In April, 2011, right after Rory McIlroy’s meltdown in the final round of that year’s Masters, I predicted that Rory’s travails in Augusta would be viewed in retrospect as a minor glitch on his road to greatness— an aberration rather than a tendency. (Tiger’s weekend crumbles during this year’s majors, however, represent a trend.) Now […]
Posts
The PGA Championship’s Elimination of Bunkers –What’s Next?
The PGA’s decision to treat all those deep sandy pits that look exactly like bunkers at Kiawah’s Ocean Course during the PGA Championship this week as “sandy areas through the green” raises some interesting questions. The whole notion of “waste areas” has a provocative provenance. According to Forrest Richardson, a golf course architect based in […]
The PGA Championship, the Ocean Course, and the Menacing Geography of Pete Dye
Jim Furyk’s meltdown on the 72nd hole at Firestone last week foreshadowed what we’re likely to see a lot of at this week’s PGA Championship on the Ocean Course on Kiawah Island. Pete Dye knows how to plant fear deep into the heads of players even before they get to the first tee, and nowhere […]
A Grown-up Wins the Open Championship
Ernie Els’ unlikely victory in the Open Championship at Royal Lytham pumps a large dose of decency and grace into the weakened soul of golf. As much as Tiger Woods’ charisma and dominance have influenced golf to change in some undeniably better ways, his rude persona on the course, his grating boorishness and vulgarity, have […]
Links Golf and the Creation of Augusta National–and a Chance to Win the Golf Trip of a Lifetime
Links golf courses are not popular in China, where Augusta National is regarded as the beau ideal. This is ironic, because Bobby Jones and Alister Mackenzie both esteemed links course above all others, and the Old Course at St Andrews most of all. Mackenzie insisted that the “Spirit of St Andrews” pervaded Augusta National, although […]
Review of The Empty Family, by Colm Tóibín
In the spring of 2007, I attended a tribute hosted by Colm Tóibín in honor of novelist John McGahern at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin. An enthusiastic audience watched a series of clips from films either written by McGahern or based on his stories, with commentary on each provided by Tóibín. Tóibín spoke of […]
Bambi and the Art of Golf Course Design: An Appreciation
“Bill Coore spends weeks tramping around a work site. On a new project, his first task is to identify the easiest, most natural ways to move around the land, often guided by the paths that deer and other native animals have created.” John Paul Newport, The Wall Street Journal, “Zen and the Art of Golf […]
A Review of Arcadia, a Novel by Lauren Goff.
Arcadia, by Lauren Groff. Hyperion, March 13, 2012. 304 pages, $25.99. When I was in graduate school at the University of Rochester in the late sixties, the embers of the Second Great Awakening were still smoldering to ash in upstate New York. Known as the burned-over district because it was aflame with religious fervor, western […]
The Clicgear Three Wheeled Golf Cart
The Clicgear Cart is, as its website says, “the original compact three-wheel golf pushcart.” The Clicgear Cart won the 2007 Best New Product Award at the PGA Merchandise Show, providing a terrific promotional boost. The cart has great word of mouth, too. Two of my regular playing partners swear by it, in part because […]
Lost and Found in Beijing
China Daily reported in 2010 that Beijing’s population had reached twenty-two million people. (Eight to nine million of these are “non-permanent residents.”) City planners hope to cap Beijing’s size at eighteen million, but that seems implausible—how do you shrink a city that’s already a magnet for every ambitious person in a country of 1.3 billion? […]