Golf course familiarity runs contrary to the well tread relationship-tarring adage.  Rather than contempt, playing the same courses over and over again tends to breed lower scores.
After logging dozens of rounds on a track, the lay of the land yields far fewer surprises as course knowledge become encyclopedic and the confidence of experience informs club selection and other strategic decisions.
 
Still, after a couple years of racking up rounds in your neck of the woods and seeing the same holes over and over again, many avid golfers begin to develop an itch to spread their wings, take their sticks out on the road and chase some strange. Put it this way, if course fidelity was a normative behavior and there was an Ashley Madison for guys looking to be a little less faithful to the well tread turfgrass of their local muni, it’d be as massive a success as Bandon Dunes.

A cub put on an impromptu greenside show at the Mountainside Golf Course at the plush Fairmont Hot Springs resort in B.C.

“This is like the circus, look at him,” exclaims the awestruck golfer filming the spectacle.  After doing some rump shaking, back scratching, and playfully pawing at the flagstick, Smokey Jr. spots a ball on the green and ends his act.  He saunters over to it, promptly stuffs it in his mouth and wanders off. 

The climax of the FedEx Cup playoffs, arguably one of the game’s toughest mettle-testers, and inarguably the most lucrative gets underway Thursday.  Three events have whittled the top 125 golfers down to the 30 who will arrive at Atlanta’s East Lake for the TOUR Championship for a chance at a handsome sterling silver Tiffany & Co.-designed chalice and a handsomer eight-figure bonus: $9 million up front with another million tucked into a player’s tax-deferred retirement account for safekeeping.  There’s a bevy of first-timers in the field (nearly 30% of the field) raring for glory and a mega bank account boost-we focus in on the three golfers making their TOUR Championship debut that have a shot at it.

Chris Kirk   “Mr. Composure”

This cool customer who keeps his emotions dialed down to one whether he’s holing a twenty-foot birdy or just shanked a shot into the drink.   A native Atlantan who played college golf in Georgia, Kirk is going to have a very supportive gallery in East Lake. Leading the fray heading into the final shindig, he controls his own destiny still odds makers aren’t as convinced with his ability to not collapse under the pressure as his fans with some bookmakers giving him a 55-1 shot.

Received a heads-up text from Ripped Links founding partner today revealing that the company is gearing up for the nascent sport's debut demonstration event this September. The fresh par-3 contest shake ‘n bakes golf's orthodoxy and brings Gen Y into the fold by pouring rocket fuel on the game’s pace of play and lending golf action sport cachet. For the uninitiated this is Ripped Links in a nutshell: holes are set up in a nontraditional environment like a beach in SoCal with golfers hitting off elevated platforms and then zip-lining over the crowd on down to the green to putt and play the hole out. Rinse and repeat a couple more times from different platforms and call it a round. The speedy conveyance from tee to green is solely to heighten the energy of the experience and doesn’t affect the scoring system.

“The quality of golf is paramount. We are not doing mini-golf on steroids. There are no loopy-loops or giant windmills to hit through. This is pure ball-striking and the best players will ultimately win,” Weston explained to Golf Canada.

According to Weston the new fangled sport which re-imagines golf as a high octane action sport demonstrated for the first time this September in Vancouver, the exact date(s) and location is still TBD.

Pine Lakes Country Club, the patriarch of Grand Strand golf opened in 1927, ten years after my grandfather was born. Grandaddy’s welcoming fairways and receptive greens that tend to usher solid putts holeward bound are gentle, kind, and fair.  Those traits also describe to a tee my  grandfather, a very special man, who passed away last May.

Originally Published in Ontario Golf Magazine
Golf isn't the primary draw on the Outer Banks, or OBX as in the know folks call the 200-mile span of dune strewn barrier islands in Northeastern North Carolina that buffer a trio of Sounds (Currituck, Albermarle, and Pamlico) from the crashing waves of the Atlantic.  

A solo golf trip provides a unique opportunity to ponder whether an eagle is still an eagle if only other wildlife share in the experience. While that may sound like dollar-store metaphysics with no bragging rights up for grabs, lone wolf golf affords an opportunity to bury your ego in the deep rough and find out what kind of golfer you really are. The legendary fairways of Hilton Head Island promise a verdant setting for such a golfing spirit quest. 
 
The cross-trainer shaped 12-mile wide island’s developers might have been wise to carve out a giant swoosh shaped roadway just for kicks. Even Hilton Head’s Intracoastal waterways and inland marinas appear to be blue shoelaces and socks from an aerial vantage point. Locals often use the toe and heel as navigational totems. If this were Dubai, man-made, spike-shaped islands would be sculpted to the immediate south of the well-heeled shoe leaving little doubt that this place was made for golfers. But artificial islets would fly in the face of au naturel Hilton Head whose sneaker silhouette is just the way God made it.

Golf getaway prissies of the “I played Ballybunion AND Carnoustie last summer, and have the signed scorecards to prove it” variety often dismiss Myrtle Beach as a tourist sand trap crawling with Suburban driving dudes who go by two first names and amble into the tee box along with their 40+ BMI.  While the Grand Strand’s sheer breadth of course offerings does emphasize quantity — the golf capital of the world is home to more holes than a Tim Hortons franchise — there are plenty of widely lauded masterpieces among the 102 spreads, sure to spoil even the most accomplished weekend warrior’s good walk.