Play Golf America – Patriot Golf Day

“EVER tried cocaine?” I ask.

“No,” he replies.

“Never?”

“No, I’ve never seen hard drugs, never mind taken them; I’ve not even had a drag from a cigarette.”

“You’ve never seen hard drugs?”

“No.”

“Or been offered them?”

“I was offered a spliff once. I’m in Hawaii and this guy comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, want to come to a party tonight? Want some bud?’ I said, ‘What?’ He says, ‘Do you want some bud?’ I thought he was talking about Budweiser, that’s how square I was. So, no I have never seen it; I am pretty naive on that, pretty square.”

“That’s a surprise,” I observe. “I would have thought, given the circles you move in, that you would have been offered it at least once.”

“But I have never been in those circles,” he argues. “I’ve never been a party-goer. Some guys are down in the nightclubs until four o’clock in the morning, but I’ve never been like that. I was going to say ‘hate’, but I’m not interested in nightclubs. Why go to a place where it’s smoky and it stinks and it’s so loud that you can’t even talk?”

“So what was your release?” I ask.

“My release?”

“Yes, what was your release when you were the world No 1?”

“To just get away from things,” he says. “To go fishing for the day.”

“Fishing! And that would be enough, would it?”

“Yes, I have always been that way. It started as a kid by going cycling. I’d come home and get on my bike and ride through the villages of Hertfordshire and get lost. I’d be out there for hours, just riding from village to village down beautiful country lanes, so that was my first release.”

“You enjoyed your own company?”

“Yeah, I’d go to the range on my own and I’d be happy as a sand-boy doing my routine; getting up every morning, arriving at the club, practising and making up games on my own and then playing in the afternoon on my own with imaginary friends — or imaginary pros, rather, and I was happy, mega-happy. I have never been bored with golf. I still enjoy tipping a bag of balls out and having somebody watching my swing.”

“So, you’re saying that when you were world No 1 and the pressure was intense, that a day’s fishing could reboot you?”

“Yeah, it was just great to get away; to get down on the river with no clock-watching and spend the day there, but I haven’t had enough of that; my schedule for years has been crazy. It’s like, Jackie Stewart calls me and says, ‘Why don’t you come to Monaco next week?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Oh no’, because I know Matthew [his son] would love to go. So I tell him a week later, ‘Guess who called me, Matthew?’ and he is literally beating me up. ‘Oh Dad, you’re joking’. And I say, ‘Next year’, but it’s tough to keep saying, ‘Next year’.”

Oakmont was the only unanimous choice among tournament sites, but a dozen courses received multiple votes. Laurel Valley Golf Club in Ligonier was left off only two lists.

The survey was conducted almost entirely with tournament players, because they compete on all the top local courses under prime conditions.

It is a good course by any standard, but it is the unique location and history and setting in and around this legendary track that makes a round at Brickyard Crossing special.

Brickyard Crossing is a Pete Dye course, but not his best public course in Indy. That would be “The Fort” on the other side of town. However, a round at the Brickyard Crossing is unique and worth it, if only for the spectacle of playing four holes inside the famous raceway.

Well, a fight has broke out between the non-profit homeowners association and the Board of Trustees of the club – who are also homeowners. The problem – the golf course is more than $9 million in debt and growing. The solution, at least for the Board of Trustees, is brilliant. Get the 50% of the homeowners who aren’t members of the club to pay for the club’s debt.

 Looking to allay some of that debt, the complaint continues, the club board and that of the homeowners association, called the CCSHA, in 2004 “began informal, behind-the-scenes discussions regarding means by which the Board of Trustees of the CCSHA could force the members of CCSHA to assist with the financial difficulties faced by the club.”

The suit says “the vast majority” of the CCSHA board were also members of the country club.

Now that’s a plan – get into trouble, then get somebody else to pay to get you out of trouble.

Leisure Development Limited, the developer of the new Machrihanish Dunes Golf Club in Machrihanish, Scotland is pleased to announce that Euan Grant, formerly Head Greenkeeper of the Old Course at St. Andrews, has joined Machrihanish Dunes as Keeper of the Green. In this role, Euan will work with David McLay Kidd and his team during construction and will be responsible for maintaining the new links course when it opens next year.

Machrihanish Dune’s website can be found here.

Viewers of Country Music Television were 20 percent more likely to do so, and viewers of the Golf Channel were 31 percent more likely to have said they were Republicans [than the general population].