Tom Doak’s Sedge Valley – A Sub-Par 70 Design at Sand Valley
By Tony Dear Golf course design priorities have seen a welcome shift in recent years. The emphasis on demanding, arduous golf has started to give way to fun, sustainable courses that you’d want to play again and again. The new wave is seen in the boom of short courses across the country (Pinehurst’s Cradle, […]
The 6 Top Modern Golf Courses in Scotland
By Erik Matuszewski The game of golf, at least as we know it, was born on the links land of eastern Scotland over 500 years ago. While it’s now played by tens of millions of golfers around the world, Scotland is still widely known as the home of golf. It is home to the iconic […]
100 Years of Pebble Beach: A “New” Course for the U.S. Open
By James A. Frank In 2019, Pebble Beach Golf Links will celebrate its 100th birthday and host its sixth U.S. Open. To commemorate these milestones, each issue of Links Magazine and LINKSdigital between now and then will tell the unique story that is Pebble Beach. Every golf course is a work in progress, changing over […]
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 […]
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 […]
Hiding in Plain Sight: Golf on England’s South Coast
By Graylyn Loomis I was once on a golf course with Tom Doak when he told a story about a trip he’d taken with one of his clients. The man asked Tom to plan a trip to the UK with no constraints on cost or time. The group would fly private from the states […]
What Next for the Bally Bandon Sheep Ranch?
By Tony Dear It has become decreasingly mysterious with every passing article—and there have been many—but the Sheep Ranch still possesses sufficient intrigue and anonymity to ensure the golfer recounting his experiences of the place speaks mostly to a hushed audience. Images and stories have been filtering through for nearly two decades, and its […]
Prince’s Golf Club: A Gem in Southeast England
By Graylyn Loomis When the revolutionary rubber-core Haskell Golf Ball arrived in Britain around 1900, it rendered old—and even contemporary—courses obsolete. To combat the problem, a developer decided to build Prince’s Golf Club. It was considered very long at 7,000 yards when it opened in 1906 and was heralded as a course for the […]
You’ve Got to Play: 17th at Danzante Bay
By Tony Dear As you climb the sharply uphill par-four 16th at Danzante Bay, all thoughts are on what lies over the ridge behind the green. You putt out a little quicker than normal, then drive vigorously to the crest of the hill. You’ve heard about the par-three 17th hole. Maybe you’ve watched Round […]
