Lots of good stuff to sort through before the lads tee off tomorrow....
Peggy On Our Mind - Jaime Diaz does far better than most in his remembrance of Peggy Kirk Bell. I'll excerpt this anecdote, but you're banished from the site if you don't read the whole thing:
Having been a good player, Bell was harder on herself and driven by the mystery of the golf swing. Her son-in-law, 1978 PGA Tour rookie-of-the-year Pat McGowan, onoccasion would see Ma Bell make impromptu 300-yard trips in her 1964 Lincoln convertible from her home to Pine Needles’ expansive practice range, as if, well, she owned the place.
“She’d be watching NFL football, which she was passionate about,” McGowan says, “but then she’d get a swing idea that she had to work out right then, and get in that huge car with the suicide doors and drive straight across the first and 18th fairways. When she got to the range, she’d brake with a big hook slide that sent pine straw flying, and hit maybe 10 balls with a 7-iron. She’d have figured something out, and she’d drive back the same way and watch the game. That was her—enthusiastic, curious, driven, always fun.”
She was a golf person if ever that genus species meant anything.... and another anecdote from the local paper's account of her memorial service:
And, oh, were there stories to be told.
Rev. John Hage, the Brownson pastor, said he visited Peggy not long ago and at one point said, “Let’s pray.”
Peggy’s response: “Let’s play.”
“She was ready to play 18 holes of golf,” Hage said, smiling.
When Pine Needles and Mid-Pines are out your front door, anything less would be sacrilege.
R.I.P.
Twitter Spat of the Day - You're gonna need some background here, so you might want to freshen that cup of coffee.
David McClay Kidd is a Scottish golf course architect who originally came to prominance through his design of Bandon Dunes (the original course). How he got that gig is interesting of itself, but we don't have time for that now....
Based upon that and other work, Kidd landed one of the most prestigious design awards of our generation, what became the Castle Course in St. Andrews. So, you'll intuit where this is going, the course absolutel bombed.... I'll let Kidd defend it first:
As for the Castle Course itself, Kidd repeated what he has often said about the layout:that he knew from the start that it would polarize opinions, given its standing as the seventh course in the hallowed St. Andrews Links Trust, not to mention its setting, on a bluff overlooking the home of golf.
He acknowledged that the land itself was “relatively boring,” which nudged him toward a bold design approach.
“I knew that no matter what I built, it was going to piss off half the people,” Kidd said. “So at some point, you say, screw it, I’m going to go balls out.”
That piece came as a result of Tom Doak's brutal assessment in his updated Confidential Guide:
“A friend of mine who had never played The Old Course waited for hours at the starter's box in July to try to get out as a single, and as the day was starting to wane, he told the starter he was thinking of going up to The Castle Course instead. ‘No laddie, you don't want to do that,’ came the reply. ‘We'll get you out yet.’
I'm with the starter on this one. I feel for David Kidd because a lot of the criticisms of the course are things one might say about The Old Course if it wasn't so famous: the greens are huge and wild, and it's hard to discern the strategy from the tee. However, the severe tilt of the land and the size of the greens yields a lot of recovery shots to greens that are up over your head, and the moonscape of the course is only appealing when you’re looking away from it, across the bay toward town. Trying to one-up Kingsbarns (a heralded course just up the road) turned out to be a formula for excess.”
And Doak's rating was famously a goose-egg, though one should note the longstanding enmity between the two.
Way too much background given the silliness of the actual story, but we love when folks beclown themselves. So Kidd (or DMK) got asked a question about this, and you'd assume hes' a millennial from the whiny response:
Well, blaming the media worked pretty well for Trump....
This is actually an interesting subject to which a return might be fun, as "resistance to scoring" is used as a rating factor. More importantly, I'm always hesitant to jump on the designer without understanding the demands of their client. I don't know how you blame the guy moving earth for making the client happy, as they are, after all, running a business....
Shack's got a good cross-section of the tweets and Kidd's recent work, Gamble Sands and Sand Valley, seem to be restoring his reputation. Blaming the media, though, is for weasels....
The World Cup, An Appreciation - Aussie architect Mike Clayton has a thoughtful take on last weekend's competition entertainment, though the lede is quite regrettable:
We are often reminded professional golf is about ‘entertainment’ and ‘we are in the entertainment business’.
Maybe, but what constitutes entertainment?
Some think it simply revolves around birdies and eagles. Maybe, but is that the ‘mashed potatoes’, ‘baba-booey’, ‘get in the hole’ crowd or the galleries following last weeks World Cup play at Kingston Heath last week? Not once did we hear a spectator invoking the inane comments we hear so often from the telecasts of the American Tour.
Carful, Clayts, don't go all Peter Willet on us.... What follows is a timely discussion of the play on a timeless classic of a golf course not quite rendered obsolete by modern driving distances:
More interesting and entertaining to watch was how the field played the short par 4 4th hole (the club’s normal 3rd) There was a wide variety of clubs played from the tee in
The Kiwi Kontingent Saturday’s foursomes play with Rickie Fowler leaving Jimmy Walker a full nine iron to the flag while Soren Kjelsden, the shortest of the top players last week, left his partner Thorbjorn Olesen with barely anything more than a chip from the perfect angle.
A few matches ahead the New Zealanders Ryan Fox and Danny Lee made a comedic mess of a seemingly simple hole by playing it completely the wrong way despite hitting two perfectly good looking shots.
Ya think? Read his piece for the dissection of the Kiwi's mistakes, leading to this wonderful coda:
Great courses provide entertainment by asking thought-provoking questions. Great players do the same by hitting brilliant shots and great crowds respond and in their own way add to the entertainment.
Mindless golf on boring courses may be a recipe for birdies and eagles but it entertains no one. Kingston Heath showed off professional golf at its best last week and it was the real star of the show.
Alister MacKenzie well understood golf was about daring play and he made courses where it was properly rewarded.
And yes, with the exception of the West Coast swing, American professional golf is mostly of the mindless variety he describes, but so is every other professional tour. But, unless you're prepared to make the case that the guy shouting "mashed potatos" is speaking of the venue, why go there?
The North, Ready For Its Close-Up - The newly-restored North Course at Torrey Pines has opened, and John Strege has the skinny on the focus on playability:
Toward that end, Weiskopf has reduced the number of bunkers from 60 to 42 and madethem generally easier from which to play. Average green sizes have increased from about 4,500 square feet to 6,000 square feet. He’s added his signature touch, a drivable par 4, the new seventh hole. The fairways are marginally wider and he’s softened playability in areas fronting the greens.
“My philosophy is to put the penalties on the side of holes,” he said. Penalties are not directly in front, so people can play by missing the ball in front of these greens and still have a good pitch or a chip and even a long putt.”
And this makes so much sense it's hard to believe they did it:
Weiskopf also reversed the nines. “I thought that was very important. The back nine, the old front nine, is the more iconic of the two nines from the standpoint of its location of holes on the ravines overlooking the ocean and looking back on the beach south to San Diego. It just leaves you with a much more positive, memorable experience when you play the nines that way.”
The new back nine includes the course’s two most memorable holes, the par-3 15th (formerly the sixth) and par-4 16th. On the latter hole, an uphill climb along the cliff to a green elevated to the extreme, he lowered the green by 10 or 12 feet.
The photo is of the old 6th/new 15th, perhaps the most famous hole in the complex. It's never been a particularly interesting golf course, a bit os a waste of the tremendous site. And Weiskopf didn't have near the budget to reimagine the dreary routing, so we should all keep our expectations in check.
I remain curious as to what Phil had in mind, a curiosity that Tom Weiskopf and the folks in LaJolla apparently didn't share. But they at least had their priorites straight, recognizing that a Tour pro plays at most one round a year on this track.
Sue, Baby, Sue - A former Wall Street Journal editor takes to the paper to decry the USGA's ageism. Ironic, no doubt, given golf's demographics and per capita Cialis consumption, but there you have it.
It's a two-count indictment, and we'll deal with them in the order presented:
A widespread problem as golfers grow older is the onset of the putting yips, a nervous flinching of the wrists, especially on shorter putts. This dreaded affliction rarely bothersyounger players. But it is common among seniors whose nerves tend often to be more fragile.
An antidote had until recently been to acquire a longer, heavier putter and then to anchor the grip against the chest to reduce or even eliminate any flinching. But now, just when at last I had pretty well used this technique to conquer my late-in-life entanglement with the yips, the USGA rules people have declared no more anchoring. They were careful, however, not to ban the long putter itself, no doubt mindful that such a prohibition might trigger lawsuits by its producers. But without anchoring, the long and heavy putters can become unwieldy and far less helpful against the yips.
That last bit is what an attorney would call an admission against interest. Kind of proves their point, doesn't it?
There's no excuse for the delay in banning anchored putting, which adds additional irony as relates to his second count. But there's also no law preventing folks from using non-conforming methods in their games or solo rounds. I'll not get into the full bifurcation argument here, just note that this seems a plea for an exemption based upon age.... Good luck with that.
Now, did I hear someone say something about solo rounds? The Michael Jordan of segues still has game, as per Count No. 2:
The second change was even more discouraging for those of us whose partners from the old days grow ever scarcer, forcing us to discover the considerable joys of playing alone. Specifically, the rules people have outlawed submitting scores played solo.
For those of us who play most of our rounds alone, that means fewer rounds will count toward calculating a handicap, which very likely will mean a less accurate handicap. That’s no small thing on those rare days when I do compete against friends for a few dollars.
Writing of the joys of solo golf in The Wall Street Journal in 2013, I noted enthusiastically that a solitary golfer, using however many handicap strokes may be allowed, may compete quite happily “against the course” and “record an accurate score.” This score, in turn, may be submitted, I wrote, so as to maintain an accurate handicap.
To paraphrase Woody Allen, it's golf with someone I love. And of course who isn't sympathetic about an older golfer losing his golf buddies?
I'm of two minds on this one.... Analytically, the handicap system is, and has to be, a peer review system. Of all the GHIN joints in the world, only the folks who one plays with know if your handicap is accuarte. One can readily see that a solo round has no peer review...
On the other hand, is this such a problem? The USGA has aimed its fire at a core constituency, virtually accused them of cheating, its just not clear what they're cheating at.... My own personal experience is that in the alter cocker demo vanity handicaps are a far bigger issue, but again, good luck with that one.
The writer again shoots himself in his aged foot by noting that his solo scores mirror his witnessed score, confirming that his ahndicap should be equally valid.... He's just annoyed to be called out.
In a world of uncontrolled distance rendering classic courses obsolete, I'm pleased to see the deck chairs on the Titanic have been symmetrically arranged.
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