"Fighting for a miracle: Course designer David Kahn and his wife, Karen, search for strength in the most daunting battle imaginable"

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Alan Shipnuck at Golf.com shares the heartbreaking story of Amelia and Makenzie Kahn, daughters of David and Karen who are battling one of the world's rarest disease for children.

Carve out a few minutes for this one. 

A Topgolf fundraiser for a research-based foundation related to Batten's Disease is this Monday. Shipnuck explains:

With such a tiny potential market, drug companies have little incentive to put resources into studying the disease and trying to develop a cure, or even ways to slow its symptoms. And so the Kahns are taking on this fight themselves, having formed the ForeBatten Foundation. "That golfy play on words with ‘fore' might be a little corny," says David, "but it speaks to our mission: Watch out, Batten."

This Monday, March 12, the ForeBatten Foundation will host its inaugural fundraiser at TopGolf in Scottsdale. The ambitious goal is to raise the $800,000 needed to fund a critical new research study. David has tapped his many friends and contacts in golf to assemble a dazzling array of auction items, including a pair of Berckmans Place tickets for the final round of this year's Masters; a dream trip for four to Bandon Dunes; tee times everywhere from Winged Foot to Riviera to Oakmont to Los Angeles Country Club; unique experiences, ranging from a private tennis lesson with Andy Roddick to a round of golf with Paige Spiranac; and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to play the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnyland Farms, the cultish, intensely private Dick Wilson design (restored in 2011 by Jackson Kahn) that has long been a private playground for ambassadors and Presidents.

Head's Up For Par-3 Course Fans: The Cradle By The Numbers

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Maybe your course, city or club is considering a par-3 course? Well, then say thanks the social media and golf professional team at Pinehurst for documenting early numbers on their new short course. 

Sounds like a lot of fun is taking place. If only golf had about 1000 more of these sprinkled across the land.

  • More than 6,100 rounds were played on the new 9-hole, 789-yard short course.
  • The busiest day had 174 golfers play, and the largest group was a 12-some.
  • With a $50 greens fee that includes replay rounds that same day, the average time to play one round was just over an hour.
  • In those first few weeks, more than 220 juniors under 17 played for free with a paid adult while Pinehurst Country Club members played 2,100 rounds and hosted 706 guests.
  • Since opening, more than 30 holes-in-one have been recorded, with aces coming from players ages 8 to 84.
  • In a unique event, Pinehurst teaching professional Kelly Mitchum played the short course from sunrise to sunset on the winter solstice – the shortest day of the year – and finished 26 complete rounds for a total of 234 holes. He shot 12 under par for the day.

Revamped Pine Needles Gets Another U.S. Women's Open

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Beth Ann Nichols at Golfweek with all of the details on new/old look Pine Needles getting a record fourth U.S. Women's Open, this time sadly without patron saint Peggy Kirk Bell around but featuring revitalized architecture.

As he did at the must-play Mid-Pines, 36-year-old architect Kyle Franz is bringing some fun back to Donald Ross’ 1928 Pine Needles design. Not that there was anything wrong with the course restored about fifteen years ago by John Fought, but as The Forecaddie notes, with everything going on in the neighborhood, Pine Needles was starting to lack a certain visual sizzle that you can only find in the sandhills of North Carolina.

Some photos of the recent work, starting with this before/after (arrow on right of image will take you to the after):

It’s Time For Pebble Beach To Commision A Master Plan

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As the restoration movement continues to reinvigorate tired properties, the power and clarity delivered by a master plan document is often forgotten as the long term key to a healthy design.

Understandably, the excitement over better playing and looking golf holes becomes the focus after a restoration. But these projects almost never commenced without a document evaluating the original design’s evolution or the changes necessary to improve things. They also provide a fine opportunity for vital “under-the-hood” improvements required to carry a course into the future.

Countless classics were guided by these documents and now swear by them, sometimes religiously clinging to the plan without some wiggle room to make modifications. But given the history of green committees, ironclad plans prove wiser than leaving leeway for amateur architects to leave their mark.

The latest addition to Pebble Beach demonstrates, in glaring fashion, the danger of not having a master plan or a genuine grasp of the architectural high-point of a course. The planting of South African gazanias on one of golf’s most beautiful locales needing no help suggests it is time for America’s national golfing treasure to commission a serious master plan. To not recognize the architectural and landscape malpractice suggests either too many or not enough cooks are in the Pebble Beach kitchen.

There really is no shame in having reached this point, as most of the best courses in the world were driven to consider their design past and future after some sort of gaffe. Nearly in every case it was not a general realization of architectural decline, but instead something as gaudy as a goofy gazania bed.

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Besides the non-native component, accentuated by seeing actual wildflowers sprouting randomly on the gorgeous cliffs of Pebble Beach, this “look at me” execution may be the most robust splash of color since Dorothy, Toto and friends were off to see the Wizard. (Only they waded through fields of poppies, the state flower in California that bloom in springtime.)

Taking a hard look at Pebble Beach’s design evolution and targeting the course at its peak would help the famed resort understand priorities in aesthetics, strategy and playability. There has been a sense that doing so would damage the grand story of amateurs Jack Neville and Douglas Grant, commissioned by Samuel Morse and concocting the masterpiece we know today. Their masterful routing will always be integral to the Pebble Beach story, however, design trends evolved over the decade following their effort and the course ultimately came together with touches from Herbert Fowler, Alister MacKenzie, and then most significantly, thanks to Chandler Egan and Robert Hunter's pre-1929 U.S. Amateur remodel. Egan reached the semi-finals of that amateur and is one of America's greatest amateur golfers.

A study of that 1929 effort would show larger and more intricate green shapes and a better attempt at injecting a sense of naturalness on a magnificent site plagued in early days by geometric and unsightly features. The old images below validate the unique qualities of the 1929 version and while the current ownership of Pebble Beach has taken the resort from hard times to grand stewardship, the golf course vision has fallen behind the clarity they've shown in maintaining the overall Pebble Beach community. It's time for the resort to consider restoration professionals who can identify the best features, understand how the course has evolved, and steer Pebble Beach in a direction that best embodies the course at its peak. Given the importance of the course, perhaps even a bake-off style process open to many architects will provide even more clarity.

From a strictly business perspective, I suspect such a plan would right the rankings ship, which has seen Pebble Beach slipping in all of the major magazine rankings. While this amazing place is not in danger of failing just because magazine panelists are giving lower golf course grades, they are sending a message: Pebble Beach is not as good as it should be.

As I argued this week on Golf Central, the design is actually underrated and should be the undisputed No. 1 course in America. Currently, it is not, and a bed of gazanias won't help make golf's most beautiful setting any prettier.  The flower bed merely highlights the need to commission a master plan.

Above the 7th hole, 1929 U.S. Amateur and 2018 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am along with more scenes from the old days:

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23's Latest Comeback: Hobe Sound Course Project Back On, To Be Designed By Weed

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Bobby Weed! He's a fine architect, even finer family man and great friend of the game.

And now he's the architect of record for Michael Jordan's Grove XXIII, the on-again, off-again, very much on-again exclusive answer to the Bear's Club. Originally thought to be Tom Doak's project to lose, Jordan has turned to Weed for what sounds very much like a course aimed at lure a few tour pros from Bear's Club.

From the Forecaddie:

The par-72 layout includes plans for tees ranging from 5,445 yards up to 7,470. Weed is excited about finding a way to challenge players, with bunkers planned deep into the fairway landing areas, some 330-340 yards off the back tees. Plus he’s got some special angles worked up.

“I’m going to be in their head,” he told the Man Out Front.

The full press release announcing the project that is scheduled to open next year:

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Florida (January 20, 2018) – Bobby Weed Golf Design (www.bobbyweed.com) has been selected to design the golf course at GROVE XXIII, an exclusive, members-only private club under construction in Hobe Sound, Fla. NBA legend and avid golfer Michael Jordan is the majority partner in GROVE XXIII. The golf course is scheduled to be ready for play in 2019.

 “Knowing the caliber of the membership and Michael’s passion for golf, we are designing a forward-thinking, progressive layout,” said Weed. “Golf course architects are in the best position to address how technology has changed strategic design.

“This project is an opportunity to update how architects provide all players with a fun and interesting challenge. It will be a course for tomorrow, a course with a refined edge.”

Weed is living on site throughout the duration of construction in order to personally shape features and supervise the work.

About Grove XXIII

Set on the site of a former citrus grove, the golf course is routed with the south Florida trade winds in mind. The two nines wrap around each other while traversing the site in opposing directions. This dynamic layout ensures that golfers will feel the breeze from every quarter.

The routing also features a unique crossover at the 5th and 14th tees, where golfers can switch from one nine to the other and still finish out a nine-hole loop. This singular feature offers the membership four nine-hole permutations, significantly enhancing both daily set-up and member tournament format possibilities.

Weed continued, “We are using proprietary player performance data to help establish the dimensions of features and rethinking the tenets of risk and reward that have long guided strategic golf design, but are stagnant today, especially in the face of equipment technology.”

The Weed design team has been provided with these player performance data by Darren May, co-founder of “Every Ball Counts” and appointed golf coach and ambassador to GROVE XXIII.

“The team environment encouraged by Bobby Weed allows a free flow of very valuable information,” May said. “To see this information integrated in the course design, and be part of the process, is extremely exciting.”

An intimate, contemporary clubhouse will be elevated above the open and expansive 225-acre property, offering long vistas to every golf hole.

Updated Plans For Woods-Designed Chicago Park District Course

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The Chicago Park District presented an refined vision that merges Jackson Park and South Shore golf courses, reports Lolly Bowean for the Tribune. The project, with players from Mark Rolfing to Tiger Woods to Mike Keiser to Barack Obama, could be a future host of PGA Tour events if it happens.

Community concerns were behind the revised routing and presentation. Cost is still very much an issue:

For more than a year, there has been a push to transform the two golf courses into a PGA Tour-worthy course. Constructing the new course would cost about $30 million and it would take another $30 million to make infrastructure improvements, said Michael Kelly, Park District general superintendent and CEO. At the public hearing, officials said much of the money would come from private donations, but a firm spending plan was not presented.

And there was this, where I'm pretty sure the writer innocently left out the key word "public":

Beau Welling, who is helping design the course for TGR, said the reason Tiger Woods wants to complete the project is because he sees it as an opportunity to improve a course that serves the public, not just elite athletes.

“I’ve never seen him so excited about a project,” Welling said at a news conference before the public meeting. “Tiger Woods is really about meaningful projects that have impact,” he said later. “It’s really about the community. Tiger Woods grew up on golf courses … this is a very special thing (for him).”

The updated routing:

 

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Oakmont: The Shrinking Of Short Grass

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Ryan Farrow did an aerial overlay of the famed Oakmont Country Club from 1938 vs. 2017 and found that more bunkers have been added while there has been a huge drop in fairway acreage and width.

The club's tree removal program undoubtedly impacts the turf shift to rough, but that's not the entire story. Something else has happened in that time. Oh, right, the top players are hitting it about 80 yards longer.

Coul Links Fight: "The billionaire vs. the fly"

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Thanks to reader Steven for Chris Baraniuk's pretty one-sided take on Coul Links and the efforts to block this proposed Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw design near Dornoch.

It was hard to forge through the piece after seeing the architects identified as "developers." And I am curious about branding Mike Keiser a billionaire, but mostly I was struck that the fight now seems to be over preserving the site due to a fly.

Now, I love all critters and never want to see golf invading a rare habitat but...

The specimen is a few millimeters in length, but it’s easy to make out the chunkiness of its thorax and the proud shape of its wings.

This is Botanophila fonsecai, Fonseca’s seed fly. It was caught in 1996 on a beach beside Dornoch in northeast Scotland, and it’s part of a collection being cataloged by Stephen Moran, an entomologist who lives nearby.

Presented in a box full of remarkably similar species, the fly does not look particularly special — and yet it is.

As far as we know, Botanophila fonsecai exists in only one place in the world: a roughly six-mile strip of coastline, adjacent to Dornoch and the nearby village of Embo. Its entire world is estimated to be less than a single square mile; its population size is unknown.

If this fine project dies because of a fly, then we know co-developer Todd Warnock was right, this was about the current American president and his course near Aberdeen.

 

“We play four or five each year that are very solid. Most of the others are pretty weak, honestly.”

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Golfweek's Eamon Lynch talks to some interesting male golfers who are tuned into golf architecture and who generally have to tune out most courses week-to-week.

Besides great insights from Geoff Ogilvy and Zac Blair, I enjoyed this from Frank Nobilo on elite players, which is even more reason to step up the design nuance and risk-reward setup!

“He finds the weakness and exploits it. You take the liberties that your own game allows,” Nobilo said.

Nobilo notes that Johnson hit driver on eight of the last nine holes at the Plantation Course.

”At no stage is he considering what the designer had in mind, or for that matter who they are,” Nobilo said. “He only thinks what advantage he can gain.”

A man doesn’t need to waste time mulling risk when he can fly it all and reap the reward.

And this from Ogilvy on non-major tour courses he's play if architecture and brain engagement were the only pre-requisites for schedule-making.

I asked Ogilvy how many non-major events he’d compete in if he only played courses that engaged his brain. Kapalua. Riviera. Pebble Beach … Long pause.

“I’m starting to run out of courses,” he said. “Which is a shame. It’s a business and we have to go where the money goes. But strategically interesting architecture generally produces better tournaments and winners. Augusta National is so good at finding the guy who has got every part of his game – including his head – going that week. That principle remains everywhere. The more interesting questions a course asks, the more the cream rises to the top.”

 

"Year after unveiling, what’s latest on Tiger Woods’ Chicago golf project?"

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Not much, appears to be the answer from Teddy Greenstein.

In this Chicago Tribune update, Greenstein speaks to developer Mike Keiser, a consultant and donor for the rebuilding of two rundown muni's into a Tiger Woods redesign complimenting the Obama Presidential Libary.

While Keiser blames bureacrats and red tape, the ambitious design sounds like the main culprit.

But as Keiser knows, building a golf course on the South Side is way more complicated than doing it in rural Wisconsin. Here’s why:

•This isn’t merely adding a course. Golfers loyal to the Jackson Park and South Shore courses fear something will be taken from them. Or made more expensive.

•The construction of an underpass at 67th Street to link the properties could cost around $25 million. Other expensive roadwork needs to be done so golfers no longer have to dodge cars between holes. And the shoreline might have to be fortified.

•Some residents are wary of traffic issues during construction and the relocation of a nature sanctuary.

Golf, Golf Digest Present Peculiar "Best New Course" Awards

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As the golf industry no longer churns out courses or even sees consistency in the renovation market, Golf and Golf Digest struggle to present their annual year-end "Best New" awards with any consistency. Or logic.

Golf's is an odd list given the international courses few in its U.S.-based readership will play. Then there is the blessing of Streamsong Black as the year's "best new course of the year" and Sand Valley as the year's "best new course you can play." Even though Streamsong is a resort you very much can play, with the Black opening in September.

The Golf categories:

BEST NEW COURSE YOU CAN PLAY

BEST NEW COURSE OF THE YEAR

BEST NEW PRIVATE COURSE/INTERNATIONAL COURSE

RENOVATION OF THE YEAR

BEST NEW COURSE YOU CAN PLAY (HONORABLE MENTION)

SPECIAL CITATION: Spectacular New Short Courses

Congratulations to all who won, even though we don't know why or who picked you under what criteria.

Golf Digest's categories appear to make a little more sense, though what is presented ultimately is pretty confusing.

In 2014Gamble Sands was deemed the best new course in America.

In 2015, Golf Digest acknowledged 10 best new courses, 10 best remodels that somehow couldn’t find space for Winged Foot East, where the restoration work re-opened in 2015 has been lauded for sensitively recapturing an American classic. Given that Golf Digest pays dues for two of its editorial members to be Winged Foot members, a not-enough-votes excuse seems a stretch.

2016 saw three each of a Best New Private, Public and Remodeled categories. Still no luck for Winged Foot East. But the awards featured extensive panelist comments that added some fun reading.

And now in 2017 the marketplace forced another new approach, with this explanation from Golf Digest:

Still not enough new courses to warrant New Public and New Private categories, so the 15 new courses nominated for consideration competed in a single Best New Courses race. But with 85 remodeled courses nominated, we decided to split our Best New Remodel survey into three categories to reflect the wide range of projects in today’s design industry. Major Remodel involves a total redesign with little regard to the original architecture. Renovation improves a design but sticks to the original routing. Restoration strives to honor the original architecture. What about “blow-up” jobs, where an existing course is so drastically altered (“blown up”) that it hardly resembles the original? That was up to each architect and individual club to decide whether to compete as a Best New candidate or Best Major Remodel.

The list produced some pretty strange results, most notably with the once-loved Quail Hollow, now loathed by some tour players who just a few years ago were declaring it one of the PGA Tour's best venues. After last year's PGA Championship, most expect the club to remedy the gruesome 4th hole addition, an absurd mess of a hole. That did not stop the panel for giving high marks and placing Quail Hollow as their second best remodel behind Jackson and Kahn'sFazio's MPCC Dunes remodel.

Even though the project was largely envisioned and carried out by Fazio's former shapers, Golf Digest gave all the credit to Fazio. The club's own first placque acknowledges all of the aforementioned names.

Most inexplicably, Torrey Pines North, which stuck to its original routing except for flipping the nines, finished third in major remodel when it was pretty clearly just an insipid renovation. Did switching nines really become grounds for a major remodel label? 

The TPC Sawgrass won for best renovation with its new turf and one redesigned hole. On that basis, it may be eligible annually given its turbulent renovation history.

The Old White TPC won its second best new award, having won the best new remodel in 2007. And even though it won this time under the restoration label, Keith Foster made significant changes to the award winner. He restored around the remodel. Got that?

Something tells me after looking at the Golf Digest selections, the panel would not care for the things Matt Ginella and I presented as our ways of evaluating golf courses. From Morning Drive's Design Week: