Golf Digest SIP 2022 - Travel

THERE ARE TWO TYPES of golfers: those who seek new courses and those who don’t. Global pandemics notwithstanding, inertia is what keeps people at home. Maybe a membership has been paid for and each round increases some divisor of utility. Maybe someone in your life keeps your clock and calendar with too sharp a pencil. Maybe you’ve found enough fascination in trying to replicate shots in a game where no two are ever quite alike. I’m so far gone that if quitting were the only other option, I’d gladly sign up to play the same two holes for the rest of my life in some Sisyphean nightmare. That’s actually a fun question to bat around with buddies: Which consecutive holes from your home course would you choose? I can almost understand not…

THE BRITISH WRITER BERNARD Darwin once described “a perfect stretch of golfing country” as “broken and undulating with… sandhills on the left and a vast expanse of rushes on the right.” It was a sight, he wrote, “to make glad the heart of man, and at the same time to fill him with gloomy doubts as to whether he is quite good enough to play upon such a course.” The terrain Darwin writes of is, broadly, the links, those rather cold landscapes of hollows, sandhills, heather, fescues and gorse that occasionally arise in special places where the ocean cedes slivers of shore to golf. For several hundred years, players of the game knew nothing else; golf was played only in these conditions, across winding bumpy ground tossed hither and yon over…

MORGAN PURVIS HAD SOME FREE TIME ON his hands. The financial analyst from Aiken, S.C.—just across the border from Augusta, Ga.—had gone through the same micro-discectomy surgery on his back that put Tiger Woods on the shelf, and he wasn’t sure when he would be able to play again. ▶ “It was the first time in my life where I physically couldn’t do something,” says Purvis of the injury that came after years of playing golf and paddle tennis. “I wanted to set a goal for myself for what I’d do when I was back on my feet again. What could I do to celebrate that?” ▶ Laid up from the surgery, Purvis had been reading about his home course, Palmetto Golf Club, and how Augusta National designer Alister MacKenzie…

MORGAN PURVIS The Alister MacKenzie Collection (including Augusta National, Cypress Point, Crystal Downs, Ohio State Scarlet, University of Michigan, Pasatiempo) DONNIE LUPER The Domestic Majors: play all the U.S. major championship venues (like Oakmont, Pebble Beach, Pinehurst No. 2, Winged Foot) CORY LEWIS The Numbers Game: play 200 courses in a year KEITH O’HALLORAN The Seth Raynor Collection (including Chicago Golf Club, Fishers Island, Monterey Peninsula, Shoreacres, Waialae) JIMMIE JAMES (pictured) Golf Digest America’s 100 Greatest collection: play all the current 100 Greatest in a single calendar year JOHN KRUEGER The Local Challenge: play all of the courses in your home state TONY KOROLOGOS The Solstice Golfathon: play four courses in four states on the longest day of the year SOREN JACOBSEN The Route 66: play one round in all 50 states in one year DR. CLYDE HENDERSON The World Tour: play golf on every continent (including…

We are taught in middle school that when we peer into the night sky we’re actually looking back in time since the light we see from the stars originated hundreds and maybe thousands of years ago. Golf course openings also provide a look into the past; they seem new, but the origins were often years in the making. Their design and composition reveal things about the economic and regional conditions of the time and place in which they were conceived. Current periods of slow or nonexistent golf development are an indication of previous bear markets or old financial headwinds. A core group of international course openings, recent and upcoming, reveals the opposite. These projects reflect more optimistic realities and the fruit of savvy foresight going back years, as well as bold…

FEW THINGS WARM THE heart of a golf enthusiast more than a golf trip with buddies, especially one that is well-planned. If it has been a while since you have undertaken a buddies trip because of the pandemic, then your next one is even more important to get right—down to every last detail. In case you need a refresher on what goes into a successful buddies golf trip, here is a rundown, in no particular order, of 10 factors that a trip organizer should take into consideration in preparation for that special occasion. Who you invite is important A group of buddies could just as easily visit the world’s worst golf resort and have a blast as it could travel to Pebble Beach and be miserable. More than lodging, food, weather and…