Upcoming: Bill Bergin
Just had a great talk with Bill Bergin, an architect who’s really finding his stride right now and working on some fascinating projects. Look for the show to be up and live early next week.
Episode 3: Bill Coore
In this episode of Feed the Ball, Derek Duncan speaks to Bill Coore, who along with design partner Ben Crenshaw and their team of shapers has built a collection of what are considered to be some of the greatest golf courses of the last 60 or 70 years. Bill shares his thoughts on life and…
RTJ Trail – Oxmoor Valley: Vertigo at the Ridge Course
Certain elements of the Ridge Course at Oxmoor Valley in southeast Birmingham are fairly outrageous. I think of the 1st and 2nd holes (formerly the 10th and 11th, a par-4 followed by a par-5, one going uphill, the other downhill) that are so steep they play like a life size Q-bert pyramid where the only place a ball can come to rest…
RTJ Trail: Smoothing Into Oxmoor Valley’s Valley Course
The Valley Course at Oxmoor Valley makes a dramatic entrance with a tee shot that drops nearly 200 feet to a fairway bracketed by large clover bunkers. The rest of the routing covers the tamer flats on the western side of Little Shades Mountain with none of the big up and down movements of the Ridge Course, at…
Pelican Golf Club, nee Belleview Biltmore
We’ll never know how good this course originally was (for many years it was an amenity for the historic Belleview Biltmore hotel up the road) because it began to fall into disrepair due to various financial crises shortly after it opened in 1925. Likely it was never very special — Ross’s topographical map would have been pretty…
Another Round for Druid Hills
Druid Hills is one of Atlanta’s original surviving clubs along with Ansley, Capital City Club–Brookhaven (also an H. H. Barker design, completely reconfigured by Bob Cupp in 2009) and East Lake. The design is nestled snugly into one of the city’s most prestigious old neighborhoods near Emory University where Atlanta’s moneyed set built estate homes in the early…
Solid and Scenic: Amelia Island Plantation’s Oak Marsh
Compared to Ocean Links, Amelia Island Plantation’s other (now deceased) resort course, Oak Marsh is both more solid and less interesting. The holes follow a standard real estate development configuration, playing through wooded condos on the inland side of Highway A1A along the Amelia River and Intracoastal Waterway. Each nine starts slow, flowing in counterclockwise and clockwise rotations on either side…
The Highs and Lows of Sanctuary Ridge
Any course that claims to be Florida’s “mountain course” cannot be taken seriously. This is a state that considers a mountain anything that’s higher than the roof of your house. However. Sanctuary Ridge, located at the north end of Lake Wales Ridge near Clermont, is in fact situated on some of the state’s most vertiginous real estate. The…
Episode 2: Bobby Weed
Bobby Weed joins Derek Duncan on the latest edition of the Feed the Ball podcast. Join us as Bobby talks about how he learned from Pete Dye that all good golf courses are built in the field, the joy of getting back on the bulldozer, his recent work at The Medalist Club in South Florida…
Upcoming Interview: Bobby Weed
Architect Bobby Weed and I were scheduled to talk last week for an upcoming episode of Feed the Ball, until Hurricane Irma blew chaos into both our lives. He’s now traveling and repairing damage to his property near Ponte Vedra, but I’ll be catching up with him soon. Be on the lookout for the latest podcast…