Following the economic crash of 2008, Love Golf Design, founded by brothers Mark Love and Davis Love III, decided to step back. Now, after a hiatus, the company has resumed business with several new renovations in the works following last year’s completion of Atlantic Dunes, a total remodel of one of the Lowcountry’s original golf…
Few living architects are better than Steve Smyers at combining an understanding of golf shots and strategy with holes that possess immense visual flourish. Based in Florida, he’s designed courses and played in top-level amateur tournaments all over the globe. He joins Derek Duncan on the Feed the Ball podcast to discuss how he’s always evolving as a designer,…
To renovate or restore. That is the question many historic clubs must decide when their courses are in need of repair. Just as many would view it a tragedy to deface a pristine Colonial- or antebellum-era house with modern accoutrements, prominent golf voices believe the features of classic era courses, and the architectural intent behind…
In this episode, architect Bill Bergin and Derek Duncan catch up and discuss a wide array of subjects including Bill’s recent and upcoming re-workings of several historic clubs, WWSRD (what would Seth Raynor do?), keeping pace with Bob Tway and the northwest Atlanta high school golf scene, going low at St. Andrews, Bill’s top 3 Atlanta…
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…
Atlanta’s East Lake Golf Club, the “permanent” site of the TOUR Championship, is not unlike a Marvel Comics superhero. Its been cast into a role it had no intention of playing, resurrected from a lonely downward fate by powerful outside forces, refurbished to be put to use for the greater “good” fighting encroaching evils and blights. This hero has…
It doesn’t surprise me when I hear people say their favorite course at Pinehurst is No. 8. The brilliance of No. 2 — its subtlety and contour — is a hard sell for resort golfers and can seem dramatically over-hyped next to the outrageous green fee. And as good as the other six courses are, none match…
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but apparently you can teach an old dog old tricks. I’m not saying Denis Griffiths is old, but at Old Union in north Georgia’s Appalachian foothills near Blairsville the architect created a look that might have come straight out of the early 20th century. Or before. Old Union is brightened with…
The lovely 10th, working back toward the sea, shows how smart bunkering can give fairways sinuous movement within straight hole corridors. (photo: thebreakers.com) No one alive today can tell us if the original course at The Breakers (now the resort’s Ocean Course) is anything like it was 90 or 100 years ago. But when you go there, it sure feels like golf from…
It’s impossible to talk about Pinehurst No. 2 without talking about the big convex greens. And it’s hard to talk about the greens without recalling Pete Dye’s old yarn about how they got the way they are. Dye played the No. 2 course weekly while stationed at Fort Bragg in the 1940’s. The greens then were not particularly crowned…