http://tgpnolan.com Quality Golf Articles by Professional Journalists Sun, 01 May 2011 21:15:44 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Come Masters weekend, golf’s rank and file fans will be joined by millions of drop-bys.  They will look for a spare chair in the living room and ask who’s winning, what an eagle is, why anyone would wear that ridiculous get-up.  But most simply absorb the beauty of the golf course, and as they do, they fall silent and grow attentive.  A very few of them have little stories they can tell. Among the kibbitzers is ... ]]> http://tgpnolan.com/golf/about-the-gameessays/460/no-such-person-as-bobby-jones/ Waiting for the ferry I watch Strangford Lough tighten and boil whitely through a last narrow chute.  Somewhere beyond a horizon made brief by sullen clouds, it spills into the Irish Sea.  Beyond the crossing sits the Portaferry quay and behind it a steep hill.  It is a sunless Monday morning in October.  Bored commuters ignore the scent of salt water and the screaming gulls.  When they hear the bass rumble of the ferryboat’s diesel ... ]]> http://tgpnolan.com/golf/golf/courses-and-travel/424/of-needles-and-haystacks/ Snowing.  Again.  We live in our zip codes and take what we get. Up here on the mountain, winter is emphatic in cleaving golf into separate seasons: one forever gone, one way too far in the future.  There is last year, and next year.  Between them is now. If we didn’t strain for signs of the fresh season’s start within weeks of the old season's end, we’d be reasonable people, and golfers are not reasonable people.  So ... ]]> http://tgpnolan.com/golf/golf/equipment/414/looking-for-signs/ Only a bigamist has as much to celebrate in 2011 as do I. This year I mark not one, but two, silver anniversaries.  My golf clubs and my pickup both hit 25.  It’s a time to pause and reflect. The pickup is a 1986 Chevrolet C10, the line’s entry model.  It was cherry red when I bought it, but it’s not anymore.  Too much sun.  Now it’s about the color of an M&M your kid lost behind ... ]]> http://tgpnolan.com/golf/golf/equipment/401/coming-up-silver/ What we’re going to see come October 1 is a golf-rich country hosting a riveting championship on a generally lousy golf course redeemed by a most clever finish. There is nothing of Welsh-flavored golf at The 2010 Course, a glorified patch job engineered for the Ryder Cup.  Fourteen holes of dead-flat slogging through the rather aptly named Valley of Usk lead to some thumping good stuff: a four-hole finish that includes a drivable par-4 and concludes ... ]]> http://tgpnolan.com/golf/partner/kalos/369/wales-is-a-ryder-cup-lock/ The first and second at The Sand Hills Club On America’s High Plains, towns announce themselves as clusters of silvery skyscrapers rising above the flatness, and only with diminishing distance do the great towers resolve themselves into grain elevators.  After awhile I knew that the towns were much alike.  Along with the elevators would be a railroad grade crossing, a convenience store for gas and Coke, the remains of what once was the center of town, ... ]]> http://tgpnolan.com/golf/golf/330/high-plains-drifting-golf-included/ We worked our way up Ireland’s eastern coastline from Dublin toward Belfast with one of the world’s big boys, Royal County Down, on the agenda.  After a tough driving day; wet, slick, and breezy, we’d made Newcastle, about 30 miles south of Belfast, and taken rooms at the Slieve Donard, a massive old dowager overlooking Dundrum Bay.  Close to the golf course, too.  A two-minute stroll along a path framed by tall privet hedges to ... ]]> http://tgpnolan.com/golf/golf/312/royal-county-down-irish-golfs-dark-star/ I have a file — loosely speaking -- labeled “Golf Stuff.”  It’s an old, out-at-the-elbows shoebox, struggling to hold a warren of magazine clips, logo balls, tees, and ball markers.  Most particularly, though, it’s my scorecard library, wealthy with the short stories I write to myself in a hieroglyphics of numerals, dots, checks and circles. These cards are the few culled from the many.  Some I save simply because they name the most luminous stars in ... ]]> http://tgpnolan.com/golf/about-the-gameessays/30/keeping-score/ How formidable a challenge is the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, South Carolina?  Mike Vegis, the resort’s public relations director, and my host, puts it succinctly: “Yikes.” There are golf courses, and then there are great golf courses, the outsized affairs that provoke our awe.  The Ocean Course is like that: unendingly beautiful to look at, impeccably handled in design and execution, and impossible to play.  Feel the love?  Nope. That’s me and Pete Dye, when it ... ]]> http://tgpnolan.com/golf/golf/224/surfs-up-scores-are-too-at-kiawahs-ocean-course/ The links at Aberdovey, Wales, as you see, are not a difficult place to get up an afternoon's worth of links golf you won't forget, and if you're lucky, a few good stories into the bargain. As fine as Aberdovey the course is, its great legacy to golf in Great Britain is one of its members: Bernard Darwin, who narrated golf's stories better than anyone of his era and set standards for the entire sportswriting genre ... ]]> http://tgpnolan.com/golf/golf/105/aberdovey-and-bernard-darwin/