I was taught that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all. If I believed that, the rest of this column about Canewood Golf Course in Georgetown, Kentucky would simply be blank, perhaps with a collection pictures of the course left to speak for themselves. My first ever trip…
Last month I polled my readers on if they have a favorite golf course souvenir that the like to purchase as a keepsake at the golf course. It turns out, Dear Readers, we really don’t. Our preference appears to be “a little of this” and “a little of that.” The results below confirm that amongst…
We’ve had an exceptionally wet start to our summer in the southern Ohio River Valley. The rash of daily summer thunderstorms has left me wondering if I really live in central Kentucky or southern Florida. The upside of all the water is the lush green grass pretty much everywhere and some of the healthiest vegetable…
Arthur Hills’ name doesn’t garner tremendous respect amongst golf architecture aficionados and the snobbish sort over on the Golf Club Atlas boards. Personally, I generally enjoy his designs; granted, his portfolio of Kentucky courses is fairly small (I’ve played 8 of his 10 Kentucky projects, plus Longaberger G.C. in Ohio) and think he and his…
I forgot to post the results of the March Blog Poll Question in a timely manner. You know, sometimes life (fatherhood, career, husbandry, actually playing golf, etc.) just gets in the way of the brain functioning at a high level…if at all. Back in March, I asked you, Dear Readers, what is the longest iron…
When I recently transitioned to my shiny new Sun Mountain Four 5 golf bag, it was a perfect opportunity to inventory and assess all of the accumulated tools, toys, and junk that had become permanent free riders during each round of golf. In addition to at least two dozen found golf balls that I would…
On the Indiana side of the flat lands of the Ohio River valley between Louisville and Cincinnati, Tom Fazio crafted a really nice, fairly challenging golf course to accompany the Belterra Casino. Nestled in the river’s flood plain, it’s evident from the first tee that thousands of tons of earth were moved to craft this…
The May Poll Question brought out a record number of responses, and hopefully a little shameful self-reflection for most of you that responded, Dear Readers. In last month’s question, I posited, “What rule do you and your friends disregard regularly?” I was interested in what my Readers’ regular golfing buddies let slide from the scorecard…
Pulling into the parking lot of the Moss Hill Golf Club in Versailles, Kentucky, I really had no idea what to expect. All I knew from some cursory Internet research was that the course was relatively short at 6,142 from the back tees. It was a cool late afternoon in April, in which we’d received…
I love my home course. It’s a nearly 100 year-old parkland layout, replete with narrow, tree-lined fairways, deceivingly subtle elevation changes, and sloping, postage stamp greens. It’s our only local municipal course that lies inside our city’s “inner loop,” mere minutes from downtown and less than a mile (as the crow flies) from the University…
Between welcoming a new son, a long, cold winter, and an exceptionally wet spring, I’ve managed to get out for a 18 golf games this year, including ten 9-hole rounds. Almost all of the 9-hole rounds were walked, which is part of my renewed emphasis on my physical fitness and enjoyment of the entire golf…
Everyone has played one of those golf courses. You know, the place where the pickup trucks outnumber the sedans in the parking lot 3-to-1 or better. Where golf cleats are optional, jeans are welcomed, tank-tops are abundant, and just having fun is the order of the day. A place where a round is not so…
In a perfect world, we would all play golf completely by the Rules. All of them. All the time. Every time. However, in my experience, outside of tournament play, very rarely do I find that golfers follow every rule, every time, myself included. I don’t throw this generalization out for consumption to impugn the integrity…
With the recent release of Golf Digest’s annual equipment Hot List, my perennial evaluation of what’s in my golf bag and daydreaming about new clubs commenced in earnest. I’m generally happy with my clubs. In the course of my year of golf lessons, I discovered that any deficiencies resulting from putting a club on the…
It’s not a perfect bell curve, but the results of this month’s One Bearded Golfer poll question makes me think our crack research team is getting better at creating our monthly questions. And in the spirit of putting your money where your mouth is, I think I learned more about my audience from the results…
At my lesson earlier this week, my pro and I got to talking about my impending (read: wish list) future equipment upgrades. I trust Mike, so I was genuinely interested in his opinion of my current clubs, in the context of how they fit and work for me, and more importantly, what I should be…
One of the side benefits of keeping an official golf handicap through the USGA’s national Golf Handicap and Information Network (GHIN) system is that it makes you a member of the enormous network of over 9,000 golf clubs that use the GHIN system. The simple, user-friendly functionality of the system is easy to utilize for…
Guns, in the United States of America, are an instant fistfight, hot-button issue, because everyone has an opinion on them, and most of those opinions are very strong. Regulation of guns and gun ownership is one of a handful of lingering cultural and political battle-fronts that will never be won or lost, but continually fought…
I admit it, I was ignorant and arrogant last year when I penned a column ranting and bemoaning the overwhelming number of putter options available for sale and the supposed self-serving overkill of actually going through the process of getting fitted for a putter. The whole concept of getting fitted for a putter seemed absurd. …
With an arctic blast moving through central Kentucky this coming week, my earnest start to the 2015 golf season is on hold at least one more week. Rather than bemoaning the circumstances of the present, it seems like the perfect opportunity to look back at the best golf course experiences I had last year. This…
As we count down the days until the golf season begins, the Kentucky Golf Association (“KGA”) is already carrying the banner for creating excitement and enthusiasm for golf in the Commonwealth. In addition to the traditional championships one would expect from a state golf association, the KGA has added an amateur series at some fantastic…
During my golf lesson today, my teaching pro bestowed to me the best explanation of how to think about The Rules of Golf. If your brain capacity is spent on something better than memorizing all 34 official Rules, their various subsections, and the voluminous Official Decisions, this little nugget will keep you in compliance with…
My teaching pro has taken me just about as far has he can, physically. He has told and shown me just about everything I needed to learn in order to construct a performing, repeating golf swing. It’s not the prettiest or most powerful swing on the range, but it is becoming apparent quickly that I’m…
For golfers in North America, especially those living anywhere not named “Florida” or “Arizona,” winter is the silly golf season. Occasionally, a few of us are able to get out for some off-season frigid golf just to satisfy our need to be outside on the links. However, for most everyone else, winter is the time…
Battling a small bout of winter greys and feeling an episode of cabin fever coming on, John Mark and I were borderline desperate to get out onto a golf course. I certainly wanted to take my swing that I’d been working on so diligently for a test drive. Luckily, we able to take advantage of…