Golf News Net Publisher, Broadcaster, and Editor Ryan Ballengee writes this solid article on distance on the PGA Tour. I’ve been agreeing with Ryan for years – we need bifurcation on the Tour.Once you turn pro, grab a persimmon driver and hardwood woods. I mean really – people are routinely hitting 400+ yard drives now. Normal players just...
PITTSBURGH, PA – —The noise afterwards, It rises up like a storm, As if you were the Thunder God himself. Proximo to Maximus the Gladiator— Like a scene from Gladiator, the roar of adulation rang from Erie to Allentown and from Scranton to Akron. No mere coliseum could match it. Conquering heroes were returning home, and this is Pittsburgh. When you...
OAKMONT, PA – “It’s the hardest golf course I’ve ever played,” said pretty much every golfer in the field this week at the 2016 U.S. Open. Sergio Garcia, Dustin Johnson, Andrew Sullivan, Phil Mickelson: the list was endless. Mighty Oakmont, Henry Fownes’s knuckle-dragging, slavering-jawed, razor-sharp taloned grassy guillotine is...
OAKMONT, PA – We’ve had our ledes written for 17 years, but still haven’t been able to use them. “Phinally Phil!” “Phillin’ Groovy!” “Mickel-slam!” – they all lay useless in a seldom used Microsoft Word file I call “The Well of Lost Plots,” where bits of articles that end up on the cutting...
NEW HARTFORD, NY – With a heavy heart, we here at AWITP are saddened to report that Lu Chen, a.k.a. the Irrepressible Mr. Lu, has died. He was killed when his Cessna C210 crashed in Northern New Jersey as he was flying on work-related business. He was 59. Mr. Lu’s plane went down on May 16th in a wooded area in Sussex County near a town called Wantage...
OAKMONT, PA – They’re called “half-par holes” be cause they play either much easier or much harder than the par on the scorecard states, and they are often the key to winning a golf tournament. Be it stroke play or match play, the ability to negotiate the razor thin edge between a birdie (or even eagle) or a triple bogey is the difference...
—Friends to Jay: “Who’s going to win the U.S. Open this year?” Jay to Friends: “Oakmont, that’s who.”— Of all the major championship venues I’ve seen in my career as a sports writer – and I’ve see everything from Augusta to Pebble and back – Oakmont is my favorite. Cresting the hill of the second...
MAMARONECK, NY – Brian Williams pitched in from perdition to open the day’s play with lightning, while college stars Chris Troy and James Nicholas closed the day with thunder, using gargantuan length and unyielding pressure to pummel their opponents by a combined score of 8&7. Winged Foot members all, along with Williams’s partner Hans...
SCOTCH PLAINS, NJ – Raise a glass to 100 years of rousing cheers. Shackamaxon Country club in northwest New Jersey celebrates their centennial this year. It’s another runaway success for the tandem of owner/developer/magnate Chris Schiavone and golf architect Stephen Kay. Finger pressed firmly on the zeitgeist of modern golf architecture, they’ve...
Great job by Ryan Ballengee and the folks at Golf News Net running my review of my new Callaway Apex Forged Irons.
UPDATE! I’m still hitting the irons great, thank you for asking!
We had Ryan Ballengee and Gary Van Sickle on the Jay’s Plays show on the Golf News Net Radio Network. We talked about the Masters, Jordan Spieth, the Players, Fowler, McIlroy, the USGA Fourball and the Anderson Memorial, both at Winged Foot, and the best moments of Tropic Thunder! sadly, no one has gotten the JB’s Best Hot Sauce Trivia Question right in a...
MAMARONECK, NY – Set your TiVo for Fox Sports 1 this weekend, because you’ll get a rare and wonderful opportunity: Winged Foot’s East Course, in all its majesty and splendor, will finally get the close-up it so richly deserves as the USGA and the television cameras descend on the venerable club – the Yankee Stadium of golf – for the...
Just like newly-minted Masters Champion Danny Willett, the due date for Ryan and Katie Ballengee’s second child was…Masters Sunday! Yup…planned that well! :):) Still, the ever clever Ballengee, publisher, producer, and editor of the Golf News Net came up with a brilliant birth announcement for little Rose Carmela: Genius! So now little Carrick has a...
It was the 66 that was the illusion — that and the four consecutive birdies to close the front nine on Sunday. But those 22 holes are what made us believe that Jordan Spieth was headed into Butler Cabin for another Green Jacket Ceremony to close out the 80th Masters as back-to-back champion. Surely the steely-nerved, iron-willed, icy-veined two-time major...
It’s an all new Jay’s Plays Show on the Golf News Net Radio Network. First golf architect Bill Love and Director of Golf Will Hutter talk about Olympic Club and how it might play for the 2021 U.S. Women’s Open. Then golf architect Stephen Kay and golf course magnate Chris Schiavone jump on the show to talk about Shackamaxon’s 100th anniversary...