"R&A World Golf Museum Opens Following A Complete Redevelopment"

Great news for those visiting St Andrews as the renamed R&A World Golf Museum has been renovated and “re-interpreted”. It sits right across from the R&A clubhouse, so if you’re there for golf or just killing time during an Open Championship wind delay, make sure to check it out.

I thought the museum told the story of golf quite beautifully—the cafe upstairs is also handy for St Andrews golfers—but it sounds like they’ve made the place better.

For Immediate Release…

THE R&A WORLD GOLF MUSEUM OPENS FOLLOWING A COMPLETE REDEVELOPMENT

21 June 2021, St Andrews, Scotland: From today, The R&A is pleased to welcome visitors to The R&A World Golf Museum, in St Andrews, which has undergone an extensive redevelopment.

Beginning as a cabinet of curiosities in the 1800s and known as the British Golf Museum for the past 30 years, the Museum based at the home of golf enters a new era as The R&A World Golf Museum.

Closed since early 2020, the Museum galleries, have been redisplayed and re-interpreted, ready to welcome visitors to explore the rich history of golf.

Visitors will be uplifted and inspired as the past, present and future of golf is brought to life around them through immersive, eye-catching and interactive displays.

Phil Anderton, Executive Director – Chief Development Officer at The R&A commented, “Golf is synonymous with St Andrews – it was first played here in the 1500’s and The Old Course is the first 18 hole course in the world, so it is fitting that The R&A World Golf Museum resides just steps from its 1st tee.

“Golf is rich in tradition which has been built through centuries of enjoyment. It is these traditions and the evolution of the game which are explored in the galleries of The R&A World Golf Museum.

“Through the interactive galleries we hope to engage with current and new fans to deepen their knowledge and connection to golf.”

The story of golf is presented through six new thematic zones, each designed to engage and entertain through experiential and video displays.

From July 2021, The R&A World Golf Museum will also feature an exhibition celebrating the life of legendary golfer Severino Ballesteros. Seve – His Life Through the Lens - will run for 18 months, including throughout The 150th Open in St Andrews, and visitors will enjoy a unique collection dedicated to his greatest achievements in golf, including winning The Open on three occasions in 1979, 1984 and 1988.

The R&A World Golf Museum has created a five-star visitor experience that is accessible to all.

Angela Howe, Director – Museum & Heritage at The R&A said, “Our goal when developing The R&A World Golf Museum was to re-imagine the golf heritage experience; making it appealing to established golf fans whilst attracting and educating those new to the sport.

“The refurbishment of the galleries provides a modern back drop for people to learn about golf’s heritage via immersive, interactive and interesting exhibits.

“We are looking forward to opening on the 21 June and welcoming guests to enjoy all that The R&A World Golf Museum has to offer.’’

The R&A World Golf Museum is located on Bruce Embankment, St Andrews, Scotland and is open from 09:30 until 17:00 Monday – Saturday and 10:00 until 17:00 on Sunday from 21 June, 2021. The Café is open five days a week, from 09:30 until 17:00 Wednesday-Saturday and 10:00 until 17:00 Sunday.

In addition to the galleries The R&A World Golf Museum also offers a retail shop and a café which overlooks the famed West Sands Beach.

Entry into the Museum is £12 for adults, £10 for concessions, £6 for children and free for children under the age of four.

Q&A With Author Peter May And U.S. Open Final Qualifying Roundup

A smart new book just in time for Father’s Day and the U.S. Open has arrived and I you enjoy this chat with Peter May in The Quadrilateral.

This one is open to all so check it and if you enjoy, buy the book and subscribe to The Quad free or because you want to read yesterday’s U.S. Women’s Open roundup and other past subscriber-only posts.

Also, today’s edition features a quick roundup of the almost-concluded U.S. Open Final Qualifyings.

Chris Powell's MacKenzie Reclamation Is Featured By The NY Times, Golf.com

During the coronavirus pandemic Chris Powell became obsessed with restoring a lost Alister MacKenzie design in Wales and mowed enough down to play it…for a day.

Josh Sens at Golf filed this take on the wild story, with a definite bent toward golfers who will enjoy the details.

And in Sunday’s New York Times, Jack Williams filed a similar feature with photos by Phil Hatcher-Moore.

While others in Britain spent the past year or so navigating coronavirus lockdowns and picking up indoor hobbies, Powell estimated that he had spent roughly 1,000 hours roaming this land that was once his town’s local golf course — a site that closed more than five decades ago and has slowly been melding into the landscape ever since.

Thanks to Powell’s dedication to discovery and his skills as a one-man renovation team, he managed not only to identify all of the previous tees and greens, hidden among the hills and foliage, but also to repair the course to a playable state. There were surprises along the way, too — like the discovery of ties to a certain course in Augusta, Ga. — and now he and the group were ready to tackle the Rhayader Golf Links once more.

Anyway, both are super reads about a pretty fun story.

"Rye: England's Golden Age Wonders"

I learned a lot about Rye from the latest Cookie Jar mini-doc. Not far from this year’s Open host, it’s high on my list of places to visit and study.

Zurich Classic: Time For Four-Ball To Go?

Should this event just be four rounds of alt shot?

— No Laying Up (@NoLayingUp) April 25, 2021

Four adults playing their ball and picking up when they’re out of the hole? That should (theoretically) go faster than four grown men playing pure stroke play.

Four-ball is a complete slog of a format with the best male golfers and needs to be eliminated where possible. But since the world’s best rarely are out of a hole and they’re slow as it is, the format produces a death march.

The Ryder Cup will not abandon four-ball matches even though they were not added until 1963. But the Zurich Classic is supposed to be entertaining. Its two best ball rounds drag on forever and produce so little tension.

But foursomes? Straight alternate shot certainly brings a different tension level. Maybe an excess of intensity given that foursomes is a match play format and was never envisioned as a form of stroke play.

As No Laying Up tweeted, four rounds of alternate shot might make the Zurich better. But four days of pure alternate shot would prove too fan-unfriendly over four days. I’d prefer to see the event go to Scotch foursomes (both players hit drives). Maybe play that version for three days and move to straight alternate shot for the final day?

Your thoughts?

"A Push to Move the Golf Course Atop a Native American ‘Stonehenge'"

Historians hoping to preserve the ancient Octagon Earthworks in Newark, Ohio, as a UNESCO World Heritage site faces a problem: the golf club that leases the property.

The New York Times’ Sarah Bahr explains how historians are looking to preserve the ancient Octagon Earthworks in Newark, Ohio and earn them an UNESCO World Heritage designation.

The problem? These earthworks have been part of Moundbuilders Country Club more more than 100 years but have not become an issue:

But now the club, which has leased the land for more than a century, is being asked to relocate so that the mounds can be properly embraced as an archaeological treasure, a move club members understand — they have preserved the mounds for generations — but one that they say will be difficult for them to undertake unless representatives of the state kick up the ante for the cost of creating a new golf venue.

The $1.7 million amount the state’s representatives have proposed under eminent domain is up from an initial offer of $800,000. But the club wants $12 million. The dispute heads to the Ohio Supreme Court on Tuesday.

It’s a terrific and balanced read, so as always I urge you to hit the link.

Also, here is 1930 Golf Illustrated story on Moundbuilders.

Q&A With Charles Coody, Part 2

The 1971 Masters winner explains how a case of polio turned him into a golfer, Ben Hogan, Dan Jenkins, his Walker Cup-bound grandson and the Abilene course he operates.

And as with part 1, I’m opening up this to all to read as a gift from my kind Quadrilateral supporters.

You can read more about The Quadrilateral here.

Q&A With 1971 Masters Champion Charles Coody

Anniversaries are great excuses to go back in time and get our attention in advance of the Masters. This year will be 50 years since Charles Coody won and I got to spend a very compelling hour listening to his stories, including the incredible tale of his caddie for the week and how Coody played those final holes just two years removed from blowing a lead with three holes to go.

We also discussed Hogan, the Champions Dinner, his grandson making the Walker Cup team, and the odd treatment he got from fellow TCU Horned Frog Dan Jenkins. But that’s in part 2.

For now, here is Part 1 of my Quadrilateral chat with Charles Coody that I’ve opened up to all subscribers. I think you’ll enjoy it.

If you want to watch the 1971 final round before reading, here it is:

R.I.P. Frank Thomas, USGA Technical Director And Golf Inventor

Mike Stachura and Mike Johnson pen a lengthy remembrance of Frank Thomas, longtime USGA technical director and inventor. While the story goes into great depth on some of the fascinating moments in his career, Thomas’s accomplishments were well summed up by the USGA’s Mike Davis:

Thomas earned the respect of both those who worked with him at the USGA and those whose products he ruled on sometimes negatively. “Frank was such an important part of the USGA and the game,” said Mike Davis, CEO of the USGA. “He was an innovator who created golf’s first graphite shaft and played an integral role in creating the Slope System for golf course rating, among many of his incredible achievements. Most importantly, he was a friend of so many in our game. He will be sorely missed.”

And this on the graphite shaft:

Prior to coming to the USGA, Thomas earned an engineering degree from Western Michigan University and was working for Shakespeare Sporting Goods. He developed the filament winding technique for graphite fibers around a mandrel to control the demanding torsional bending properties of a golf shaft.

Thomas took on several pieces of equipment during his time, including the Polara ball and Ping’s square grooves. Both got the USGA sued and Thomas was named by Ping in the Eye2 iron case.

But it was the USGA’s knockdown-drag-out fight with Ping and its founder Karsten Solheim over the “square grooves” in his Eye2 irons that was a kind of Cuban Missile Crisis event for equipment rulemaking. It led to a $300 million antitrust lawsuit in 1985 that named Thomas personally and hinged on the interpretation of the measurement of a groove, a measurement that for all intents and purposes constituted the width of a human hair. Thomas initiated a change in the rules that provided updated and practical guidelines that in essence prevented more than half the irons on the market at the time from being ruled non-conforming. But the new specifics on groove width and spacing ran into measurement challenges, and the ruling bodies eventually blinked—albeit with no money changing hands and, perhaps most importantly, the USGA’s authority to make equipment rules was upheld.

"The rich vs the very, very rich: the Wentworth golf club rebellion"

It’s been a while by Wentworth standards since we’ve heard of drama or another course renovation coming out of the English countryside.

But The Guardian’s long read is devoted to the club’s first world dramas and Chinese owner Yan Bin. Thanks to all who forwarded a fascinating read that’ll make you believe your club or condo board is perfectly sane.

The story author, Samanth Subramanian writes:

The ongoing clash between Yan Bin and his club’s members has witnessed several dramatic phases: threats, lawsuits, duplicity, negotiations, truces, even death. But the tale isn’t just about the preposterousness of the wealthy. Rather, it’s impossible to learn about all this turmoil – in a place called “the Island”, for crying out loud – and not see it as an allegory. With its groves of pine and rhododendrons, its houses named Heatherbrook or Bluebell Wood or Silver Birches, and the gentle hillocks of its club’s fairways, Wentworth Estate holds dear a vision of pastoral Englishness. But since the 1980s, Wentworth has been reshaped – just like England itself – by money: first the wealth of the homegrown 1%, which considered itself immune to the turmoil of change, but which then found itself subject to the whims of the globalised capital held by the 0.001% like Yan Bin. The saga is familiar: a small locality unsettled by the arrival of an outsider. Except that the outsider is a transnational holding corporation, and the locality is Wentworth Estate, a slice of England overtaken by the world.

Before We Leave The Concession...

Before we move on from The Concession Golf Club in Bradenton, a salute is in order for putting on a good short notice show with the World Golf Championships-Workday Championship at The Concession (just imagine, the first tee announcer repeated that doozy all day!).

While the architecture leans a little too artificial and overbuilt for my taste, the course appeared to give players plenty of fun problems to solve. It’s not clear if this is a one-off, but the February 16th press release announcing Workday as sponsor only specified this stand-in role because the normal host in Mexico City was not available (and sounds unlikely to return). The Concession also paid an unsustainable fee to help fund the purse and maybe move some real estate.

Either way, I really enjoyed the excuse to go back and read up on the 1969 Ryder Cup moment that gave the course its name, digging up some fun and forgotten anecdotes from that Cup for Quadrilateral subscribers here.

Flashback: Arnold Palmer On Larry King Live

Longtime personality and interviewer Larry King, who passed away at 87, loved sports and while he didn’t know much about golf, managed to draw plenty out of the few golfers he talked to over his career.

This chat with Arnold Palmer was played during the 15th Club with Scotty Sayers and Ed Clements today, where yours truly was also a guest. The opening story about Arnie’s Army should draw you in.

Marvel: The Lido To Be Resurrected In Rural Wisconsin

The obsession with recreating Lido Golf Club will finally come full circle near Sand Valley resort. In a world that craves Marvel’s latest Avengers remake, this might be a fitting course for the times and already under construction according to The Fried Egg’s Garrett Morrison. It’s a full CGI special based on Peter Flory’s interpretation after learning The Golf Club game. He was inspired Daniel Wexler’s Missing Links that detailed the Lido’s rise and fall best.

This is all a long winded way of saying all your favorite template holes will be meticulously recreated by Doak, from Captain America, I mean, the Punchbowl to the Channel, with cameos from all the rest of CB Macdonald’s favorites. Morrison on the novelty of the project:

Michael and Chris Keiser plan to resurrect the Lido Golf Club, the legendary Long Island course that disappeared 80 years ago. The Keiser brothers have hired Tom Doak to carry out the reconstruction of Charles Blair Macdonald’s original design.

With funding and zoning approval in place, the Wisconsin Lido is quickly becoming a reality. Pre-construction began several months ago, and in an interview with The Fried Egg, Michael Keiser—the developer behind Sand Valley and the eldest son of Bandon Dunes owner Mike Keiser—said Doak’s team has already rough-graded two famous holes from the Lido, No. 4 (“Channel”) and No. 12 (“Punchbowl”). “Two pretty good holes to start with,” Keiser quipped.

While a private course, Sand Valley resort guests may have an opportunity to play.

The par-68, 6,100-yard fun course Doak was to create for Sand Valley and called Sedge Valley, has been put on pause**.

For a full set of images Golfweek has posted pretty much the entire digital recreation of the course.

And if you are headed to Thailand any time soon, Gil Hanse’s team has already recreated the Lido, set for opening later this year.

**Updated after clarification from Kemper Sports that the course is on pause, not abandoned, which is sensational news given the potential to break barriers with a non-72/7000 course.

Today In Much Needed Distractionary Content: Cookie Jar Golf Takes Us To Musselburgh, East Lothian

As the classy purveyors at Cookie Jar Golf understate in their description for the latest video, “The game of golf owes a lot to this little stretch of East Lothian linksland. “

Longtime readers know of my affinity for Musselburgh and the entire East Lothian region for its incredible variety of links and importance in fostering the game.

This could not have landed at a better time for those seeking much needed distractionary content. Video one focuses on Musselburgh, the second is a longer piece on their fall trip to East Lothian. Enjoy!

Books! Proctor's Monarch Of The Green, Pettit's MacKenzie Reader, McStravick's Road War Papers

It’s that time of year when chances are pretty good you got a golf trinket you didn’t want and still await that amazing golf book you mumbled out loud about. Well, I don’t like your chances so might as well treat yourself.

I’ve only read one of the three but have good reason to believe the other two, while pricey, will be real keepers.

My favorite read of a summer we were deprived of links golf comes from American Stephen Proctor who meticulously researched Monarch of the Green: Young Tom Morris, Pioneer of the Game.

A former senior editor at the Baltimore Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle and Houston Chronicle, Proctor took on the difficult task of telling Young Tom Morris’ story and delivered a highly readable, immensely satisfying work of non-fiction despite the—spoiler here—dark ending. I note the non-fiction component given the previously published and also superb, Tommy’s Honour, Kevin Cook’s researched and fictionalized account of the Morris’. While the liberties were small, any created dialogue can be a killer for some (it was not for me, a credit to Cook’s respect for the subject matter).

While telling the story of Young Tom, Proctor also introduces to the origins of The Open, life in St Andrews and other areas without ever straying from telling the incredible life story. A must if you are going to Scotland or dreaming along those lines. Aren’t we all these days?

Another great Scot—when he wanted to be—is going to be chronicled in a much needed compilation of writings, photos, plans and other information. Josh Pettit’s MacKenzie Reader is at the printer and will provide an update to the prior MacKenzie coffee table book by Tom Doak. So much has been uncovered since that excellent work and I can’t wait to see what Pettit ultimately will surprise and delight us with (I’ve seen portions and also contributed a short piece on the Good Doctor’s less-than-rosy days spent in L.A.).

Ordering information is here.

Today, 30 August 2020, is Dr. Alister MacKenzie’s 150th birthday (b. 30 August 1870). In commemoration of the Good Doctor’s sesquicentennial the MacKenzie Institute is pleased to announce the new book "The MacKenzie Reader" is now available for pre-order https://t.co/MoxaNfqglH

— Dr. Alister MacKenzie (@DoctorMacKenzie) August 31, 2020

Reading about a nasty fight over a road does not exactly sound very golfy, but owning Roger McStravick’s other well-researched works and knowing his passion for St Andrews, I can’t wait to find out more about those early days that shaped the town and led to an absurd war.

Nick Rodger profiles McStravick and previews the book here in this Herald story.

It seems we’ll also learn more about how the Old Course came to be. My copy is on order and I can’t wait.

“Everybody had written that the first hole was created in the 1840s or so,” he said. “But I found the receipt from the 1830s which showed the carter was being paid to take the rubbish from St Andrews, dump it on what was the beach, level it off and that reclaimed land was how the first hole was created. The man who actually did this, John Carstairs, talks about the whole case. The first hole is effectively built on the rubbish.”

For McStravick, the Old Course and St Andrews as a whole is the gift that keeps on giving. “There are so many wonderful twists and turns in the history of St Andrews and that’s the beauty of the place,” he said.

You can order the book here.