Royal Golf Club: From Corporate Playground to Community Course
By Adam Schupak When Art Fry, co-inventor of the Post-It Note, visited the construction site of Royal Golf Club in Lake Elmo, Minn., he took one look at the stunning clubhouse view of Horseshoe Lake and said, “I’ve played a thousand rounds here and I never knew there was a lake there.” That’s just […]
Arcadia Bluffs South Course – A True Modern Classic
By Tony Dear Thanks largely to social media, the names C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor have become familiar to more than just a small group of golf historians and architecture geeks in recent years. As their fame has grown, so has the desire to play the numerous top-100 courses they designed during the Golden […]
Country Club of Orlando – A Renovation Lesson for Classic Clubs
By Graylyn Loomis I grew up in the mountains of North Carolina, where hilly terrain and serious elevation change are standard on most golf courses. With that upbringing, I’ve often been skeptical of courses on flat land, finding them uninteresting. But, over the last few years, my bias has eroded as I’ve seen what […]
The 5 Courses I Want to Play Most
By Graylyn Loomis If you picture the LINKS staff as a group of crazed golf travelers, you’re not far off. On any given day we’re either on, returning from, or planning our next golf adventures and rarely does a week go by when a staffer isn’t visiting a new destination. With all of that […]
LINKS Golf Podcast Ep. 1 – A Golf Trip to Southern England
In the first episode of the LINKS Magazine Golf Podcast, we dive into a recent trip that Graylyn took to a golf-rich part of the UK after a strong recommendation from Tom Doak. That area was the southern coast of England where Graylyn played St. Enodoc, Saunton (West), Royal North Devon, Prince’s Golf Club, Royal […]
Links Living: Desert Mountain
A new luxury-home enclave and a seventh golf course designed with a big dose of fun are reenergizing this exclusive community high in the Sonoran Desert When you are the only private community in the world with six Jack Nicklaus Signature golf courses and set on 8,200 acres of picturesque Sonoran Desert, offering a new […]
Links Living: Sailfish Point
At this unpretentious, private, sea-island community in one of Florida’s most coveted locations, the emphasis is on quality, not quantity All too often, it’s the latest and greatest that grabs our attention. But when you have a good thing going, not making wholesale changes to your community can be the wisest course of action. Take […]
State of the Game: What Does the Data Say About Golf Right Now?
Did you know one in every nine people plays golf? That’s more than participate in basketball, baseball, tennis, or skiing, making golf one of the nation’s largest participation sports. There’s no doubt you’ve heard a wide range of opinion about the state and health of the game, so let’s take a closer look at the […]
The Hotchkiss School Course: A Raynor Course Open to All
Golf architecture geeks surely know the name Seth Raynor. A local surveyor (and non-golfer) plucked out of obscurity by Charles Blair Macdonald to help him build the National Golf Links on Long Island, Raynor became Macdonald’s partner, the yin to his yang, and following his boss’s “template hole” formula designed a number of notable […]
What Can the PGA Tour Learn from the European Tour?
Since taking over the European Tour in August 2015, Keith Pelley has proved to be an agent of change. Under his watch the European Tour has tackled such topics as golf’s glacial pace-of-play problem with a 40-second shot clock at one tournament to breaking from the monotony of 72-hole stroke-play competition with such events as […]