Course review treasure chest - if you like Phil Sokol

I was poised to lavish praise on a Kansas newspaper for the depth of its regular course reviews when I noticed that it seemed to be a syndicated series, provided by The Sports Network's Phil Sokol.

After further investigation, I was resigned to giving you the relevant keywords for a Google search, when I noticed that these wonderfully detailed labours of love are in fact archived as I'd hoped.

Fill your boots here and congrats to TSN's webmaster for nicely finishing off the page with club logos when he or she might have been tempted just to list the club names. Some of us recognise your dedication.
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Pic of the Day XII - nice backdrop and looks a nice hole to play.

Bitter-sweet day on The Golf Course as Art

Mixed feelings as I scour today's golf course news feeds for material.

Part of me would really like to celebrate this year's British Par 3 Championship. Much as I don't believe for one moment that "a fantastic honour" was Tony Jacklin's exact initial reaction to being invited to host the tournament, I think anything that gets us away from 7,000 yard courses and Howitzer drivers, even for just a weekend, is to be welcomed.

Who knows, what was formerly The British Professional Short Course Championship, could eventually inspire a generation of architects to devote just part of their portfolio to par 3 courses that are more art than afterthought.

And good on Nailcote Hall, this year's venue, for providing an aerial photo and hole notes to go with their course plan: better course coverage than some 18 hole clubs that are otherwise full of themselves deign to provide.

Then I noticed the bad news.

Celebrities.

The event, it would seem, is crawling with them and at a time when I sense that even Pebble Beach's annual celeb-fest is starting to pall, I'm not sure embellishing a tournament with a back-slappers' parade of D-listers is the way forward any longer.

There may be no finer example of celebrities needing to stick with what they know than snooker player Willie Thorne's toe-curling comparison of his infant playing partner with Tiger Woods, a minute or so into this video on the tournament's homepage. Whoever Sally is, we can only pray she was de-briefed by Hal Sutton or Gordon Sherry at the earliest opportunity.
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And on the subject of bitter-sweet, what pleasure I felt at quickly finding a story to get my teeth into, during my perusal of the headlines, was tempered by its connection with my old stamping ground at Mount Oswald Golf Club.

Mentioned here previously, it appears that the developers so keen to stick a dirty great business park where the course now stands have been working on their touchy-feeliness with the local community, by sponsoring a Durham rowing club.

In fairness, maybe they would have been just as quick with the sponsorship readies if they didn't happen to be sweating on a major planning application in the very same city.

But I'm not betting on it. My comment at the end of the Northern Echo article is self-explanatory.
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Nothing equivocal about Pic of the Day XI, at any rate...

Not all classic UK courses are by the sea

One positive spin-off already from reading Spirit of St Andrews: I'm waking up to what's on my own doorstep.

I've always been Americo-centric where golf courses are concerned. Guilty of the great blasphemy for any British golfer, I'm drawn more to man-made courses than to the classic links and the greater variety of landscape in North America tends to make for a more eye-catching range of inland tracks.

Without Mackenzie's book, I would probably never have looked twice at Woking Golf Club, which for someone blogging on golf course design, would have been borderline criminal. This is the course where part-time architect Stuart Paton provided one of golf architecture's landmark moments; putting a bunker slap bang in that part of the 4th fairway where members liked to drive their ball.

For the storm this created, you'd think he'd insisted they play the hole naked. How ironic that we now regard the choices that this tweak engendered - drive the tight side of the bunkers for an easy approach, or the safer side for a tricky shot over sand - as standard for any course that wants to be taken seriously.

An excellent review of the Surrey course can be found at Golf Club Atlas while the reader comments at Top 100 Golf Courses of the World make interesting reading. Note that not even acclaimed green contouring and fiendish sand-and-heather bunkers can preclude the need to add length to certain holes to keep up with the march of time: one reviewer describes it as an easy course.

This, mind you, is one of the most interesting comments on the design of a golf course that I've read for a while:

"...it was so short that it played much harder than normal"

Hmmm. Food for thought.

I suppose there is an important caveat to those sites that let readers post their comments on a course: you might get an unbiased opinion but you're also getting the view of someone who may have only played the course once and that isn't always enough for the place to be fairly represented.

Note the comment about Woking's 3rd, for example, a hole that features a favourite detail of mine - the lone bunker immediately in front of the green. As the Golf Club Atlas review says:

"it dictates the play for the hole and makes the approach shot to the contoured green a real challenge under all circumstances...Once again, mid to long irons are called for on the approach and great thought should be given to how to use the ground around the green as one's friend."

Yet one reviewer on Top 100 Golf Courses dismisses the same hole as being "a touch ordinary"!

One fact should meet universal acclaim, however: if Woking's £35 twilight green fee isn't the best bargain you'll find anywhere in England's most affluent county, my name's Arnold Palmer.
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Pic of the Day X

Golf porn

Oodles of it. From the appropriately-named Endless Golf: 28 course videos from around the USA with more to come. Perfect for killing the odd spare five minutes at the office. Mind you don't go blind...
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Pic of the Day IX
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Hailed as possibly the seminal text on golf course architecture, I've begun reading The Spirit of St Andrews expecting to be challenged. I wasn't sure the process would start so soon, mind. From page nine:

"No hole can be considered perfect unless it can be played with a putter"

Gulp.

"Everyone should be allowed to enjoy a golf game, including even old gentlemen of ninety and children of five and six. Some of them cannot drive further than a good player armed with a putter"

Oh well: start as you mean to go on, I suppose.

At last, Els puts heat on Tiger

Enjoy this, it doesn't come round too often.

Tiger Woods playing catch-up.

We wait to see how the great man's first course designs turn out but he needs to know that Ernie Els looks to have set a mean pace with the Els Club at Dubai's Sports City.

Not only does this link set you up for some nice, free, virtual magazine reading, complete with page-turning sound effects but this one takes you to the February issue of Worldwide Golf, where you'll find a feature highlighting Els' creation, beginning on page 8. Clicking on sections of each page will magnify them, allowing a greater scrutiny of the course.

While the bleak surroundings obviously need some work, as development of the site as a whole proceeds, straight away I like this about Ernie: he's not frightened to put bunkers in the middle of fairways, possibly a manifestation of the South African's experience of links golf. All I can say is more power to his elbow.

Some heart-warming extracts from Alex Gallemore's report:

"Stone-dead spin flop shots and short, low-flighted chips with plenty of zip are clearly more of a necessity than bombing your drive 300 yards off the tee..."

"You just can't get away with a 'find the middle of the green and hope for the best' kind of approach. You always need to be alert to the pin positions. The pace and swirling contours of the greens will have the grey matter working overtime..."

"There are no 'bling' Las Vegas touches. It's not 8,000 yards with lakes positioned to have you running back to the pro shop for a top-up every other hole but you will be booking plenty of short game lessons"

You'll find a hole-by-hole guide - albeit hellishly slow to download - here.

Over to you, Tiger.

Texas golf architect now stars online

Architect Roy Bechtol's new website makes its debut this week and shows a nice, understated look to his courses that I find instantly appealing.

Comments like this don't do him any harm, either:

"If you route a golf course properly, when you are finished and you haven’t moved a whole lot of dirt, it looks like it has been there 100 years."

He explains his philosophy in this interview with Austin's Business District magazine ("...you build a golf course for two reasons: to sell real estate and to get rid of effluent") although sadly never gets round to explaining just what you have to do to get on the Fortunate 500, a list of Austin's "most social people".

His courses appear to get generally good reviews (search against 'Bechtol' here for the relevant threads) despite suggestions in some quarters that The Ambush at Lajitas is apparently as bland as the photos suggest. Thirteen Bechtol holes can be found among the 96 that make up the book Spectacular Golf of Texas.
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Latest cheap gimmick by desperate golf clubs - become a member at North Carolina's National Golf Club and they throw in a house...
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Pic of the Day VIII

18 still the best of the Beach joys

Whatever they call The Crosby these days, last week's renewal got the New York Times all wistful about the enduring charm of Pebble Beach's 18th hole.

Maybe there are technically better closers among the world's great courses, although personally, I struggle to think of one. Is there an 18th that fuses drama with scenery better than this one, though? I doubt it.

Some have tried drawing parallels with the 18th at St Andrews but while I love the Old Course with all the zeal of a convert, there is a world of difference between the Auld Grey Toon and the bright blue Pacific.

I was won over to Americana by three iconic images in my youth: a tide of Disney movies that suggested American kids had about 38 weeks of school vacation a year, Frank Cannon swanning around southern California with a phone in his car (the height of hedonism to someone in austere '70s Britain) and my first view of Pebble Beach on World of Sport.

There they were, teeing off at 18 in The Crosby, beneath an impossibly blue sky, by an impossibly blue ocean, onto impossibly green grass and there were whales gliding by just 200 yards from where the caddies were standing.

Sold.

Alister MacKenzie felt that the opening to the green could have been more generous, when he wrote of the course in The Spirit of St Andrews but with modern club design bringing the green more into reach for the two-shotter, maybe that tight entrance looks more valid now.

Certainly, the hole should be an interesting test case for those who argue that technology has to be countered with something other than the knee-jerk response of longer holes, for there is nowhere else for the tee to go here unless you build back out into the ocean.

And they wouldn't, would they?

"Some people say the 18^th is overrated," claims Golf Club Atlas, "they grouse it is 'a three wood, lay-up, wedge.' Somewhere along the line those people have become far too analytical and/or jaded. The 18^th at Pebble is the only finishing hole with as thrilling a walk as the home hole at St. Andrews. Both are birdieable and make ideal swing holes. Technology is actually making the 18^th more fascinating with time as more and more professionals go for it in two."

• "The world-renowned par-5 18th hole was originally a 325-yard par 4."
  
• "The 18th tee doesn't sit on natural rock but on cleverly painted cement, installed in 1997 to prevent erosion." - both from 19 things you didn't know about Pebble Beach
  
• You'll find a view of the hole from the expensive seats here. Like me, you'll wonder if she's ever going to get her face out of the lens but take heart, she does.
• 18's almost-real-time webcam here
• And for afterwards, see Pebble's inimitable spin on the term 'souvenir shop' here. Take a gun - if you break something, it will be marginally less costly to kill yourself
• Back at the budget end of the market, meanwhile, you can buy your own piece of 18 here but act fast
  

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Eyes on a Scottish golf holiday this year? I've no idea how good Golf Desk Scotland is in this respect but you might like to look at their site.


[pic courtesy of Shelleybelly1]

Pic of the Day VII

Great sunset shot to start the month.

Golf bookstore finally on course

After an increasingly bizarre selection of titles cropped up in my supposedly 'themed' Amazon sidebar these last few weeks, I have decided to change tack and open my own virtual bookstore, in which supermodels, stock trading and bonefishing will hopefully be notable by their absence.

Just one title is now highlighted in the sidebar but click on it and you'll be taken to a detailed summary of the book. Click on the 'Golf Courses' category link to the right of that review and you'll be transported to a page of numerous golf course books to click on as you wish.

Hitting the 'Golf Course as Art' link on the bookstore page returns you to the blog.

This is as close to a hard sell as you'll see me get. I just wanted you to know what's available and the rest is up to you.

Any comments on the bookstore, good or bad, will be welcomed. But I'm not bringing Tyra Banks back...

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And on the subject of exquisite contouring, all hail January's winner of my highly informal Pic of the Day contest, which will now go forward to the end of year final. If there's golf in heaven, this is what the 1st may look like...
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Webcam watch - celebrating those on-course cameras that Steve Williams hasn't got round to yet...

Today: Real Club de Golf de Las Palmas.

Credit where it's due for Kota Permai course

Good to see Kota Permai being named as the best golf course in Malaysia by readers of Golf Malaysia magazine.

I've tried this undulating Ross Watson design, courtesy of Tiger Woods 2k, and it strikes a fine balance between offering enough space to let your game breathe but enough hazards to keep your interest.

• Further details about the course and a photo gallery here
• Golf Malaysia feature on the club here
• Wallpaper images here

Incidentally, not much cause for optimism when you read the full text of the Golf Malaysia Awards report. Why on earth do you need prizes for 'Most Scenic' and 'Most Difficult' golf courses and holes?

I could design something on the side of an Alpine mountain that asks a golfer to thread a 285-yard drive through a 10 foot-wide crevasse but it would mean damn all in terms of high-quality golf architecture.

Scenic?

Difficult?

Surely you just pick the best?

Slammin' Sammy left us wanting more

Read this feature about Sam Snead's thoughts on golf design and you're inclined to wish he'd become more involved in course design than he did.

"You think a green should have pretty gentle slopes?" Carton asked.

"Yeah, I think it should," Snead said. He enjoined Carton not to build those troublesome tiers, advising him instead to design greens with a few challenging hole locations. The trick was in the way the bunkers were set. They should guard a relatively small piece of the green, leaving a broad, open target for the average player. "If you want to, you know, squeeze their nuts, you can put the hole just alongside this trap and give them [average players] all the green to hit."

As it is, he left us with the following, all collaborative efforts:

The Club at Savannah Harbor
Legends course at Chateau Elan
Poplar Grove GC
Tecolote Canyon (map) (scorecard)

This is what I can find, at any rate. Let me know if there are any I've missed. It must be said that the forgiving tone of Snead's comments rather belies what looks to be a tough start to Poplar Grove (two water carries in the first four holes) but generally these look like courses most golfers could negotiate without recourse to morphine.

I also enclose this interview with his co-designer on Poplar Grove, Ed Carton, who shatters my illusion that all golf course designers are as formidable with their irons as they are with pencil and paper.

"I’m about a 20 handicapper, so I bring the average person’s perspective. Having worked closely with professional players such as the Sneads and Raymond Floyd, I’m able to give clients the best of both worlds."

I can't begin to tell you how much better this makes me feel about myself as a would-be golf architecture pundit...

Finally, for anyone inerested in touring the Land of Snead, I found this detailed piece in the excellent Cigar Aficionado magazine.