Home > Backspin
Pat Green to christen TSD golf program today
Austin singer-songwriter Pat Green is on deck to dedicate the Texas School for the Deaf’s new golf program at noon today.
Green will be joined at the Rangers’ new practice green by his friend Tom Kelly and the Austin Sertoma Club. The green is on the west side of the campus at 1102 S. Congress Ave.
Green and Kelly furnished the school with Nike golf equipment, according to a new release from the TSD. The school, which first offered golf as a physical education class in the fall, will field a golf team this year.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
Sign of the times: a recession blog is born at Golf Digest
While we’re wondering what’s going on over at ColoVista, a couple of editors at GolfDigest.com have created a blog about golf-related finance and real estate.
Peter Finch of Golf Digest magazine and Geoff Russell of Golf World debut nicely in Deeds & Weeds, a collection of woeful stories from the properties industry. The news cited therein is neither optimistic nor hopeful — unless you have a secret stash of capital and desire a once-in-a-lifetime deal on (choose any or all) lots, houses, clubs or resorts now or soon to be wilting on the For Sale vine.
Just don’t plan a flip any time soon.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
ColoVista: ‘It has become financially necessary to close’
In a letter to members and residents of the golf-course community in Bastrop, the vice president of the company trying to sell the property writes that ColoVista Country Club closed Tuesday, with no immediate plans to reopen.
“After years of working with consultants, seeking potential buyers and providing extraordinary financial support to this wonderful, yet costly, operation, it has become financially necessary to close,” wrote Julie Tysor of Colliers International. Portions of the letter were cited in this week’s editions of The Smithville Times.
The Times quotes Tysor as saying the club remains for sale. And it “will honor currently scheduled events at the clubhouse mansion.”
“We would also consider selling it separately from the golf course, as a private residence or private conference facility, since many developers have indicated a desire to build a new clubhouse that would better complement the amenities,” Tysor wrote in the letter to members and residents, according to the Times.
Could the only thing worse than the golf-course market right now be the high-end real-estate market in Bastrop?
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
Closing time at ColoVista?
Residents of the ColoVista development in Bastrop reportedly woke today to notices on their doors announcing the golf course is closed. Phone calls to the pro shop and administration offices went unanswered this afternoon, although the Web site bears no indication of trouble.
The club has been on the market for some time. But we all know what the market is like nowadays.
Has Central Texas lost a golf course?
I’ve got a compromise. Go ahead and close the front nine — but keep the back.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
Texas Historical Commission approves marker for Lions
Ken Tiemann, one of the individuals involved in researching the role of Lions Municipal Golf Course in the desegregation of golf in the South, forwarded an email today from the Texas Historical Commission, which has approved a marker for the embattled West Austin course. Lions joins some 13,000 other sites in Texas to earn a historical marker.
Tiemann and Bob Ozer, who also helped to uncover the evidence suggesting Lions was the first municipal course in the South to allow African-Americans unrestricted access to the course, now plan to pursue a similar designation from the National Register of Historic Places.
Their efforts could further complicate the future of the 151-acre part of the Brackenridge Tract that Lions occupies. The University of Texas System Board of Regents, which owns the land and leases the Lions property to the city until its contract expires in 2019, is awaiting the results of a master-planning firm’s work, which could (likely will) sketch out the future uses of the tract. Those are due in June.
Meanwhile, the Austin City Council met in executive session recently to again discuss Lions, specifically the possibility of acquiring it. The council already voted earlier this month to support the Travis County Historical Commission’s effort to have the state marker placed at Lions.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment
Irish 19-year-old McIlory plans to play Shell
Steve Campbell of the Houston Chronicle reports today that Rory McIlroy, the long-haired lad from Northern Ireland who just won the Dubai Desert Classic at the wee age of a mere 19 summers, intends to play the Shell Houston Open, which begins April 2.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment
Tournament season opens March 7-8 with Horseshoe Bay Invitational
The second annual Horseshoe Bay Resort Invitational is scheduled for March 7 and 8 at Ram Rock and Apple Rock.
Two divisions — open and senior — are planned for the stroke-play event, the first in the series of tournaments that award points through austinamateurgolf.com. Dean Lundquist won the open division last year by a stroke, with rounds of 77-83—160. (The weather on the first day at Apple Rock was delightful. The weather on the second day at Ram was not.)
The entry fee is $185 ($125 for Horseshoe Bay members). It includes the tournament rounds, cart fees, lunch both days, a shirt and hat, and a prize fund.
To request in an invitation, contact Jesse Horner by email at jhorner@hsbresort.com or by telephone at 830-598-6561.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
Tour sues Ginn over cancelled sponsorship
The PGA Tour filed suit last week in Florida against Ginn Sports Entertainment and Ginn Development, which abruptly ended its sponsorship of the Champions Tour’s Ginn Championship at Hammock Beach Resort, among other tournaments.
From Gary Smits in Jacksonville:
Tour executive vice-president of communications Ty Votaw pointed out Wednesday that the Tour was working with Ginn to modify the sponsorship agreement, and was taken by surprise when Ginn canceled its sponsorships through an e-mailed news release.
The tour news archives include this link to an Associated Press story that indicated Ginn had three years remaining in its contract with the Champions Tour.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
James Nitties, the Hooters Tour and golf’s endearing calculus of possibility
Let’s say it’s late July 2008. The Hooters Tour, tournament golf’s version of Double-A baseball, is in town to play at Onion Creek. You go out late for the third round on Saturday, catch a group turning at No. 10 and decide to watch a wide-shouldered lad with a curious name who looks like he could bend nails.
James Nitties? He later places 29th in the Onion Creek Classic as nearly no one watches. He shoots 8-under-par rounds of 69-69-68-66 — golf that shows flashes of genius but pales next to Dawie Van der Walt’s composite 17-under-par score that wins. Nitties is nowhere in sight when Van Der Walt poses for pictures with the Hooters girls. He has arrived, competed and departed in anonymity. It’s the blessing and the curse of playing on the Hooters Tour. Nitties has won $1,609 in Austin, which might or might not cover expenses.
Now let’s say it’s Sunday.
The Super Bowl has the attention of many, but in Scottsdale, Ariz., Nitties finishes the FBR Open with a final-round 68. His 65-69-70-68—272 earns him a tie for fourth place with former PGA Championship winner David Toms. Each makes $264,000. It’s another fortune for Toms; for Nitties, it’s his first.
Golf Magazine senior writer Cameron Morfit wrote a few words about young Nitties and his equally young career in golf. They took me back to summertime, when I watched Nitties play the 10th and 11th at Onion Creek before turning back to await the leaders.
You ask those players on the mini-tours, and every one of them says he’ll get out on the big tour. Every one.
And some do.
Stephen Dunn/Getty
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment
Four sleeves of fabulous frivolity about the TPC Scottsdale
In honor of the conclusion of the first round of the FBR Open in Scottsdale, Ariz., I present you with a dozen disjointed and completely inconsequential observations from my early-January round at the TPC Scottsdale Stadium Course. I hope you find at least half of them worth reading and one worth remembering for an hour or so.
The pro shop is one of the finest I’ve ever been in. Items for sale included bags, shoes, prints, headcovers, coasters, sets of highball glasses, astronomically priced Argyle sweaters, moneyclips, rain gear, umbrellas and socks, all uniformly logoed. Golf World always includes TPC Scottsdale in its rankings of the top 100 shops in America. It’s in the Public Course category.
That’s correct. TPC Scottsdale is a public course, albeit one with a green fee that could buy you a decent suit. You get a metal bag tag and a yardage book when you play it. It’s on a busy street near what looked like a community college, and it’s bordered on one long side by an enormous berm that hides rows of banks, restaurants and smoke-windowed offices. That berm and the stadium mounding consistent with the tour-affiliated TPC courses give you the sensation that you’re out in the middle of the desert, when in fact you’re in the middle of a suburb of Phoenix.
The driving range is a long way from everything, especially the first tee. It’s sort of down a hill and in the middle of the course, between the ninth green and 10th tee. The range itself is unremarkable. The chipping green is convenient but pedestrian. The back end of the range is where the many PGA Tour players who live in Phoenix go to practice before the FBR; we saw Jeff Quinney and Kirk Triplett down there as we turned. The practice-putting green is big, wide, gently contoured and pickled with holes everywhere you look.
The opening hole is a short par 4 that plays up a little hill. I hit hybrid off the tee and 7-iron into the green. There is a band of desert short of the green to discourage big hitters from trying to drive the green.
John Daly once drove the band of desert — and the green. He probably made par, but bogey isn’t inconceivable.
We had a forecaddie, who told us the story about Daly’s driving the green. A forecaddie was a blessing when we played on Jan. 5. The fairways were hemmed for the FBR, and the rough was 7 inches high in places. My companion that day, American-Statesman sports editor John Bridges, labored from the long rough a few times early in his round. I did not envy him.
The par-5 13th hole has a split fairway, with a big patch of desert and scrub marooned in the middle. Off to the left and on the far side of the cart path sits the enormous rock behind which, in 1999, Tiger Woods found his tee shot. He had a bunch of burly guys from the gallery help him move the rock, which the rules official deemed a loose impediment, granting Woods free relief. A plaque is now affixed to the rock, commemorating the day a charging Woods employed the spectators to nudge the boulder out of the way so he could sling his second shot into a greenside bunker and make birdie, only to lose to Rocco Mediate anyway. I had my picture taken next to the rock. It’s the one you see at the top of this blog.
The drama really builds on the par-5 15th. That’s the shortish hole with the island green. A good drive leaves you with a hybrid or long iron into the green, which is banked sharply from back to front so it can accept a lower ball. But it’s not really the risk/reward quality of the hole that makes it so thrilling.
What makes the 15th so interesting is what’s right next to it. After finishing the hole, we walked the footbridge and through a door-sized opening in the seamless ribbon of bleacher seating erected for the FBR. The opening leads to the tees of the par-3 16th, perhaps the loudest hole in creation. “The most animated hole in golf,” says Golf Channel broadcaster Brandel Chamblee. “You have to collect yourself to hit that shot,” Paul Azinger says. “One of the greatest experiences on the PGA Tour.”
No. 16 is short, flat and without peril. No water. No trees. Just five bunkers and the tees, which are pools of bright green grass separated by desert, cacti and beautiful Western landscaping. The green is large and not terrifying. But the bleachers accommodate about 35,000 people, which I reckon makes it feel like playing golf in a baseball stadium. During the tournament, players endure 35,000 jeers and hisses if they miss the green. On the day we played, I informed John and our forecaddie that I intended to play tee shots until I hit the green. I looked to see how balls I had. I had six.
I nailed the green on my first swing. It was an 8-iron to about seven feet. I missed the putt. I will tell that story forever. If you play with me, I promise you will hear it.
The 17th is a wee par-4 with water down the left and bunkers sprinkled along the right. Many tour players try to drive it, some succeed and Andrew Magee once made a double-eagle ace there. John birdied it with a handsome wedge shot that checked about nine feet under the hole. It was our only birdie of the morning. We then lashed tee shots down the fairway on the cape-ish 18th, missing the water we had to carry and all the bunkers left and right. At our request, the forecaddie took the cart, and John and I strolled to our balls, pretending to absorb adoring roars from thousands of Arizonans who, in a matter of three weeks, actually would be sitting in those empty green bleachers on the flank. When he met us in the fairway, the forecaddie reminded us to look for the marker set in the ground beyond the only fairway bunker on the left. John and I hit our approaches and walked. And walked. And walked. And we walked some more. We finally found the marker. It noted that 2008 FBR champion J.B. Holmes drove his ball to that very spot on the first and only hole of the playoff against Phil Mickelson. The marker said we were 357 yards from the back tee on the far side of the gaping lake in between. We stared at the tee from where we stood. You had to squint to see it. They say playing a TPC course can make you feel like a tour player. In reality, it merely reminds you why you’re not.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment
Austin oranges and San Francisco apples
In a situation that echoes the Save Muny campaign to keep Lions Municipal Golf Course in Tarrytown, two city-owned golf courses in San Francisco — Lincoln Park and the Alister McKenzie-designed Sharp Park — face a gloomy future as the recession deepens and fewer people play golf. The situations are very different (apples to oranges or, as it were, salamanders to snakes or frogs) but strikingly similar at the core.
Thomas Bonk, the new writer at large for Golf Digest Digital, explores the opposing forces in the debate over what to do with the two old golf courses. At issue is usage, which has nothing to do with the efforts to protect Lions from modern development on the UT System-owned Brackenridge Tract. Lions gets plenty of play. But the valuable land that it occupies could be a lot more profitable to the system as, say, a residential, retail or resort development.
Real-estate potential is one of the issues motivating the city of San Francisco to evaluate Lincoln Park. At dilapidated Sharp Park, the question is whether to spend millions to improve the course or “turn the place into a tidal swamp to protect local species of garter snake and red-legged frog.”
Echoes of Austin there, too.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
Ginn bails on Champions Tour, LPGA
The title sponsor of three professional golf tournaments, including a Champions Tour event scheduled for late March, abruptly pulled out of its commitments today, surprising even veteran tour staffers in Ponte Vedra. Ginn Sports Entertainment, which sponsors the Ginn Championship at Hammock Beach Resort on the senior circuit, blamed the recession:
Ginn Sports Entertainment, LLC and Ginn Development Company, LLC jointly announced today that they have made the decision to end their active participation in professional golf. Effective immediately, these Ginn companies are withdrawing their sponsorship of the Ginn Championship at Hammock Beach, the Ginn Open at Reunion and the Ginn sur Mer Classic at the Conservatory, will not be hosting or producing any of these professional golf tournaments (including 2009 tournaments), and will no longer be sponsoring professional golfers.
Ginn Development Company is in the real estate resort and community development business - a sector of the economy that has suffered significantly during the credit and real estate meltdown.
Last Friday, real estate sales and marketing operations for Ginn communities were terminated due to the loss of revenue in these businesses. The revenue that was generated from these operations had been used to fund the professional golf tournaments and sponsorships, including paying for the prize money and television coverage for these events.
“We have worked diligently with many others for several months to find solutions to our predicament with respect to these professional golf tournaments,” said Robert Gidel, president and CEO of Ginn Development Company. “We did the best we could, but the economy got the best of us with respect to the tournaments.”
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment
Three Texas courses land in Golf World’s “100 Best Golf Shops”
Golf World released its latest rankings of golf shops in four categories: Off-Course, Private, Public and Resort.
The PGA Tour Shop at DFW Airport made the list in the Off-Course category, but only three courses in Texas earned a spot in the rest of the rankings:
Redstone Golf Club, Humble
Westin La Cantera Resort Course, San Antonio
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment
John Updike: 1932-2009
The novelist, essayist, lyricist who gave us Golf Dreams and longtime contributor to Golf Digest died Tuesday near his home in Massachusetts. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times begins Updike’s obituary with a paragraph that almost could stand alone as a testament to Updike’s considerable influence in the literary world:
Endowed with an art student’s pictorial imagination, a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor, John Updike — who died on Tuesday at 76 — was arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters. He moved fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel: a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
A half-eaten pear in the bunker? Allow me to consult my iPhone
A friend of mine (thanks, Edward) sent me this link today while I was laid up in the bed with the flu or some similar affliction. While I support — in principle and spirit and absolutely to the letter — any effort to properly apply the Rules of Golf, the notion of having golf rules on an iPhone seems to me a little like paving both sides of each hole for carts on a walkable course. There are quite enough electronic devices on the golf course as it is. Why encourage more?
The UK site GolfBlogger has a little more about iGolfrules. The technology looks clean, sensible and easy to navigate, even for a Luddite such as myself. Disclaimer: I carry a mobile phone on the golf course. But only because I have two young children at home and a wife who needs to know that she can reach me if she must. I keep the phone on vibrate, hidden in a bag pouch. Places such as Austin Golf Club prohibit cell phones for a reason.
Because they don’t really belong on a golf course.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment
‘The curious case of David Gossett’
Found this long and interesting story today about Austin resident David Gossett, the former University of Texas star and U.S. Amateur champion. I worked in Memphis when Gossett shot an opening-round 66 — as a high-school senior — at the Stanford St. Jude Championship at his home course, TPC Southwind. I thought he was the next Nicklaus. He left Texas early, shot a 59 in Q-School and won the John Deere Classic in 2001. He was the next Nicklaus. But then he vanished, and he wasn’t.
He’s resurfaced in mini tours and Nationwide Monday qualifiers. Approaching 30, he sounds optimistic:
“I’ve got a clear picture now of what I have to do to play good golf again,” Gossett said. “My blueprint, if you will, has become more clear. It’s been cloudy these last few years.”
The story by Dave Seanor also explores the context for Gossett’s rapid disappearance from elite competitive golf, reasons that have to do with leaving longtime Memphis swing coach Rob Akins in favor of David Leadbetter:
“When I worked with him it was all instruction, it was all swing mechanics. It’s fine to work on mechanics, but when you have to go out there and race the car on the track, and all you’ve been doing is playing with the engine and messing around with the engine, you forget how to drive the car.”
Interesting note there at the end, if you read it the right way. I watched Gossett play a practice round last year at the Hooters Tour stop at Onion Creek. He fairly breezed through the course with a level of shotmaking that could produce something in the low 60s, if he were keeping score. In the tournament, Gossett shot 74-66 and missed the cut.
No doubt Gossett remembers how to drive the car. He just needs to remember how to drive it every time he turns the key.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment
You can’t birdie them all if you don’t birdie the first
Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite have birdied their first holes of the 2009 season at the Mitsubishi Electric Championship at Hualalai, where in the early going Kite is minus 3 — three shots behind Hale Irwin (who also birdied his first hole of the year) and R.W. Eaks (who did not, but he birdied his second). Crenshaw is minus 1. While I accept that this does not qualify as news, I remind you that we do do trivia around here. We can even call them fun facts, if you wish.
I found a fun picture of the course. Boy, that looks fun. I bet Kite and Crenshaw are having fun out there in the sun.
Have a fun weekend yourselves. Hope it includes golf — and birdies on the first.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
How far to fly that sand?
Video from the Dallas Morning News Web site and WFAA: A small plane draws a tough lie in a Plano golf course bunker.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment
Truer words I’ve never read
Every now and again a small batch of words deserves wide and enthusiastic distribution. This, I really think, should be printed and tacked to walls wherever golf is discussed.
It’s a simple poem engraved in a granite boulder tombstone in the Vermont town of Stowe. The man buried there, trick-shot artist Joe Kirkwood, died in 1970. But stories about him still crackle with life.
So does his timeless epitaph:
Tell your story of hard luck shots,
Of each shot straight and true,
But when you are done remember son,
That nobody cares but you.
I’m not sure anyone associates my golf blog with consistent and sound wisdom. But admit it: occasionally you get a jewel.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment
Follow The Roar? Yes, by all means do
Last night I finished my first golf book of 2009. I’ll tear through about a dozen of the genre a year, concluding that most of them are average, a few are good and one or two approach excellence. I’m of the opinion that any golf book — fiction, non-fiction, biography, travel and instruction — is worth an earnest look. I rarely read one and think it was a waste of time. But I’m a junkie. My standards are different. That is, when it comes to golf books, they are easily met but rarely exceeded.
Follow The Roar: Tailing Tiger for all 604 Holes of His Most Spectacular Season (HarperCollins, $25.95 hardback, 278 pages) — excerpt here — is like golf non-fiction’s answer to guilty and leisurely summer beach reading. It is probably not what you would call an important book, whatever that means. But it does illuminate an experience many golf fans will find appealing: Bob Smiley, a self-deprecating and out-of-work television writer with a well-trained eye for detail, undertakes the exercise of witnessing the 2008 golf season from the vantage point of the unruly mass that is the gallery following Tiger Woods. Smiley has no special (i.e. credentialed) access to Woods. In most cases, he has to buy a ticket to each tournament. He has to find a hotel, meals, a place to park. He does not get to know Woods personally. He does not interview Woods. He does not endeavor to seek Woods’ insights or thoughts or epiphanies. Smiley does what most of us do. He just watches, marvels and tries to keep up.
That’s the pure, unadorned fun of the book. Smiley personifies and gives voice to the countless golf fans who see Woods in person only when Woods is playing high-profile tournament golf. And his chronicle is not so much about the short, dramatic and shortened-by-injury season that ended with that spectacular U.S. Open playoff at Torrey Pines; it’s about the journey that makes good narrative non-fiction work. It’s part travel, part memoir, part documentary, part humor and all as real as it could be. Smiley sees a season of golf through the everyman lens, and it works on every level.
On to the next assignments: James Dodson’s A Son of the Game and Tom Coyne’s A Course Called Ireland. I’ll report back when I’m done.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment
Triton Financial Classic has Heisman hopes for 2009
Details about the new Triton Financial Classic are beginning to spread like fine cedar pollen.
The Champions Tour tournament, scheduled for June 5 through 7 at The Hills Country Club, will feature a Thursday pro-am that includes a bunch of former Heisman Trophy winners. And some of those ex-football players will compete in a two-day tournament on Friday and Saturday within the 54-hole championship, according to a source close to the event.
Imagine.
“Now on the tee: three men who need no introduction to the city of Austin … three former University of Texas Longhorns … Austin resident, 1992 U.S. Open champion, former Walker Cupper and steadfast Longhorn fanatic Tom Kite … three-time all-Southwest Conference selection Phil Blackmar … and Austin native, two-time Masters champion, winner of three consecutive NCAA championships under legendary coach George Hannon and captain of the unforgettable 1999 Ryder Cup squad Ben Crenshaw!”
“Next to play: Jason White, Sam Bradford and Reggie Bush.”
Perhaps, if they’re not busy, Colt McCoy could caddie for Bradford and Vince Young could loop for Bush.
Latest comments
Good.
Life is about more than money.
UT was given 18 million this week.
The crooks at the ‘investment’ portion of UT lost money and yet the main man got a 7 figure bonus.
Leave Lions alone, UT, or leave, period.
... read the full comment by digsouth | Comment on Texas Historical Commission approves marker for Lions Read Texas Historical Commission approves marker for Lions
I think this guy is a winner….this year!
... read the full comment by digsouth | Comment on James Nitties, the Hooters Tour and golf's endearing calculus of possibility Read James Nitties, the Hooters Tour and golf's endearing calculus of possibility
This kid has immense game; his swing is as long and fluid as any I’ve ever seen for someone of his stature. I saw him hit a modest 3 wood 320 on the 9th hole Sunday in Dubai (290 carry). It’ll be fascinating to see how he performs on American
... read the full comment by Will Sharpe | Comment on Irish 19-year-old McIlory plans to play Shell Read Irish 19-year-old McIlory plans to play Shell
You’d think a guy with the last name “Nitties” could easily work out a sponsorship deal with Hooters……. It just makes sense!
... read the full comment by hmmmmm | Comment on James Nitties, the Hooters Tour and golf's endearing calculus of possibility Read James Nitties, the Hooters Tour and golf's endearing calculus of possibility
See more recent comments