Trying to describe the essentials of good golf course routing calls to mind Justice Potter Stewart’s old brief about classifying porn — I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it. Bad golf course routings can be spotted miles away but truly great ones can be sublime. You often don’t realize they’re…
Hopefully people playing Tot Hill Farm outside of Raleigh know what they’re getting into. If they do, the disguised and oddly shaped fairways won’t bother them, nor will all the rocks and boulders, nor will the curiously oblong putting surfaces that melt like American cheese over the hilly landscapes. If they don’t, then this stuff will drive them mad.…
Do you love Donald Ross and the idea of experiencing accurate expressions of his designs? Then this podcast is for you. Architect Kris Spence made the jump from golf superintendent to the design and build world when a club in North Carolina hired him to help restore the lost features of its Donald Ross course. 20…
The opening tee shot at Tobacco Road is played through a gap between two steep grass-covered dunes to a partially obscured fairway. If played from the correct tees, getting the drive over and past the dunes isn’t difficult. But the fact that these battlements are there at all is a signal that this is not going to be a typical…
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…
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…