GolfStinks

A Golf Blog for the Rest of Us!

Chip Shots: Real Ultimate Golf?

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Remember that board game “Ultimate Golf”? It combined 18 of the most famous holes in the world to make one course. Well, what if that course really existed? I would love to play a course where number 1 looked like the first hole at Royal St. Georges; the fifth like #5 at Cypress Point; and the 16th was exactly like the 16th at Oakland Hills!

It would be totally cool to play exact replicas of these great holes all in one course! Now I understand that sea-side and desert holes may be tricky, depending on where this “Ultimate Course” is built, but even without those types of holes, this course would be legendary!

Some golf course tycoon should get on this idea – it could rake in the cash!

What is Golf Art?

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My post last week about that golf bag telephone really got me thinking about why these golf nicknacks are created in the first place. And then it occurred to me that these things are, technically speaking anyhow, a form of art.

A telephone in the shape of a golf bag is art you say?

My wife has a BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts). She’s always said; “if the person who created it calls it art, then it’s art.” It doesn’t matter if it’s just a canvas splattered with paint shot out of a cannon at 500 paces – if the guy lighting the canon fuse calls it art, then we’re perfectly justified in hanging it on our wall.

So let’s get back to my golf bag telephone for a second. Pat from New York (who emailed me to win said phone last week) considers it art, even though I didn’t. He plans on displaying it in his house with pride. And for Pat, it’s not just static art, but it’s functional art too (after all, it’s a phone to boot). Pour yourself a glass of wine, pull up a chair and admire it, Pat!

But let’s face it, when we think about golf, we think about things like the tours, or courses, or clubs & balls. When we think about the golf industry, apparel and equipment retailers come to mind. But we forget that this multi-billion dollar industry includes a place for art too. And I’m not just talking about the golf bag telephone anymore.

Take a look at the images below:


That, my friends, is golf art. I spied those at a touristy-type store in the historic district of Albuquerque. Both are created using golf things (parts of a club, a ball, tees – even the crown on the bird’s head in the top photo is pieces of a soft spike)! It takes a certain breed to put those kinds of tchotchkes in your home, and I’m not among them. But you can’t deny, it’s art.

Of course, art also includes paintings and there is no shortage of golf paintings out there – observe the two distinctly different ones below:

My eye was drawn to painting on top, while my wife (the artist) chose the one on the bottom as being attractive.

And what about the subject in the aforementioned paintings – the courses. Are they not art in and of themselves? Walking down a quiet fairway on a perfect day – as far as I’m concerned, when you’re on the golf course, you’re surrounded in amazing art. The way the green distinguishes itself from the fairway and rough; the gorgeous vista from the tee; a ball that softly landed a foot from the cup – to me, this is all art – and I’m sure the course designer considered it as much. Heck, one could argue that the new forged wedge in my bag is a work of art! (OK, maybe I’m getting a little carried away).

But let’s try to answer my original question: What is golf art? Perhaps an appropriate way to answer that would be to rearrange the question into a statement…

Golf is art.

Golf Stinks, but this is Ridiculous…

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Apparently the state of Illinois has a skunk problem. So much so, The Wall Street Journal decided to publish an article about it yesterday (on page A7 no less – must have been a slow news day).

What piqued my interest though was the sub-headline that this plethora of pee-yew is also affecting local golf courses. It seems “the skunks tear up the courses while digging for grubs.”

The publication interviewed one animal control professional who was hired by the courses to remove the critters. This guy proudly claimed to have taken out (e.g. shot dead) nearly 30 skunks on two courses (apparently this is totally legal in Illinois).

Can you picture this guy maneuvering covertly around the course a la Carl Spackler? According to the article, he would stalk his prey on the course and once he spotted his target, he would hop “out of a small SUV and shoot them with a .22-caliber rifle.”

Geesh! What’s next? Dropping C-4 explosives into their burrows and taking cover? You know, not for nothing, but I don’t see anyone out there blasting away at the Canadian Geese that are on the course – I mean, there’s way more of them roaming around and for goodness sake, they’re actually shitting all over the fairways and greens!

Alright, so maybe we can’t just go around knocking-off gaggles of geese. But I’ll tell you one golf course pest we should be looking into…Does anyone know what a Cicada Killer is?

OK, maybe you’ve heard of Cicadas – those large bugs that leave their shell behind on trees and make that annoying noise on summer evenings? Well, there’s a type of wasp that specifically hunts them, and it’s called a Cicada Killer.

These things are freaky – they look like gigantic bees (probably 1.5 to 2.5 inches in length). Anyway, these guys burrow in holes in the ground, and golf courses are a favorite haunt of theirs – especially in the sand traps and on the greens. I’ve personally seen them on a few local courses up here in Connecticut and while it’s rare they sting humans, they’re still scary as hell in person. Check out this video of Cicada Killers on a golf course.

But let’s get back to the skunk issue in Illinois for a moment. It seems our malodorous mammal friends are not just invading the Prairie State. Earlier this year, they also infested a neighborhood and golf course in Tennessee. To make matters worse, the golf course (Fox Den County Club) was getting ready to host a Nationwide Tour event: “‘The last thing we really need out here is a skunk problem,’ said course superintendent Scott Severance.”

Well Scott, I guess you could convince the owners to change the course name to Skunk Den Country Club (ba-dum-DUM). Seriously though – you golfers be careful out there…

Are all Golf Courses Basically the Same?

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To all you non-golfers; It may appear on TV that all golf courses are the same. And, believe it or not, I once thought that too…at least for a period of time.

As some of you may know, I’ve played many, many different golf courses in my 20+ years on the links (including my quest to play all the public 18-holers in my state). But after you play so many, they tend to mesh together in your mind like a hodgepodge of flag sticks, sand traps, ponds and grass.

When you’re new to the game of golf, typically you frequent one course that you feel comfortable on. And that level of comfort pretty much keeps you loyal until the day a golfing buddy invites you to play somewhere else. Going to that “new” course can be exciting and it will seem like everything is different – the scenery, the layout, all of it.

And in reality, it was all different. But then you play a another course and another and before you know it, they all start to look similar. Well, after playing at all these different places, I developed a problem:

If a person mentioned a particular course to me, I would quickly tell them, “Oh, I’ve played there and it was decent.” When they’d follow-up with, “What did you like about it?” I would hesitate. I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember any details of said course! I would try to remember – I’d think of a particular par 3 with a pond and 30 par 3’s with ponds rushed into my mind.

So what did I do? Were all those courses I experienced – that I spent my hard-earned money on – lost somewhere in that vast (and mostly empty) noggin of mine? I prayed not. The solution? I began writing reviews for each course – complete with my own rating system – which seemed to jog the old memory!

Much of that system is still intact and can be found on golfstinks.com – except now I’ve gotten your input too. If you took the survey (see the results HERE), you had a say in how the rating system should work. I know there are more of you out there – golfers that love playing at different courses. Well, you’ll never have to forget the details again – just rate and post a review for any of the thousands of courses in our database.

But, shameless plug aside, I think I’ve come full-circle. When I first started golfing, every course I played was unique. Then, eventually, one track bled into another. And now, I’ve learned to take notice, appreciate and file-away the idiosyncrasies of each place I visit.

I once penned an entire post on why golf is unique compared to the other sports – and one of the biggest reasons is no two courses are exactly alike. Think about that for a second. Football fields (both American and European) conform to exact specifications; baseball diamonds and hockey rinks do too. But not golf – every single course is unique to itself.

Of course, I knew this all along. But it sure is fun remembering it all over again! So don’t just play golf…experience it. Travel, discover and enjoy – even if it’s just to the course in the next county over.

Inside Condé Nast Traveler’s Golf Resort Ratings

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Condé Nast Traveler has released its Top 125 Golf Resorts issue and I’m wondering how many of us should actually take this list seriously? The list was compiled from the publication’s 2010 Readers’ Choice survey, which was conducted online and had nearly 26,000 respondents.

That’s allot of respondents, but can these results really be that accurate? Firstly, how many resorts have these respondents vacationed at? My guess is not many (and certainly not all 125). So if they’ve stayed at only one or two, there really isn’t much basis for comparison. When people choose a resort, they typically select one they’ve heard of (perhaps through lists such as in Condé Nast Traveler).

After visiting a resort, some people will then take the online survey (which could be years removed from when they were actually there), thus providing more (possibly outdated) feedback on a resort that is already on the list. With data being collected on the same resorts over and over, I surmise it would be an uphill battle for new resorts (or those who have undergone vast renovations) to make the cut, despite offering a similar experience to those listed (especially considering resorts had to receive a certain number of responses to make the list to begin with). All this leads to a somewhat flawed rating system in my opinion.

But what’s even more interesting is Condé Nast Traveler hasn’t actually produced a top 125 list at all. Instead, it has taken golf resorts that received the most responses and ranked them by region. First they hone in on the typical U.S. golf vacation states like Arizona, California, Florida and Hawaii. Then the publication provides top lists for the Northern, Western and Southern U.S. (aforementioned states excluded). Finally, it compiles a measly top 25 list for golf resorts from the rest of the world. The lists combined total 125 resorts.

Condé Nast Traveler buckets resorts in this manner because they have no data to legitimately rank 125 golf resorts in order from best to worst. After all, they are only going off a volunteer survey, which typically draws from the same old pool of resorts, rated by people who really have no basis for comparing such establishments in the first place.

But what about the fact that this info exists at all? Sure, these lists can be fun to look at, but are they realistic? Seriously, how many of you plan on actually vacationing at one of these golf resorts this year? For starters, these places aren’t cheap. According to the publication, rates are listed in three categories and represented by dollar signs: “$”; “$$”; and “$$$” – where prices encompass “the least expensive double during peak golf season.” Well, the “least expensive” turns out to be $350 or less ($); $350-$499 ($$); and $500+ ($$$) – it doesn’t specify, but I assume this is per night; golf not included – ready to pack the old clubs yet?

All this makes me wonder who’s really benefitting from this list being published?

So with that said, I’d like to see how many of our readers are planning an excursion this year to one of these top golf resorts. Take the poll* below and let us know.

Will you play a Top Golf Resort in 2011?


*It should be noted that respondents to this poll are on a volunteer basis and are drawn from the same old pool of this blog’s readership.

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