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Location: Chicago’s lakefront

Time: 5:05 p.m., April 21st

It is the first nice day in what feels like 7,000 days in Chicago. That’s what this spring has been like: Winter, extended. And that’s why the hottest place to be is the Diversey Driving Range. 

Springtime in the Midwest — we won’t sugarcoat it — totally stinks! No good for golfers, and no good for golf courses. But it makes driving ranges one helluva place to people watch. As Midwesterner Andy North explained to me last fall, “If you’re running a golf course, you’re basically shut down for five months. But then, if you get nice weather in April, you can’t keep people away.” 

Only Diversey was keeping people away on this day, because there was nowhere for them to go. Every one of its 76 hitting stations was filled, with players on deck, and even some waiting in the hole. One quick-thinker snatched a mat off the pile of synthetic turf squares and added a new station to the far end. For at least one day, Diversey now had 77 stations. And it needed it — the line to simply buy a bucket of balls was 20 deep, stretching out the door and snaking its way toward the lake. 

The Lincoln Park Zoo is nearby, and so is Lake Michigan, but my walks and runs through the area always draw me toward Diversey, for nothing more than an innocent State of the Game assessment. The golfers, bounding down Diversey Parkway or biking along Lake Shore Drive West, come in all different shapes, sizes and levels of club-carrying creativity.  

There’s the typical looper, schlepping a full set through the park, but also many toting “Sunday” Bags, the woven satchels that closely resemble rifle cases, slung over a shoulder. Some players carry just three clubs in hand as they arrive for their session. Others show up with five clubs awkwardly sticking over their shoulders, jammed into a drawstring bag. One ingenious father wedged three clubs between the wheels of his toddler’s stroller, right above the Spiderman comic books. Another, wearing a LeBron James player tee, hoofed it across the park to the practice facility, four shafts protruding his backpack, zip-tied together via an iPhone charging cord. He must have run out of rubber bands.

They come by Uber, by bus, by car. It’s plausible some even come by boat, with the marina nearby. Plenty turn up via bike, and obviously plenty on foot. At least one golfer, his sweaty cheeks glistening, came gliding in via Bauer rollerblades. 

If Bethpage Black on Long Island is The People’s Country Club, Diversey might as well be The People’s Practice Facility. There are zero frills here. No huge targets to hit at, just rock-hard greens, unreceptive to a spinny wedge shot. A yellow, painted caution line separates endless optimism (the watchers) from reality (the swingers). Diversey is about as far from TopGolf as you can get these days, despite the property holding incredible value. (TopGolf, I’ve been told, was at one point interested in buying up the land.) There’s no music being played, just the sound of contact, instruction, and often disappointment. When the weather is consistently good, a beer garden opens up next door, and on warm summer nights can be just as popular as the range itself. 

Tonight, in mid-April, that beer garden was unsurprisingly closed. Instead, the place to drink was the top level of the two-level range as it was blanketed in sunshine. One happy customer in shorts, shades and an unbuttoned Chris Coghlan Cubs jersey was just happy to hang out. He had spent 30 minutes waiting for a spot to open up, basking in the sun and bragging about how he never pays for parking at Diversey (and had never been caught). Once his practice partner arrived, he made a quick run to a convenience store, returning triumphant and announcing: “I’ve got Pringles and alcohol!” Pringles, White Claws and wedges — what more could you need? Perhaps not even that much. He crossed paths with one player leaving the range, a hybrid in his left hand and a tallboy Miller Lite in his right, nothing more.

In about 30 minutes at Diversey, you can see every lovable aspect of golf sickos. The hardo with three alignment sticks, grinding through each swing. The five buddies with five large buckets, ready to spend the next two hours in control of a single station. There was also the pair chipping styrofoam balls on the putting green, right next to a sign that read ‘No Chipping.’

There would be no policing of this infraction, because there was no time to police it. A sign posted on the window of the driving range entrance stated the obvious: Help wanted. Two people checked in guests behind the counter while one picked the range and another wrangled the empty buckets. It was, unquestionably, the worst time for one of the two working ball dispensers to suddenly break. But one of them did, creating a line 35-deep of people who spent $16 for golf balls they had to wait 15 minutes for.

Perhaps the healthiest sign of the game is just how many women use the facilities at Diversey. Sure, there will always be a male majority here and at nearly every driving range, but dozens of women were getting their cuts in during high-time this Thursday. That’s the case for this driving range on most nights and weekend afternoons. There’s nothing intimidating about it. Diversey is open year-round, and despite the brutal Chicago winters, it’s used every single day. In 2019, when a polar vortex ripped through the Midwest, the parks department shut down the range for two days … and received a string of phone calls from Chicagoans who wanted to brave the frigid temps. Then, a year ago, another rare closure: Too many balls got stuck in the snow, so there were none left to dish out.

Around 5:30 p.m., a driving range neighbor crossed the street with two clubs in hand: driver and putter. He spent a half hour on the concrete putting green, hitting into cups so old, their edges had permanently been beaten inward, creating a funneled diameter much wider than the standard 4.25 inches. You could find better holes at the mini golf course 30 yards away, but not a single person was playing it. Full swings only.

Dismayed by the lengthy wait for a range spot, our neighbor bid me farewell as he headed home, zero full swings taken. Did he learn anything? Probably not. But you can’t blame him for wanting to try. He — like all of us — had been putting on carpet for the past five months. 

Another reason why he’s anxious is that Diversey had been closed for months. It shut down in January for improvements and construction, and promised to reopen in late March. But it didn’t open in late March. It opened, finally, on April 8, “at 1:30 in the afternoon!” the shop attendant exclaimed. It was the earliest they could do it, on a Friday afternoon where the high temperature reached 39 degrees. Why would they open on a 39-degree day? Because they knew people would come. And they did.

This is part of our Muni Monday series, spotlighting stories from the world of city- and county-owned golf courses around the world. Love Diversey? Send an email to Sean at sean.zak@golf.com. Got a muni story that needs telling? Send tips to Dylan Dethier or to munimondays@gmail.com and follow Muni Mondays on Instagram.

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The post This renovated Connecticut muni is a (dirt cheap!) Top 100 Course clone appeared first on Golf.

HARTFORD, Conn. — It should be noted first that Keney Park drains terribly.

On the day after a rainstorm, the course is largely underwater. The grass is soft and drooping at high points; entirely submerged at low ones. If you’re not careful, you’ll step in a puddle in the first fairway and find yourself in soggy socks for the rest of a glorious spring morning. Your feet will squelch and your ball will plop and the grooves of your clubs will pack tight with mud.

And now that I’ve done the locals the favor of scaring off the hordes soon to descend upon Keney Park for at least a few days a month, it should now be noted that Keney Park is one of the finest municipal courses I’ve had the good fortune of playing.

Keney Park is laughably good: well-maintained, remarkably affordable (less than $50 even for out-of-staters), and ridiculously fun. For a course so close to New York City, snagging a tee time mere minutes before teeing off feels like stealing. But then you walk the course and realize a cheap tee time at Keney Park isn’t stealing … it’s grand larceny.

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The course’s design elements draw inspiration from St. Andrews, Garden City, and a half-dozen other Golden Age tracks. Template holes and concepts are everywhere — a Biarritz, a redan, a principal’s nose and a punchbowl are just a few of the design elements stolen by Keney Park. Of particular note: the 8th hole, where church pew bunkers appear as if plucked directly from the fairways at Oakmont.

The front nine, which was originally designed by Devereux Emmet of Garden City and Congressional fame, is a delightful apportionment of the land. Each hole blends challenge, enjoyment and intrigue in a way that requires a wide variety of shot types but not necessarily blinding precision. Even after the March monsoons drowned the rest of the course, the greens were in tremendous shape: firm, bouncy, and slick.

Sometimes, the imitation goes a step too far. The gap between the Emmet-designed front and the back is cavernous. The second nine — named the “Ross Nine” for Robert “Jack” Ross, a local engineer who took on the second half of the Keney Park project (before Matthew Dusenberry’s 2010s renovation) — is wonky. Some design concepts feel forced, smushed unnecessarily into places where they do not belong. The result is visually stimulating but strategically blasé, like a skyscraper placed alone in the desert.

But that criticism could also be considered a strength. There isn’t a single forgettable hole among the bunch, even on some of the odder back-nine routings. For a municipal course costing you slightly more than a range trip, it feels greedy to dock points for strategic significance.

I played in late March with my friend Drew — a tune-up round at the beginning of both of our seasons. Drew is a recent Hartford transplant, an ESPN employee displaced from his hometown of Plymouth, Minn. He was charged the local fee of $34, a pittance neither of us could quite believe upon the completion of our round.

“I think this is going to be my new home course,” he said matter-of-factly.

“I freaking wish it could be mine,” I replied.

In all, Keney Park feels aspirational, but it shouldn’t be. Interesting, well-maintained, easily accessible municipal golf is a public right in the same way as green spaces and transportation. In a thriving community like Hartford, Keney Park is a blueprint for building the game from the ground up. The course offers camps, lessons, hosts weekly leagues and offers both season-long memberships and daily tee times. Its constituents pull from a diverse group of ages, backgrounds and ethnicities.

For those of us fortunate enough to stumble upon Keney Park, it’s a reminder of all the things that make golf great — and of all the ways in which it still has to grow. For $45 on the weekends, it’s one of the great finds in all of the northeast.

Even if it drains terribly.

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The post Why this nearly century-old women’s golf club is enjoying a revival appeared first on Golf.

In the photographs, the golfers wear knit blazers, full-length skirts and Panama-style caps — threads that now look retro, and no wonder.

The snapshots depict members of the Harding Park Women’s Golf Club in the early years of their organization, which was a long while ago.

Among the oldest institutions of its kind in California, the club was founded in the 1930s, shortly after Harding opened. For generations, it endured, its members keeping their appointed weekday rounds on the San Francisco muni they called home. They saw Harding through the wake of the Depression and its glory years of the post-War era when the course hosted a regular Tour stop. They continued playing through forlorn stretches in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when conditions grew so scruffy, it was hard to tell the fairways from the rough.

Over time, club membership dwindled. But the group held on until the early aughts, when Harding shut down for major renovations, destined to become a tournament-worthy track once more. With the course under construction, women’s club members took to playing elsewhere. When Harding reopened, with a modest rate hike for residents, few opted to return.

In 2003, the women’s club disbanded, and for nearly 20 years, it went largely forgotten. But now, like Harding itself, it has been reborn.

Credit for its revival goes to Lily Achatz, a Bay Area native and an unlikely champion of the women’s game. Growing up in the ‘80s, Achatz didn’t play golf. She first picked up a club at age 12, when her father took her to the driving range. Achatz liked it but was wary of the all-dude demographic. Golf, she figured, wasn’t quite a fit for her.

Life went on. Achatz moved to New York, graduated college, embarked on a career in the fashion business. Athletic and outdoorsy, she enjoyed a range of sports. But golf only flashed into the picture now and then, when guy friends invited her to play. Again, she felt the pull — and the hesitation.

“The courses were so beautiful, and I loved being out there,” Achatz says. “But it also seemed like such a bro society. I just thought it would be weird for me to go out alone.”

After the attacks of Sept. 11, Achatz relocated to San Francisco, busying herself with work and friends, all the while thinking that maybe one day, someday, she’d give golf another crack. When Covid hit, her motivation reached a tipping point. Achatz booked a lesson at Presidio Golf Club, a public-access course in the heart of the city. While learning to swing, Achatz also learned that she wasn’t alone. The Presidio was home to a women’s club, players of all levels, in it for community more than competition. 

Achatz signed up and — raise your hand if you could see this coming — was smitten by the fresh air, the fellowship, the challenge: the happy gateway drugs to golf addiction.

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It was official. Golf became her thing.

Soon, Achatz made a wish list of other local courses. Harding was high on it, though she worried its demands might be too much. Her newfound Presidio golf friends helped her past that hurdle, skipping across town to guide her first round at the intimidating muni.

“They made me feel so comfortable,” Achatz says. “And they helped me understand that it didn’t matter what you shot, as long as you understood the etiquette.”

Around the same time, Achatz attended her first LPGA event, the Mediheal Championship, at nearby Lake Merced Golf Club. There, she crossed paths with Tom Smith, Harding’s general manager. The two got talking. When Achatz mentioned her dual interests in golf and fashion, Smith pulled up photos on his phone, black-and-white images from the 1930s that he’d first seen in a scrapbook at his workplace: portraits of members of the Harding Park Women’s Golf Club, dressed in their Babe Didrikson Zaharias-era duds.

Achatz loved the clothes. But something else was even more alluring: the idea of bringing back the club.

With help from Smith and Lyn Nelson, director of golf development and property manager for San Francisco’s Recreations and Parks Department, Achatz spent the next few months pushing through the hoops to make that happen. In late 2021, the Harding Park Women’s Golf Club was reinstated, sanctioned by the city and under the umbrella of the Northern California Golf Association. This past February, Achatz opened the doors for enrollment. Overnight, 50 women signed up. Based on early feedback, Achatz projects that the number will swell to more than 100 by the end of the year.

The robust response reflects a broader trend: During golf’s recent boom, girls and women have become the fastest-growing sector of the game. It also speaks to golf’s wide demographic reach. The new club membership runs the gamut in age, background and ability, ranging from Nicole Holm, a 28-year-old former high school golfer-turned-public health researcher, to 80-year-old Jane Grimm, who works as a sculptor but knows how to shape shots, too.

“Aside from playing with my sister, I can’t recall the last time I showed up at a course and wound up playing with another female golfer,” Holm says. “That’s what makes this so special — having a community of women who love the game as much as I do.”

In the two months since its relaunch, the club has gathered regularly for nine-hole twilight rounds on Harding’s scenic back side. But Achatz and her cohort have bigger ambitions. Along with monthly 18-hole outings, plans are in the works for educational clinics; Toptracer league play; online happy-hour Q&A’s; mixed-gender events with a sibling group, the Harding Park Golf Club, which is open to all but whose active members all are men.

The list goes on.

“We are open to all ideas,” Achatz says.

The women’s club costs $105 a year to join, and another $49 to establish and maintain an official handicap. Not that scorekeeping is required. Members compete mostly against themselves. The group currency is camaraderie. Post-round cocktails are valued, too.

Like the abiding spirit, the dress code is relaxed, though retro threads might earn you style points. It is, after all, an historic club, updated, where everything old is new again.

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The post This five-star muni is such a good value its regulars want to keep it a secret appeared first on Golf.

The post This five-star muni is such a good value its regulars want to keep it a secret appeared first on Golf.

It’s hard to keep a secret a secret in the New York metropolitan area. Too many prying eyes, too many perked ears, too many trigger-happy Twitterers. If something is worthy of praise — a restaurant, a band, yep, even a golf course — word in the tri-state region spreads quickly, and alas the secret is no longer.

Which makes Rock Spring Golf Club, in West Orange, N.J. — less than 20 miles west of Midtown Manhattan — such an anomaly.

Sure, some local golfers know the place, and some golf-course architecture enthusiasts, too. But since it was converted from a private club to a municipally owned course in 2019, Rock Spring — despite its Big Apple skyline views! — largely has remained a sleeping giant.

“That’s the cool thing about it: We’re three years in now and there’s still a lot of people out there who don’t know about us,” Chris Parker, Rock Spring’s general manager, told me the other day. “They still think it’s a private club, or they’ve driven past it and aren’t really sure what it is.”

What it is is one of two publicly accessible Seth Raynor designs in the United States, non-resort division. (The course was actually built by Raynor’s top lieutenant, Charles Banks, but the design was conjured by Raynor, and his fingerprints are everywhere.)

If Raynor’s name doesn’t mean anything to you, that’s cool. Just know that Rock Spring is a joy to play, with endless intrigue, charm and variety. It’s also one of the great bargains on the Met Area golf scene. When I played it a couple of weeks ago, the walking fee was all of $40. Beginning next month, those rates will jump to $52 during the week and $92 on the weekends, but even those fees do little to diminish Rock Spring’s value.

If Raynor’s name does mean something to you, by now you might be sitting on the edge of your seat. As you should be. Rock Spring is that good. Raynor’s hallmark touches — a redan, a double-plateau green, a “Short” hole — are all over the hilly site. From the moated (by sand) green at the par-3 6th to the risk-reward drive created by three diagonally positioned fairway bunkers on the par-4 11th to pushed-up greens and steep-faced bunkers, there’s a fun surprise or challenge waiting around every corner. No public course in the Met Area is more interesting or memorable, certainly not among those this correspondent has played.

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In the United States, sadly most “template” holes — or those inspired by iconic designs from the British Isles and imported stateside by C.B. Macdonald, with whom Raynor collaborated — are hidden behind the hedges of private clubs. Rock Spring is that rare American design that exposes template golf to the masses. The redan hole, the par-3 3rd, is a standout and not just because you can see the monoliths of Manhattan from the tee. From the tips, it’s a 200-yard shot across a scruffy ravine, to a green that runs diagonally and is pitched from front to back. The hole is both daunting and beautiful, even with construction vehicles parked in the chasm below.  

When I visited with a neighborhood friend on a weirdly warm March afternoon, I didn’t want the round to end. The other player with whom we were grouped — an investment banker and Rock Spring regular from Hoboken — had other concerns. He knew my profession.  

“Don’t you dare write about this place and blow us up,” he said as we waited to hit our tee shots up the 18th fairway. He was only half-joking. That’s the thing about Rock Spring — its regulars know how good they have it and understandably want to keep the secret to themselves. Added Parker: “People who’ve discovered it, they’re like, ‘Oh we don’t want it overcrowded. It’s already hard to get a tee time.’”

Much of Rock Spring’s low profile is rooted in its history. For 93 years, it was a private club; an empty swimming pool and stately locker room serve as reminders. But over time, the club succumbed to financial pressures. In 2015, Montclair Golf Club, in a nearby town, assumed Rock Spring’s mortgage and made the club a subsidiary of Montclair. That experiment lasted only three years, at which point West Orange Township, eager to preserve the green space, acquired the property for $11 million. That was in 2019.

The town hired KemperSports to manage the course, and within its first year under the new arrangement, Rock Spring turned a profit, according to figures shared in a West Orange city council meeting. Today, business it still brisk.

Some of the clientele are aware of the architectural muscle of the course, but likely just as many are not, Parker said.

“Part of strategy this year and moving forward is educating people on what it means to play template golf,” he said. “A lot of people don’t really know what that means. So we’re planning to put up some signage and do some things with scorecards and yardage books where we can help educate people about the importance and significance of some of the structural designs out there.   

“But that’s one of the beautiful things about the place: You could play the course and not know anything about the design and still have a great time. It’s a second-shot golf course. You can’t overpower it. You have to pick and choose and think your way around. You can be a high-handicapper and enjoy it, you can be a low-handicapper and enjoy it.”

Or a mid-handicapper. I can report that firsthand.

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The post One of Fred Couples greatest lessons? It was learned by doing this. appeared first on Golf.

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Fred Couples wants to add a disclaimer on this. Country clubs are great. 

It’s just that he grew up on a muni — the par-3 at Jefferson Park in Seattle — and, well, you know how one of the sweetest swingers in golf turned out. The country clubs have their manicured tees, fairways, greens and bunkers. But the munis? On a recent episode of the On the Mark podcast, hosted by longtime teaching pro Mark Immelman, Couples waxed poetic on his old home. 

“I want to take you back to growing up in Seattle,” Immelman said. “I’m a public course guy. You learn certain things playing on a public course. You played at Jefferson Park, I believe it was.” 

“Well, you hit a great point when you said you learn a little bit more, or a little different things, and I’ll tell you what you learn is, as I got to be a better, young, 9- and 10-year-old player — I grew up on a par-3 course,” Couples said. “And there was 18 holes there, too, so at Jefferson Park, there’s a great nine-hole course with one short par-4, but all great par-3s with pop-up greens and then it had the 18-hole course. 

“So going backward just for a second was you get different lies, you get bunkers that aren’t raked because it’s a public facility, and you know, you’re taught a lot of things, and you know, I don’t know how great your guys’ course was, but ours was a really, really nice course. It was just a blast for me to play.”

Memorable, too, for Couples was whom he played with at Jefferson, which also has an 18-hole course. Later in the podcast — which is very much worth a complete listen here — the 1992 Masters champ said he biked to the course, played, paid five dollars for a burger, fries and drink, and played again. And each round was with whomever.

“I had so many friends that played so growing up on a public course, I played with everybody,” Couples said on the podcast. “I think if I grew up on a country club, I probably would play with most young juniors, and I learned to grow up. Any little mistakes as a 13-year-old, you know, these 30- and 40-year-olds wouldn’t want to be around some punk.” 

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“Oh, that’s exactly the truth,” Immelman said. “And what I profess to, you know, all manner of golfers coming up, play it down, to your observation; find someone better than you, play alongside them. I mean, my younger brother [2008 Masters champ Trevor Immelman], he’s nine years our junior, was playing golf with, he was 5 at the time, we’re 14, and you learn to get good fast.”  

“No, you’re dead right, and that’s not to say that, you know, kids at country clubs don’t play with older players,” Couples said. “But the point being is, they see those people all the time. I would get thrown in with a couple good players and maybe they brought a friend over that would play, and so, you know, playing the ball down, playing in bunkers that maybe weren’t raked perfectly because someone just went in there and slapped it around, or with their foot. So you’re 100 percent correct, and one of the greatest things ever is, there was a guy named Hans Turner, and his son, Jay, and I used to play a lot. We used to play — can’t make it up — one yard from the back of every tee from the tips, even at 13 years old. 

“And again, I played a course that in the winter time in Seattle felt like it played 8,000 yards long. And in the summer when it dried out, it was like 6,000 yards. So I’d get to like the seventh hole, it would be in the wintertime, two woods, and the summer, it would be a driver and a 7-iron. So you know, people that grow up in perfect weather, which is what I would want any kid to do, but in Seattle, it was not always perfect. The golf course played differently, but one of the things I enjoyed, like you said, I was playing with people from everywhere, all ages.”

(For more on Couples’ old course, or to play it — the most it will set you back this time of year is $35 — check out the Jefferson Park website here. And again, to hear more from Couples, you can listen to the On the Mark podcast here.)  

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Imagine if Gil Hanse reworked Augusta Municipal Golf Course, the city-owned track near the home of the Masters, and Augusta National paid for it — and agreed to do the maintenance, too.

Or if Tom Doak touched up Pacific Grove Golf Links, the seaside muni just north of Monterey, and Cypress Point assumed its care.

Nothing of the sort would ever happen, right? And yet it has, half a world away.

For the details, we turn our gaze Down Under to the Melbourne Sandbelt and a course called Sandy Golf Links, formerly known as Sandringham.

Sandy boasts a solid pedigree. It also occupies a prime location. Originally designed by Vern Morcom, a looming figure in the region (Morcom’s father, Mick, was the lead builder on much of Alister Mackenzie’s Sandbelt work, and Vern himself was the head greenskeeper at Kingston Heath for more than 40 years), the course butts up against revered Royal Melbourne (No. 7 in our latest ranking of Top 100 Courses).

But where Royal Melbourne is reserved for members and their guests, Sandy Links is what we Americans would call a muni. Never mind that Australians don’t use that term. Sandy fits the bill. The place is city-owned. Anyone can play it.

For years, the course they played had the pleasant but tired trappings of so many munis: a layout with sound bones in an aging body.

You’d never know that from its looks today.

The early murmurings of change began in 2010, when Royal Melbourne took over the lease. The 2011 Presidents Cup was approaching, and for various reasons, including parking and practice facilities, it made sense for the club to have some control over the property next door. The lease was for a year, but when that year expired, Royal Melbourne re-upped. The year after that, the club signed on again.

By then, other developments were afoot. Golf Australia, the game’s national body, was searching for a new home in the region, an administrative center that would double as a high-tech training facility: a grooming grounds for tomorrow’s stars.

In 2016, the course still known as Sandringham was chosen as the site.

A dramatic overhaul was required.

Fast forward to the present. The Australian Golf Center is now finished, its final touches wrapped up this past fall, complete with covered hitting bays, nifty short-game grounds, a double-ended driving range and other offerings befitting Australia’s best young amateurs and pros.

But for everyday golfers, the most important change is to the course itself.

Reimagined by Mike Cocking, a design partner in OCM Golf, the architectural firm co-founded by Geoff Ogilvy, the course rebranded as Sandy Golf Links provides a true Sandbelt experience for the masses — with the backing of the Sandbelt’s most prestigious private club.

Royal Melbourne, which put its resources to work in the construction, also handles the maintenance, bringing out the shine in Cocking’s fine design.

To make room for the expanded practice grounds, Cocking had to lose holes 1 and 9 from the original layout. Necessity being the mother of invention, he then got creative to find a new 18 within a reduced footprint.

The result is a par-65 routing that tips out at a modest 5,400 yards but makes up for in artistry what it lacks in length. Fairways are broad-shouldered but angles are essential. Every tee, green and bunker has been rebuilt and repositioned, in a style consistent with Sandy’s more famous neighbor. Even the mowing patterns mimic those next door.

Adding to the kinship, Sandy’s greens feature ‘Sutton’s blend,’ the same grass type that is otherwise used exclusively next door. The aim is to approximate the fabled putting surfaces at Royal Melbourne, right down to the satisfying wooden sound you get if you let a putter drop on the green.

In Sandy’s new sporty form, there are no par 5s, but that, too, squares with the spirit of golf in the Sandbelt, where world-beating short par-3s and 4s abound. On turf kept firm and fast by the Royal Melbourne team, a crafty ground game goes a long way here. It doesn’t hurt to be a bomber. Never does. But this is egalitarian golf, manageable in scale for newbies even as it tests more seasoned sticks with its demands around the greens.

And boy, does it cut a handsome profile.

Check out the photos. The clean-edge bunkers, guarding targets shaped out of rollicking terrain. You might think that you were looking at Royal Melbourne’s more compact cousin.

It’s a dream arrangement and one without an obvious parallel. But this country is home to a lot of worthy munis, standing in the shadow of big-time private courses.

Looking at the photos and thinking about your local muni, you could be forgiven for letting yourself daydream.

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In the annals of expense report history — next to the $4,000 bottle of Dom Perignon and the $100,000 corporate retreat — is a $225 charge from ‘Air California Adventure.’

Yes, I did jump off a cliff in the name of golf journalism. Yes, I acted alone in this behavior — unprompted by supervisors or coworkers. And yes, I was reimbursed in full.

Long before Torrey Pines was home to one of the world’s most beloved municipal golf courses, it was home to the gliders.

The easiest description of gliding is, well, flying. Using only some fabric and the wind, individuals float high above the land, sashaying lazily through the air like small clouds. Gliders come in two primary forms: paragliders — in which the operator sits in a basket underneath a large parachute — or hanggliders — in which the operator ‘hangs’ suspended in the air from an aerodynamic chute designed like a paper airplane.

Benefitted by consistent easterly winds; high, jagged cliffs; and a steady dose of year-round sunlight, gliding quickly became San Diego’s adopted sport. In 1930, the locals officially christened Torrey Pines Gliderport, and not long after, the legendary Charles Lindbergh made the first-ever sailplane flight over the cliffs.

By the time William P. Bell got to designing a golf course on what remained of an abandoned Army base in the late-50s, Torrey Pines was a bonafide hub of aviation. In many ways, the course was an extension of the promise represented by the gliderport: a public good, operated by the public, for public consumption.

To the great fortune of the people of San Diego, that legacy has remained intact for the last century for both parks, even as names like Lindbergh and Woods and Rahm have made history on its turf. Today, the gliderport is a destination spot for thrill-seekers, while locals can play the South Course for $63 — $38 during twilight — on any given weekday.

Travel

Perhaps their proximity has something to do with it. The gliderport sits less than 1,000 feet from the 12^th green at Torrey Pines South Course, but it’s hard to get within a mile of property without noticing its byproducts. On a clear, breezy day, the traffic over Torrey Pines rivals the traffic on it.

The gliders aren’t a nuisance, though. Far from it. They’re perhaps the South Course’s most charming quality, and for those of us stupid enough to try flying one, they provide something else entirely: a glimpse of what actually makes Torrey Pines great.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment a dumb idea became an even dumber action, but it likely started around the time I reached the 15^th hole at Torrey Pines South on April 27, 2021.

I should have been thrilled. It was Tuesday at Torrey Pines. I was in Southern California covering the USGA’s U.S. Open Preview Day with no responsibilities other than to play great golf for free. And yet I was distracted.

Preview Days are terrific, but they are, by definition, not unique. Every member of the media sees the same course playing the same way, hears the same stakeholders speak, tries the same halfway house snack and recreates the same famous shot. Then those same media members go home and write ostensibly the same story.

That’s all good fun, but as a 23-year-old with aspirations of continuing to visit beautiful golf courses for work, I felt a responsibility to find something different, so I broke one of golf’s cardinal rules. I made a phone call from the tee box.

“Torrey Pines Gliderport,” sung the woman on the other end of the line.

“Question for you,” I responded. “Is there any chance you’ll still be flying in about an hour?”

“Oh man,” she said. “Maybe. But I’d get here sooner, if you can.”

“Roger that, I’ll call you back in 20 minutes.”

Come to think of it, maybe the first action of stupidity came 45 minutes later, when the front desk attendant at Torrey Pines Gliderport handed me an iPad and began filming.

“Okay, just read the script below for me nice and slow,” she said.

“My name is James Colgan and today is April 27th. I choose to participate in the sport of paragliding with the understanding it is an inherently dangerous sport which may result in injury, bodily harm or even death.”

Before I could question the necessity of such stringent liability measures, a stranger approached me.

“This your first time?” he asked, sensing my nerves.

“Yeah.”

He took off his sunglasses and looked me straight in the eye.

“There’s only one thing you need to know,” he said, winding up. “You need to be careful up there …”

“Yeah?”

“You might get addicted.”

As it turns out, jumping off a cliff is relatively easy. Convincing yourself to do it, on the other hand, is not.

So when my pilot, Mark, told me to sprint as fast as I could toward the cliff’s edge, I paused for a second.

“Keep going man!” Mark screamed. “GO! GO! GO! GO!”

Just as we reached the cliff’s edge, a gust of wind hit our parachute, jolting the two of us into the air.

Suddenly, we were flying.

“Like a bird, man!!!” Mark yelled again, steering us in the direction of the golf course.

The two of us rocketed over the cliffs, staring down at the ocean below as a pack of dolphins breached the waves. The feeling was euphoric — as if the whole world stopped to ride with you. Before long, the golf course came into view.

The late afternoon sun cast shadows over the fairways and greens, illuminating the contours I’d inspected from up close less than an hour earlier. Down below, a foursome enjoyed a picture-perfect emergency nine. They waved up to me, and I waved back.

Mark steered me further over the golf course, and we dipped just above the treetops and over the valleys.

An hour over the golf course felt like 10 minutes, but just as abruptly as we’d entered the sky, it was soon time to return to earth.

I FaceTimed my parents from the ground.

“Oh god,” Mom said when she saw the grin on my face. “What did you do?”

There is a lesson to be learned in enjoying Torrey Pines twice, but I’m afraid it has precious little to do with course design or architectural significance.

From the ground, Torrey Pines is like a lot of other places in golf — spectacular for a few moments, unspectacular in plenty of others. Its greens are bumpy, its bunkers are clumpy and firm, its fairways are not kept at a razor’s edge. Some blades of grass are not perfectly manicured, and no, the clubhouse is not anyone’s definition of ‘palatial.’

But from the sky, a very different picture comes into view, a picture without the preconceptions of a ‘major championship golf course.’ In its place, one finds a stretch of land with green grass and rolling terrain, 18 tee boxes and greens aligned in neat order, and dozens of strangers, united by nothing other than their passion for being in this place at this very moment.

From the sky, it doesn’t matter what Rees Jones did or didn’t do in his recent renovation to William Bell’s design. Nor does it matter whether the quality dips after the 4^th tee box, or if the par-5 9^th is long and straight enough to serve as an emergency runway for a 747.

Rather, it matters that Torrey Pines exists. It matters that you and I can enjoy this place in the same way Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus and Jon Rahm once did.  It matters that this place — with its imperfect golf and congested skies — continues to provide a glimpse of golf for what it actually was meant to be, and not for the many exclusionary things for which it was not.

Maybe all Torrey Pines needs is more people who are willing to take the 10,000-foot view.

Or maybe I’m just glad my boss approved my expense report.

This is part of our Muni Monday series, spotlighting stories from the world of city- and county-owned golf courses around the world. Got a muni story that needs telling? Send tips to Dylan Dethier or to munimondays@gmail.com and follow Muni Mondays on Instagram.

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The post Controversial California bill targets muni golf — and that’s missing the point appeared first on Golf.

The post Controversial California bill targets muni golf — and that’s missing the point appeared first on Golf.

Golf is booming all around the country.

But in California, where I live, the boom has coincided with something more explosive: a housing crisis that only seems to be getting worse.

The causes of the problem are deep-rooted and complex, which means that the solutions aren’t easy, either. But in the state legislature, in Sacramento, lawmakers have taken up the question of whether golf can be part of the fix.

That topic is charged, too.

If you follow the headlines, you may have read about a California bill known as AB672. It is listed on the docket under the heading, ‘Publicly owned golf courses: conversion: affordable housing.’

Which pretty much sums it up.

The proposed legislation would incentivize cities to repurpose their munis by offering them state funds to build housing on the courses.

AB672’s author is Cristina Garcia, a State Assemblymember who represents a district in east Los Angeles. When I spoke with her late last spring, shortly after she first brought the bill to the floor, Garcia told me that she had no gripe with golf. She simply wondered whether, in densely populated areas of the state, munis were the best use of public land. AB672, she said at the time, was her way of “planting a flag in the ground and starting a conversation.”

Courses

There has certainly been a lot to talk about.

Advocates for golf have made it clear that they aren’t buying what Garcia is selling.

They see AB672 as a Trojan horse, an anti-golf measure disguised as a housing bill, one that’s woefully misguided for all kinds of reasons, fueled by political expediency but also shaped by stereotypes and falsehoods that have long dogged the game. What will happen to AB672 in the legislative grind is impossible to say. But regardless of its future, the bill has brought golf’s most stubborn optics problems into relief.

Anyone who knows the game knows that it has a split personality. One side of its character is high-end and exclusive, sometimes insufferably so. But then there’s all the rest.

According to data from the National Golf Foundation and the Southern California Golf Association, 22 percent of courses in California are munis. They represent about 45 percent of rounds played, and some 90 percent of the game’s growth and diversity programs.

That’s a lot of tee times today, with the prospect of many more tomorrow. But not enough to change some widely held perceptions. When some people look at golf, the only game they see is the one that Malcom Gladwell took aim at in his 2017 bombshell of a “I hate golf and here’s why you should, too,” podcast. In it, Gladwell trained his ire on private clubs in Los Angeles, decrying them as real-estate tax boondoggles that provide the super-rich with swish playgrounds at the public’s expense.

Golf makes an easy target for pundits and politicians alike, and not entirely without justification.

The irony is, when critics sling their arrows—whether through podcasts or proposed legislation—at a game that they regard as elitist, it’s rarely the gilded side of golf that takes the hit.

As golf’s defenders see it, the same dynamics that animated Gladwell’s broadside also underpin the thinking behind a bill like AB672, among other efforts that put munis in the crosshairs.

California has seen plenty of them before.

In 2007, for example, a neighborhood coalition in San Francisco mounted a campaign to turn Lincoln Park Golf Course, a muni on the shoulder of the Golden Gate, into soccer fields and an event center. Never mind that Lincoln sits on hilly land poorly suited to soccer, or that part of the course lies over an abandoned cemetery (good luck getting permission to move earth there!), the movement gained momentum. So real was the threat to Lincoln that it inspired the creation of the San Francisco Public Golf Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group that has since fought for years to stave off the closure of Sharp Park, an Alister Mackenzie-designed muni just south of San Francisco. Both Sharp and Lincoln are still alive, but so are critics who would like to see them put to other use.

In California, most assaults on munis have come from the political left, energized by the view of golf as an environmental bogeyman or an affront to equity or some combination of the two. But munis catch flak from the other flank, too. Over the years, I’ve stopped counting the number of times I’ve heard golf-course operators of conservative leaning blast munis as being anti-competitive operations that keep greens fees artificially low through government subsidy. Some have told me they aren’t sure that munis should even exist.

Overall, though, people who have golf’s best interests in mind seem to understand that now is not a time for the game to be divided against itself.

One of those people is Tom Hsieh.

Hsieh is a San Francisco native in his mid-50s who holds the lease with the city to run Gleneagles, a nine-hole muni in South San Francisco that he grew up playing. He  is also a former political consultant and one of the co-founders of the San Francisco Public Golf Alliance.

Some 15 years ago, when he helped spearhead the effort to protect Lincoln Park, Hsieh says that local golfers were poorly organized and disinclined toward activism.

“They were mostly fat and happy with the access that they had,” he says. “We had to wake people up to the fact that they had to be ready to fight or their course was going to go away.”

Where Lincoln Park was a backyard battle, AB672, Hsieh says, is something else: a “perfect storm on the state-wide level,” powered by one of California’s most pressing concerns.

“Politicians survive by putting oil on squeaky gears,” Hsieh says. “And housing is the ultimate squeaky gear. It’s a very real California issue.”

Whether AB672 is a smart way to address it is another matter. In Hsieh’s view, the bill isn’t just flawed for being blind to the large and diverse populations that munis serve; he says it also runs counter to other state legislative efforts to create more housing along transit corridors, where most golf courses aren’t, in the name of greener, more sustainable cities.

“The whole idea was supposed to be to keep people out of their cars, reducing emissions and congestion,” he says. “Taking golf courses and turning them into housing goes against these progressive ideas.”

For Hsieh and others in his camp, though, perhaps the most alarming aspect of the bill is the dangerous precedent they say it sets by singling out golf from other forms of recreation.

“What happens if we amend this bill to include parks, swimming pools, soccer fields, tennis courts?” Hsieh says. “If you’re going to go after golf, what’s next? Once that domino falls, it’s on. Anything is fair game.”

Travel

AB672 still has a way to go to make it into law, with a winding path through various committees before it could even get to the governor’s desk.

But most golfers understand the perils of complacency. You post a few good scores, reel off a few straight birdies—just when you think you’ve got a handle on the game, the fates conspire to knock you down.

What’s true on the course applies in the political arena, too.

“We can’t afford to let our guard down,” Hsieh says.

Working to golf’s advantage is the current boom. Tee sheets are packed with Covid-era converts and others who have been either newly introduced or freshly reawakened to the magic of the game. More people than ever recognize golf’s value.

Golf, Hsieh says, is also now far better organized politically than it used to be.

Since so much of politics is perception, the battle around AB672 will hinge in part on the game’s ability to present a fuller picture of itself.

That picture could include a scene I took in the past Friday morning, when I dropped by Metropolitan Golf Links, better known as Metro, a muni stretched beside the Oakland airport. I was hoping to catch up with Nate Jackson before he teed off with his roving men’s group.

Jackson is 81, and like most Black golfers of his generation, he wasn’t welcomed to the game through the front gates of a country club.

His introduction came as a boy at a muni. And munis remain central to his life even now.

For decades, Jackson and his crew have pegged it at least once a week on a rotating circuit of publicly owned courses that spans from Monterey to San Francisco and beyond. Most of the players are members of the Bay Area Golf Club, a predominantly Black organization that was founded in 1954 amid a swelling national movement to break down racial barriers in the game.

Jackson serves as president of the group’s local chapter, a post he has held for nearly 20 years. It was in that capacity, earlier this month, that he penned a letter to California lawmakers, urging them to strike down AB672.

“Of course, we know that California has a housing problem,” Jackson wrote. “But the state does not have to—and shouldn’t—purport to fix a housing problem with the misguided gesture of closing public courses.”

Doing so, he noted, “would be a slap at African American and other ethnic minority golfers and would be a death blow to programs like First Tee and Youth on Course.”

Now, on a sunny day at Metro, Jackson took a break from limbering up to speak with me by the putting green. From almost anywhere at Metro, you can see commercial aircraft in the near distance. But directly overhead is the busy flight path for a private airstrip. As Jackson and I talked, a procession of those jets roared in just above us, some surely carrying passengers who perfectly embodied the golfer of Gladwell-ian stereotype.

The scene on the ground marked a stark contrast.

“People think golf’s a rich man’s game,” Jackson said. He was leaning on his putter, glancing around at his regular partners, most of them pensioners in their 70s and 80s, preparing for a day of friendly skins at modest greens fees. 

“But that’s not the type of golf we play.”

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The post This historic Donald Ross muni could soon undergo a $12 million renovation appeared first on Golf.

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***Update: The City of Sarasota voted to approve the $12.5 million renovation at Bobby Jones Golf Club on Monday evening, also passing a measure granting conservation status over the land in perpetuity.***

Before Bobby Jones Golf Club could earn an audience with one of the most famous players in the history of the sport, the Sarasota, Fla.-based municipal course faced a slightly different issue: it needed a name.

It was 1926, and after a prolonged period of construction, the famed Donald Ross had completed his design work on the course — the latest in a string of design efforts across the Sunshine State. Ross had done a particularly noteworthy job in Sarasota, building the 6,700-yard, par-72 course on a large parcel of public property about three miles inland.

When the town’s residents eventually decided they ought to name the course they so frequently enjoyed, only one name found itself in consideration: the most famous golfer of the era, Robert Tyre “Bobby” Jones.

Travel

Jones was an adopted son of Sarasota. He was first introduced to the area in 1925, when he competed in a highly publicized 72-hole match against Walter Hagen at Whitfield, another nearby Ross course. It was still seven years before Jones would become Augusta National’s founding member, and his winter schedule was light. So Jones returned to Sarasota in the winter of ’26, playing a half-dozen more matches against the finest players of the era.

On February 13, 1927, with Jones in attendance, the people of Sarasota officially dedicated Bobby Jones Golf Club. Jones would go on to shoot 73 on Ross’ work that day, besting a group of local amateurs by two strokes.

In the near-hundred years since that grand opening, Bobby Jones Golf Club has seen a ton of golf, and precious little change. Yes, the land looks different — the surrounding area is now a nature sanctuary, open for public use well beyond golf. But up until the summer, the facilities were untouched from their mid-century development, and years of use had sagged the condition of the namesake course.

Today, the course remains closed and its facilities have been bulldozed. But there is hope for the future — hope that could come as quickly as Monday.

According to a report from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, the city of Sarasota will consider a series of measures this week that could alter the future of the club for the better.

Courses

The headliner is a proposed $12.5 million renovation to the park which, if passed, will cover the cost of expanded access to walking trails, new facilities, a new clubhouse, the construction of a nine-hole executive course, and most pressingly, a full-fledged restoration of the beloved, 18-hole Ross muni. A course development company named QGS Developments has been given the contract for the restoration, should the city’s commission give the green light. The city will also debate whether to hand over course management responsibilities to Antares Golf, LLC, operators of a host of municipal courses nationwide. And the cherry on top, for golf-lovers and Ross nerds? The city will also consider a motion urging it to give conservation status to the course, which would prevent the course from being developed or sold in perpetuity.

There’s much we won’t know until the city of Sarasota communes Monday evening to discuss the changes, but the club’s decision to bulldoze the remaining structures would seem be a favorable sign for proponents of a large-scale renovation.

For now at least, there’s reason for cautious optimism for the future of one of golf’s most historic munis. That’s good news.

As for clearing up the naming discrepancy with Bobby Jones Golf Course in Atlanta? Well, we’ll leave that for a future day.

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The post There’s a radically different story bouncing around municipal golf courses appeared first on Golf.

The post There’s a radically different story bouncing around municipal golf courses appeared first on Golf.

As courses close and frigid temps settle in, December can often seem like the most ominous golf month of the year. And icy conditions aside, nothing has been colder than golf’s evaluation in annual municipal budgets in recent years, often debated in the calendar’s final month. 

Should we sell the golf course(s)? 

How many years have the golf courses been in the red? 

Is there something better we could do with this land? 

They’re paraphrased questions but they represent a lot of what parks departments, course advisory boards and local government committees discussed in the mid- to late-2010s. Golf had receded away from its Tiger Boom over 15 years. For munis, December was always a time of existential doom.

But December 2021 isn’t that way. In December 2021, the outlook for munis suddenly feels quite good. Norwich Golf Club in Connecticut saw revenues increase 15% in 2020. The municipal governing body then set an adjusted, reasonable revenue target for 2021, and the course eclipsed that by 17%. December has become a month for announcing gains at Norwich, and they’re now looking at what can be improved by using those funds in 2022.

Last week, the company that manages White Deer Golf Course in Pennsylvania cut a check for $25,000 and delivered it to a Lycoming County Commissioners meeting. The Williamsport muni had reached a self-sustaining level of operations and were now giving back to the county. Surplus profit at a muni. What a thought!

Sherrill Park Golf Course, a muni just north of Dallas, has seen a 28% increase in rounds played over the last two years. They’re turning that into an improved drainage system and facility renovations. We haven’t worked hard to cherry-pick happy 2021 muni stories — these are just announcements we at Muni Monday HQ have seen in the last 10 days.

Municipal courses are, in many ways, the lifeblood of this game. They exist to provide for the customer rather than profit. When Marysville Golf Course in Michigan recently proposed a modest, 3% hike on its memberships, council members asked a simple question. “Is 3% enough?” Would we be better off with a bigger increase? “It’s enough to get things done,” said Mark Thompson, according to local newspaper The Voice. “We had a good year in calendar 2021. Three percent will hopefully be enough to have another good year in 2022.”

When the other local courses in Rockford, Ill. were closed in early December, Swanhills was open for play. Temps were up, players showed up. Two hundred and thirty-two of them! And thus December 2nd — a Thursday! — became Swanhills’ biggest day of the year, earning a headline in the Rockford Register Star. The late-season infusion helped make 2021 the best year the course had seen in over a decade.

We can think of the “Covid Boom” that golf has witnessed the last 20 months game as a nice boost for a sport that badly needed it. But now that it has spanned two full seasons of play, it might be time we think of it as an example of a virtuous microeconomic cycle, too. On a basic level, the more you peg it at a golf course, the more improvements that course can make on its own, thus making the golf experience better for players.

Los Alamos County Golf Course is a great example. Just over 19,000 people live in Los Alamos County, just north of Albuquerque, New Mexico. They’ve got one municipal course, and it has been starved for improvements for years. Great news: it’s getting those improvements, too! Money has been earmarked for a major overhaul of the irrigation system and a refined driving range — but the government approval process is a slow one. Those plans have been researched for years. Course operators have made three different presentations about it just this year alone.

But what’s the quickest way to get improvements approved and actually completed at a muni? “One of the things they’ll look at first is ‘Well, what have you been showing us lately as far as your numbers?’” said Mike Lippiatt, course manager at LACGC. “‘What’s your revenue look like? What are your rounds? What’s your user count? Things like that.

Travel

“When we see the type of increases that we realized this past year, we are in a whole lot better position to receive things on your wish list.” Sounds simple and straightforward, business-wise. If your rounds are down and your numbers aren’t positive, well, you’ve likely seen that story play out on your own local muni over the past decade. The wish list grows and is never prioritized.

LACGC runs on a fiscal year of July-June, which meant Lippiatt’s most recent ‘numbers’ did not include the Covid shutdown the entire country of golf courses experienced between March 2020 and May. In other words, this past fiscal year at LACGC was all gravy, baby! And it led to Lippiatt successfully campaigning for three tiny, but vital changes: an automated range ball dispenser, a handicap-compliant golf cart and an update to its fiber optic infrastructure for the maintenance staff. The latter of the bunch replaced an outdated system and will help them care for the course conditions more efficiently. 

These sort of improvements might not stand out. They won’t headline the course’s website. They might not impact the rounds of many visitors. But they’ve made LACGC a better, more efficient place. And they’ve come directly as the result of increased play the last 20 months. The players of Los Alamos County Golf Course will rightfully reap the benefits of the money they invested at this government-owned recreation facility. When the course opens back up in 2022, the cycle continues. 

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