American Dream Courses: Northeast
The Northeast is the home of old golf in America—where guest passes are prized like Willy Wonka’s golden tickets. But for every secluded Devereux Emmet, Walter Travis, Alexander Findlay, or Willie Campbell design there are plenty of excellent public courses anyone can play. This is our version of the American Dream—really good golf where everyone […]
QuickSands — How Much Fun Can You Handle?
I’m standing on the tee of the downhill 13th at the new QuickSands Course at Gamble Sands in central Washington, thinking that putter is probably the play. No question, actually. Really, the 13th sums up the tantalizing challenge of QuickSands perfectly. The hole may be playing 92 yards, but the tee sits about 50 feet […]
American Dream Courses: Midwest (East)
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The eastern half of the Midwest is our sixth region having navigated about two-thirds of the country in our “American Dream Courses” series. We’ve identified dozens of interesting, affordable, welcoming golf courses, but may have hit peak “Dream Golf” here in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan…especially Michigan. Because there are so many excellent courses […]
The Best Architect You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of
Mike DeVries has been quietly, but steadily, building a reputation for designing great courses He’s been interviewed on Golf Channel and designed a course in the world’s top 25. His star is unquestionably on the rise. Yet, Mike DeVries remains something of an unknown. Unless you’re in his home state or halfway around the world, […]
American Dream Courses: Midwest (West)
In a land made up predominantly of plains, pastures, prairies, and relatively few golf courses (1,435 over an area of roughly 520,000 square miles), you might assume rattling off a dozen that fit into our American Dream Courses criteria—good, inexpensive, welcoming, under-the-radar, special in some way—would be pretty straightforward. It actually threw up a number […]
TPC Harding Park’s Road to Glory
The venue for this week’s PGA Championship has enjoyed something of a wild ride since opening in July 1925. Designed by Sam Whiting and William Watson whose famed Lake Course at the Olympic Club had opened the year before, TPC Harding Park was originally named Lake Merced Municipal Links but soon was dedicated to President […]
What Makes A Green Great?
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of interesting greens to the rank, renown, and reputation of a golf course. It would be similarly tough accumulating all the telling quotes the great architects have submitted on the subject—but here are a few: “Putting greens constructed with relation to the length and topography of the […]
American Dream Courses: Western Mountain Region
You know how this goes—we recommend courses that don’t necessarily create headlines, but which have a special something that makes them worth knowing. This is our version of the American Dream—really good golf where everyone is welcome and everyone can afford to play. Here are 10 from our Western Mountain region (Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and […]
Rick Shiels: Golf Equipment’s YouTube Guru
It’s hard to pinpoint Rick Shiels’s English accent. Predominantly Lancastrian, there’s a lot of Mancunian in there too, and just a trace of Yorkshire perhaps. Fortunately, despite the mix, he has no problem communicating with an audience, be it online or fans of Golf Channel’s Driver v. Driver 2 on which he was a judge. […]
American Dream Courses: Northwest
If you’re into cool, small towns with more breweries than grocery stores, snow-capped volcanoes (dormant since Mount St. Helens blew in 1980), arid high desert, and primitive beaches backed by dark coniferous forests, then you’ll likely fall as hard for the Pacific Northwest as I did. The golf gets pretty sensational, too. You know about […]
