Saturday, December 26, 2009

Sergio Garcia arguably the biggest disappointment of 2009

FROM THE AOL GOLF NEWS SERVICE
The end-of-year world professional rankings are out - and they make pretty clear who are the stars of 2009 and who are the flops.
INTO the game's top 10 from a year ago have come Northern Ireland's 20-year-old Rory McIlroy, England's Paul Casey and Americans Steve Stricker, Jim Furyk and Kenny Perry.
OUT go Sergio Garcia, Vijay Singh, Robert Karlsson, Camilo Villegas and Ernie Els.
The biggest climbers are US PGA champion Y E Yang, who started the season 478th and finishes it at 31st, and Italian Edoardo Molinari, who has climbed from 653rd to 48th.
The biggest fallers are 2008 Masters champion Trevor Immelman, who suffered a wrist injury and crashed from 20th to 133rd, Australian Aaron Baddeley (36th to 139th) and Swede Carl Pettersson (62nd to 212th).
Tiger Woods stayed at the top all year but came close to losing the world number one spot in March as a result of his eight-month lay-off following knee surgery, and the gap is bound to close again now that he has announced an indefinite break to try to sort out his personal life.
As Woods approaches his 34th birthday on December 30 - not much to celebrate, you would think, either for him or his wife Elin when she turns 30 on New Year's Day - it is interesting to note that the majority of players in the world's top 50 are now younger than him.
Chief amongst them, of course, are McIlroy, up from 39th to ninth, and 18-year-old Ryo Ishikawa, who has climbed from 60th to 30th.
But the old guys still had their moments. Kenny Perry, 50 next June, almost won The Masters and, far more amazingly, Tom Watson nearly captured a sixth Open title two months before he reached 60.
From a European perspective the biggest disappointment had to be Garcia. He started 2009 second in the rankings and had a chance to topple Woods, but never managed a top-three finish all year.

Labels:

Hickory golf honours game's traditions

FROM THE GOLF WEEK WEBSITE
By James Achenbach
Every year I try to play in at least a dozen golf tournaments. I mean real tournaments, not pro-ams or charity events.
My favourite event of 2009? The Selma Four-Ball Classic, held at stately Selma Country Club, Alabama.
Modern golf clubs are forbidden. Put away your Callaways, TaylorMades, Nikes, Titleists and Pings for this one, because competitors play with hickory-shafted clubs.
This is where I met the Hickory Tiger, named after a certain golfer who has won 14 major championships.
The Hickory Tiger, aka Randy Jensen, knows a thing or two about majors, having captured the US National Hickory Championship a record eight times. Jensen showed up for the Selma Four-Ball Classic with long-time partner Mike Stolarsky in tow.
They played, they birdied, they won by four, they returned home to Omaha, Neb., where Jensen manages Classic Golf, a shop specialising in vintage clubs and apparel.
“Do you play regular golf?” somebody asked him. “If, by regular golf, you mean graphite shafts and titanium driver heads, no way,” he answered. “I don’t play anything but hickory golf.”
“Why is this?” came the follow-up question.
“It’s too easy with modern clubs,” he said. “You can hit the ball all over the clubface and still hit good shots. Playing with hickory is more of a challenge. It’s more fun.”
Hickory golf has been in exile some 75 years. It was 1924 when the U.S. Golf Association issued its approval of steel shafts. Six years later, in 1930, Bobby Jones used hickory in winning his Grand Slam. The last USGA championship captured by hickory was in 1936, when lawyer John Fischer II of Cincinnati won the US Amateur.
“It’s hard to express how much my dad loved those hickory shafts,” said his son, John Fischer III, also a Cincinnati attorney. “He went to the MacGregor factory, and it took him two days just to find the right ones.”
In conjunction with the Golf Collectors Society (www.golfcollectors.com), the younger Fischer has published a delightful 36-page memoir, “The Last Hickory Golf Champion,” about his late father’s hickory adventures.
Today there is a resurgence of hickory, as reflected by national hickory championships in Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Scotland, Sweden, Finland and the United States.
The Society of Hickory Golfers (www.hickorygolfers.com) promotes hickory tournaments in North America, and an annual hickory tour has emerged. Many hickory events have been contested at Oakhurst Links in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where golf has been played since the 1880s and where the grass is cut by the world’s most efficient lawn mowers, sometimes known as sheep.
In Selma, I spotted a license plate with one word on it – HICKORY. It belonged to Tad Moore, one of the world’s best-known golf club designers. For decades, Moore created clubs for Maxfli and other companies. Now he has turned to hickory.
Moore produces replica clubs in a shop on Selma Avenue (www.tadmoore.com). Also in that shop is putterman Otey Crisman III, whose father, Otey Crisman II, made aluminum-headed putters, most with hickory shafts, that won the Masters five times and the US PGA Championship four times.
As hosts of the competition at Selma Country Club, Moore and his wife, Carol, showcased Southern hospitality in spectacular fashion. This included a heavy emphasis on early 20th century apparel and nightly parties at antebellum homes.
Hickory appears to be sweeping the South of the States. In Louisville, Kentucky, Mike Just, president of Louisville Golf, introduced a line of hickory clubs in 2007 and watched them account for about 15 percent of Louisville Golf’s sales in 2008.
In Greensboro, North Carolina Chris Deinlein plays in a regular money game at Sedgefield Country Club with his hickory-shafted clubs. Sedgefield is long enough and tough enough to host the Wyndham Championship on the US PGA Tour, but that doesn’t stop Deinlein.
“Sure, I get comments,” Deinlein said, “but I don’t care. This is the only way I play. If I sacrifice 10 or 15 yards off the tee, so be it. I believe the game was meant to be played this way. And old courses do not become obsolete when golfers use hickory.”
Almost all golfers score higher with hickory than steel. The drives are shorter (240 yards is a monster hit) and the irons don’t have much sole bounce and tend to be diggers.
An authentic player such as Jensen will use nothing but original clubs. Others may play replica clubs. There are two types of hickory competition – pre-1905, with clubs and gutta-percha replica balls from that period, and pre-1935, when the clubheads were much improved and rubber balls had emerged. Most tournaments fall into the pre-1935 category, with players using the softest modern balls they can find.
To that end, a company called McIntyre White Authentic Golf, located in San Diego, manufactures three different rubber golf balls using modern soft cores and Surlyn covers with old-time designs.
All this is like a step back in time, but it’s more. Hickory golf is a ritual in which the history and traditions of golf are honoured and celebrated.
If the truth be told, some of us would do it just to play dress-up in the elegant clothes of another era

Labels:

Trump buys two courses in

north-east America


Donald Trump not only builds golf courses, he buys ready-made ones.
The American billionaire has paid undisclosed sums to become the owner of one course in the south of New Jersey State and another in Hudson Valley, New York State.
Dan Scavino, executive vice president of the Trump Organisation's Trump Golf Division, said that the Pine Hill Golf Club in Pine Hill, New Jersey, would be renamed Trump National Golf Club-Philadelphia. Scavino would not say how much his boss paid for the Tom Fazio-designed course, which offers views of the Philadelphia skyline. The more widely-known Pine Valley Golf Club is a neighbouring course.
Scavino said the company plans to convert the semi-private course into a luxury private members club.
Trump also has bought Branton Woods Golf Club at Hopewell Junction, New York. It will be renamed Trump National Golf Club-Hudson Valley.

Any comments? E-mail them to Colin@scottishgolfview.com

Labels:

Copyright © Colin Farquharson

If you can't find what you are looking for.... please check the Archive List or search this site with Google