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 […]
The Best of Harry Colt’s Lesser-Known Courses
U.S. readers will certainly know the name Harry Colt (born Henry in London in 1869)—the man who showed the world amateur golfers (though he did make the cut at the 1891 Open Championship) were capable of designing golf courses and doing it so well it could become a legitimate profession. A Cambridge grad, Colt gave […]
American Dream Courses: Southwest
After exploring the southeast, we stay at a similar latitude but move across the country to the southwest for the second installment of our “American Dream” series—specifically California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and southern Utah. The southwest isn’t blessed with quite as much golf as the southeast perhaps, and there are comparatively few old-school golf […]
What’s Next for America’s Munis?
By Tony Dear What’s going on with municipal golf? One minute you read there are now more city-owned courses in the U.S. than ever—2,497, according to the National Golf Foundation (as of 2017–2018)—and that many are being given multi-million-dollar renovations. But then you see a story lamenting the terrible drain municipals are on […]
Five of James Braid’s Best Courses
James Braid was an immense figure in the game, belonging to a very short and distinguished list of greats who not only won at least five major championships, but also became productive (if not always brilliant) course designers—a list that includes J.H. Taylor, Jack Nicklaus, Peter Thomson, Gary Player, Arnold Palmer, and Nick Faldo. Add […]
American Dream Courses: Southeast
Who doesn’t love the occasional trip to a top-100 course with its awesome architecture, near-perfect conditioning, and fancy clubhouse? Equally appealing though (to us, anyway) is the discovery of something altogether less glamorous, but a little more affordable and still hugely enjoyable. In this series, we’re covering each region of the U.S. and nominating courses […]
Player-Architects: What They Offer, What They Lack, and Who Was the Best?
John Fought, the 1977 U.S. Amateur champion, a two-time PGA Tour winner, and a highly regarded course architect, believes a successful playing background can both hurt and hinder the transition into design. “One advantage I had was that I’d seen some of the best courses in the world under tournament conditions,” he says. “I think […]
