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Golf Course Trades Runs My Green Lakes Article

GREEN LAKES – SYRACUSE’S BABY BETHPAGE

Golf Course Trades did a remarkable job with my Green Lakes article. This one was fun, especially because I got a bunker named after me. You read that correctly. When you hole out a bunker shot, you get the bunker named after you. That’s Rule 36. (Rule 35 is have fun…).

“…many of the bunkers had become so filled with sand or their faces so eroded, you could play out of them with a putter, an untenable situation for any serious golf course. The situation came to a head recently when Your Author holed out a 100-foot shot out of the back right bunker of the par-3 fourth hole with a putter. It also broke 40 feet if it broke an inch.

That green is set in one of Jones’s trademark crossovers, where three tees and three greens all meet. Close to ten groups witnessed the shot or at least the after-celebration, so loud and reverberating Your Author took two bows, a curtain call, and will be dining out that story for a long time to come. “Jay’s Sandbox” has now become the working title for the back right bunker. The press left another label.

This has created quite the conundrum for the maintenance team: the staff wasn’t sure whether they were going to restore that bunker or remove it altogether. Your Author’s nifty bit of prestidigitation may have forced their hand, however. When you’ve cowed the greatest golfing professionals in the world into submission at a national championship, you can’t let a scrawny, hobbit-sized, 16-handicap go scoreboard on you, especially not by making a mockery out of your bunker with a putter: no sir! And no less personages than both of Robert Trent Jones’s sons agree.

“Green Lakes is an historic course, and one of my father’s favorites,” said Rees Jones. “And that shot is now part of the course’s history.”

[Author’s interjection: Yeah! There you go!]”

From the article: