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Look Back: Sept. 6 1971: George Archer defeats Lou Graham and J.C. Snead in a playoff to win the Greater Hartford Open. 1981: Jay Haas wins the B.C. Open by a three-stroke margin over Tom Kite. 1992: Richard Zokol and Dick Mast duel at the Greater Milwaukee Open before Zokol wins by two strokes. 1998: Jeff Sluman, who calls Chicago home, defeats Wisconsin native Steve Stricker by one stroke to win the Greater Milwaukee Open.
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Business
ClubCorp USA
sold 5 million shares of stock in ClubLink Corporation, Canada's
largest owner of golf courses and resorts, to Tri-White Corporation at
$5 a share. ClubCorp sold approximately 25 percent of ClubLink in order
to pay down debt, and also sold some shares in European PGA Tour Inc.
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Carbite Golf
reaches profitability for the second quarter of 2001 with an operating
profit of more than $195,000. Net income was over $85,000 compared to
a net loss of $531,059 for the same quarter last year. President and CEO
John Pierandozzi says that a focus on the company's core business of putters
and wedges and a move away from direct marketing campaigns helped eliminate
losses.
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Real Estate
The Real Estate Finance
Group of Heller Financial acquires a portfolio of golf course loans
from Bank of America. Heller's Golf Lending Group targets existing middle-market
golf course properties across the United States, Canada and the Caribbean
and provides floating rate debt ranging from 50 percent to 75 percent
loan-to-value.
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People
Callaway Golf Company
announces that Michael J. Rider has been promoted to the position
of Senior Vice President, Assistant General Counsel. Rider has been with
Callaway Golf since 1996, and most recently served as Vice President,
Associate General Counsel.
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Long-drive pro Mike
Wiebe joins the staff of Sonartec, producer of Driving Cavity
metal woods and driving irons club heads. Wiebe, who placed sixth in the
Canadian and seventh in the U.S. national long drive contests in 2000,
uses Sonartec's club heads in competition.
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Mike Holmes
accepts his first head professional job at Goose Creek Golf Club
in Virginia. Holmes was previously an assistant pro at two courses in
Maryland before coming to Goose Creek, and says he plans to implement
a capital improvement plan that will improve the facility and increase
the number of rounds played.
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Equipment
Golf car manufacturer
E-Z-GO and ProLink, maker of GPS golf course information
management systems, team up to put GPS systems in every one of the 145
golf cars at Royal Pines Resort in Queensland, Australia. The installation,
the largest to date for the two companies, also gives Royal Pines the
first color GPS system in Australia.
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FEEL Golf adds
a 47-degree wedge to its line of popular scoring wedges. The wedge, which
has a comparable loft to a pitching wedge, is designed for tough long
rough and bunker shots and will debut in late September at the PGA Fall
Expo in Las Vegas.
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Instruction
Natural Golf Corporation
announces that American Golf Corporation's Flamingo Island Club at Lely
Resort in Naples, Fla. will be an official site of Natural Golf's Signature
Series Schools. Also, Natural Golf announces that instructional author
Peter Fox is the director of the Naples-based Natural Golf facility.
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Events
PGA Tour professionals
Bob Tway, Willie Wood and Scott Verplank, all graduates of Oklahoma State,
will participate in a pro-am Monday to benefit an endowed scholarship
in the name of OSU basketball player Nate Fleming. Fleming was
killed in a plane crash after the OSU-Colorado basketball game in January.
Several other pros will participate as well as members of the OSU basketball
and golf teams.
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Five Questions
Tom
Doak
Architect and author
Tom Doak
is a noted architect and author who debuted highly-acclaimed works in
both arenas this year. On the peaceful Southern coast of Oregon, Doak
has unveiled Pacific Dunes, a breathtaking course that is reminiscent
of Scottish links and that is the talk of the golfing community. Doak
also collaborated with Dr. James Scott and Ray Haddock on the writing
of The Life and Work of Dr. Alister MacKenzie, a compelling biography
that provides a fresh insight to the man and his legacy. In a special
two-part Five Questions session, Doak recently talked about MacKenzie
and the course designer's lasting influence on the profession, the on-going
changes at Augusta National, as well as Doak's own masterpiece, Pacific
Dunes. The second part will run Thursday, Sept. 13.
Full text of Part 1...
Q: Dr. Alister MacKenzie is obviously best known for designing some of the great courses in the world -- Augusta National, Cypress Point, Royal Melbourne, Lahinch, Crystal Downs -- but in doing the book what did you find out about MacKenzie that you might not have realized before?
A: Quite a
bit. MacKenzie has been an idol of mine since I was a kid. I got to see
some of his best courses when I was a teenager and was always fascinated
by his work.
As an architect myself, it was always fascinating how he could have done
all this work in all these many places in such a brief time span. The
body of work for which he is really famous was all done in a span of six
or seven years in the late 1920s and early '30s.
With the help of Dr. Scott's research and trying to get a timeline in
place it really started to come together about how he worked and how quickly
he worked -- his ability to get associates on the same page, teach them
the basics of what he wanted them to do and leave them to it.
He was in Australia one time for five or six weeks, left a bunch of notes
and discussed his ideas in detail with the construction superintendents
down there and then was never back.
I had been able to piece that together a little bit in reading between
the lines in The Spirit of St. Andrews when it came out. There
is a really odd group of courses he picked out to talk about and, as it
turns out, those are the ones he saw finished. Some of his famous courses
-- Royal Melbourne and Augusta and Crystal Downs -- he barely talked about
because he only did plans and got them started. He never saw them finished
and never got the feedback from the clients as to how they turned out.
Q: MacKenzie was a mediocre player at best, and as a course designer he was more focused on making a course interesting rather than rewarding expert play. How did his approach set apart his designs from those architects who had a player's perspective?
A: Most of
the architects of that day -- and even some today -- were professionals
or ex-professionals. Donald Ross made his fame as an architect in the
States, but he was an apprentice at Dornoch and then St. Andrews, and
he played in several U.S. Opens and did fairly well. That's how he got
a reputation for knowing enough about golf to design golf courses.
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