The humor of golf is a divine comedy in the deeper sense. Like all sources of laughter it lies in contrast and paradox; in the thought of otherwise grave men gravely devoting hours and money to a technique which so often they, apparently alone, do not know they can never master. The solemnity of the eternal failure is vastly comic. The perpetualness of their hope is nobly humorous.
R. C. Robertson-Glaskow (1901-1965)
Quoted in: Grounds For Golf
Geoff Shackelford (2003)
This warning is seen around rural Ireland where gravel tends to build on the narrow roadways from shoddy construction and wear and tear. It is an admonishment to drivers to beware because traction and control can be lost when navigating these surfaces.
With the WGC Bridgestone Invitational and the PGA Championship over the next two weeks, there are a number of players who need to heed this warning as they try to consolidate their grip on the roadway in an effort to make the Ryder Cup Teams or position themselves to feast on the $32 million available in the four FedEx Cup Playoffs events starting later this month. Failing to carefully negotiate this competitive terrain could leave them stranded off to the side of the road with the emergency flashers blinking.
Jim Furyk, who is currently wallowing at 15th in the Ryder Cup Standings and 25th in the FedEx Cup race, got everyone’s attention with his opening round 63 at Firestone yesterday. His seven birdies and an eagle thrust him to the front of the pack in Bridgestone Invitational. Keegan Bradley who is hanging on by his fingernails to a 9th spot on the Ryder Cup list relied on a hot putter to make seven birdies to offset four bogies on his way to 67 and a T-9 going into Friday’s second round. Dustin Johnson and Steve Stricker at 12th and 13th in the Ryder Cup list respectively, will need to do better than their one and two under scores from day one if they are going to grab a secure spot in the Ryder top 8 and avoid having to solicit Captain DLIII for a captain’s choice on the squad.
Tiger Woods, in an event that he has won 7 times since 1999, continued to show the inconsistent form he has displayed all year. He managed to guide his ball between the shoulders of the roadway yesterday hitting 65% of the fairways and 78% of the greens. But his putter, or maybe his green reading eye, let him down big time with 33 putts including a gagged 3-footer on the 18th hole for his third bogey on the back side on the way to a mundane par round and a T-31 to this point. He has good company in the mediocre pit with Rory, Graeme, Kootch, and Rickey Fowler all on that number.
So much will be decided over the next eight weeks-Fed Ex Champ, Player of the Year, Stewards of the Ryder Cup, and much more. How the top players do at Firestone and Kiawah the next two weeks will have much to say about their chances pursuing the treasures at the end of this road.
August, 2012
Established in the late 1800’s this place is a small scale version the old line rich man’s retreat, on the order of a Homestead or Greenbrier, full service food, accommodations, golf, spa, family recreation, and all. It has a much more casual presentation than those others but that may be a function of the new day more than anything else. A very comfortable atmosphere-well managed-it makes for a perfect two-day getaway from the hub-bub of urban life.
Par 3 “Tiny Tim” even has the chocolate drop mounds (omnihotels.com)
The golf course is quirky but very interesting. It is the result of the efforts of three architects over a thirty year period-and it has been recently updated in 2007 without changing the effective old style character of the links. Spencer Oldham did the original 18 holes in 1895 featuring chocolate drop mounds, geometric S-curve bunkers, and donut bunkers. In 1912 A.W. Tillinghast got his hands on it and scaled it back to a nine-hole course with his own architectural features. In 1923 Donald Ross took it back to a full 18-hole track and you can see raised greens with lots of tiering, artistic bunkering constellations, and, most distinctively, a creative and strategic use of the Shober’s Run that meanders throughout the entire golf course. The renovation work in 2007 was done by Forse Design Company of Pennsylvania who are known for doing period restoration and renovation work throughout the US and Canada-they have recently had their hands in renovation work to the Broadmoor-East Course in Colorado and the Newport Country Club in Rhode Island-sites of recent U.S. Senior Opens and U.S. Women’s Opens respectively. They did a wonderful job retaining the characteristics of all three of these fine architects while making it a very playable and a challenging golf experience.
The entire course is in the flood plain of the Shober Spring Stream and sits nestled between the foothills on either side. There is a good bit of meandering back and forth so the holes do not route in a typical outward and inward loop. For a course set in the foothills there are not that many severe elevation changes on holes and you get surprisingly few side hill or billy goat stances during the round. As with most old style courses the track does not sprawl-the next tee is a few steps from the last green and the round has a tidy-compact feel to it. Green surfaces are totally updated-very quick-lots of pitch and undulation and oddly shaped which makes for really small targets from the fairway. You will do some pitching and chipping to save pars.
The green speed is the course’s major defense considering the tiering and undulations you will face. But at the same time these characteristics provide you with a good correction mechanism for your approach shots if you pay attention to green topography and use it accordingly. Big hitters will be frustrated by the many times they cannot just haul off and hit as much as they can-position off the tee is extremely important to getting the best angle of attack into the greens.
The last characteristic worth noting is the balance of the types of holes and the sequencing. Five Par 5’s, Five Par 3’s, and 8 Par 4’s (only one over 400 yards) means you are hitting lots of finesse shots through the day and the mix is pretty random. There is a sequence from 2 to 6 where you play par 3, par 5, par 3, par 5, short par 4-other than the driver on the second par 3 you have no long shots for five holes. From 9 through 14 you have a similar 5-3-4-4-5-3 run but in the midst of this one you have two of the longest holes you play all day. My point is you have to be very mentally agile to play this course effectively-there is no natural rhythm to the course other than the constant sound of the babbling of the ever present Shober’s Run.
Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania
Architects: Spencer Oldham (1895), A.W. Tillinghast (1912), Donald Ross (1923), Forse Design (2007)
Tees Par Rating Slope Yardage
Medal 72 73.4 140 6785
Ross 72 71.9 136 6446
Tillie 72 69.3 130 6023
Oldham 72 69.8 122 5106
(Click here to review Bedford Springs hole-by-hole descriptions)
Sure makes practical sense to me.
Sentiment captured by S. Cherner
July, 2011
Apparently there are no suspended particles because the scoring through the first two rounds in the Evian Masters has been nothing shy of pure!
In a tournament where 15-under generally wins the day Stacy Lewis is already 12-under through two rounds. Her 9-under performance on Thursday which included 7 birdies in a row was bubbling over the top. She is back on simmer with a complimenting 69 today and leads the field by one shot.
Other notables are scorching the Evian Masters Golf Club as well. Inbee Park of South Korea shot an 8-under 63 with a balance of 4 birdies on each side in today’s round. Paula Creamer shot a 67 to go with her fine 68 and is T-3 with Inbee. Beatriz Recari had a 66 today and So Yeon Ryu, the U.S. Open champ, found her travel legs after a lackluster 73 on day one and shot 7-under to get herself into the mix for the weekend. Lots of other proven competitiors are within 7 of the lead including Se Ri Pak, Karrie Webb, Jiyai Shin, and Azahra Munoz.
The rough is not what it was last year and the hot weather must have the balls bounding to support this low scoring. It seems we will be watching a shoot-out on the shores of Lake Geneva on the Golf Channel this weekend.
July, 2012
Dream Golf is required reading if you are going to play this new west coast mecca of American golf. Stephen Goodwin writes a detailed account of the conception, planning, construction, and operation of Mike Keiser idyllic contribution to the inventory of American golf destinations. Goodwin’s access to Keiser, David Kidd, Tom Doak, Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw and so many other protaganists who were instrumental in this exercise make this an informative read.
To dream of bringing true links golf to America was an audacious ambition on it’s own. But Keiser, a wealthy entrepreneur from his success building Recycled Paper Greetings, took this a whole step further. He saw himself as the George Crump of our time-the man who in 1913 conceived and funded the building of the most famous golf course in America Pine Valley on obscure sandy scrub hills outside of Camden, New Jersey.
To this end Keiser not only conceived of the idea he went through the painstaking process of becoming an expert in links golf by assiduously playing all the greatest links venues in the world and tirelessly networked with architects and experts on the subject. Using his own money and connections he searched for just the right raw venue that could be a home to his dream until he landed on this remote site in southern Oregon.
The book documents Keiser’s immersion in the process and his entrepreneurial risk taking it took to bring it to fruition. He landed the best young architects of our time before they were famous and full of themselves. As a result he pushed them on to create something very unique-real links golf courses on American soil.
David Kidd-a young Scotsman-did the first course Bandon Dunes in the late 1990s. Tom Doak, one of the truly knowledgeable people when it comes to traditional links course design, did Pacific Dunes next in 2001. Bandon Trails was the work in 2005 of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw who had to negotiate the blending of more rugged inland terrain with the desired seaside features. Tom Doak came back in 2010 to create Old Macdonald a testimonial course to the pioneering influence of C.B. Macdonald considered by many to be the grandfather of American golf course architecture.
This book provides marvelous insight into the planning of golf courses and the special challenge of bringing authentic links design features to an American seaside venue. The detail of conversations and the evolved thinking that brought these courses-all of which are in the top 100 in America by the magazine rating listings-to reality makes this a rich and engaging read.
The bonus is that for each course the author played a round with the designer and Goodwin gives a hole-by-hole account of the experience. This is like getting a course guide written by the architect as a primer before playing the course. Very cool indeed.
I highly recommend this read whether you are going to Bandon Dunes or not. If you are going to Bandon it will provide unique insight to the facility and the guys who created and still run the place. If not you will just become much more knowledgeable about the Herculean effort it takes to create a storied venue.
Dream Golf
Stephen Goodwin (2010)
In the Coore-Crenshaw theology, the cardinal sin of golf course architecture is anything that appears to be forced or contrived or “thought out”. The hand of the architect should be invisible-and this takes much labor and patience and discipline. “We don’t want our holes to look like golf holes,” Bill says, “They should look like landscapes which just happen to include a golf hole”.
Dream Golf
Stephen Goodwin
2010
What we witnessed at the Open Championship this year is hard to fathom. Ten to fifteen mile an hour winds turned the last day into a slapstick circus act that included final round pie-in-your-face performances by Tiger (+3) who double wall-balled it out of the bunker on #6 on his way to a triple bogie, Sneds (+4) with back-to-back double bogies on #7 and #8, and Gmac (+5), who grew up with the winds of Northern Ireland as his teacher, befuddled by the with wind, carding 7 bogies over the last 18 holes.
But the biggest pie, the grand daddy of them all, was saved for Adam Scott who stood on the 15th tee with a four shot lead and four letters already etched on the Claret Jug and inexplicably played the final stretch four-over-par to lose to the Big Easy by one.
Ernie must have a regular Saturday foursome at Lytham. He was second in the Open Championship there back in 1996 and third when it returned in 2001. His play all week showed total mastery of the complicated driving script, especially on the difficult back nine. 32 on Sunday-four birdies over the last nine holes-capped a 7-under performance on the back nine over the four days. That lapped the field for the inward half. The crescendo created when he buried his birdie putt on 18 with authority to post 7-under for the championship clearly unnerved Scott who was half way down a vortex to infamy.
That trip for Adam was slow and agonizing-more a series of fender benders than a full blown crash and burn.
He missed a short one on 15 to make bogie, made a contortionist’s escape from a bunker on 16 only to miss another short one to make bogie. From the middle of the fairway on 17 he jerked his 170-yard approach into the fur back left of the green.
His playing partner McDowell remarked afterward, “Half of England is to the right of that pin and he missed it left…..the alarm bell started to ring. I thought, ‘Hold on, we’ve got a problem here’”. The result was his third bogie in three holes and he was now tied with Ernie sipping iced tea in the clubhouse.
Maybe the least understandable choice was on 18 tee where, needing par to make a playoff, Scott abandoned his strategy of playing iron off this tee in the first three rounds to avoid the bunker constellation in the driving area and pulled a three wood to try to set up a more aggressive approach hoping to make birdie and win the championship outright. The three wood did not slide to right as intended and left him in one of those revetted nasties with no shot at the green. He managed to play a third shot to 10 feet but the par putt never threatened the hole and the last chapter of this sorted tale was now in ink.
Ernie Els, a four time major winner, was as graceful in victory as Scott was in defeat. Among other supportive condolences Els shared with Scott afterward he said, “I’ve been there before. I hope he doesn’t take it as hard as I did.”
Bill Dwyre of The Tribune Newspapers said in his article, “Champions come along every day. Compassionate ones do not. On Sunday at the British Open, Ernie Els was there for everybody.”
That is true but there is a small lorry full of skeletons being FedExed to Adam Scott this morning. He will need a big closet and a very short memory to overcome the disappointment of this one that got away.
July, 2012
It won’t be a big wind at The Open Championship on Sunday, likely about 15 m.p.h. out of the southwest, but it will be enough to inject some interest into the outcome of today’s festivities.
For the first time all week the links at Lytham will play like a links and all those bunkers and high rough that the players have been so successful in avoiding in the prevailing stillness will be reaching out and grabbing balls whose direction is being influenced by the crosswinds. The key today will be holding the ball against those winds to mitigate those influences and keep the ball out of bother.
The other thing we will see is balls running out through the greens, especially when the approach is downwind. Making up and downs from off these greens is going to be essential to the guy who prevails. Today will not be the dart shooting contest we witnessed the first three days, it will take patience and creativity to navigate the safe corridors of play narrowed significantly by the wind.
By the end of the day there will be heroes and there will be hounds. Those with the humility to take the indignity the links throws their way and stay focused to the task at hand will be the ones contesting for that claret jug.
July, 2012
Apparently the pep talk Steve Williams gave Adam Scott on the driving range before the first round at The Open Championship today worked, Scott found himself at the main console in the control room at Lytham St. Annes with the lead after shooting an inter-stellar 64 today.
Williams advice was to play the first round with a sense of urgency as he has done in later rounds of the majors this year. Scott said, “It’s what I haven’t done the first rounds of majors this year….to play today like it was Sunday and there was no tomorrow”.
If not for an errant 2 iron into the cosmic hay on the final hole that led to a bogie, Scott’s round of 8 birdies, including 5 in 6 holes on the back nine, had him looking at 63 which does not happen very often in a major.
Success at Lytham is about controlling your tee ball and staying out of the 200+ bunkers that make this course look like a piece of very moldy swiss cheese. He hit 71% of the fairways and 72% of the greens which is a formula for success, especially with lethargic greens that are only stimping about 10. Scott has a swing to die for and the pedigree to win majors so no one should be surprised at this performance.
The benign conditions kept many of the big name fly boys on the leader board which will make for an intriguing leader board this weekend. Seven major winners are among the top 12 scores after the first round. Three dozen players shot rounds in the 60’s today including Eldrick Woods, Paul Lawrie, Zach Johnson, Brandt Snedeker, Bubba Watson, Graeme McDowell, and Rory Mcilroy.
Rory had it going pretty well until he plunked a teenager on the head with his tee ball on the 15th and the ball caromed out of bounds leading to a double bogey. After giving the boy a signed glove on which he wrote “Sorry” Rory joked later “He could have headed it the other way and it would have been in the fairway”. Rory rebounded with birdies on two of the last three to stay in touch with the leaders.
This is the Open Championship so the wind and the rain, all but absent today, will have it’s say over the next few days and that will change everything. When that happens, as Scott says, he is “just going to have to knuckle down to handle that. But I’m confident. My ball striking is good. I think I can get it around no matter what the conditions are.”
If Scott is to win this major championship and “go where he has not gone before” he will need to heed the experienced guidance from Spock on the bag and get a few good breaks to help navigate the hidden space bumps The Aussie Enterprise will undoubtedly encounter along the way.
July, 2012
moegolf 