• “Just as a day may come at sunset into its most glorious hour, or a life toward the gray-bearded end enter a halcyon happiness, December golf, as long as it lasts, can seem the sweetest golf of the year. The unkind winds and muddy plugged lies of April and May, the deepening rough of June, the hot, eager crowds of July and August, the obfuscating goose feathers and fallen leaves of the autumn are all gone, gone, and golf feels, on the frost-stiffened fairways, reduced to its austere and innocent essence.”

• “December always holds some mild-enough days. Sunshine glints like a thin shell of ice on the upper sides of the bare, gray twigs, the sky is striped like blue bacon, a tardy line of Canada geese wobbles its way south, and the air is delighted to be providing oxygen to some plucky sportsmen. The foursome, thinned perhaps to a mere threesome or twosome, meets by the boarded-up clubhouse exhilarated to have an entire golf course to itself-fairway upon fairway visible through the naked trees, zigzagging back and forth in the view from the first tee. There are no tee markers, no starting times, no scorecards, no gasoline carts-just golf-mad men and women, wearing wool hats and two sweaters each, moving on their feet…

Full piece. 

• …”the governing bodies did not budge on one of the most requested rule changes: relief from divots.”

• “Chalk this up to a win for the all-important “play it as it lies” principle, the most vital tenet of golf’s rules. But do not expect this to be the last time divot-relief is scrutinized. There is good reason to believe the adoption of several changes will force the U.S. Golf Association and R&A to cave on the divot matter.”

• “More than any other annoyance in the sport, seeing a ball finish in divots of differing recovery stages can be an aggravating though generally rare occurrence given the number of shots struck.”

• “At courses with big maintenance budgets and carts armed with sand bottles, the issue gets trickier when an old divot blatantly becomes ground under repair, particularly when players can spot seeds in the mix. The divot issue is generally more acute for American golfers who play an aerial game, making the recovery shot more painful than on a links, where fewer forced carries mean golfers more easily can advance the ball to the hole via the ground.”

• “According to the rules experts who put an incredible amount of time into this simplification effort and who deserve our gratitude for listening as never before, the divot issue was cited heavily during the feedback period. Even as the golfing public successfully lobbied for a monumental change in the stroke and distance rules, the rules experts – gulp – dug deep when it came to considering divots as ground under repair.”

• “That was reflected in numerous rules changes, including: a local rule dealing with balls that are lost or OB; establishing the ability to set a “maximum score”; sanctioning the use of distance-measuring devices; reducing or eliminating some penalties; encouraging “ready golf”; providing a means for poor players to extricate themselves from bunkers; and allowing players to move loose impediments in bunkers. It’s also reflected in a condensed rule book – 24 rules, down from 34 – that contains less-tortured language, and also supporting videos and other materials that are easily consumed.”

• “Without blowing up the rules, they’ve done a wonderful job of maintaining the integrity of golf and yet made things more consistent throughout the course and reduced penalties that frankly seem a little unfair in many people’s eyes,” said Bill Linneman, director of rules and competitions for the Wisconsin Golf Association.”

• “The USGA and R&A didn’t just meet everyday golfers halfway; they embraced them in a big bear hug. The result, said Ryan Farb, the Northern California Golf Association’s director of rules and competitions, is “The everyday player is going to end up playing by the rules by default a lot more than they used to.”

• “Congressional Country Club has decided to cut ties with golf course architect Keith Foster. The club’s Board of Governors came to the decision this morning and will begin the process of finding a new architect. The move came following Wednesday’s news that Foster had plead guilty to illegally transporting between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of items made from endangered species, migratory birds and other wildlife. Foster potentially faces up to five years in prison. In an email to the membership, Club President Bev Lane remarked, “The permitting phase of the Blue Course restoration project will continue as planned. A list of golf course architects has been developed and initial discussions with them have already begun.”

• “Keith Foster has also been let go at Olympia Fields Country Club following the news of his guilty plea. The club and Foster were in the early stages of masterplanning at the historic club. Olympia Fields released a statement to their membership “we have done our best to mitigate the Club’s damages resulting from his admitted offenses and are proceeding to formulate a plan to move forward with another architect.” Before selecting Foster, Olympia Fields was considering Andy Staples, Tom Doak and Jim Urbina.”

• “Olympia Fields Country Club will host a FedEx Cup Playoff event in 2020, according to a report from the Chicago Tribune.

• Sources tell the Tribune that the event now called the BMW Championship will take place at the site of the 2003 U.S. Open in Olympia Fields, Ill., where Jim Furyk won with a then record-low 272 total.”

• “The BMW has traditionally been held in the Chicago area every other year, but this means back-to-back years with the 2019 event set for Medinah Country Club”

• “When I finished high school, I sat down with my dad to try to hash out a game plan to get into the golf industry. My dad was an environmental scientist for 40 years with the Ministry of Environment in Ontario, so he helped me a great deal in understanding the policy system here in Canada. I started by getting my bachelor’s degree from the University of Waterloo in Planning and Environmental Design. In my last coop term, I went for broke and I reached out to Rod Whitman in Canada, who invited me to do a 5-month coop with him during the construction of Sagebrush Golf & Sporting Club in British Columbia. The pay was paltry and I ran a shovel and a rake for most of the summer, but I fell in love with it instantly.”

• “I later went back for my master’s in Landscape Architecture at the University of Guelph, which I finished in 2016. The culmination of that was my thesis, which has now become this book. Nowadays, I have my own company, Cutten Golf, Inc., which allows me to partner with people like Rod and Dave Axland, who has been Coore and Crenshaw’s chief project manager for 30 years. I couldn’t have walked into a better situation as a young, aspiring architect. To have the opportunity to work with these guys is incredible.”

• “Having had the opportunity to peek at an advanced copy, I can say the book is completely fascinating. Talk a little bit about what compelled you to devote so much of yourself to this pursuit in the first place.”

• “I’m the type of person that needs to answer my own questions to be satisfied. I’m not comfortable with just accepting things as fact without knowing the story behind them. I was sitting in one of my first master’s classes, which was basically a history of the landscape architecture profession. I’m learning how everything is influenced by society and wars and economy and I thought, “This has to be true for golf, but no one’s ever talked about it.”

• “At the time, I was also batting around ideas for my thesis. I was thinking a lot about the renovations that had recently been done to Pinehurst No. 2 and I was particularly curious about how Donald Ross’s original design was so much more environmentally sound than what it had been allowed to become over the course of time.”

• “One of the key quotes that I got from Bill [Coore] about that project was that they were not trying to be “environmental crusaders” so much as they were just trying to put the course back to the way Donald Ross had originally intended it. So the question I kept asking in my head was, “How did this happen?” I sort of went on a fact finding mission to uncover how golf course architecture changed and it kept snowballing. I just kept following leads in different directions that began to connect all the dots for me. I went a little deeper down the rabbit hole every day, and ended up with a 600+ page thesis to turn in.”

• Brian Keogh of Irish Golf Desk writes, “Combining the eternal appeal of Seve Ballesteros with the star power of Ryder Cup hero Jon Rahm has drawn more than 600 children to participate in the ‘Seve & Jon Golf for Kids’ programme in Spain.”

• “While the youngsters know all about Seve through watching his videos and hearing the stories of his feats, they were keen to get to know Rahm and played golf with their hero at Meaztegi Golf, a Seve-designed public golf course in Ortuella, a mining town near Bilbao.”

• “After competing in five qualifiers during the summer, 80 boys and girls under 16 made it to the final event of the ‘Seve & Jon Golf for Kids’ series, which is a joint initiative by Jon Rahm and the Seve Ballesteros Foundation aimed at introducing younger generations to the game of golf and its values.”

• “Tiger Woods on 18th green, reacting after missing a birdie putt. Friday, 20th July, 2018. Scotland also benefited from £51 million in destination marketing activity thanks to The Open being broadcast on television to more than 600 million households in 193 countries worldwide.”

• “The study – which was commissioned by golf’s governing body The R&A, VisitScotland and Angus Council – also concluded that the Angus area alone received a £21 million injection of new money from The Open.”

• “Almost half of the spectators who attended The Open (49.8%) travelled from outwith Scotland, while the overwhelming majority of Scottish fans (84.8%) came from outside Angus. The research found 62% of non-Angus residents indicated they would return to the region for a break within 12 months.”

Listen here.