Jason Day Tests World’s Greatest Golf-course Feature

Posted on May 29, 2016 by David Owen

This past Monday, Bob G., an honorary member of the Sunday Morning Group, invited Peter A., Hacker (real name), and me to join him for a round at his home course, GlenArbor Golf Club, in Bedford Hills, New York. We arrived before Bob did, and when I went into the locker room to take a whiz I noticed that one of the lockers had been reserved for someone named Jason Day.

Amazingly, that Jason Day turned out to be the real Jason Day, the No. 1 player in the world. Nobody at the club had mentioned anything about it to Bob, but Day was there to take part in an outing conducted by one of his sponsors, RBC, the Royal Bank of Canada.

The outing consisted of thirty-two youngish banker types, and the format was a shamble—a best-ball competition in which every player in a foursome plays his or her own ball from the foursome’s best tee shot. Day joined each group for one hole. Here he is, hitting a shot on a hole next to a lake:

That’s not Day on the right, standing in the hazard; that’s Hacker, recovering from an unfortunate drive. Day is on the left, under the red arrow. We got a closer look at him when he and the final RBC foursome played the eighteenth, a 414-yard par 4. The second half of that hole plays almost vertically up a steep hill, toward the clubhouse. Day had to hit is tee shot from the way-back tee, but his drive still flew miles beyond the other drives in the group. Naturally, his drive was the one they chose to use. Here he is, playing his second shot. (He hit it to about three feet, and made the putt).

You have to figure that Day’s appearance was required by a contract he signed before he turned into Superman, but, even so, he seemed to be having a pretty good time. Here he is during lunch, as GlenArbor’s director of golf was announcing things like the winner of the closest-to-the-pin contest:

Actually, I would bet that in some ways the outing was more fun for Day than it was for the bankers—who, after all, were under enormous pressure not to shank, flub, chilly-dip, or yip their ball while the best player in the world stood a few feet away, watching:

We weren’t part of the outing, so I couldn’t do something I desperately wanted to do: grab a handful of soft-shell crabs from a big chafing dish on the buffet table. But we did get to try an awesome feature that GlenArbor added recently, right next to the terrace where the bankers were having drinks and eating lunch. Every golf club in the world should add one of these, even if they have to build a lake and a steep hill in order to do it:

Those are Pro V1s in the range basket. The tee and the floating green haven’t been there for very long, but the director of golf told us that there are 60,000 balls in the lake already, and that a scuba diver will be coming soon to recover them. Here’s Bob, trying his luck:

He missed the green, which is roughly the size of a doormat, but he came pretty close. Jason Day tried, too. Naturally, he stiffed it—and, because he had, he said he wasn’t going to push his luck by taking a second shot. He hit so fast that I didn’t manage to get a picture until afterward, as he was heading back to his table:

Great player. Great course. Great floating green. Great afternoon.

The Case for All-male Golf Clubs

Posted on May 21, 2016 by David Owen

Marion Hollins, the captain of the first American Curtis Cup team and the founder of Women’s National Golf & Tennis Club. (Photo by Puttnam/Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The men-only membership policy of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews was scandalous and indefensible, since the R & A is the main worldwide governing body for all of golf. But the men-only membership policy of Muirfield is not, since the tournament it will no longer be allowed to host, the British Open, is also men-only. Why shouldn’t a sports event whose participants are all of one sex be held at a sports club whose members are also all of that sex?

I wrote about this issue in Golf Digest thirteen years ago, when the controversy involved Augusta National and the Masters. The bitterest argument then was that the absence of women from the membership of any golf club is, ipso facto, the sexual equivalent of racism. At that time, the Rev. Jesse Jackson described men-only membership as “gender apartheid,” and said, “The gender bigotry is as offensive as racial bigotry or religious bigotry.” Others made essentially the same claim: that operating a social club whose membership includes no women is morally indistinguishable from operating a social club (or a society) that excludes blacks or Jews.

Yet Jackson’s accusation depended on a false analogy, and on his own (willful) muddling of the possible reasons for making distinctions between human beings. Racism is a belief in nonexistent racial differences, especially ones that imply the inferiority of one race in comparison with another. Sexism is more complicated, because genuine, non-prejudicial differences between men and women really do exist. (Maintaining separate restrooms for whites and blacks is morally repugnant; maintaining separate restrooms for males and females is not—and the current debate about restroom access for transgender people underscores that truth, since the one thing both sides agree about is that the differences are monumentally important.) Indeed, one of the transforming accomplishments of American feminism has been to foster a broader appreciation of the meaningful ways in which men and women are not the same. Women who prefer to be treated by female physicians, or to join women-only health clubs, or to be represented by female divorce attorneys aren’t guilty of “gender apartheid”; their preferences merely reflect the fact that they, like men, have needs and emotions and desires that are not sex blind.

If you aren’t tired of this issue already, you can read my entire argument here.

Marion Hollins and Maureen Orcutt, 1932.(Photo by J. Gaiger/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

Marion Hollins and Maureen Orcutt, in England for the first Curtis Cup, 1932. (Photo by J. Gaiger/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

The Trump Files: “Do You Girls Want to be Supermodels When You Grow Up?”

Posted on May 16, 2016 by David Owen

Eleven friends and I just returned from a golf trip to Ireland. Something you have to be ready for when you travel outside the United States is hearing what people in other countries think about whatever the United States has been up to lately—and this year the main thing the United States has been up to is Donald Trump. He’s not easy to talk about with foreigners, because people who haven’t had much exposure to him tend to view him as a standard-issue American greed-driven mega-mogul—Michael Douglas in “Wall Street”—rather than seeing him the way most of his countrymen do, as the only conceivable member of whatever category he actually belongs in.

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I met Trump four years ago, while working on an article about him and his golf courses for Golf Digest. Our first encounter was at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. (Trump’s courses, like his buildings, are easy to alphabetize.) When I pulled up at the club’s bag drop, a parking attendant, who was dressed in white trousers, a white shirt and a white cap, stepped briskly toward my rental car. I popped my trunk, palmed a five-dollar bill, opened the car door and then—with a possibly audible gasp—realized that the guy I’d taken for an attendant was actually Trump himself, who had come out to the curb to greet me. I (slipped the fiver back into my pocket and) enthusiastically shook his hand.

In the clubhouse, Trump introduced me to various distinguished members and guests, including the the former tennis star John Lloyd; the CEOs of AT&T, NASDAQ, Macy’s and several other corporations; and the head coach of the New England Patriots, Bill Belichick, and his girlfriend, Linda Holliday. Trump seemed genuinely excited to see all these people—and even more excited to see that I was seeing all these people, right there in his own club. False modesty, much less actual modesty, is not among Trump’s vices. “We have the big people here, in terms of membership,” he said. “Everybody who’s anybody in Palm Beach is a member here. So, anyway. . . .” He invited Belichick and Holliday to come for dinner that night at the Mar-a-Lago Club, which he also owns, then told a waitress that he wanted the golf club to pick up their lunch check. He was being genuinely gracious and welcoming, but you could also see how extraordinarily eager he was to be liked, and to be seen being liked.

Raymond Floyd, who was leading an outing of business executives, walked toward our table.

“The great Ray Floyd,” Trump said.

“Hi, Donald. Don’t get up.”

“You look beautiful.”

“I keep fooling them. That’s what I say. I’m following your lead.”

“I love this guy,” Trump said. “This guy—the greatest chipper. He’s going to teach me how to chip someday. Have a good time, Ray.”

Floyd walked away, and Trump said to me: “He’s a member. We have the best members here. Everybody. He’s a wonderful guy, Ray, actually. And one great competitor. He was the oldest guy ever to win the Open. Remember, at Shinnecock? He was the oldest guy ever to win the Open. Great guy.”

Floyd walked by again. Trump asked him, “How old were you when you won the U.S. Open. Forty-six?”

“Forty-six? No, forty-four.”

“Is that the record?”

“No, Irwin surpassed me by a few months.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that. Ah, you’re something, Ray. How’s your wife doing?” (Floyd’s wife, Maria, was being treated for bladder cancer. She died six months later.)

“She’s doing great. She’s cancer-free.”

“Give her my regards,” Trump said. Then, to me: “His wife had a little problem, to put it mildly, but I’m hearing good things.”

“We go every three months,” Floyd said. “We go back in the first of next month.”

“That’s great. She’s a fantastic woman. She kept him under check, which is not easy, OK? I knew him before and after.”

“Changed the lifestyle.”

“She did a good job. Ivanka tells me Christina’s doing good.”

“I think she’s using Ivanka’s baby nurse.”

“Well, Ivanka has good taste, so follow Ivanka. Have a good time, Ray. Enjoy it.”

Floyd went out to join his corporate clients, and Trump, beaming, said, “So, I do it for fun. It’s become a very successful business, because of the level of quality. When other clubs are empty, everybody wants to join here. And by ‘here’ I mean all of my clubs. Every one of them works, and works really well.” We talked quite a bit about his course in Aberdeen, Scotland, which was just about to open. “Look, I get a kick,” he said. “I know Bandon Dunes. The biggest dune there is like one tenth the size of our smallest dune. It’s a toy. And they get such great reviews. Every one of my courses is, like, amazing.”

Either you find Trump’s manner repellent or—because his need is so palpable that his fawning seems guileless—you can decide to give him a break and be impressed by whatever it is that he wants you to be impressed by. “Palm Beach is the richest place anywhere on the planet, in terms of, you know, wealth,” he said at one point. “And yet it takes me four minutes to get to my course from Mar-a-Lago. That’s called location. The course was designed by Jim Fazio [Tom’s brother], and it’s considered the best one in Florida, but even if it were terrible it would be a big success, because of where it is.” And so forth.

The easiest thing to do is to nod, even if you aren’t quite sure what you’re nodding about. At one point, Trump pointed to some nice-looking trees on the golf course and said, “Those trees cost $25,000 apiece—but of course I got them for less”—a sort of double-reverse brag, since he wanted me to be impressed by both how expensive the trees were and how little they had cost. Similarly, when we were talking about the golf courses he owns, he said, “I don’t believe in building them now, because I can buy them for 10 cents on the dollar—so why should I build them? Although the prices are going way up. There was an article recently. Because of me, people are starting to say, Wow, what a good investment.” Golf courses are cheap—but because of Trump they’re also expensive. It’s a fine line.

After lunch, in the locker room, Trump introduced me to a man he called “the richest guy in Germany.” To be a member of one of his clubs, you have to have a high tolerance for that sort of thing: other people’s wealth is one of his main topics, when his main topic isn’t his own wealth. And, apparently, there are quite a few people who do have a high tolerance for it. (The face of “the richest guy in Germany” lit up when Trump called him that; a woman he introduced to me, on the driving range, as “a very rich lady” didn’t seem bothered at all.)

We ran into the crooner Vic Damone, who was getting ready to play golf. Trump knew that Damone’s wife had had a stroke not long before, and, by way of conversation, he said that he would gladly “be a character witness” for Damone in any legal action her children might take to prevent him from receiving any of her estate—his version of brotherly compassion. I told Damone that I was sorry about his wife’s illness. He seemed shaken, but said that she was a little better. He said that he had been staying up with her at night and sleeping in the afternoon, and that recently he had begun playing a little golf late in the day, as a break. Trump told me later that Damone and his wife had met at Mar-a-Lago, where she was staying and he was singing—and added (for the second time) that she was worth $900 million.

That night, Trump put me up at Mar-a-Lago, in a room called the Adam Suite, whose next resident, the woman at the front desk told me, was going to be Bill Clinton. An hour or so after I checked in, the phone rang—and it was Trump, calling to make sure I was still having a good time. (The night before, he’d called my home, in Connecticut, to make sure I was really coming down. I was already in Florida, so he chatted with my wife, and invited her to come, too.)

We met for dinner at 8. It was seafood-buffet night at Mar-a-Lago, and Trump ate roughly a lobster and a half’s worth of shelled lobster claws and split lobster tails, then went back and for big plate of sweet-and-sour shrimp on rice. As we were standing near the buffet line, one of the Nederlanders, of the Nederlander Organization, greeted Trump warmly, and said something like, “Donald, you’ve done a great job, and you’ve done it all by yourself, independent of your father’s accomplishments”—something so on-the-mark, in terms of Trump’s clear yearning for affirmation and reassurance, that I thought Trump might be embarrassed. But he beamed. And back at the table, speaking of Nederlander, he told me, “Off the record, he says my golf course is the best one in Florida.” (By “off the record” Trump means roughly the opposite of what other people mean by it. At lunch, he had told me about some trees he had gotten in trouble for cutting down, on a golf course he owns near Washington, D.C. “You probably heard about that,” he said. “It’s the only place on the Potomac River without trees. Off the record, I took down the trees and made the front page of the Washington Post four days in a row.”)

While we were having dessert, two giggly little girls from New Jersey, whose parents were part of a group from Trump’s golf club in Bedminster—“one of the richest places in the country”—came over to our table and asked Trump to dance. He said that he would dance with them in Bedminster. Then he asked them if they wanted to be supermodels when they grew up. (They said yes). Then he asked them to kiss him. (And they did.)

Local Man Buys Florida Condo and Eighteen Months of Golf for Less Than the Price of a Used Subaru Station Wagon

Posted on May 12, 2016 by David Owen

Bill Dranginis and his daughter, Ashlie, who teaches seventh-grade math.

Last fall, I played in a state tournament with Bill Dranginis, who retired in January from a varied career that included, among other things, running his own golf-accessories company and coaching high school swimming and track. He has won nine club championships over a period of five decades, including seven at two clubs not far from mine, and he has been inducted into two local golf halls of fame. Here he is with his daughter, Ashlie, who teaches seventh-grade math, on a Donald Ross course about an hour from where we live.

He called recently to say he’d just returned from a shopping trip to Florida. “I had planned a one-month excursion to try and find an affordable winter home and a golf course that I could enjoy at a reasonable price,” he said. Here’s another photo of Dranginis, with his brother, Dan, the year they won their flight in the member-guest at Dan’s club, Congressional:

During his Florida shopping trip, Dranginis looked first in Fort Myers, and found a pair of courses he liked a lot, both of them owned by the city: Fort Myers Country Club, which was designed by Donald Ross in the early 1900s, and Eastwood Golf Course, which was designed by Robert von Hagge and Bruce Devlin. “Playing those two would have cost maybe $2,500 to $3,000 for the winter,” he said. “That was good, but I couldn’t find a condo in my price range.” Here’s Ross’s original layout for Fort Myers:

Dranginis then spent a week each in Delray Beach and Fort Lauderdale. “I found a nice course in West Palm, called Madison Green,” he continued. “Lots of water and tight driving areas, slope 145 at 6,300 yards. They were having a membership drive: $3,000 for 18 months, starting in December, including carts, range balls, and club storage.”

That was ideal, but he still hadn’t found a place to live. Then a real-estate agent who was the sister of a friend of his told him about a 55-and-over community called Century Village —which the comedian Red Buttons used to be the television spokesman for.

“She had bought a condo there two years earlier for a good price,” he said, “but she didn’t think there was anything like that available now. And there was a downside: no mortgages allowed, so you had to buy the units outright.” Still, the place had tempting amenities: 14 outdoor pools, an indoor pool, tennis, bocce, shuffleboard, sailing, a billiard room with six tables, basic cable, first-run movies.

He decided to look, and a different real-estate agent showed him around. “I saw six units,” he said. “The first was a one-bedroom, and it was very clean. The asking price was $20,000. I offered $19,000, and got it. It’s 15 minutes from Madison Green. I can’t wait for next winter.”

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18 Good Things About Golf: No. 16

Posted on May 12, 2016 by David Owen

16. Golf is a literate game. Reading about golf provides plentiful opportunities for genial self-deception. The flaws in your swing recede as you imagine the clashes of titans. As always, your enjoyment is heightened by the certainty that, if you had come to the final nine with a lead that big, you wouldn’t have let victory slip through your fingers, unlike Palmer or Spieth. Then a remark of Hogan’s reminds you of a grip change your pro recommended last year—a grip change that felt peculiar the one time you tried it but that might be your ticket (you now see clearly) to the Senior Tour. Then a description of the sixteenth at Cypress Point transports you to the part of your mind where your children are grown, your spouse is merciful, and you have all the money in the world.

On the page, golf is a game you could almost get the hang of. As you read, your slice becomes a gentle draw, and your best shots swell in your memory until they have pushed aside every lip-out, chili dip, pop-up, and shank. Sometimes when I’ve been reading about golf, a feeling starts to build that’s like a smoker’s yearning for a cigarette. It’s a physical longing, which, as often as not, leads to anxious glances at the clock. Could I get to the driving range and back before the plumber arrives? Will my editor really care if that article is another day late? Isn’t there maybe just enough daylight left for nine holes, if I don’t bother to change my shoes?

Best of all, reading about golf is less susceptible than golf itself to the depredations of age. When the yips have stolen our putting stroke, when we can no longer lift our driver, when even a cart seems like too much effort, we will still have golf’s huge and continually growing library to keep us in the game, even if we have to hire a caddie to read it to us.

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When You Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Have to Play Golf

Posted on April 28, 2016 by David Owen

I was in New York the other day, and I saw this guy on a bike crossing to the other side of FDR Drive at about 90th Street with golf clubs in a backpack. Maybe he was on his way to play at Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx. It’s the oldest municipal golf course in the United States, and it has one of the greatest locker rooms in all of golf:

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Or maybe he was on his way to the driving range on Randalls Island, in the East River:

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Wherever he was headed, he had his clubs, and he had carried them on his bike often enough to have figured out how to keep them out of his way:

Masters Countdown: Why Does Augusta National Have Two Head Pros?

Posted on March 24, 2016 by David Owen

Augusta National has two head professionals, Tony Sessa and J.J. Weaver. They started as assistants under the club’s previous co-professionals, Bob Kletcke and David Spencer, and they moved up when Kletcke and Spencer retired. But how did Augusta National end up with two head professionals in the first place?

J.J. Weaver and Christine Wang, who won the girls’ 12-13 division of a regional round of the Drive, Chip and Putt in 2013. (Bob Levey/Getty Images)

The club’s original pro was Ed Dudley, who was Bobby Jones’s first choice for the job. (His second and third choices were Macdonald Smith and Willie MacFarlane.) Jones explained his criteria to Clifford Roberts, the club’s co-founder and chairman, before the two of them approached Dudley: “First of all I want a gentleman. Next, I feel we should select a pro who likes to teach. And, finally, I believe we want someone who is a good player.”

Robert P. Jones (Bobby's father), Jerry Franklin (an important early member), Clifford Roberts, Bobby Jones, and Ed Dudley, the club's first pro, 1931. (Augusta National/Getty Images)

Col. Robert P. Jones (Bobby’s father), Jerry Franklin (an important early member), Clifford Roberts, Bobby Jones, and Ed Dudley, the club’s first pro, 1931, three years before the first Masters. (Augusta National/Getty Images)

A fourth requirement was that the new pro be willing to work without a salary, since there was no money to pay him. Dudley at first had to get by on what he could earn from lessons and his minimally stocked golf shop—a tough proposition, considering how few golfers played the course in the early years.

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Clifford Roberts and Ed Dudley, 1940s.

Beginning in 1934, he supplemented his income with earnings from his souvenir tent at the Masters and from the tournament itself, which he played in fourteen times. He finished in the top ten seven times during the first eight tournaments, and he came close to winning in 1937, when he finished third, behind Byron Nelson and Ralph Guldahl.

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Dudley’s “golf shop” at the 1940 Masters. That’s Lloyd Mangrum on the right.

Dudley retired from Augusta National in 1957 and was succeeded by his assistant, Gene Stout, who had also been his assistant at the Broadmoor, in Colorado Springs, where the two men worked during the summers, when Augusta National was closed.

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Gene Stout showing off samples of his tournament merchandise at the 1962 Masters.

Stout was replaced in August, 1966, by his assistant, Robert Kletcke.

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Bob Kletcke and Arnold Palmer in the ninth fairway, in the 1960s.

And that same year Kletcke hired David Spencer to serve as his own assistant.

In the spring of 1967, at the end of Kletcke’s first season as the club’s head pro, he and Spencer were called to a meeting with Roberts. They were both nervous, because they figured they must have done something to displease their boss. When they arrived, though, they found Roberts in a good mood, and he told them they had done a good job. He said, furthermore, that he and the other members were tired of getting to know and like the club’s assistant professionals, only to have them move on to other jobs after just a few years. He said that he would like for both Kletcke and Spencer to remain at the club, and that if they continued to do a good job they could stay for as long as they liked.

“But I don’t want Bob eating steak and Dave eating hamburger,” Roberts went on. He said that he had arrived at a solution, which was for the club to have two head professionals, or co-professionals. He had had the club’s general manager draw up a partnership agreement, and he said that if they would sign it the jobs would be theirs. He said he realized that such an arrangement could lead to tensions, and that he did not want the two men to think of themselves as rivals. As a result, he said, if a situation ever arose in which he felt compelled to fire one of them, he would fire them both.

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Bob Kletcke and David Spencer.

Kletcke and Spencer were surprised by Roberts’ offer, and they asked if they could take the proposed agreement back to the golf shop to talk it over. On their way past the clubhouse, Spencer said, “Gee, Bob, I don’t know about this.” He had planned to stay at Augusta National for a few years, as was customary for assistants, then seek a head professional’s position at another club, probably in the Midwest.

“I don’t know either,” Kletcke said. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea.” Kletcke had been thinking he would like to try to play on tour. (He later did so briefly, with Roberts’ encouragement and with financial backing from several Augusta members.) Neither man was enthusiastic about sharing a job. They weren’t sure they would be compatible partners, and they weren’t excited by the thought that a misstep by either one of them, in Roberts’ eyes, could put both of them out of work. They talked about the proposal for some time, and came to the conclusion that it didn’t make sense for them. It had been considerate of Roberts to make the offer, but the arrangement was clearly unworkable. The only matter to be decided was which of them would tell Roberts.

“I’ve been here longer,” Kletcke said. “Why don’t you go back and tell him?”

“You know him better than I do,” Spencer said. “I think you ought to go.”

There was a long silence. Each man imagined knocking on Roberts’ door and explaining that neither of them liked his plan. They looked at the ground.

“Maybe we could both go.”

There was another long silence.

At last, Spencer held out his hand and said, “Well, how do you do, partner?” And the two men worked together, at adjacent desks, for the next four decades. If either of them had had the nerve to return to Roberts’ room after their meeting in 1967, both almost certainly would have left Augusta to do something else.

Bob Kletcke and David Spencer. (Augusta National/Getty Images)

Masters Countdown: Why did Gene Sarazen Skip the First Masters?

Posted on March 21, 2016 by David Owen

Gene Sarazen hit “the shot heard round the world”—his epochal double-eagle on Augusta’s fifteenth hole—in 1935, during the final round of the second Augusta National Invitation Tournament (as the Masters was officially known until 1939). He hadn’t played the year before. Why?

Sarazen himself often said, years later, that he skipped the first Masters because the invitation came from Clifford Roberts, the club’s co-founder and chairman, “and what the hell do I want to play in a tournament sponsored by a Wall Street broker?”—as he told me in a telephone interview in 1997. He also said that he threw out the first invitation because it had a Wall Street return address, and he figured it must be some kind of financial promotion.

Funny stories—but they aren’t true. His invitation came not from Roberts but from Alfred Bourne, who was the club’s vice president and principal financial backer, and Sarazen responded in February with a nice letter in which he told Bourne that he was “very glad to accept.” He backed out shortly before the tournament, though, because he realized that he had a conflicting commitment with Joe Kirkwood, an Australian professional and trick-shot expert (who had also been invited).

Sarazen and Kirkwood worked during the winter for the Miami Biltmore Hotel. Kirkwood had once proposed to Sarazen that they travel abroad together, and Sarazen had suggested South America. Kirkwood, unbeknownst to Sarazen, had scheduled their departure for late March, a week before the tournament, and their plans could not be changed. Sarazen, at the time, deeply regretted missing the first Masters. He said that a caddie in Fiji (on a different trip, presumably) told him, “We no hear of Mister Sarazen in Fiji, but we hear of Mister Jones.” He made certain that he would be available for the second Masters—which he won, in a playoff with Craig Wood.

The Masters wasn’t officially called the Masters until 1939, but many players, sportswriters, and others used that name (which Jones considered presumptuous) from the beginning.

Every Course Should Copy These Awesome Features

Posted on March 15, 2016 by David Owen

On Saturday, Addison, Todd, Hacker (real name), and I took a field trip to Wintonbury Hills, a muny that’s roughly an hour and fifteen minutes from where we live. The course, which opened in 2005, was designed by Pete Dye and Tim Liddy. There are four sets of tees, at 6,700, 6,300, 5,700, and 5,000 yards. As is seldom the case at golf courses of any kind, though, the scorecard at Wintonbury lists ratings and slopes for both men and women from all four sets:

Furthermore, neither the scorecard nor any of the course signage mentions “women’s tees,” or “senior tees,” or “regular men’s tees,” or “championship tees,” or anything else. There are just four different sets, at four different yardages, and the scorecard contains enough information to enable players of both sexes, at all levels, to calculate handicaps for matches of all kinds, in all conceivable combinations.

Every course should do this.

Addison and Todd played from the black tees, I played from the greens, and Hacker played from the whites, and we were able to adjust our handicaps accordingly. (The USGA actually makes doing this much, much harder than it needs to be—but that’s a semi-complicated issue, which I’ll explore in a couple of future posts.) We played three matches, switching partners every six holes, and everything came out virtually even. (Todd and I each lost a dollar.) And if Michelle Wie and my mother had joined us we would have been able to work them into the game, too.

Another awesome Wintonbury feature—and one that should be copied by public courses everywhere—is generous fairways accompanied by challenging green complexes. This is a feature that Wintonbury shares with Muirfield Village and Augusta National, to name two member-friendly golf courses that great players don’t dismiss as too easy. Wide fairways keep play moving. None of the four of us lost a ball.

Addison, Hacker, Todd.

Another awesome thing about Wintonbury: the Bag of Beer, available in the grillroom (which is called the Tap Inn):

That’s what the guy in the photo below was picking up. Weirdly, though, he had ordered just two beers—both Budweisers. What was he planning to drink when he got to the third hole?

The only thing I didn’t like about Wintonbury: they charge you extra if you walk. (They don’t think of it as a walking penalty—in their view, they give away carts, since carts are included in the greens fees—but a walking penalty is what it is, since you don’t pay less if you don’t take a cart.) As far as I could see, though, we were the only walkers, so they probably don’t get a lot of complaints.

Still, it’s a terrific course. We’re definitely going back.

Masters Countdown: How Augusta National Almost Built a Miniature Version of Itself

Posted on March 14, 2016 by David Owen

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum opened in Cooperstown, New York, on June 12, 1939. The Professional Golfers Association responded by creating its own hall and inducting several legendary players, among them Bobby Jones. But the P.G.A.’s hall was merely conceptual: there was neither a building nor a plan for one.

Clifford Roberts, Augusta National’s co-founder and chairman, thought the ideal location for a golf hall of fame would be at the club. The site he favored was an elevated six-acre parcel roughly 250 yards to the east of the tenth green. In a letter to Jones, he wrote that visitors “would have four good views of the course instead of one,” and that “members using the golf course would have a good view of an attractive building.”

The site Roberts favored was in the upper right-hand quadrant of this image. (And, yes, those are building lots. Augusta National tried to sell them, unsuccessfully, for more than twenty years.) You can see the old tenth green at the left, next to the familiar amoeba-shaped bunker.

Roberts wanted one wing of his hall of fame to contain “automatic movie machines,” which, for a quarter, would show instructional films by the game’s great teachers. Another wing would serve as both a comprehensive library and a bookstore. Visitors would be able to buy “popular-priced copies” of some of the books in the library, as well as souvenir booklets and postcards depicting the course.

This is an early Augusta National postcard, showing the tenth green in its original location, before it was moved back and to the left. Roberts’s preferred site for his golf hall of game was out of the frame to the left.

Roberts also wanted to create “a miniature Augusta National course surrounding the Hall of Fame which would be a practical pitch and putt course and could be made a most attractive part of the landscaping scheme.” The holes would be scaled-down replicas of the holes on the big course. He proposed a greens fee of twenty-five cents.

Despite Roberts’s enthusiasm, the idea never came to anything. The two members he had been counting on to pay for the project lost interest in it, and the club didn’t have the money to proceed on its own. And then news from Europe and the Pacific made other concerns more pressing.

Incidentally, the first hall of fame in the United States wasn’t in Cooperstown; it was in the Bronx. It was built in 1900 by New York University, on what’s now the campus of Bronx Community College, and was designed by Stanford White.

It was called the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. It was inspired by the Ruhmeshalle, in Munich, which had been built 50 years earlier. The original inductees were John Adams, John James Audubon, Henry Ward Beecher, William Ellery Channing, Henry Clay, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Farragut, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Fulton, Ulysses S. Grant, Asa Gray, Nathanial Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horace Mann, John Marshal, Samuel F. B. Morse, George Peabody, Joseph Story, Gilbert Stuart, George Washington, Daniel Webster, and Eli Whitney.

It’s still there, and you can still visit it—maybe after playing one of the four swell municipal golf courses in the Bronx: Van Cortlandt, Split Rock, Pelham Bay, and Ferry Point (aka Trump National).

My Usual Game: David Owen

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