As always, GNN does a terrific job of making my articles look magazine-worthy. Both of these courses are pleasant surprises. Timber Banks has superb green complexes, while Copake has interesting false fronts and sides to greens. Both courses put a premium on second shot accuracy, and they are both wonderfully inexpensive as well.
I wrote about Meadow Club for this month’s Golf Course Trades, one of those courses that you have to play before you die. Here’s my favorite part of the article: As I took a deep breath and savored the crisp, wine-sweet, forest-fragrant air, the October sun’s rays began their last golden stretch across Alister Mackenzie and Robert Hunter’s...
The year was 1971, and even though the Rolling Stones had just generated grillions of dollars with their world-wide hit “Satisfaction,” there was Mick Jagger on a media dais surrounded by a forest of microphones and a phalanx of international journalists explaining that – for tax reasons – the Stones had to flee their beloved England and...
MONROE TOWNSHIP, NJ – Of the many accolades that our beloved Banks Course has earned since Stephen Kay’s masterful restoration, perhaps none was more important than the glowing comments from no less a personage than Ran Morrissett himself, owner and operator of GolfClubAtlas.com, a world-wide think tank of experts on the topic of golf design. As I took...
On the face of it, this looks unfair. A 10 year old girl, clearly a child prodigy at golf, is mysteriously being banned from golf for one year while her parents fight over custody. From the Deadspin article: “The ban comes as the kid is thriving on the links. By the count of Vechery [the father], a career real estate salesman and part-time golf coach, his...
If you want the truth about what’s happening in the darker corners of the sports world, Phil Mushnick of the New York Post should be a daily stop. Today he skewers Nike’s entire Tiger Woods-fueled lunacy that led to their demise. From the article: “Nike was barking up the wrong money tree. Golfers aren’t as impressionable or as vulnerable as...
SPRINGFIELD, NJ – Right on cue, Baltusrol did what it always does at major golf championships – surrender a record low score. Sometimes it’s an immortal that does it – such as Jack Nicklaus or Phil Mickelson. Sometimes, however, it’s a journeyman who comes out of nowhere – Lee Janzen or Thomas Bjorn leap to mind. Each of those four...
SPRINGFIELD, NJ – When the tempest breaks at a major championship, it tends to do so with Olympian fury. A bar sinister moves across the sky with a rapidity that seems incredible. Then the wind’s voice rises with growing fury. The clouds turn black, then green, convulsing all a once into a washing machine in the sky. That’s what we’re waiting...
“Ye friends that weep about my grave Compose your minds to rest Prepare with me for sudden death And be forever blest” That is the chilling epitaph on the forlorn, grey tombstone standing sentinel over wealthy oxen farmer Baltus Roll’s lonely grave in a northern New Jersey Presbyterian burial ground. His was a pioneering family in the region, so...
We said this was a terrible idea, and each day we are proved more prophetic. If it’s not fecal matter on the water, savage protests, a recession with people starving in he streets, government corruption to make even Hillary Clinton blush, it’s now a mosquito-borne virus that delivers genetic defects to your kids while slowly decaying your brain and blood...
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...
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!
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...
MONROE TOWNSHIP, NJ – The wind was cold as Spanish steel. A golf ball-gray sky stretched end to end across the horizon, clouds moving forlornly before the breeze. To the west a dark thunderhead roiled, black as a witch’s cauldron. Yet to the buoyant hearts of northeast golfers it might have well been a sunny 4th of July. “What a perfect day for golf...