If you haven’t read Part 1 of this piece, the following might not make a lot of sense to you. The first criterion on which I will use to judge a golf course are the aesthetics. It’s pretty simple: if a course has mountains, marsh lands, oceans, or some other spectacle of nature, the pirates will be a plenty; trailer parks, landfills, or sites reminiscent of Tennesse’s Neylan stadium (the previous three are redundant, perhaps) are likely to give a course only one jolly buccaneer. The second thing I typically look for is shot quality. Overall, the course needs to ...

When I first began playing a lot of golf my freshman year of college I was always eager to play a new course, especially one that had received a high rating in one of the premier golf publications. I took every chance I had to play these “great courses", and I would always rave about the experience when I returned. The only problem was that I didn’t really have my own opinion of what I considered to be great qualities in a golf course, so I was usually basing my opinion on the fact that I didn’t believe a “four-star” ...

It is impossible to watch coverage of The Players Championship without being drowned by discussion of the infamous 17th hole: we see what every player does on the hole; we hear about the hole even when the cameras are elsewhere; and I’d bet one of my fingers that once the leaders make the turn on Sunday, a great deal of the coverage will be focused on the looming 17th. Sure, the hole is fun to watch, but enough is enough. In terms of design, that hole isn’t even one of the top ten holes at the Stadium Course. In fact, ...

I had a day of golf on Saturday that reminded me again why I love the game so much. We were in Norfolk, Virginia for a wedding, and the father of the bride set up a scramble on Saturday morning at Sewells Point Golf Club. The leading group went off at 7:00 am, and the temperature was better suited for skiing than for golf. The first ball in my group was in the air at about 7:10, roughly 3 minutes after the first beer had been opened. Out of the twenty-two men participating in the scramble, we had some good ...

The money spent on golf advertising today is at an all-time high, and it is not going down anytime in the foreseeable future. What I often wonder is how the executives at certain companies can decide that some of these advertising campaigns are actually a good idea. Who decided to market the Bridgestone golf balls, which are geared toward the low-handicap player at $36 per dozen, with the slogan “Boom-It” in front of a background that looks like one of those 1970’s barber shop polls? I saw another ad in Golf Digest this morning that made me think I should ...

I have recently come to the conclusion that course rankings are basically useless, because the factor that carries the most weight is without a doubt the architect’s last name. Give Golf Digest or Golf Magazine a new course designed by Dye, Fazio, or Nicklaus, and they foam at the mouth. The course is decorated with more stars than the American flag, and the greens fees shoot through the roof. However, many of these courses don’t live up to their reputation, and you feel that the guy behind the counter in the shop should have been wearing a stocking over his ...