What's the Deal with the U.S. Open?
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Pinehurst No. 2 (or, perhaps, my lawn)
So if you are flipping past the U.S. Open golf tournament on TV and are wondering why even the somewhat brownish fairways, much less the gravel and weeds rough, are looking more like my lawn after a tough summer than the impeccable treeline to treeline emerald greenness of Augusta National during the Masters, well, the reasons, strategic, aesthetic, and ethnic for that were the subject of my column in Taki’s Magazine earlier in the week.
Augusta National (or, at least, definitely not my lawn)
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Steve: A book to satisfy some of your golf obsession is “A Season In Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands” by golf writer Lorne Rubenstein. Andrew Carnegie was a long time member of Royal Dornoch, and the annual club championship, the Carnegie Cup, is a silver trophy he donated to the club. Royal Dornoch is supposed to be the 2nd oldest place where gold was first played, and the course/club dates to 1616. Its native son Donald Ross brought the style of the Dornoch links to America, where his legendary, classic courses include Pinehurst #2, Seminole, and Oak Hill.
This reminds me of when my hometown golf course that was managed by a monastery was eclipsed by a new money, ultra-green (you know: chemical, artificial, lol!) golf course. The latter’s existence, and the installed community it served, were owed to very fact that the town was the sort of place that would have, well, a golf course run by monks!
I prefer this look, myself.
I googled Darwin and golf the other day (lol), but nothing caught my attention.
When I googled he and roses, I found this.
I’m hardly an expert on 19th century portraiture, I’ve seen at least a few hundred of them in passing, but this struck me as unusual; this boy was destined to be a naturalist.
Usually the children are holding a favorite toy, or just resting their hands. Catherine is decorated with roses and what looks to be perhaps morning glories.
Charles, on the other hand, is holding not just mere flowers, but is displaying a proud, potted specimen: lachenalia.
That naturalists like Darwin and Lamarck had a love of plants starting from such young ages may seem trite and tired, but perhaps we have forgotten that learned men in the 18th century becoming obsessed with naturalism was, well, novel (BTW, the Lightner Museum in St. Augustine has a great floor dedicated to the upper class naturalism hobbyist of the 19th century).
I’m glad you talked about this in advance; I seldom watch golf, but I’m glad I tuned in yesterday and today.
My mom is a golf fanatic and gets into golf architecture some. She was telling me about some course several months ago that she considered passe; will have to see if she remembers. She and my aunt went to some professional game here in Florida a couple months ago, her first, and it made her year.
They did a nice job. A couple years ago my local Target had a line of furnishings that were “pre-weathered, ” advertised with outdoor coastal scenes of happy and beautiful New Englandish models. That is, they (the furnishings) looked like they had spent a few healthy years surviving salty and vigorous New England breezes. The look was accomplished by chemistry and marketing experts, of course, and not by actual time spent in the limited sunlight of an actual locality. This course (Pinehurst) clearly has little to do with North Carolina (I have played a lot of golf in way Southern Virginia, and there is no way that the Pinehurst course can sincerely exist within a few hundred miles of Southern Virginia) but, according to the pictures I saw on my TV, the weathered grass, the random and picturesque weeds, and the challengingly disconsolate sand are all pure North Atlantic coast quality. Of course, ninety years from now, it will all look as authentic as a fake Vermeer from the 1920s does now, but for today, it looks very good on HD.
Steve, I’d like to invite you to act as Chief Ecotect for the new ‘native-friendly’ links I’m planning at Whistling Whiffs. . . Dunes. Thingy.
Robert Trent Sailer, not bad. Think about it.
Your people can call my people, but I don’t have any. Cheers.
What’s especially weird about Pinehurst No. 2’s set-up for the U.S. Open is that they aren’t bothering to water the _fairway_ near sandy waste areas. So large parts of the fairways are tawny in color. Presumably, they don’t want to sprinkle the waste bunkers with water and have lush weeds grow densely in areas that they can’t use gang mowers upon. But, it doesn’t seem like too much of a technological challenge to put in sprinklers along the edge of the fairway that only sprinkle 180 degrees rather than 360 degrees. I have sprinklers like that on my lawn that don’t waste much water on the sidewalk.
I guess the idea is that Donald Ross during the Depression could only afford one irrigation line down the middle of the fairway, so why should golfers in 2014 paying $410 to play No. 2 expect any better?
Anyway, that’s an example of high-end golf’s emerging aesthetic of Scottish/WASP skinflintness, but whether too many Kardashian-Americans think it looks cool remains to be seen.
Okay, the functional argument for only installing one line of sprinklers down the middle of each fairway when Crenshaw and Coore renovated Pinehurst No. 2 a few years ago was that if you put in 180 degree sprinklers along the edges of the fairway so the whole fairway will be green, what if the wind happens to blow some water into the wastelands? Then the waste bunkers will sprout deep rough right off the edge of the fairways and players will lose their balls if they just miss the fairway but not if they miss it badly.
But that’s mostly an excuse for making the golf course look like Donald Ross from Dornoch is running it during the Depression because you think that miserly Scottish aesthetics look cool and repel the arrivistes.