We’ll be paying the PGA Championship in August for the last time this year; it moves to mid-May starting in 2019. Here is a list of the future PGA Championship venues going forward – at least the ones that have been determined… 2018 – Bellerive Country Club, St. Louis, Mo. 2019 – Bethpage State Park, (Black Course) Bethpage, N.Y. 2020...
So my U.S. Open preview is up at Golf News Net. (They always male it look fantastic!) Ryan Ballengee and I will have wall-to-wall coverage of the tournament all week long, with radio, video, and 1,500 words a day. Plus I’ll have three-day coverage of the Anderson Memorial at Winged Foot. Throw in a round at National Golf Links of America, and that’s a...
Wow, what a terrific job Ryan Ballengee and the GNN team did publishing my fun look at the various U.S. Open Qualifying sites. Click here for the story. My fave part of the article: Orange County National’s Crooked Cat course is another boring, watery, center-line slog, so much so that during the week of the PGA Show, you’ll often hear golfers that played...
Imagine my surprise when I saw something called “Hombre Golf Club, the Bad and Ugly Courses” listed among the nearly 100 local qualifying sites for the 118th U.S. Open. What passes for names these days! First we had the Mighty Ducks in hockey, now we have the Good the Bad and the Ugly in golf? What’s next? Is the Outlaw Josie Wales gonna pop out...
Tell anyone other than an ardent golfer that you’re going to Fenway and they’ll ask you to say hi to Big Papi and Jason Varitek for them. Tell the ardent golfer, on the other hand, and they’ll not only know that Yankee Stadium is much closer, they’ll be totally jealous too, because they know Fenway is a terrific A.W. Tillinghast golf club...
WAYNE, NJ – His name is Hank Gola, and for decades he was the voice of the Great New York Sports Fan as the New York Daily News beat writer for pro football and golf. Hank is beloved in NYC, a home town boy who became a lifer of a local sports writer with a dozen national accolades to his name. If you grew up reading the New York sports pages, you saw the...
As usual, Golf Course Trades did a phenomenal job of laying out my article about Pete Dye’s other masterpiece at Casa de Campo – Dye Fore! Parts are a throwback to Seth Raynor and Charles Blair Macdonald, parts are clifftop excitement, and parts are puckish Pete Dye at his creative best. And wait till next month when Stephen Kay and Lester George talk...
The folks over at Golf Course Trades did a terrific job publishing my U.S. Open Road trip article in their September issue. It was a great run: The Roc and Pheasant with Phil Furfari, Canterbury in Cleveland, where – among others – Jack Nicklaus made indelible major championship history, Keith Foster’s dazzling renovation of Moraine Country Club in...
CHARLOTTE, NC – You have to love Jim Furyk. He shoots from the lip. When asked about the changes to Quail Hollow Club for the 99th PGA Championship, he had the perfect laconic reply. “One could be the toughest opening hole in golf. It actually looks like a really nice par-5 to me, but for some reason they put par-4 on the card,” he deadpanned. See...
Golf News Net ran my Jay’s Plays radio show interview with Eric Bergstol. We talked Bayonne, designing in greater New York City, his Empire Golf empire, and more! Tune in here for the fun.
BAYONNE, NJ – A funny thing happened when I went to interview a golf course architect about his design strategies. I got a grad school-level lecture in landscape architecture, construction, and golf course permitting instead. It was every bit as fascinating. Eric Bergstol lives the dream of everyone who enters one of those Armchair Architecture contests they...
We’ll have a longer article soon, but the best modern curse we visited this year was Boston Golf Club, called “the best course designed since 1960” by one of the smartest architecture critics I know. Designed by Gil Hanse, the course is a 21st century Pine Valley, a rustic, minimalist Shangri-la deep in the forest west of Boston. We’ll have...
MONROE TOWNSHIP, NJ – The eyes of the golf architecture cognoscenti are again upon our beloved Forsgate, and once more we are being spoken of in knowing nods and holy whispers. Golf Design expert Ran Morrissett, owner and operator of the golf design think tank GolfClubAtlas.com, has posted his analysis of the Banks course on line at for all the golf world to...
Steve Czaban has this eye-opening expose on the graft, incompetence, and neglect plaguing the future of the Rio Olympics course. I remember telling certain golf architects that losing that bid would be a blessing, and that the guy who won would be sorry in the long run. And while it was fun for three weeks, it looks like that might be the extent of the course’s...
SCARSDALE, NY – [Author’s Note: Ardent golfers on both sides of the pond have heard of Sunningdale Golf Club in Merry Old England, a heathland masterpiece by Harry Colt and one of the world’s great courses, so rightly famous that author Ian Fleming made his quintessential super-spy James Bond a member of the august club. But here in America another...