Bradley S. Klein - Wide Open Fairways

2013 by Bradley S. Klein

Acknowledgments for the use of previously published material appear on page 189, which constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Klein, Bradley S.

Wide open fairways: a journey across the landscapes of modern golf / Bradley S. Klein.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

EPUB ISBN : 978-1-4962-0984-9; MOBI ISBN : 978-1-4962-0985-6
1. Golf coursesDesign and construction. 2. Golf coursesLocation. I. Title.

GV 975. K 535 2013

796.352068dc23 2013003773

Set in Sabon by Laura Wellington.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Preface

I spend a lot of time on golf courses. In this book I explain what Im looking at, how I view these recreational spaces, and why I think they are interesting as cultural forms.

In many ways this is a personal memoir as much as it is an account of what makes golf courses compelling landscapes. The narrative follows my growing up and becoming professionally engaged in golf, first as a caddie, then as a journalist and book author, and more recently as someone who is regularly active in teaching and educating folks in the golf industry about the art and practice of golf course design and maintenance. The fact that I have no formal training in either landscape design or agronomy might have been a handicap, but I hope the reader will come to appreciate that its possible to bring to bear other disciplines and training. In my case that includes a long stint studying, teaching, and writing about world political culture and political economy. On the more practical side my observations draw upon years spent in the caddie yards of private clubs and, later on, the PGA Tour, where I cut my teeth looping in close to one hundred events, including six U.S. Opens. I never won, but I learned and saw a lot.

These days my work takes me on the road about 150 days a year, and that time is spent walking and talking golf with superintendents, architects, club general managers, and green committee chairmen as well as staffers and leaders of various golf associations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

I get asked a lot how many courses I have seen, and I dont know for sure and dont really want to know for sure. Somehow my mental Rolodex has enough room and flexibility to keep track of the main elements of the places Ive seen, but I dont keep a specific list or have a spreadsheet grading each and every course Ive encountered. Among the few numerical indices I can refer to is that I have seen 175 of the top-rated 200 U.S. courses that the magazine I work for, Golfweek , ratesand I should know this because I lead that rating operation and shepherd a team of 750 course evaluators around and frequently lecture to them (sometimes at them) about how to assess golf courses. Worldwide Ive chalked up a similar percentagehaving visited 88 of the top 100 courses that Golf Magazine rates internationally.

One more index suggests the persistence of my occupational habit. Back in 2004, when I wrote the foreword to Jeff Barrs book 1001 Golf Holes You Must Play before You Die , I noted having seen 436 of those famous holes. Now, eight years later, that number is up to 516. At least Im beyond the halfway point to deliverance, though clearly a lot of ground remains to be covered.

But this book isnt about lists or about spreadsheets with data. Instead, its an entirely impressionistic account of how golf courses are cultural markerscultural links, if you willthat tie this popular recreation into larger issues of land use, ecology, design, and imagination. The interest here is less on playing these golf courses under competitive conditionsthere are already thousands of books about thatthan on how these wide open spaces function as landscapes that inspire us, that stimulate our senses and make us feel like we are somewhere special.

Ive been playing golf for forty-five years, and since the very beginning, back in the late 1960s, Ive been fascinated by the variety of places where I found golf. In part it was simply the beauty of these complex sports fieldsthe most varied and least rule governed in all of sports. But it was also home life that I sought to escape from early on. Golf courses were lovely retreats for me, and even in my teens I was aware of how powerful a sense of calm came over me the moment I stepped through the gates of a country club onto one of those private courses near our house. I was transported. And so off I went, to caddie and to play and later on to write about the game and eventually to make a living doing something I quite simply loved to do.

At first the golf writing was avocational, as was my golfan escape from academic pressures. But all along I knew I wanted to become a golf writer and leave university life behind. It became a matter of formulating one of those famous Five-Year Plans for a transition into the golf world. And it was helped by having carved out an expertise at analyzing golf courses that left me with far less competition than would have been the case had I wanted to write about the PGA Tour or golf instruction.

And so I started, first with the occasional freelance article in Score: Canadas Golf Magazine , then in U.S. tournament programs, and finally, in November 1988, for Golfweek as a monthly columnist with 1,500 words to fill on matters of golf course design. Soon other magazine assignments followed, but I never left the pages of Golfweek , and as my golf workload increased and the influence of my political science book, on U.S. foreign policy, didnt quite measure up to my hopes, it was clearly time to make the leap full-time to golf. Which I did, finally, in 1999, as founding editor of a Golfweek offshoot called Superintendent News , which saw me writing about golf courses with far more frequency and intensity, now for two publications. And of course we had to start filling the virtual pages of our website. All of which gave me more room, if less time, to explain to folks what makes those golf course special places.

My first golf book, Rough Meditations (1997, 2006), consisted almost entirely of already published columns and articles that had appeared in a variety of outlets. I was able to re-present them in only slightly edited form as a series of thematically organized chapters and thus to make sense of the accumulated material without having to rewrite them from scratch. And when I started thinking about Wide Open Fairways , I thought I could pull off a similar effort of collection and organization. But several intervening factors made that impossible. For one thing the folks at the University of Nebraska Press wisely balked at publishing a collection of old material. Second, the media culture had changed. What used to be columns and articles of 1,500 to 2,000 words had shrunk, thanks to the collective attention deficit disorder afflicting modern print journalism editors and social media, to the point where my standard column is now down to 840 words, and many web pieces are half that length.

As I began to see if I could stretch and pull and revise existing material that was already published, it became clear that I would have to start with a fresh approach to the material. Along the way, as I recount in the introduction, my father died, and his passing led me to a much deeper appreciation of the extent to which my own approach to golf courses has been governed by my relationship with himand to the peculiar nature of his own mental universe. As I began to sift through the materials to review the articles I had written and to revisit the places I was writing about, it became clear that there was more substance and continuity to my thinking and experience of golf courses than I had given myself credit for.