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...
SOUTHAMPTON, NY – It’s the best golf design magic trick since Oakmont made 5,000 trees disappear. Now you see it, now you don’t – prest-o! change-o! – and with a wave of a wand, a whiff of diesel, and a crackerjack grounds crew, the fairways of 2018 U.S. Open host Shinnecock Hills narrowed pretty much overnight. Penn and Teller got nuthin’ on Shinnecock head super...
As always, Golf Course Trades did a phenomenal job with my preview for the U.S. Open. Super Jon Jennings leads an all-star cast of supers, meteorologists, and USGA brass in getting Shinnecock Hills ready for the pros and the National Championship. Jennings is a fascinating guy. as the articles states, “Golf is lucky to have gotten Jennings at all, actually. He...
The awful weather of this never-ending winter continued all across New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and into the Rust Belt and Heartland, crippling travel and causing multiple delays to the start of golf season. Even Shinnecock Hills, site of this year’s U.S. Open, has been affected. Erring on the side of caution (of course) the Club will Open one week later than...
I suppose it’s fitting that on the 30th anniversary of Sandy Lyle donning the Green Jacket that our generation’s heel of a golfer – a person as sour, dour, and sometimes unlovable as Lyle – won the 82nd Masters. Patrick Reed slouched and slogged his way into Butler Cabin and the Green Jacket with a workmanlike but uninspiring, up-and-down final round 71 for 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 it lament...
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 from behind a...
One last U.S. Open redux as Tony Dear, our European Correspondent, came on the sow to talk U.S. Open, Brooks Koepka, and miss the trivia question yet again:):) We’ll be checking in with him again in a couple weeks to talk Royal Birkdale and the Open Championship.
TOWN OF ERIN, WI – No less a personage than nine-time major champion Gary Player himself said that, “the long bunker shot is the most difficult shot in golf.” How fitting it is then, that the 2017 U.S. Open was essentially sealed by Brooks Koepka with one of the most exquisite played in the recent annals of the tournament. Clinging to a one shot lead over plucky...
TOWN OF ERIN, WI – Dear Dad: Happy Father’s Day! Another year, another U.S. Open, (13 now, in a row, and 25 majors overall), another year I get to write a letter to you in the form of an article, and you get to tell me what I should have done all week while I was here. Oh well, it beats Mom feeding you that slop at the nursing home they call food, don’t it? I still...
ERIN, WI – Hey! Ron Whitten, Dana Fry, and Mike Hurdzan built this great golf course in Wisconsin. Let’s go and hack at it! That’s not my loudmouth, lunkhead golf buddies and I talking, it’s the brightest stars of the professional tours. A remarkably benign Erin Hills surrendered record numbers of birdies to every Tom, Dick, and Harry (or in this case, every Brooks...
ERIN, WI – With a precision that Bernhard Langer would have envied, Rickie Fowler seized the first round lead of the 117th U.S. Open with a dazzling 7-under 65. It was the lowest score-to-par in the first round of the National Open since Jack Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf fired 8-under 63s at Baltusrol in 1980. Fowler’s card was sparkling clean – seven birdies no bogeys...
ERIN, WI – The collection of one shot holes at Erin Hills is as strong as we’ve ever seen at any U.S. Open. Both nine and 16 are downright iconic: instant classics. Both holes also prove that length is overrated. The ninth green is completely encircled by bunkers, including several narrow trenches just wide enough to stand, but, in places, to narrow to take anything...
ERIN, WI – A blood red sunset bathed Erin Hills Golf Course in an eerie witch-light as the sun descended behind an ominous curtain of black clouds. One last feeble flicker of the dying rays extinguished dismally, and then the landscape plunged into darkness, illuminated only by angry streaks of lightning, each strike silhouetting the clubhouse against the surrounding...
Gary D’Amato of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the author of the definitive book on Erin Hills joined us on the Jay’s Plays Radio Show to finish up our U.S. Open preview for the Golf News Net. We talked the Erin Hills, broke down the chances for a number of players. We even got Tiger Woods in there too…for the last time this week, that’s...