Let’s get one thing straight: the numbers are never going to work. They’re not coming back. At least not anytime soon. I’m talking about the swirling brew of statistics that portray golf as an imperiled game, including diminished annual rounds played, the plummeting number of committed players, golf course closings, shrinking memberships, a paucity of…
Dave Wilber, aka the Turfgrass Zealot, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on golf grasses and soils. Agronomist to the stars, Wilber has consulted with and been instrumental in developing grassing plans for some of the world’s greatest courses, including places like Kingsbarns in Scotland and Friars Head. He’s also been a pioneer in…
Over the last several years we’ve been witnessing a fairly radical development in golf architecture. Ever since the most important golf tournaments shifted formats from match play to stroke play, architects and clubs and organizations have been concerned, and occasionally obsessed, with “defending” par. In modern golf par has become sacrosanct, an (admittedly arbitrary) construct…
Mike Keiser once said the property at Sand Valley reminded him of a combination of Pine Valley, Sand Hills and Sunningdale. Talk about raising expectations. Intimate knowledge of those courses isn’t required to appreciate this rare environment of barren sand, monstrous dunes and orbital pine forests that accounts for Sand Valley. In fact you need…
Paul Cowley has worn many hats in his golf career: land and landscape planner, structural architect, superintendent and construction engineer. The majority of his golf architecture career, however, was spent running projects and designing courses for Mark and Davis Love III. Known inside the industry as one of the most creative and original thinkers, Cowley…
Tom Dunne founded the independent golf journal McKellar in 2017. Featuring alluring artwork with a playful point of view and stories from the best writers in the business, McKellar has become one of the brightest stars of a much welcomed revival of boutique publishing. In the course of traveling extensively to explore different courses and…
Dutch architect Frank Pont made a dramatic jump from the diverse worlds of engineering, corporate banking and mergers into golf course design in the mid-2000s. Since that time he’s become one of Europe’s most active and respected practitioners in historical restoration and remodeling. Through his work at some of the most prominent old courses on…
First off, this is not about J.B. Holmes, that poor, maligned social media avatar for tortuously slow play. This is about you, your friends and foes, your family and your foursome. It’s about pace of play. A pox of slow play consumes the game of golf — relentlessly and severely — and we’re no longer…
Canadian Trevor Dormer has been in the golf construction business since the early 2000’s and has become a prominent member of the industry’s talented “under-40” (for now) group of construction specialists and shapers. He’s worked around the globe with, among others, Nicklaus Design, Rod Whitman, Ron Prichard, Bill Coore, and Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner.…
Dave Axland and Rod Whitman, two of modern golf’s most skilled and admired construction men, met in the 1980s through Bill Coore. Axland has been an associate and project manager for numerous Coore-Crenshaw courses since the mid-1990s including Sand Hills, Talking Stick, Friars Head, Old Sandwich, Chechessee Creek plus numerous others, and has designed Wild…