger instructor, with a big caveat.

A Day With Butch!

Tiger? Come on, olive branch extended!

"Would I be open to going back and working with him properly? I have got more players than I can handle right now, so that would never happen.

"But if he ever wanted my opinion I would be more than happy to give it to him. I would have to know about his body and what his health issues are but I don't think it is going to happen - but I'd be willing to give him my opinion.

"I would be open to spending a day with him, watch him hit balls and give him my opinions."

Ahhhhhhhhhh...yet more hope for world peace.

2016 WGC Match Play Brackets: Better Than Most?

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Playing with the Dell bracket, there are some really fun pods and potentially dreamy quarter and semi-final matchups if the favorites advance (if, if, if). Here is the GeoffShackelford.com league page. FYI I have Rory in the final against Ryan Moore. And I've installed Bubba as the 2-1 favorite to make the first "match play is all luck" comment.

As Doug Ferguson notes in his roundup of the WGC Match Play bracket draw, the marquee match up features old pals Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas. PGATour.com's Mike McCallister offers a similar breakdown, highlighting that aforementioned match-up plus other intriguing draws.

The GolfChannel.com gang picks their toughest pools

The AJGA shared this fun photo of Spieth and Thomas, circa 2007 and Tweeted by the PGA Tour: 

 

Q&A With Kevin Robbins, Harvey Penick Biographer

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Kevin Robbins has authored a biography of Harvey Penick due out April 5 (though Robbins will be signing exclusively Wednesday at the Austin CC pro shop). The former Austin American Statesman writer is still on top of the Austin golf scene and is a professor at the University of Texas School of Journalism.

I've just begun his wonderful book and for fans of golf or biographies, it's just the kind of celebration of an American life that you could hope for.

As discussed on Morning Drive today, this week should be about Harvey Penick as much as it's about Austin and the country club. So I was thrilled that Robbins could be featured in this week's Forward Press, and that he has written this PGATour.com piece on Penick. Here is his interview in its entirety:

GS: What inspired you to do a biography of Harvey Penick?

KR: My grandmother gave me the Little Red Book for Christmas in 1992. Every chapter felt like an epiphany. I’d never read anything like it. It completely changed the way I looked at golf. I circled words, underlined passages, dogeared pages, filled the margins with stars and check marks and exclamation points. I bought the three other books and loved them just as much. 

All these years later, after I’d written many times about Harvey and his family and his pupils as a golf writer for the Austin American-Statesman, I was lying in bed, trying to think of a book idea, because I was a college teacher now, and college teachers are expected to write books. I originally wanted tell the man-in-full story of the 1995 Masters. But Ben Crenshaw was tepid about the idea, and I really needed his participation for it to work. Literally the very next night, lying in bed again, I realized I was missing the point entirely. I didn’t want to write about the 1995 Masters. I wanted to write about the reason we remember the 1995 Masters. That reason was Harvey. 

GS: Most people know of Harvey through his book or Ben Crenshaw’s Masters win. What does the book delve into that will most surprise people about his life?

KR: Many things, I hope. Harvey was an excellent player. He competed with or against Walter Hagen, Ben Hogan, Horton Smith, John Bredemus, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Betsy Rawls and many other titans of the game. He played pre-PGA Tour professional tournaments throughout Texas, including the early Texas Opens at Brackenridge Park. He finished in the middle of the pack at the 1950 Texas PGA, notable because his prized student, a young man in cuffed khakis named Morris Williams Jr., beat Byron Nelson to win. Williams won the three major Texas championships that year — the Texas Junior, the Texas PGA and the Texas Amateur. He remains the only player to have done that. 

The book shines a light on players such as Williams, who died three years later, before he turned 24. He might have been the best player Harvey ever taught had he not been killed in a plane crash in Florida. I hope readers will enjoy learning about how young Harvey learned to play — by watching the greats, including first-hand encounters with Francis Ouimet and Bobby Jones — and how he turned those observations into the contents of his red notebook, the forebear of the Little Red. But I hope also readers will enjoy meeting and learning about players such as Williams, Ed White, Terry Jastrow, Cindy Figg-Currier and many others who never made the World Golf Hall of Fame but have compelling stories nonetheless.

I also love the story behind the Little Red Book. On one level, it’s a story of the relationship between two unlikely collaborators: Harvey and his co-author, the larger-than-life Bud Shrake. On another, it’s a story of purpose. Harvey was not well in 1991, when he and Shrake began work on the Little Red Book. The project gave Harvey another reason to live. It gave him new meaning. This is a biography, but it’s also a story of the importance of identity.

GS: You are teaching journalism at UT. What’s your sense of the state of golf journalism today?

KR: I miss Herbert Warren Wind. I mean that both literally and figuratively.

I very much admire Alan Shipnuck and Michael Bamberger and Karen Crouse and others who tell wonderful stories about and through golf, but I’m sentimental for the time when Golfweek and Golf World arrived in the mailbox with evocative, well-crafted game stories and profiles that I could really settle into, for when The New Yorker gave Wind 6,000 words to go deep and long and broad. Golf seems so well suited to literary journalism. Who was it who said the smaller the ball, the better the writing? He, or she, was right.

I don’t follow golf journalism quite as much as I used to. I still read Doug Ferguson and will until his last tournament. I think Jason Sobel is delightful. I miss Bill Fields.

I like what you, Shane Bacon, Shane Ryan and others have brought to golf coverage. You’re responsible for a shift, I think, to journalism that is less cloying, more critical, less reverential and more accountable, in the tradition of Gary Van Sickle and Jeff Rude. I also think Golf Channel is doing good work, both on the broadcast and the website. There are more places to go for golf coverage and commentary. Everyone seems to make everyone better.

GS: The location where Harvey started as pro at Austin Country Club is not the current location, correct? What’s the backstory on the club’s move?

KR: The club has moved twice. The growing city of Austin eventually surrounded the original location, so the club moved east — to the country, as it were — in 1950. Perry Maxwell designed the course there, and that’s where Harvey made his greatest impression, teaching players such as Rawls, Kathy Whitworth and Mickey Wright, as well as Crenshaw and Tom Kite when they were boys. The club moved in 1984 to its current location in Davenport Ranch, in the beautiful and prosperous hills of far west Austin. Another club, Onion Creek (the birthplace of the Champions Tour, it should be noted), had begun siphoning members in the 1970s, and ACC wanted to relocate to where the money was moving in Austin. That direction was west.

Your site host meeting Mr. Penick in 1990.GS: How do you think Austin CC will work as a tournament venue?

KR: Great question. I've played ACC a number of times, but not until the 2012 Texas Mid-Amateur qualifier did I truly learn how to score on it. It isn’t a bomber’s golf course. You have to hit spots with tee shots — sometimes in order to avoid losing a ball in Lake Austin or in a canyon on what will play in the Dell as the front nine. It’s Texas, so you play in wind. It’s a spectacular second-shot course.

I think it favors players who excel with wedges. It’s a short course, so even with fairway metals and long irons from the tee, these players will have many approaches of 120 yards or less. Three of the par-five holes, and maybe four (I don’t know which tee they’ll play on No. 16), are reachable, so little scrambling chips and pitches will be crucial.

It will be cozy. The club isn’t easy to get to, or to walk. It’s bound in many places by the lake, the canyons or, to a lesser extent, neighborhoods houses mansions. It’s not roomy like, say, an Oakmont or Augusta National. Think Colonial, only up-and-down like Augusta — with less space for spectators. 

GS: What’s your sense on the outcome of the Lyons muni situation?

KR: The lease between the city and the University of Texas Board of Regents expires in 2019. A wonderful group called Save Muny has made a lot of noble progress in advancing Lions’ rightful role in desegregation, but I don’t think that will have any consequence on system’s goal to extract more money out of that incredibly valuable land. I’m already preparing my farewell letter to sweet Lions.

GS: Favorite TexMex spot in Austin?

KR: Trap question. Mine is Matt’s El Rancho, with about 33 other places in a close tie for second.

GS: What’s the community interest level in this event?

KR: High. Folks are beyond excited. They want to see Jason Day and Adam Scott and Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth and Phil Mickelson. They also want to see what ACC looks like beyond the lakeside holes they see from the Pennybacker Bridge on Loop 360. You can’t see much of ACC from roads or streets. I know some very good players in Austin who’ve never been inside the gates. So I think part of the enthusiasm has to do with television coverage of the front side of the course (the back-nine holes every other week of the year).

GS: Favorite golf course in Austin?

KR: Another trap question. I have a rotation of four, and I often answer differently, depending on the occasion. 

If this were any other week of the year, I might say The Hills Country Club (designed by Jack Nicklaus, a shot-carver’s dogleggy dream, home of the long-lost Champions Tour event in Austin known as the FedEx Kinko’s Classic), the Onion Creek Club (designed by Jimmy Demaret, birthplace of the Champions Tour in 1978, the prettiest little cypress-lined course east of Houston) or Austin Golf Club (designed by Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore, a quiet delight of walkable purity — it feels like a sanctuary to me -- tucked into the ranch land west of Austin). 

But it’s not any other week of the year, so my answer is this: ACC.


You can buy the book from Amazon here.

Reminder: Bracketology Golf Style! 2016 WGC Match Play

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No prizes this time around, just the joy of trying to guess who will prevail on a course few of the players know in the WGC Dell Match Play.

The big WGC draw is on Golf Channel at 7 pm ET, and I explained how it works in the Forward Press, plus I guaranteed no leaks on Twitter!

I've started a league for this site and hope the link works here.

Darren Clarke Is Prepared To Lose Friends Over Ryder Picks

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Oliver Brown of the Daily Mail goes into plenty of detail with Darren Clarke well out from the Ryder Cup, including the captain's obsessive compulisve storage of clothes depending on sizes due to his fluctuating weights (based on the photos taken two weeks ago, he's skewing back toward the Monty weight division again).

Anyway, it's not until late September and the stage for drama is already being set as stalwarts Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter look unlikely to make the team on points.

Considering that the captain has three primary jobs--finding rainsuits that don't leak, informing players when they are being benched, and not running over spectators in the captain's buggy--Brown believes that Clarke should have job #2 covered:

It is unlikely the 2011 Open champion will be scribbling potential pairings on scraps of paper during practice and trying to pass them off as a sandwich order, as Sir Nick Faldo did at Valhalla in 2008. Clarke will have a Plan A, a Plan B and a Plan C. He will organise. He will be involved. He will man-manage. He will know the characters of each of his players inside-out.

After a bunch of stuff about how he and Paul McGinley have patched things up (I know you were worried), Clarke admits he may lose some pals over his captain's picks in the name of winning.

Clarke knows he will face tough choices. Others have already wondered aloud whether he might be tempted to offer preferential treatment to old pals like Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter if they fail to qualify automatically for Hazeltine and need to rely on being among Clarke’s three wildcard picks. Clarke snorts with contempt about that idea.

‘An old pals’ act?’ he says. ‘How could I possibly do that? The Ryder Cup is much, much more important than an old pals’ act. That does not happen. Under no circumstances would I let myself... that’s not going to happen. No chance.

'I would have no problem with saying to Lee I was picking a rookie instead of him for a wildcard. Lee would be my best mate but I would have no problem. Why? Because it’s for the team. It’s not individuals. You have got to manage individuals’ egos but the team is there together."

Video: Another 6-Year-Old With A Picture Perfect Swing

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Gavin Sanchez is 6 and loves to play golf.

With a swing like this, who can blame him. A future DCP and PGA Tour star in the making...


Another keeper with his little brother, stay with it to the end...


And this comes a month after seeing Godiva Kim's amazing swing. How do they do it!