Golf, Wine, and Safari in South Africa
By Tony Dear South Africa’s many attractions are hardly unknown. But having just spent three unforgettable weeks there visiting Cape Town, drinking a lot of incredible wine, watching elephants and lions in the wild, and playing a few really good golf courses, I’d estimate it gets about one-fifth the coverage it deserves. Getting there […]
Does the Golf Course Architect Matter?
Ted Vassallo, a retired civil engineer from Vermont, says the identity of the golf course architect wasn’t a major factor when he and wife Jan were deciding which of the seven communities at The Cliffs to move into. “We originally intended building a house up in the mountains at Glassy, which has a Tom Jackson […]
Our Favorite 9-Hole Golf Courses in the Country
By Tony Dear These are our 10 favorite 9-hole courses that anyone can play. Sweetens Cove—South Pittsburg, Tenn. Built on the site of an old course called Sequatchie Valley that was about as dull as a golf course could be, Sweetens Cove opened to great acclaim in 2014. The brilliant minds behind the transformation were […]
Exploring the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail
By Tony Dear Back in the mid-to-late 1980s, the CEO of Alabama’s state employee pension fund—Retirement Systems of Alabama (RSA)—hatched an outlandish plan to build multiple golf courses simultaneously throughout the state, a state never before regarded as a golf destination. Nothing like it had ever been conceived, let alone attempted, but this man hoped […]
First Green Teaches Kids Environmental Benefits of Golf
When Steve Kealy hosts a First Green field trip, he likes to send the kids home with an incentive to protect water quality in their homes and surrounding neighborhoods. “I teach them about storm water and waste water,” says the 27-year Superintendent at Glendale Country Club in Bellevue, Wash. “And I give them four things […]
Get to Know J.P. Harrington, Wedge Mastermind
James Patrick Harrington remembers wrapping his Cleveland RTG wedges in a wet cloth and leaving them in the bathroom overnight to hasten the rusting process. This was sometime in his early teens and the first indication he might be a golf club geek. Twenty years on, Harrington, now 35, has his own wedge label and […]
The 21st Century Wave of Breathtaking Golf Courses
If you like courses that are about real beauty rather than real estate (and who doesn’t?), then you have to agree that we are in the midst of a very special period in the history of golf architecture. Gone, hopefully for good, are the days of large-scale developments anchored on courses whose sole purpose was […]
Stoatin Brae – Michigan’s New Course from Renaissance Design
By Tony Dear In his 16 years with Tom Doak’s architectural firm Renaissance Golf, Erik Iverson has worked on numerous incredible sites. He was a design associate and shaper on the jagged, finger cliffs at Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand, the sandy knolls at Barnbougle Dunes in Australia, the beautiful Long Island coastline at […]
What You Should Know About Royal Birkdale
By Tony Dear The Open, Open Championship, and British Open all began at the same time yesterday on the historic links of Royal Birkdale Golf Club, a couple of miles south of Lord Street and Southport’s handsome town center. The club, founded as Birkdale Golf Club in 1889, moved to its present location in […]
Wisconsin – America’s Next Great Golf Destination
The national spotlight doesn’t fall on Wisconsin very often, and when it does the subject invariably seems limited to cheese, beer, or the Green Bay Packers. This week though, the Badger State is front and center—in golfers’ households anyway, as the U.S. Open unfolds at Erin Hills, a dramatic 650-acre, glacier-formed course 35 miles northwest […]
