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PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — You like lists? Check out this one, a list of American golfers who have won the Masters, won the British Open and been a Ryder Cup captain:

Hogan.

Snead.

Arnold.

Big Jack.

Watson.

Next year in Rome, when Zach Johnson serves as the U.S. Ryder Cup captain, there will be a sixth name on that list. Johnson spoke with obvious feeling about the honor of joining that fivesome when he was officially announced as the next American Ryder Cup captain at a press conference here Monday morning.

If the golfing universe were in its normal state, one might expect that list to grow from six to seven to eight in the next half-decade or so. You know, Phil Mickelson to follow Johnson, for the 2025 Ryder Cup, and then Tiger Woods after that.

Based on what they have achieved in the game, could you possibly name two American golfers who would be more obvious choices as Ryder Cup captains than Phil and Tiger?

But right now, on this final Monday in February 2022, it’s almost impossible to say.

As we have seen with Woods over the years, his life takes unpredictable turns. His resiliency, though, is almost immeasurable.

Mickelson’s future is even harder to predict. It is almost a given, if you’ve taken even a casual interest in the PGA of America’s Ryder Cup playbook, that a Ryder Cup captain will serve as an assistant captain in the preceding Ryder Cup. It’s an open secret on all your better PGA Tour driving ranges that Mickelson was considered a lock for the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage and that Woods, five years younger than Mickelson, would take the reins for 2027 in Ireland.

Yes, this sounds like crazy talk, all this long-range planning. Your correspondent cannot relate, as he is one to make his Marriott reservation for that night when leaving the Hertz lot. But this long-range planning is a real thing.

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Woods wanted a road game. You know, more of a challenge. (The Americans have not won a Ryder Cup in Europe since 1993, when Tom Watson had his first go as captain. Well, that one went well.) Also, the 2027 site, Adare Manor, in County Limerick, is owned by J.P. McManus, one of Woods’s old fishing-and-sipping buddies, from back in the day.

As for Mickelson, his public life is far more complicated now than it was just a few weeks ago. You can blame the lure of Saudi money and Phil’s mouth if you wish but there’s more to it than that. Were it not for the lure of Saudi money and Phil’s chatty ways, you could would have gotten very short odds that Mickelson would have been on the 2023 Ryder Cup team in some manner.

Johnson was asked Monday about Mickelson’s prospects as an assistant captain, if he doesn’t make the team as a 53-year-old player.

“Well, I’ll say, you know, that given basically where we are right now, I have no idea what lies ahead as far as my vice captains and who is on this team,” Johnson said. “I know that the 2020 was such, and 2023 will look vastly different. What that looks like, I don’t know yet.”

I thought I saw this thought bubble floating above Johnson’s head:

Phil? Phil’s a wild card. With Phil, who knows anything?

I should also point out that there was a certain level of grandeur to the morning event, even though Doug Ferguson of the Associated Press broke the news, that Johnson would be the captain, several days ago. It’s a big deal, in golf, to lead a Ryder Cup team. There were back-row seats reserved for Jack and Barbara Nicklaus, though neither attended. In the house was Seth Waugh, the CEO of the PGA of America, and Suzy Whaley, the first woman to serve as president of the PGA, one of the country’s oldest and most important golf organizations. The Ryder Cup trophy was also present, on a pedestal. It hasn’t been in the United States all that much in recent decades. Losers fly and winners keep the trophy.

On a wall, stage right, was a large mural with bleeding black-and-white photographs of all the Ryder Cup captains over time. There was Tom Kite and Jerry Barber, wearing glasses. There was Ben Hogan and Nicklaus, wearing ties. There was Raymond Floyd in a visor and Dave Stockton in a rodeo hat. Johnson’s turn is coming, to get on that wall.

What a career: 12 wins, including the Masters and the 2015 British Open, at the Old Course. He won the Masters in 2007, on an Easter Sunday. He’s a man of faith. He described his captaincy as a “serving role.” He said, “I’m going to be a servant for them.”

Being a public servant, or a public anything, has never been easy and it’s more difficult now than it’s ever been. The light never goes out, these days.

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Johnson was delivered a major complication by Mickelson. Winning any Ryder Cup is difficult. Picking six players is as complicated as a captain chooses to make it. The culture and language of Ryder Cup golf is far different from PGA Tour golf. When Johnson was looking for the common European phrase for what American golfers understandably call alternate shot, he went for fourball first, before settling on foursomes, after an assist from the man seated next to him, the president of the PGA, Jim Richerson of Riviera.

But Johnson is joining a list, a list that’s better than most, to use a phrase of the Florida Swing, a list with Hogan, Snead, Palmer, Nicklaus and Watson already on it. Look where golf has taken Johnson in his 46 years. Look where golf has taken this son of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

He’s a dreamer. Anybody who makes it to the PGA Tour has some dreamer in him. But there’s the dream, and there’s your life as you lead it.

Johnson’s life, he said on Monday, has exceeded his dreams. 

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — It can’t be easy, playing the Bear Trap, in the wind, on a PGA Tour Sunday, when your golf is good and a single five-word question dominates your life:

Can I keep my card?

Brian Stuard, 39-year-old pro from Jackson, Mich., and the 272nd-ranked player in the world, is an expert in this subspecialty.

The late Dave Hill of Jackson, Mich., won 13 times on Tour.

His kid brother Mike Hill won three times.

Stuard has one Tour win, in 2016, in New Orleans. 

On Saturday, a clip of Stuard playing his second shot on PGA National’s par-4 9th hole made the rounds on social media. The video begins with Stuard at address, repeatedly gripping and re-gripping his club. Another 29 seconds elapse before Stuard begins his takeaway. It’s difficult to watch but that hasn’t stopped golf fans from doing so. As of this writing, the video (below) has been viewed more than 800,000 times.

On Sunday, in the fourth round of the Honda Classic, Stuard was looking to post his first top-10 finish since the Shriners tournament in the fall of 2019.

He played the difficult, windblown tee shot on the par-3 15th hole in 1:47.

He played the tee shot on the par-4 16th in a tidy 33 seconds.

He played the tee shot on the par-4 17th in 1:05.

It should be noted that the timekeeper (your correspondent) leaned in the direction of generous timings.

There are many stipulations under the Tour’s new pace-of-play guidelines, but the most basic rule is, when it’s your turn to play, get your ball airborne (or rolling) in less than a minute and you’ll avoid the wrath of the Tour’s slow-play police. Of course, when you’re struggling to get comfortable over your ball, those 60 seconds come and go in the blink of an eye. Or so it seems to the golfer with club in hand.

Stuard has a unique waggle by which he moves the clubhead and inch or two behind the ball, then ahead of the ball, again and again, with increasing speed with each of his 10 or 12 waggles.

It almost looks like he’s drawing a perfect C with his clubhead as a pencil in the waggle, starting slightly inside with the face opening as he goes back, the face square when it’s over the ball, and then going left with the face closing for an inch or two past the ball.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat some more.

If that’s what he’s doing, Stuard’s not aware of it.

“I’m just trying to get comfortable over it,” he said when his Sunday round was over.

His Sunday playing partner, Mattias Schwab, said after the round that he found Stuard to be somewhat deliberate over the ball but compensated for it by getting to his ball quickly.

Only one Austrian golfer finished higher at the Honda than Schwab, who finished in a tie for seventh. The winner was Joseph “Sepp” Straka, another likely fan of Viennese Apple Strudel. Sepp Straka was born in Vienna and lives in Birmingham.

As for Stuard, he played the Bear Trap on Sunday in par-birdie-par. His closing 69 gave him a T9 finish and a check for $194,000.

You might want to know what’s in Stuard’s head when he’s making all those waggles, or when he spends a solid three or four seconds over the ball and perfectly still before he pulls the trigger. Stuard might not know himself, and he certainly wasn’t going to share it in a quick post-round interview.

Last year, though, Stuard did offer some color on his thoughts about pace of play, in an interview with Mike Sullivan of Metro Detroit Golfers. When Sullivan suggested that too many amateurs spend too much time deliberating over yardages and carry distances, Stuard replied: “I kind of think that for myself sometimes. If I’ve got a 185-yard shot and the pin’s tucked to the left with water left and a bunker short — I mean, what am I doing? I’m just trying to hit it to the right of the flag anyway. There’s no real discussion.”

Anyway, discussion is not Stuard’s issue. He and his caddie are nothing like Jordan Spieth and Michael Greller, pre-shot. Stuard’s issue is pulling the trigger.

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The post Why Tim Rosaforte’s death drew such an emotional response from the golf community appeared first on Golf.

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — Not many people saw an unexpected and moving moment at the Honda tournament on Saturday afternoon. It unfolded, silently, when Genevieve Rosaforte came into the tournament’s media center, a seemingly ordinary, you might say dull, meeting room off a corridor that connects the hotel lobby at PGA National and the resort’s pro shop.

But if you looked at that room through a certain lens, you could see the life that once, and continues, to percolate in it. Genevieve’s late husband had been a fixture in that room for years. 

Let’s bring in the Golf Channel Insider, Tim Rosaforte.

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How many times did Bob Costas or Mike Tirico or Dan Hicks pivot to Tim with those words, at Hondas and at Players Championships and U.S. Opens and Ryder Cups and other grand golf occasions? And there was Tim, with his shiny head, striped suit, wide tie and earnest and precise delivery. You felt like you knew him, right?

His putting coach got to FedEx after the last delivery and begged them to ship the putter overnight, which they did, and that’s the putter he used for this first-round, career-best 66.

What Tim had others didn’t. Insider was a title. It became his, quote, brand. But what it really was was a one-word job description for a sui generis position held by a sui generis man.

Mrs. Rosaforte’s main focus was not on the oversized electronic leaderboard at the front of the room or the reporters and photo editors tapping away on their laptops. It was on a large cardboard photograph of her husband standing on re-purposed catering table. The posterboard photo was the first thing you’d see upon entering the Tim Rosaforte Media Center.

A few feet down from the photo, Amanda Herrington, a young PGA Tour media official, sat at her workstation. Earlier that day, she had been remembering her first visit to the Honda press room, seven years ago, in the spring of her rookie year. Tim, battle-tested but not scarred, was seated immediately in front of her, and welcomed her in every way he could. Her eyes welled at the memory. So many others in golf media could share a similar story.

Tim died on Jan. 11. He had been diagnosed two years ago with Alzheimer’s. Still, in a sense, his death was a shocker. He played football in college, and he was a bear of man, fit in every way. You couldn’t imagine that anything could kill him. Not at 66.

In the days and weeks after Tim’s death, the outpouring was extraordinary. Jim Nantz of CBS, his familiar voice and face piped into a massive South Florida church from California for a Feb. 17 memorial service, said he could not recall anybody who, in death, had engendered such an emotional response.

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Caddies, players, fellow reporters and broadcasters, tournament executives, Tour officials and sponsors all went to Twitter and Facebook and other places to express their sadness and pay tribute to a man who was famous for his fairness, the reach of his multiple cellphones — and his shaved head, funky glasses and fashion-forward suits.

Jack Nicklaus, via Twitter, on Jan. 11: “Many hearts, including Barbara’s and mine, hurt today after the passing of our friend Tim Rosaforte.”

Earlier in the Honda week, there was a ceremony at which Larry Dorman, a former golf writer for the New York Times and the Miami Herald before that, was given the Tim Rosaforte Distinguished Writers Award. Dorman, Craig Dolch, Mike Mayo, Dave George, Greg Stoda, Randy Mell, Larry Bush, Scott Tolley, Karen Crouse, Edwin Pope: There was a long run where West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale and Miami had newspapers that were devoted to covering golf and the papers spent the money to hire the writers who could tell the story of South Florida golf. Long before Tim was a central part of Golf Central, he was a central part of that group of reporters. They were a pleasure to read.

Recently, I re-read a first-round sidebar feature for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel that Tim wrote about a mutual friend of ours, Mike Donald, a fixture of the South Florida golf scene, after the first round of the 1984 U.S. Open at Winged Foot. Hubert Green and Hale Irwin and Jim Thorpe had signed for 68s, two under, and the writers on deadline could not have had an easier day. Then Mike came in, practically at sunset, with a 68 of his own, throwing a monkey wrench into dinner plans. Tim wrote up the day with so much insight and understanding. He had Mike, Mike’s mother, Mike’s caddie, the groaning reporters, beer-drinking fans. It had everything. A rules issue. It had depth. Also, it was funny. One day, one story, in Tim’s life.

A friend of mine directed some episodes of The Lou Grant Show, starring Ed Asner. Lou Grant, of course, was Mary’s boss on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. My friend Mel once told me that Asner told him that the key to understanding Grant’s character was that he was a newspaperman at heart who had stumbled into TV news.

And that, I think, is an elemental part of why Tim registered so deeply with so many golf fans. Nobody was fooled by the suits. Did you ever watch The Sports Writers on TV, the ties barely on? Crooked ties, cigars, straight-talk? In spirit, Tim was on that show, all these years later. That’s my take. Also, he had an economy of movement, and with words, that, to me, brought to mind Arnold Palmer. Tim loved Arnold, and I imagine Arnold held Tim in the highest regard.

But I have one last thing to offer, about why so many people were so moved by Tim’s life and times and good work and tragic, way-too-early death, and this is it. He worked in golf. He worked in golf like Joe LaCava works in golf, like Slugger White works in golf, like Jim Herman works in golf. Tim had enough ability and more drive to do what millions of people wish they could do. Find a way to work in golf. Find a way to marry hobby and career. It’s some trick. Tim did it. Tim came right into your house, 200 times a year, reminding you that it could be done. Can’t think of anybody who did it better.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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Once, Phil Mickelson seemed to be a lock to someday become an honorary starter at the Masters (circa 2040) and, much more immediately, a Ryder Cup captain. Now, it’s harder to say.

Mickelson is at a crossroads. He can continue down the path he is on, aligning himself with an upstart golf league financed by the Saudi ruling class, about which nothing has been said publicly.

That’s not easy to do, when you’ve called the mouth that seeks to feed you “scary mother****ers.” And when you don’t know if the league is even going to be up and running.

Or Mickelson could drop his link to Greg Norman’s LIV Golf Investments and its Saudi backers and the world golf tour it envisions, and try to resume his big life on the PGA Tour, the Champions tour (where it’s hard to have a big life) and as a living legend of the game. It was only nine months ago that Mickelson became the oldest golfer to win a major championship!

But retreating is not Mickelson’s style, his legal entanglements with LIV Golf are possibly far more involved than we could know, and he has already scorched the earth — the majors, the PGA Tour, corporate America — where he plied his trade for so long, and so effectively.

His mouth and his ambition, to say nothing of his talent and his work ethic, got him to where he was in May, when he won the PGA at Kiawah, in coastal South Carolina, and was swarmed by fans as he marched to the 18th green.

His mouth and his ambition got him to where he is right now. Mickelson, who can be loaded with charm, who has all the best words, who has been engaging with fans and reporters and golf’s corporate sponsors for decades, is a restless personality. In the history of golf, you can’t think of another person like him. It’s not really that surprising to see him in the spot he is in.

And if anybody has the skillset to turn this around, it’s Mickelson.

Time is not on his side. Next month, he would surely want to play in the Players Championship. In April the Masters. In May the PGA.

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Golf already has one global superstar who leads an essentially isolated, quiet private life: Tiger Woods. Mickelson has always been the anti-Woods. But right now, Woods — with his temperate, well-considered remarks about his allegiance to the world that made him — looks like golf’s elder statesman. Those comments came in December, at a tournament Woods hosts in the Bahamas, and last week at Riviera, at the Genesis Invitational, another Tiger Woods production.

Mickelson has been down this road before, sort of, most notably after the 2014 Ryder Cup, when the Americans lost in Scotland and Mickelson excoriated his captain, Tom Watson. But that whole thing was narrow, compared to this.

Could Mickelson be eased out of his position as the tournament host of the American Express, the early-season PGA Tour event in the California desert? He could.

Will Mickelson ever become what he deserves to be, a revered elder statesman in the game? It’s really up to him.

The comments he made in November to Alan Shipnuck, who is writing a biography of Mickelson due out in May, had the advantage of being true. A true expression of what Mickelson feels. They exploded because the man who accused the PGA Tour of “obnoxious greed” revealed his own insatiable appetite. That appetite isn’t going anywhere. It’s a central part of his character. He’s not capable of taking a child’s portion.

Do you think it’s an ordinary person who has been able to achieve what he has achieved in his life? For 30 years, he has been one of the best players in golf history. There has never been a career like his, with the possible exception of Sam Snead’s.

He has not hurt anybody here, except himself. There is no crime. But he misread the landscape and now he’s like the guy at the bottom of the pit in one of the ads Mickelson did for Workday in the last year or two.

“Hello down there,” Mickelson says to the guy at the bottom of a sandpit. “You need help?”

Yeah, the guy says.

“Call Workday,” Mickelson says.

That wasn’t going to work for the guy in the pit, and Workday isn’t going to help Mickelson here. He’s on his own, naked to the golf world.

But Mickelson can do what golfers do. Be inventive, even with all the many restraints the game puts on you. Figure something out. Mickelson has been doing that all his life.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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Your putting life is about to improve, people.

Today we begin a sporadic series known in this bureau as Stan Tells Most. Init, we pose a putting question to the putting guru Stan Utley, write down what he says, and share it with those who seek to improve their putting. You know, for a friend.

We can’t call the series Stan Tells All. Stan doesn’t claim to tell all or know all. Which is one of the reasons we find him credible in the first place.

(Also, he teaches putting. He can’t give away all his trade secrets for free.) 

For the last 20 or so years, your correspondent — a self-described half-decent putter in his youth (but who among us wouldn’t say that?) — has become inept from six feet and in. Send in your “guaranteed” fixes if you wish, but please know they likely have already been tried. The results have been, to understate it, unspectacular.

Putters

I got Stan on the phone the other day and asked him why I could putt shockingly well on a practice putting green with a chalk line but couldn’t, try as I might, create an imaginary chalk line (aka a plumber’s line) on the golf course when playing for real.

Of course, part of the practice-green chalk-line success rate is repetition. Part of it is knowing what the putt will do. But even when I go up and down the chalk line, changing distances regularly, I still make a way higher percentage of putts than I do when putting in actual play. Also, when I putt on a practice green without the chalk-line, the results are far less impressive.

We must also make a nod in the direction of caring. Ambition has killed many worthwhile goals, including the ambition to make putts. The stakes on a practice green are almost immeasurably low, but that’s not the case, of course, on a golf course.

Which brings to mind a memorable two-word answer Brad Faxon once gave in response to a casual question from my friend to Gary Van Sickle years ago. Van Sickle saw Faxon on a putting green at a Tour event — I think it was at the Westchester Country Club — and asked him what he was working on. “Not caring,” Brad said. Not caring is a powerful thing. Ask a Buddhist.

Low stakes, repetition, lack of performance anxiety, those will all help you make more putts on a practice green with a chalk line. But those three things can’t explain making nine out of 10 six-footers, with the miss coming off a lip-out.

Enter Utley, explaining most.

“What I’m trying to teach is how to send the ball true off the face and down its intended line,” Utley told me. “When you’re putting with a chalk line, you’re probably doing that. You’re more focused on the line than whether the putt goes in or not.”

But on the golf course, Utley says, the tendency for many golfers is to over-focus on whether the ball goes in or not.

Which is understandable, given that the goal of the game is to get the ball in the hole in the fewest strokes possible. Still, that doesn’t make all that focus helpful.

Utley says that most putters fall into two broad categories.

In Group I are the putters who imagine the ball falling into a certain part of the hole. For example, think of the hole as a clock with 12 hour markings. In this example, you’re a right-handed putter, the putt breaks left to right and on this particular putt, at the speed you choose, you can imagine the ball slipping into the hole at the 8 o’clock. The 8 o’clock hash tag is in your mind. It’s the thing you’re most focused on.

Then there’s Group II, to which Utley belongs. “I’m trying to start that putt on a line that’s say, seven inches left of the hole,” he said.

People who belong in Group I will have a harder time creating an imaginary chalk-line on to the course. My very goal.

Putting

I am in Group I, although there are rare days when I am putting well and I feel like I can see the whole putt ahead of time. You know how the TV golf broadcasts trace the shot while the ball is en route? Or the way you can see your putting line after you putt through dew or light snow? It looks like that in my mind’s eye (on certain days) but before the stroke is made. It’s a rare thing but I do have days like that, where I can see it and actually make it happen.

Utley said another putting coach, Mike Shannon, is an expert on figuring out whether you are in Group I or Group II — or in a hybrid group.

He said another putting coach, Craig Farnsworth, can be helpful about how you to go from the practice green to the actual course, about putting attitude. Utley’s specialty is the quality of the stroke, the strike and sending your putt down its intended line.

Utley did have one colorful description for why you should not be upset if a well-stroked putt does not drop. “You hit a bad putt. It’s not going in. A goose drops a load on it and now the putt falls. Did that make your bad putt good?”

No.

Moral: Don’t get upset about the things you can’t control.

I asked Utley if that was his first question for his pupils, to figure out if they are See-the-Clock putters or See-the-Line putters.

“I’ve got a lot of first questions,” he said. “But that’s one of them.”

I’m going to try to reinvent myself as a member of Group I. Focus more on the early part of the putt’s path.

“My last look at the hole, before I start the swing, is line — where do I want to start that putt, on what line?” Utley said. “That last look has a huge effect.”

When I practice with a chalk line, my last look is the line. When I’m the course, it is not.

But that was then.

Utley had to get off the phone. He had a lesson to give. I’ll be out when the snow clears, and maybe before.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

Need help unriddling the greens at your home course? Pick up a custom Green Book from 8AM Golf affiliate GolfLogix.

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Ed. note: This is Part III of Michael Bamberger’s three-part ode to nine-hole golf. You can read Part I here and Part II here.

***

If you know three fun facts about Sweetens Cove Golf Club, the course’s funky golf-this-way road sign is likely one of them.
    
Say you get to the nine-hole course in rural Tennessee as most people do, as a motorist and via I-24. You got your Rand McNally out? OK: now run your finger along Highway 72, aka North Cedar Avenue, heading south. You’re looking to make a sharp right on Sweetens Cove Road, named for a cove, not a golf course. And there it is: an “iconic” (not really but maybe by 2062) blue sign with white lettering:

SEQUATCHIE
VALLEY GOLF & CC

But you can barely read it, because of the 20 reflective hardware-store mailbox letters stuck on it:

SWEETENS COVE
GOLF
CLUB

The sign has been cited before. It’ll be cited again. It gets you in the mood.
 
And it’s fitting. Sweetens Cove is a golf course that is bathing in its make-do spirit. You know how Dyersville, Iowa, has a ballfield? South Pittsburg, Tenn., has a golf course. All together now: if you build it, they will come.

So you make that sharp right-hand turn on to Sweetens Cove Road, past another sign, this one posted by Star Pawn and Gun, and up and down a heaving road for two miles until you get to the golf course.

I arrived late on a recent and beautiful Wednesday afternoon. Yep, January, in Jethro-was-here rural Tennessee, and it was a perfect day for golf. No wind, high skies, mid-50s. I hadn’t played in maybe 10 days and was getting itchy. I had just read a book about the course, The Secret Home of Golf by Jim Hartsell, a Sweetens Cove regular. I had seen the golf-porn snaps. My heart was racing.
    
The course was closed.
    
The course had been closed all year, because of flooding and freezing temperatures. But now the tarps were finally off the course’s vast greens. (Technically there are nine of them but in practice you could say there are 18.) But still the course was closed.
    
The greens (MiniVerde Ultra-Dwarf Bermuda) were green. The fairways (Tifway 419 Bermuda) were the color of Army-surplus khakis. The itty-bitty pro shop was empty, save the fella manning it.
    
Nope.
     
Not today.
     
Probably tomorrow.
     
Get on the website and reserve your spot.
    
Hundred bucks, all day — if you’re walking.
    
By the way, they call that itty-bitty pro shop The Shed. If you know three fun facts about Sweetens Cove, that’s probably one of them.
    
The next day was the day. That Thursday. Opening Day, 2022, Sweetens Cove Golf Club, South Pittsburg, Tenn.
    
The first guys off all got shots of Sweetens Cove, a Tennessee whiskey, before heading out. I arrived long after that. (I’d rather be on a golf course at sunset than sunrise.) The day was dank. The fairways were soft. The greens were smooth and excellent.

Greens are to a golf course what eyes are to a portrait.
    
Some will say they are too much. Well, some would say the greens at the National Golf Links and the Old Course are too much, too. The Cove greens are excellent. There are vast sections of the greens where you could not put a pin — but you can roll your ball over this acreage, and watch it swoop and swerve. I think I saw them, in the dead of winter, likely about as fast as they get. They were country-club fast, if that. And that’s what they should be.
    
Greenkeepers have a word: pinnable. It’s an adjective, describing the sections of a green where you can cut a hole. It’s one of the most important words in golf, and one of the most underappreciated. The Sweetens Cove greens are loaded with pinnable sections. Each green has two flagsticks. On one green, one flagstick could be 100 yards from the other.
    
I played 36 holes, by myself and in about six hours, not including my lunch break, on the hood of my car. (No food service at Sweetens Cove, although they do tell you that if you order a Domino’s pie on the eighth tee, it’ll arrive by the time you hole out on nine.) I almost never waited and I played through only one group. I was never bored.

None of my four loops was like the other. I mixed-and-matched on every hole. Different tees, playing to different holes. I felt like I never played the same hole twice.

It’s an easy-walking course on a good-sized piece of land. The holes, all nine of them, are good. Good, solid, fun, I-still-got-my-ball golf holes. You’re hemmed in by mountains and farms. This is RFD golf. On the fourth green you can hear the 18-wheelers on I-24 roar on by.

Off the tee, driver in hand seven times from the back tees, the fairways are wide, but you can’t go to sleep. A lonely tree. A yawning bunker. A still cove. The approach shots, the same.

Some of the pin positions were comically difficult, but I never felt like there wasn’t a path to the bottom of the hole. I never had a moment of despair. I didn’t, but you could play all day with one ball, if you keep it out of the gunch and out of the ponds. Every hole, pretty much, has a gnarly area. Aim elsewhere.

What makes Sweetens Cove, more than anything, is its vibe. It’s refined pasture golf, if those words can coexist. It brings to mind for me two of my favorite courses: the old-timey Aiken Golf Club course, in Aiken, S.C., and Auchnafree, on the River Almond, near St. Davids, in the Scottish Highlands. Aiken is a public course. As for Auchnafree, good luck.

Sweetens Cove shouldn’t exist. I can’t think of another nine-hole public course in a rural area that is not connected to a school or a business or a resort.

By the time I marched back to the eighth tee for the fourth time, my shoes were caked in sand and dirt and the light was fading. I wasn’t worried about finishing. Nine is a par-3, and you can always play a par-3 in the dark. On the eighth tee, I could see the roof of The Shed. It was glowing, like a lighthouse for itty-bitty UFOs, or golfers trying to play home.

I did play nine by the light of the moon and made a 4 with three putts, none of them poor ones.

In the parking lot, men (I didn’t see any women then) were changing back into their Thursday-night civilian clothes in the beams of their headlights. The roof of The Shed, I could now see, was a series of stringed lights, packed tightly. The air was cool and getting cooler. A superb day of golf. My first 36-hole day of the new year. (Note to self: play more golf. It seems to make you happy.)

On my way back to I-24, I stopped at a gas station and then at the liquor store next to it. For any sentences here that you had to read twice, please direct your complaints not to me but the distillers at the Sweetens Cove Spirits Company. If you know three fun facts about Sweetens Cove, you probably know that the course owners — the humorist Peyton Manning among them — started a spirits company, too.

The one group I played through was a foursome, three men and a woman, from Alabama. They invited me through on the third hole. I went to a forward tee. I hit a solid drive, right down the sprinkler line. From there I cooked a hybrid past a tree in the middle of the fairway to about 20 feet from the left pin.

One of the boys trailing me let out a yell. I couldn’t duplicate the sound if I tried, but this is what it sounded like to me: ThatwhatImtalkinabout.
 
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@golf.com.

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I. This week, in Bamberger Briefly, a quick three-parter on the abiding pleasures of nine-hole golf. Or maybe just six on your lunch break. Or seven plus a sunset chaser, ending the day with a make-your-own cross-country hole from the 8th tee to the practice green beside the carpark. Enjoy.

In Part II, join us (won’t you?) as we take a dead-of-winter field trip, GOLF.com-style, and remember a summertime visit to a backyard nine-hole course on an estate in Southampton, L.I. The driveway alone will rekindle all manner of caviar dreams.

Part III will focus on a different nine-hole course, in a different part of the country, that is unlike the nine-hole course featured in Part II.

As for this short stack of words, here in Part I, the purpose here is to take a stand for nine-hole golf, and to introduce a marketing line that any and all golf organizations are welcome to claim as we nod to the power of poor grammar:

Travel

Nine-hole golf — it’s where it’s at!

And its rejoinder:

I got 90 minutes and I got the itch.

That doesn’t mean that the vast stock of 18-hole courses should suddenly cleave off nine in the interest of the movement, one well-promoted by the PGA of America, Jack Nicklaus and scores of industrial after-work golf leagues across the Midwest.

(Actually, those leagues — shouting out here to the fellas and gals in Cleveland, in Topeka, in the Twin Cities — don’t promote nine-hole golf. They just play it, in that golden time after the virtual work whistle whistles and before the cowbell rings announcing suppertime.)

I play a lot of golf at an itty-bitty nine-holer a mile or so from my house. When the course is quiet and I play it alone, I get around in about an hour, depending on how much putting I do. I should point out that the movement has been so effective, and the course is so appealing, that I am seldom out there alone anymore. That’s OK.

For all you grass-heads (calling all Super Secrets devotees), the fairways on this course — the St. Martins course of the Philadelphia Cricket Club — are Zoysia. Zoysia has a strong blade that stands straight up and your ball sits high on it. It’s almost like playing off a driving-range mat. It’s a forgiving playing surface and ideal for beginners especially, and those carrying a collection of hybrids.

Growing up — in Patchogue, on the Great South Bay, in Suffolk County, on Long Island — my friend Larry Lodi and I would sometimes dig clams by day (lucrative, back then), eat supper at our homes and end the day at the 18-hole municipal course in Bellport, one town over. This was no-fuss golf and we played as many holes as we could, though 10 was the most common number, sometimes going double-or-nothing on the last.

Travel

Golf was not meant to be an all-day activity. For many years, in Scotland, the most common version of the game was alternate shot (Scotch foursomes), where one golfer plays the tee shot and that golfer’s partner plays the next, shortly after it comes to rest. At Prestwick and loads of other places, rounds often took less than three hours, when played this way. Along those lines, nine-hole golf tends to be less fussy, less fixated on score — and way faster.

I’m not saying that golf should be rush-rush-rush. The opposite. Golf is a break from the press and pressure of modern life, and nobody ever makes a good golf swing when rushed. But I am saying that golf can be part of your day without gobbling up most of your waking hours.

Yes, living near a nine-hole course is a big and lucky advantage, although, as many have said, to some degree you do make your own luck.

In my travels, I am sometimes on the prowl for nine-hole golf courses, especially when traveling with my wife, who doesn’t play ye olde game.

Now would be a good time to point out a charming book called The Finest Nines, by Anthony Pippi. Pippi collects 25 nine-hole courses in one place and includes the nine-holer in Edgartown, Mass., on Martha’s Vineyard. I lived near it for a couple of years and logged a lot of rounds on it. I will say what anybody would say about it: the Edgartown nine is a joyride. The starting point for nine-hole courses is often joy. I would also say that a nine-hole round on an 18-hole course tends to raise the fun-factor, too. Play whatever tee you feel like — it adds to the fun, and moves the game along.

Zac Blair, touring pro and course nut, grew up playing a nine-hole course owned by his father called Mulligans Golf & Games in South Jordan, Utah. “Even though Mulligans is nine holes, I never believed that it lacked authenticity,” Blair wrote in a foreword to Finest Nines.

You can find your own MG&G. Wawashkamo is a nine-holer on Mackinac Island, so far north in Michigan you’re practically in Canada. The nine-holer on Shelter Island, N.Y., is called Goat Hill, with a closing, semi-blind par-3 with a grass wall for a backstop. The last time I played it, I thought I might have made a hole-in-one, the shot was so pure, but I never found the ball, which means I either made an X (we all know that score) or a 10 (the highest score a local rule allows on a hole). Does anybody care? No, nobody cares.

Few people would call Goat Hill “proper golf,” whatever that means. (Proper is not a word that has served golf well.) You might call it pasture golf — it really doesn’t matter. It is primitive.

Some of you, over the years, have asked about a primal course dear to me called Auchnafree, in a remote Scottish glen. Auchnafree was laid out by a shepherd and was tended by sheep, but the shepherd is long dead and sheep have feet and move about and if it’s a course today at all I do not know. I played it as a six-holer, some 30 years ago.

But it was golf, no question about that. You had tee markers, flagsticks marking holes some distance away, a sack on your back with some clubs in it, and feet down below your knees to get you from A to B, and from the first to the second.

Yep, golf.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.

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Joan Didion is dead. She was a writer. She lived in New York, for the most part. But she was Scottish, in manner and method.

Didion was not a golfer, though she wrote a novel called Play it as it Lays. A grammarian might have changed two letters, to Play it as it Lies. Didion, I’m sure, had her reasons.

I saw her about a year ago, leaving a restaurant, somewhere in lower Manhattan. Man, she was tiny and alone. She didn’t look she was stopping for anything or anybody.

There’s no golf in Play it as it Lays, except a single casual reference, in dialogue:

“Your father’s only Waterloo was he was always a man twenty years ahead of his time,” Benny advised me that night in the Flamingo. “The ghost-town scheme, the midget golf, the automatic blackjack concept, what do you see today?”

News

A copy-editor might have suggested a period after concept. Also, mini for midget. Didion would not have cared.

The kicker in her obit in the New York Times describes her dedication to a lost California. She was a fifth-generation Californian. The obit’s last ‘graph is a quote from one of her books, Where I Was From:

“You were meant, if you were a Californian, to know how to lash together a corral with bark, you were meant to show spirit, kill the rattlesnake, keep moving.”

You can replace Californian with Scots-Calvinist. Not just do it. Get it done. You know, Hogan. Woods. I feel for Tiger. He wants to play the shots.

Didion taught herself to write with precision by typing out Hemingway. Her sentences were efficient.

Hogan and Hemingway are pretty much the same people.

A cover of Play it as it Lays shows a coiled snake, tongue out.

Travel

The starting point for golf, for playing by its rules, is to play the ball down. Play it as it lies. You hit it there. You figure it out. Tom Watson’s thing is the lie. How’s that ball sitting? It tells you everything about what you’ll do next. The lie, the lie, the lie. Watson. Another Scots-Calvinist. He hit that shot into the wall on the Road Hole, the year Seve won there, and that was it. Just stared it down. Wrong club, wrong shot, wrong time. What more was there to say?

Don’t touch your golf ball. Unless you’re on a tee or green. Advance it with a club. You have 14 of them. That golf ball moves, it’s on you.

Most of the greats get this. Some don’t.

Somebody tell — No, in the spirit of the season, I’ll omit the first name that comes to mind. Didion would wonder why. Who are you protecting? And why?

If you come up to your ball and there’s a snake by it, don’t do a thing. Just wait for the snake to get out of the way and play your shot.

If the snake moves your ball, then you can touch it. The ball, that is. You put it back where it was and carry on.

Don’t fuss. It’s an outdoor, cross-country game. The animals were there before we were. The rabbits dug the first holes. Sheep dug the first bunkers and mowed the fairways. Don’t kill the snake. Play your shot. Keep moving. Announce your score after your ball is in the hole.

Play it as it lies. The rest is commentary.

Keep moving. You start. You head out. You march home.

From the rulebook: “Rule 9 covers a central principle of the game: `Play the ball as it lies.’”

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It was amusing, when John A. Solheim, the chairman and CEO of Ping, made a casual Godfather reference in a recent interview. Solheim is not a student of the movie trilogy. He’s 75, an engineer by training, serious and quiet and not exactly immersed in pop culture, despite his new interest in skateboarding. (This year, at both the Solheim Cup and the Junior Solheim Cup, he gave each player and captain a skateboard he designed.) Solheim, presumably, has never settled a business problem by way of a poisoned cannoli, as Connie Corleone does in Godfather III. Still, when Solheim said he was in a “Godfather-type position,” it was a knowing nod.

Like the fictional Michael Corleone, Solheim runs a company founded by his European-born father. (Karsten Solheim was born in Norway in 1911 and died in Phoenix in 2000.) The Corleones — Vito, followed by Michael and finally Michael’s nephew Vincent — face a range of complicated succession issues, financial and emotional, as the Solheims have in real life.

But there the broad similarities end. The Corleone family business was gambling and extortion. The family was based in New York and operated out of an opulent suburban mansion. The Solheims make golf clubs in a series of nondescript, sunbaked buildings off I-17 in Phoenix, the worldwide headquarters of Karsten Manufacturing (a telling name). As the don in the third generation, Vincent turned out to be a hothead, a renegade — and a disaster. John Karsten Solheim, anointed by his father, John A., as his successor, is steeped in the practices that made Ping Ping.

John K. has been the Ping president for five years already. In due course, he’ll assume his father’s titles (chairman and CEO) and responsibilities. He’s been training for the job all his life, really. He’s 47.

“It’s the third generation that loses a business, generally,” John K. Solheim said recently. He’s a businessman and an engineer, and he has a light touch. “If you get to the fourth generation, you have a legacy business.” The Ford Motor Company, for example.

In Succession, the HBO show about a media mogul and his heirs, there’s a reference to investing with a long-term view — 1,000 years. One summer, when the younger John Solheim was in college, he was his grandfather’s gofer. He saw first-hand that Karsten didn’t have a 1,000-year horizon. “He had a mindset of work on today, that today’s problems are big enough, and don’t punt things down the road,” Solheim said. “Deal with today’s problems today.”

Listening to the father and son, in separate interviews, describe the company’s past, present and future, it’s easy to reach this bold conclusion: The company’s next 30 years will look largely like its last 30. Club design rooted in engineering. Marketing campaigns that make the L.L.Bean catalog look flashy. Black as the go-to paint for drivers, fairway woods and hybrids. Bubba Watson showing up at the Masters each April wearing a Ping hat, carrying a Ping bag and playing Ping clubs.

“I never met Karsten — I wish I did — but for me John Solheim is like a father figure,” Bubba said recently. That is, John A. Solheim, the youngest of Karsten’s three sons. For a while, Bubba had a gift for getting himself in trouble with his mouth, sometimes with hot mics, sometimes with players, once with his own caddie. John A., in his mild-mannered way, got in Bubba’s face. “He came up to me at a tournament and said, ‘We can’t act this way. Forget golf, forget my company. As people, we can’t act this way.’” The paternalistic chairman.

Bubba got his first half set of Pings — left-handed, stamped with odd numbers — as a Christmas gift from his parents when he was eight. Bubba’s mother and father, living on the Florida panhandle, were not steeped in golf. But there was a local pro, Hiram Cook, who played Ping because he was lefty and the local Ping rep went out of his way to supply Cook with clubs for his own use. Bubba’s parents took their cues from Hiram Cook. The Ping reps took their cues from Karsten Solheim. Karsten’s marketing method was elementary: Take care of your base. That is, on-the-ground club pros and everyday golfers who know that the value of a golf club ultimately comes down to a single thing, which is (of course) its performance.

“We don’t blow it out the door with our marketing campaigns,” John K. said recently. “We let our equipment do the talking.” Bubba is likely the loudest and boldest person associated with Ping. He’s a de facto Ping marketing executive.

“I called John K. and said, ‘Y’all want me. I want you. Let’s not argue anymore. How about a lifetime deal?’” Bubba said recently. “John was in the first year as the president. He said, ‘I gotta talk to my dad about this one.’”

Son talked to father. Eventually, Bubba, who is 42, got his contract for life. You can be sure there are no crazy numbers in it. Ping doesn’t do crazy. It’s really two contracts in one: one covering Bubba’s remaining years as an active player, the other for when he’s sitting on the porch rocker. But without John K.’s endorsement of it, the deal never would have happened. The father and son lean on one another. They’re partners.

That’s not a given, not in any multigenerational family business. John A., the older living Solheim, said he was determined to learn from his father, in good times and in more challenging times too.

“The transition between Dad and I was not easy,” John A. said. “Dad would not discuss anything that had to do with him being gone. He didn’t want things to change. We were moving to new things, and he was hanging on. I understand what he was doing and why, but I didn’t want my son to go through that. I’ve been letting him run.”

John K. thought he was ready to start running Ping a decade ago. His father had another idea: Go to Japan, where Ping had been struggling. When John K. arrived with his family — his wife and their four kids — Ping had 1 percent of the market share, he said. They stayed for close to four years. By last year, that number was 17 percent. The breakthrough, as Solheim explained it, was understanding the Japanese golfer.

“The American golfer picks up a club in a shop and waggles it,” he said. “The Japanese golfer picks up a club and brings it right to his face.” So John K. started paying more attention to the finish on Ping’s clubs, their ferrules, how they were wrapped. Cosmetics! Karsten might not have approved. But you can’t get to performance if you can’t get a golfer to try your club.

There are guitars on the wall of John K.’s office and a Whoop health-monitoring strap around his upper arm. The junior Solheim is a triathlete and musician. One of the highlights for him at this year’s Solheim Cup was a Gwen Stefani concert, sponsored by Ping. (He didn’t meet her and didn’t try. That’s so Solheim.) John A. says his son has his father’s ear, that he can hear the many different and telling sounds that come when a golf ball and a clubface meet. Those insights can make or break a club.

The Ping name comes from the pinging sound Karsten’s first design, the 1A putter, made with its hollow midsection. John A. would stuff a small piece of rubber tire in the putter’s cavity to deaden the sound. Fathers and sons.

As a family company gets older and larger and more established, and the family behind it becomes older and larger and more established, conflict arises. A boss makes hard decisions. People, often blood relatives, can get hurt or offended. The attitude has to be, the senior Solheim says, that “taking care of the business also takes care of the family.” When he becomes the boss, John K. Solheim, the third Solheim chairman, may discover that for himself. Or not.

He remembers driving his grandfather in a golf cart on the Karsten Manufacturing campus on the rare times Karsten permitted it and “holding on for dear life” the rest of the time. You can see it: Karsten behind the wheel, his little white goatee blowing in the hot wind, knowing there is not enough time in the day to get everything done. The grandson watching and learning.

Maybe the Solheims do do crazy, just a little, and in their own inimitable way.

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The question, posed to the Tour Confidential panelists on Sunday night was this: In this season ‘o thanks, what golfy thing are we grateful for?

Your correspondent needed three words: Playable left rough.

Since then, the phone has been ringing off the hook. Actually, that’s not true, in part because phones don’t have ringers anymore and they don’t get placed on hooks. But you get the idea.

What I meant is this: I can hit a cut driver. I can stand on the right side of the tee box, aim slightly left, hit it hard (for me) with almost no release and the ball will (should) wind up in the fairway or someplace in the left rough from which you can play a second shot.

A recent discussion about this broad subject — the good miss — with the novelist-golf bum Joseph O’Neill led to a thesis-in-progress with this modest working title: How to Shoot Under 14 Over.

You know — 85 or better on par-72 course.

Instruction

And you are playing a par-72 course. Right?

For the sake of argument, a good course for you — for me, for any of us — has these rough distances on your bespoke scorecard.

Four holes that you can reach readily with your tee shot. Those are your par-3s.

Four holes, and only four holes, where your two solid shots will get you close to the green. Those are known as par-5s.

Ten holes — broadly, broadly speaking here — that you can reach with a driver and some sort of take-a-divot iron. Those are known as par-4s.

Courses are loaded with tee markers these days. Forget about your USGA-sanctioned round. On each of the 18 holes, play from a tee that can be played per the recipes above.

If your average drive is 210 yards and your average 7-iron is 120, your 10 par-4 holes should be in the 330 range. As variety is life’s spice, let’s say 300 to 350. Oh, and your 7-iron might be a hybrid of some sort.

Instruction

Welcome to Dustin Johnson’s world. He’s hitting 8-irons into par-4s all day long. Why should he have all the fun?

By the way, he has a caddie. You don’t. Leave the headcovers in the car. They’re slowing you down. Golf should be played briskly.

On par-3s and par-5s, apply the same par-4 logic.

BTW II, as you are creating your own version of this great game:

*Make all your putts.

*Write down triple if you make a triple or worse. Pick up as needed.

*If you lose a ball, drop it where it should be and add a shot.

*If you hit it OB, drop it where it went out and add a shot.

Instruction

*Play a match.

If all that adds up to 85 or better — those rules, those tees — there’s your happy ending. Collect the kindling, light the fire, gather the family. The little ones will be enthralled as you regale them with your blow-by-blow reenactment. 

OK, now let’s get into the specifics. You know that whole swing-your-swing thing? It’s good. Playable left rough is, too. Find your own playable left rough.

Your tee-shot line should be one where your miss will be OK. An OK miss is one where you can advance the ball somewhere near the green, maybe even on it.

Which gets to the new “metric” that Joe O’Neill (Netherland) and I have developed: GIR+1.

If you want to shoot in the mid-80s or better, you have to hit some greens in regulation and you have to two-putt. That requires some golf skill. Not a great deal.

If you are playing each hole at the appropriate distance, and you have a soupcon of golfing ability, you should be able to hit four greens in regulation. Five might be asking too much, but then again, not really.

Let’s say you play those four holes one over par. Four GIRs. Good on you!

Now you need to play the remaining 14 holes in 13 over or better. You’re going to make a mandatory. (A triple or worse.) You’re going to make a legit double. It’s golf. (The wind comes up. The lake yawns.) And that’s where the +1 part of the GIR+1 comes in.

GIR+1: Your ball is within 15 feet of the hole in two shots on a par-3, in three shots on a par-4 and four shots on a par-5. If you can do that 18 times, you will break 85, and 15 or 16 might be enough.

Yes, there is the game-within-the game. But how hard is it to two-putt from 15 feet?

(Don’t answer that!)

You might even make one putt per round that’s more than 10 feet long.

Regarding putting: Don’t try to hole the putt. Just try to make a good read and a good stroke. As a smart friend says, You want that ball breaking toward the hole.

None of this sounds hard, does it?

Here’s the point; here’s the upshot. If you have 15 or 16 or 17 or 18 GIR+1s over your round, you should be able to shoot the mid-80s or better.

Anybody who shoots in the mid-80s is not a duffer.

You don’t have to do anything that special. You do have to be able to chip capably (with a putter as often as possible). You have to be able to pitch the ball (move it forward and take a swing and use the bounce). And you have to be able to get out in one shot from a bunker (have some speed through the ball).

Hogan said, “The average golfer is entirely capable of building a repeating swing and breaking 80.”

Of course, for every golfer who is above average there is another who is below average. This is for us. You know, 83 is pretty darn respectable, too.

And then there are the old Scots, in the carpark, wanting to know how it went for you as they fold their trolleys up.

Howdyageton?

They don’t mean your score, and certainly not your path to the first tee. They mean how was your day — and how was your match?

Even going to the last!

Well, how fun is that, no matter what happened on the home hole?

To one and all, whether you are near or far: Happy Thanksgiving.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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