Stories
Original writing from off the cart path,
with attention to the people and places
that matter to golf in the Deep South.
America’s next four years under Donald Trump will not be without their challenges. But our battles against those challenges must begin with hope.
The end of another disappointing year, but perhaps with a glimmer of hope on the horizon.
The PGA Tour’s threat to ban players who participate in an upstart Saudi golf tour’s events raises as many questions as it answers.
In a summer caught somewhere between a pandemic and life as usual, a return trip to Pinehurst brought the chance to live — rightly or wrongly — as though things were back to normal.
Twenty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Casey Martin’s favor — but not without brandishing the same incredulousness that Martin and other people with disabilities face for daring to participate in everyday life.
Davis Riley is ready for the PGA Tour. But for the first time in his life, being ready for the next step isn’t enough.
Rob Collins and Tad King move forward with plans to inject some life into a nine-hole Memphis muni.
Landmand is a manifesto — an epistle for architectural “maximalism,” just as Sand Hills evangelized for minimalism a generation ago.
The King Collins golf course in Jackson would be the final piece in a puzzle that has long eluded Mississippi: a statewide golf trail.
With the goal of breaking ground in September 2021, the team spearheading a 12-hole King Collins design in Jackson, Miss., has begun laying the groundwork for a fundraising push beginning in late 2020.
Even by golf’s standards, golf course architecture badly underrepresented Black people. That failure endangers the game’s viability for Black and white players alike.
As of late March, 45 percent of Americans reported that the COVID-19 pandemic had created a negative impact on their mental health. Who the hell are the other 55 percent?
Bobby Jones’ rise to golf deity began in 1916. And Bobby Jones’ 1916 began in Birmingham, at Highland Park Golf Course.
Like countless other Americans, mini-tour golfers at the mercy of their next paycheck have little choice but to keep working as long as mini-tour organizers keep flaunting the coronavirus pandemic.
Playing Titleist Pro V1 balls is a little like taking a multivitamin: I know I probably should be doing it, but sometimes I forget, and honestly I’m not sure I’d notice a difference anyway.
Imagine building 26 golf courses at the height of the golf development bubble, with nine figures in public pension money — in an effort that now loses money year after year. Welcome to the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail.
In theory, 12-hole designs should be cheaper to play, build, and maintain. But in the staid industry of golf course development, there’s been no rush to test the theory. The minds behind Sweetens Cove are ready to change that.
For Cohen Trolio, the 2019 U.S. Amateur wasn’t gratifying because of his run to the semifinals. It was gratifying because his success proved that the process he’s followed throughout his career is working.
Diligence and patience have been the hallmarks of Andy Ogletree’s career. Not for the first time, they’re starting to pay off.
The Sanderson Farms Championship slogged through decades of small purses, weak fields, and year-to-year insecurity. Those days are gone — for better or worse.
Rob Collins had one shot. At Sweetens Cove, he took it — and he bet on himself over and over again. Somehow, impossibly, it worked.
The 45-year-old golf course at Gulf State Park in Gulf Shores, Ala., was called the Refuge. Coincidentally, that’s what it’s become: an empty, open wilderness, devoid of golf and almost anything else — left, at the moment, largely to the whims of nature.
The fawning over Brooks Koepka’s “mental toughness” oversimplifies a complex skillset and underappreciates the difficulty of assembling it.
In need of a peaceful golf vacation, Woodrow Wilson headed for tiny Pass Christian, Miss., in December 1913. The idyllic seaside town did what any peaceful haven would do during a presidential vacation: freaked out.
Both literally and figuratively, Memphis was built on the Mississippi River. But the river, like this 200-year-old city atop its eastern bluffs, is an enigma.
Twenty years after hosting the Women’s U.S. Open, Old Waverly Golf Club in Mississippi is proving its claim as a worthy venue with its third USGA event.
Climate change isn’t merely coming for southern golf courses, it’s already here. But as with the rest of America, preparation lags far behind the problem.
Pine Oaks Golf Course in Ocala, Fla., is a literal relic of segregation. How should we feel about the death of a course whose original purpose was to strong-arm the victims of white supremacy into buoying it?
For 110 years, a struggling beachfront golf course on the Mississippi Gulf Coast has enjoyed its claim as the state’s only Donald Ross design. Except that it’s not.
The renowned golf course architect, who renovated a number of golden age classics, had faced up to five years.