Coore Crenshaw Quest

I started playing golf in the 1990s. Digital was just a twinkle in the eye at that time so if you really wanted to know a course you had to get your hands on a physical yardage book. Of course during my Coore Crenshaw quest, you know I was going to collect as many yardage books as possible. Since we are living in modern, digital times, many golf courses have phased out the physical yardage book but those that I do have I figured, why not rank em?  These rankings are COMPLETELY subjective and only reflect the yardage books I have collected on my quest at the halfway point. Once my quest is finally over, I hope to have a definitive ranking (I can tell you are all waiting with baited breath for that one). Courses NOT ranked because no books were printed or available at the time of my visit include Sand Valley and Barton Creek. Here we go! 10) Tie We-Ko-Pa and Talking Stick Sigh Arizona. I know you are like 1,000,000 degrees during the Summer so yardage books made out ...

I recently went on a trip deep into the ranch-land of America playing courses in Nebraska and Colorado. This is the last in a series of blog posts about the 99 holes I played at these amazing courses.  Sand Hills Golf Club is one of those courses that golfers have heard whispers of but don't really know much about it. They have heard tales that it is the best links course in America, but yet it resides in Nebraska. They have heard it is one of the most naturally sculpted golf courses ever with the construction of the greens only costing $300 a hole. It constantly appears in world rankings as a top 20 course but it doesn't appear on TV for any tournaments nor really shows up anywhere other than certain publications. Sand Hills is a mystery that I greatly wanted to see for myself and I was fortunate enough to gain an invitation to play and you better believe I rearranged my schedule to see what all the whispers were about. The course is in the middle of rolling sand ...

Golf is not just a collection of famous golfers and famous golf names but also of famous course designers. Designers and their courses are often like writers and their penmanship, you can immediately tell the writer by the pen strokes (or in the case of people reading my writing, that it looks vaguely like English but they have no other clues about what is going on in the sentence). As I have gotten back into golf, I have gotten more and more into course architecture. This has been spurred on by reading Geoff Shackelford (and playing the amazing track that he designed at Rustic Canyon) and also reading the amazing book Wide Open Fairways by Bradley S. Klein. All of this research has laid the groundwork for me to come to appreciate Coore and Crenshaw's design aesthetic. C+C Music Factory (as I call them) are all about shotmaking and using the natural features of the land rather than bulldozing over it. I love courses like that and want to play ever single one of them if I ...