On Saturday afternoon, I decided to play golf in the rain. Understand that I wasn’t playing golf and then it started raining. Rather, it had been raining for several hours and I decided to go play golf anyway on a cool December day. There were two staff members in the pro shop. They didn’t laugh…
Admission: I take a little too much pride in being a contrarian. Whatever the new, popular, hot trend is, I’m almost guaranteed to scoff at it and move in the opposite direction. To wit: I have an Amazon account and password, but Mr. Bezos doesn’t have my name or address. I think I downloaded…
My eldest son is 3 years old for a few more months. He’s a little tall, a little thin, and an absolute fireball of energy. He is super active and never, ever tires of playing or learning new things. After his “Soccer” team wound down this spring, The Wife and I discovered that there is…
With the PGA Tour visiting Harbour Town and Augusta National this month, there has been plenty of discussion of good and bad golf architecture, favorite holes, restoring versus remodeling, and the like in recent days. This got me to thinking about some of the worst holes I regularly encounter locally, so that I could give…
On a randomly warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in January, I snuck out with two friends for nine holes of winter golf. And something happened that utterly ruined a perfectly nice round that, frankly, I’m still mad about two months later. So I’m hoping that committing the episode to writing will provide some cathartic relief. My…
When most golf fans think of the PGA Tour coming to Kentucky, the magnificent Valhalla Golf Club is probably what comes to mind, having hosted multiple PGA Championships, Senior PGA Championships, and even a Ryder Cup (the 2024 PGA Championship will return to Valhalla as well). The ambitious owners of Keene Trace Golf Club, located…
It took two trips to Las Vegas to finally round out my Paiute Resort triple play, but after playing the Wolf Course, I was perfectly content that I had saved the best for last. Like its Sun Mountain and Snow Mountain brethren, the Wolf is a Pete Dye design that opened for play in 2001,…
The nice thing about a warm, wet winter is that we, here in Central Kentucky. jumped into the spring golf season early. The downside to this joyous turn of events for the public at-large is that my pasty, furry, Scot-Irish mutt legs made an appearance in shorts on the golf course much sooner than anyone…
Las Vegas has a well-known way of presenting everything in and about Las Vegas to its out-of-town visitors. The City, and more specifically The Strip, is all about bigger, louder, brighter, flashier, better. Another characteristic of the City is that it’s a place that loves to boast and sell the dream of “what if,” though…
Sometimes, there really is no substitute for being in the right place at the right time, through no good deed of your own. Random dumb luck is a powerful force within the universe, and exactly how I came to enjoy an impromptu audience with golf legend and Hall of Famer Chi Chi Rodriguez. On Demo…
Ego and insecurity can be terrible, debilitating handicaps in the game of golf. Just two days and four holes into 2017, I received my first embarrassing dose of involuntary humility. A welcomed weather anomaly resulted in above average temperatures, allowing Bryan and I the thrill of playing golf in Central Kentucky on January 2nd. The…
I understand how golfers that have played the iconic Harbour Town Golf Links could overlook the Heron Point G.C. on the Sea Pines Plantation as just one of the “rest” of the courses on Hilton Head Island. Heron Point lacks the breathtaking views of Calibogue Sound, the PGA tournament pedigree, and the immaculate conditioning that…
A few days ago, December 2, 2016, would have been my Dad’s 80th birthday (*as far as the Social Security folks knew), and it occurs to me that he never saw me hit a golf ball. The closest we ever came to sharing a moment on the links was him watching me hit the little…
My outing to Maderas Golf Club this summer was far and away my favorite round of golf of 2016. The beautiful desert canyon scenery, the fun but tough course, the fantastic hospitality from the staff, and the company of the best man in my wedding who has all but given up the game added up…
This is my latest guest column for the #GolfChat Authors project on the topic of great golf course experiences. Great golf experiences happen every day. Take care of the little things, and the big things take care of themselves. It is through this simple prism that this author judges golf experiences from one round to…
You can’t be just a little bit pregnant. Forgive the terrible colloquialism, but I find this is the best way to describe the dichotomy that is my golf swing. Either I’m consistently compressing the ball with a good swing. Or I’m not. There is not any middle ground, really. When I’m putting good swings on…
The SILO Club Carrier from Rival + Revel is my favorite new golf gadget of 2016. I use “gadget” intentionally because the SILO isn’t a training aid, it’s not a piece of competitive golf equipment, and it’s not a toy or a souvenir. The SILO is a handy gadget that almost every golfer could use…
The Champions Course at the Omni Las Costa Resort in Carlsbad, CA, is a fantastic golf course. It contains lots of great, subtle architectural features that make it a challenging and memorable course. The green complexes were superb, both in their strategic design and impeccable conditioning. The same can be said for the bunkers, which…
Golf attire has come a long way in the last century or so. Hickory-club leagues notwithstanding, long gone are the days of plus-fours and button-down shirts with ties appearing on players on the golf course. Since at least the 1940’s, a nice pair of slacks or shorts and a knitted short-sleeve golf shirt are pretty…
I wish golfers and golf fans, on the whole, weren’t so steeped in manners and ingrained with the tenets of polite society. I wish that once in a while they would allow themselves to be given over to notions of herd hierarchy or lynch mob justice, where the members of the herd mercilessly keep the…
I’ve never been as confident in the thriving future of golf as I was while visiting Colina Park Golf Course in San Diego, California, this summer. This cool little Par Three pitch-and-putt course located in a city park in a kind of rundown part of town was buzzing when I showed up at about 8:30…
Thoroughbred Golf Club at High Point, tucked away amidst the beautiful rolling hills of Jessamine County, is undergoing a renaissance, of sorts, as a the new owners from Taylor Made Farm are hoping that intelligent investment in the clubs facilities and infrastructure return the course to relevance within the Bluegrass area golfing community. Formerly known…
This is my first original contribution to the #GolfChat Authors project as a contributing columnist. Check out the other great works at GolfChat.org The Ryder Cup is the greatest spectacle in golf. Sure, other tournaments have fierce partisans, but I’d argue those interests don’t generate the intensity of emotional investment and expression of the Ryder…
Long time PGA Tour professional Steve Flesch was recently caught in an audio recording admitting to episodes of committing violence against golf clubs! Despite awareness campaigns and official PGA Tour policy aimed at curbing the effects and occurrences of golfer-on-club violence, Flesch’s own words paint a picture of a player who lives on a razor-sharp…
I have attended exactly two professional golf tournaments: The PGA Championship at Valhalla in 2014 and the Senior PGA Championship in 2015. Both were incredible experiences, though decidedly nothing like what I imagine the Ryder Cup environment was this fall at Hazeltine. Seeing what professional golfers can do with a club and a golf ball…