What’s the Best Vacation Spot for Your Golf Game?
By James A. Frank You toil hard to earn yourself a little vacation time with your clubs. You book the flights, hotel, rental car, and tee times, excited to play a highly ranked course. But you quickly discover your game is ill-suited to the layout, and instead of having fun, you toil some more, growing […]
Top 10 California Golf Courses
In addition to the breathtaking views, California features some of the best golf in the country. Here’s our top 10 California golf courses. Cypress Point, Monterey In a word: location. Alister MacKenzie’s organic use of the Monterey Peninsula’s coastal dunes has three jaw-dropping oceanside holes. The par-three 16th is one of golf’s most fearsome holes, […]
The Ultimate San Diego Golf Vacation
By David Weiss San Diego is coming of age quite gracefully, graduating from swabbies and flip-flops to Jimmy Choos and start-ups in what seems like the blink of an eye. Gone are the downtown days of soup kitchens and thrift shops. The Gaslamp Quarter—version 2.0—is now home to income-disposing millennials in search of the perfect […]
Mix a Golf Tune-Up Vacation with Baseball Spring Training
For the golfer who’s also a major league baseball fan, the dream vacation is one that combines the two. There’s no better time to do that than right now, mixing your pre-season tune-up with spring training. You have two options—the Grapefruit League in Florida and the Cactus League in Arizona, with 15 major-league teams based […]
BallenIsles Country Club: The Home of the PGA Tour
In the hotbed of golf that is Palm Beach, it’s hard to find a community with more history than BallenIsles. Before there were houses, it was the original home of what became the PGA Tour. The still-challenging East Course—one of three 18-hole layouts—hosted the 1971 PGA Championship. From this proud pedigree grew a big and […]
There’s More than Great Golf at The Cliffs Communities
If you’re into golf, The Cliffs must be on your radar. Each of its seven communities—three in the mountains of the western Carolinas, three on 26-mile-long Lake Keowee, one minutes from Asheville—has its own course, and one membership means belonging to all seven. It’s the ultimate in choice. Yet as good as the golf is […]
Desert Highlands is Upgrading Homes in a Novel Way
Scottsdale is synonymous today with high-end communities featuring golf courses from leading architects. But it’s worth remembering that the northern reaches of this area, 30 miles from downtown Phoenix, were little more than cactus and rocks three decades ago and that the transformation began with a development called Desert Highlands. Over Thanksgiving weekend 1983, the […]
In Praise of the PGA Championship
A few years ago, Sports Illustrated asked 50 PGA Tour players which major they most wanted to win. The Masters took half the votes, the British and US Opens about 25% each. And the PGA Championship? 2%.Pity the poor PGA. It’s the Ringo Starr of major championships: Definitely one of the Fab Four, but not […]
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 […]
Understanding Erin Hills, Host of the 2017 U.S. Open
To understand Erin Hills for those who have yet to see it, you must start with what it is not. “It’s not parkland, it’s not heathland, it’s not linksland,” says John Morrissett, the competitions director at the Wisconsin course, which will host the U.S. Open this month. “It is really a mixture of elements.” “It […]