Welcome to HalPhillips.net, where the lede headline remains the pending publication of my new book, my second futbol effort, Sibling Rivalry: How Mexico and the US Built the Most Contentious, Co-Dependent Feud in World Soccer. Look up: There’s a tab right there in the nav bar. Go check out the new companion site, which is alway freshly stocked with timely World Cup news, book related stories and excerpts, book reviews and more (This just in: January is Envy and Scorn Month across all web and social media channels!). Pressed for time? Okay, reserve your pre-order here.
Also feel free to check out the more general offerings here at halphillips.net. Or visit my Instagram feed: a pretty cool, now US v. Mexico-centric digital museum & gallery dedicated to fun, relevant, North America soccer ephemera.
Soccer folk might also wish to check out my first book, Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories & The Making of Soccer in America. Click the graphic below to learn more and purchase this best-selling 2022 release via print, eBook or audio editions (the latter is read by a charming, disembodied A.I. simulacrum of Rebecca Lowe). Clickers below (and above) will also find the book’s companion site, replete with published, GZ-centric soccer features, commentary and podcasts.
Suffice to say, all these channels represent a must-visit for soccer news and views ahead of the 2026 World Cup, an event our two rivals will co-host. With Canada. Which is coached by an American now. So it’s all very much on brand.
Driving home from a dreamy golf excursion, author Hal Phillips noticed wispy grasses glistening alongside a newly widened stretch of a busy interstate. Their presence raised questions about the agronomics of incorporating a linksy feature into inland settings.
[Ed. This essay was first published in the November 2026 print edition of Golf Course Industry magazine. It’s posted in its entirety here. And yes: Fescue Program would make a great band name.]
Prior to the smartphone era, when folks read mainly in analog fashion, a great many of us kept a Maine Atlas and Gazetteer in the glove compartment of our cars, or the privy. Published by Yarmouth-based mapmaker DeLorme, this oversized, soft-cover booklet neatly divided this Great State of ours into 96 pages, or rectangular quadrants, each of which depicted a specific 16-by-11-inch map in remarkable detail and scale.
Most of you know this, of course. We studied The Gazetteer so as to orienteer around the state, to better familiarize ourselves with topographies and place names, in addition to those potential routes that might traverse and connect them. The conditional nature of these journeys is critical to Maine’s mythos. Our unofficial state motto, offered to folks from away seeking directions, spells this out pretty clearly: You can’t get there from hee-yah.
GPS titan Garmin purchased DeLorme back in 2016, along with Eartha, the massive, slowly rotating globe that still occupies three full stories inside the former company headquarters. GPS-enabled mapping applications have reduced the need for physical maps of all kinds. However, the need to better know and understand this place we call Maine remains undiminished.
Case in point: The many odd-ball municipal naming conventions to be found here. Until 1820, Maine was part of Massachusetts, where British place names remain commonplace. This makes sense: Winchester and Boston and Middlesex were the very towns, cities, counties and regions from whence a great many 17th and 18th century settlers hailed. I’m a Masshole born, bred and proud — the Oxford English Dictionary added the word “Masshole” in 2015 (How do you like them apples!?). And so, I endorse this naming convention as quite sensible.
Maine has its share of similarly UK-derived place designations among its 23 cities, 430 towns, and 30 plantations. Yet the naming conventions here are more varied and, well, idiosyncratic. Way more. It’s possible, for example, that the founders of Lebanon, Norway, Poland, Mexico, Sweden, Smyrna, Stockholm, Moscow, Carthage, Monticello, Bremen, Rome, Athens, Troy, Denmark, Peru, Palermo, Dresden, Paris, West Paris and South Paris all hailed from these original locations. But I doubt it.
There would appear to be little rhyme or reason to this geographic exotica. Rather, each place was so named for its own particular reason, on account of its own eccentric Creation story. The western Oxford County town of Peru (pop. 1,509), for example, was incorporated in 1821, in solidarity with the South Americans who had just declared their independence from Imperial Spain. It had first been organized in 1812 as Plantation Number 1 — a plantation being a rudimentary form of municipal self-government that, by Maine statute, cannot pass or enforce its own local ordinances. Thirty such townships still operate this way, mainly deep in the state’s interior, though the islands of Matinicus and Monhegan also function today as plantations.
Prior to its incorporation, Peru was also known as Thompsontown, in honor of General Samuel Thompson, the former Brunswick tavern keeper and one of Maine’s most prominent Revolutionary War figures. In May of 1775, shortly after the battles of Lexington and Concord, he led 600 militia in capturing and expelling the HMS Canceaux from Portland Harbor, then known as Falmouth Harbor. The Canceaux would, ahem, return in October 1775 and burn most of Falmouth to the ground.
It’s often argued that the 1975 World Series — contested 50 years ago this month — ranks among the finest in baseball history. In terms of legendary personalities and the competitive iconography that framed them, Game 6 featured enough fairy-tale moments all on its own: a not-yet-befouled Pete Rose bellyflopping into third then popping up to jawbone with his opposite number, Rico Petrocelli; rookie golden boy Fred Lynn propped limp and lifeless against the center-field wall after failing to flag down Ken Griffey’s RBI triple in the 3rd; Sparky Anderson on the top step of the dugout, ready to give Rawley Eastwick his trademark hook, only to let him face Bernie Carbo in the 8th; Johnny Bench short-hopping George Foster’s throw from left-field foul territory to cut down Denny Doyle at the plate, sending the game to extra innings where, of course, Carlton Fisk waved his game-winning homer just fair enough to hit the foul pole.
Taken together, those 12 innings form a universe unto itself, an heroic parade of Hall of Fame and otherwise iconic players doing impossibly dramatic things under extraordinary circumstances.
As a result, however, Game 6 also tends to overshadow what made this 7-game encounter an all-timer. This past summer I happened upon a passing reference to Luis Tiant’s epic 163-pitch, complete game performance in Game 4. I grew up in Boston and turned 11 the month before this World Series took place. I watched every second of Game 4. To my shame, apart from El Tiante running the bases in his little blue jacket, I remembered very few specifics.
Friend, let me remind you that for all its faults, the 21st century is a remarkable thing: All seven installments of this Fall Classic are available via YouTube — in their entirety, without commercials — so I watched Game 4 on my iPhone over the course of several hours in July. This sublime experience led to web-aided consumption of Games 2 and 3, in that order, as these, I reasoned, were the chapters in this epic saga that I remembered least of all.
I undertook this throwback-baseball immersion exercise at the same time I was reading Chuck Klosterman’s fine non-fiction book, “The Nineties,” wherein he posits that October 1975 was also a critical tipping point — those final cultural moments where baseball and its fans could claim “the sport held a unique place in U.S. life and would always be recognized as the national pastime.” By 1990, he points out, twice as many people watched NFL football.
Four years later, with release of his mini-series Baseball, Ken Burns presented the game as a prism through which we might better understand the American experience. A soulful, often convincing take but an excuse for the historian to treat the game like a relic, an historical phenomenon that did what it did but had since relinquished much of its civilizational juice.
So much of the American social contract came undone during the Seventies, why should baseball have been exempt? If retroactive understanding recasts the 1975 Fall Classic as a swan song, so be it. However, allowing such a raft of perfectly amazing memories to fall through the cracks unheeded and under-absorbed — when they’re all just sitting there on some Google server, waiting to be enjoyed all over again — is foolish. What follows is a YouTube-enabled report on this 3-game series within a Series, an event I first consumed as pre-teen, staying up way past my bedtime, exulting and sobbing by turn in a suburban living room exactly 13 miles southwest of Fenway Park.
•••
Game 4, Riverfront Stadium, Oct. 15, 1975
El Tiante was already a Boston legend before he took the mound in Game 4, of coursre. After doing his best to thwart Sox hopes in 1967, for Cleveland (one of four clubs with legitimate pennant hopes that final weekend of the season), he’d come over in 1971 and immediately claimed our hearts. No one knew how old this amiable, rather elfin Cuban really was; I suppose we still don’t know. He was a bit dumpy and could come off as clownish though a lot of that public persona was surely down to his idiosyncratic grasp of English. But he won — 18 times in 1975, despite back issues — and he did so with singular style. After his virtuoso performance in Game 4, his place in the Boston Sports Pantheon was utterly secure.
The Reds had jumped out to a 2-0 lead, but starter Fred Norman surrendered 5 in the 4th and that’s all Tiant would need, throwing ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-THREE pitches to level the Series and nail down another complete-game victory, 5-4.
Yet that’s mere box-score fodder. Tiant at his best had to be observed to be fully appreciated, and he proved even more indomitable 50 years on, despite my diminutive screen. While the man had shut out the Reds in Game 1 at Fenway four days earlier, familiarity helped the National League champions not a whit. Tiant bullied and confounded them by turn — nearly picking the imperious Joe Morgan off first in the 7th, twice running the bases, scoring what proved to be the winning run, and looking utterly gnomish the entire time.
In May of 2024, I was invited to start writing a monthly column for the daily newspaper serving our beloved twin cities of Lewiston and Auburn. Read the latest installment here. Be warned: Content at SunJournal.com resides behind a paywall. I would encourage readers, especially those here in Maine, to suck it up and subscribe. For one affordable price, folks get all the news from Greater L/A, the state’s second largest metro area; everything from sister paper, the Portland Press-Herald; plus access to content at the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal. All of these local journalism operations are now owned and operated by the Maine Trust for Local News. While I strongly encourage you to support them with your money and eyeballs, the paywall does make it difficult to promote the product to non-subscribers. So I’ll be sharing the odd column here.
By Hal Phillips It’s weird to learn via media report that specific, intimate aspects of one’s own cultural history are making “comebacks”. Maybe 15-20 years ago, a certain American demographic started collecting and playing vinyl records again, for example. Out of nowhere this became trendy. Today, folks of all ages are still giddily sourcing records from Discogs and investing in turntables, after a 20-year respite.
My Millennial son and daughter-in-law maintain a modest record collection today. Yet they have gathered these vinyl relics more or less at random, in small batches, from second-hand shops. They don’t even bother to seek out records from artists they like. Their enjoyment of this seemingly kitchy, analog activity is almost entirely ironic, like dressing as a steam punk, or churning butter.
I get it. Millennials do love their irony. But they are divorced entirely from the activities and emotions that once made vinyl-collection and record-playing irresistable.
Just last month, and in the same vein, I learned that cassette tapes are back in vogue after three decades away. I am not technically a part of this revival. I maintain two means of playing cassettes, and have for some time, because my mixed-tape collection — dating back to my own golden age of mixed tapes (1986-92) — has remained sweetly nostalgic to me. The idea of buying new tapes, or making them, feels rather anachronist, because the technical and interpersonal conditions that prevailed during this golden age no longer exist.
In short, one must have achieved a certain age — “old as dirt” is the technical term, I believe — in order to remember cassette tapes and what made them so special. But that doesn’t mean we should consign their fascinating 20th century narrative to the dustbin of history.
Until the late 1970s, there was no practical way for everyday folks to record music from vinyl — or off the only other practical music source then available, the radio. Cassette tapes changed all of that. The advance proved both technological and cultural: A friend who owned Jackson Browne’s album “Late for the Sky,” for instance, could just tape the whole thing for you. This saved money. Cassettes also stored more efficiently, in something as small as a shoe box. Critically, one could also play them in your car, if said vehicle featured a tape deck. This was huge.
Yet cassettes also transformed any schmuck into a legit DJ. Throughout the 1970s, radio was the only place where music consumers could experience a stream of individual cuts off multiple albums, from multiple artists. We take this phenomenon for granted today, thanks to Spotify, iTunes, Pandora and YouTube. Commercial radio originated this experience, however — with interruptions from advertisers. Our record players gave us commercial-free choice, but only one immutable album at a time.
Cassette tapes cannily merged these multiple forms of music consumption. They allowed us to create those playlists for ourselves, from our own record collections. They enabled playlists using other folks’ collections, from songs highjacked off the radio, even from other tapes (if a stereo had two tape decks). This multi-valent ability, acquired during the first Reagan Administration, proved thoroughly mind-blowing and futuristic. Then Sony introduced the Walkman and we all felt like cinematic characters from Blade Runner.
Observing the proliferation of dope stores here in my former mill town is, by now, old hat. They’re everywhere across the Great State of Maine and their attendant foot traffic has even begun to attract pleasantly parasitic commerce, like the Casa Del Taco truck that took up residence beside one shop, the Cure Cannabis Co., before mysteriously disappearing three weeks later.
I don’t frequent these marijuana dispensaries (though I would pay to see the staff at Cure dressed up like Robert Smith). I know a dozen folks who’ve been growing their own for decades. When Maine legalized the skunk in 2009, when municipalities decriminalized possession in 2013, I got separate calls from friends familiar with my personal habits. You celebrating? they asked. No sir, I told them. My lifestyle hasn’t changed one iota.
But psilocybin? That’s another matter. After consuming my fair share of mushrooms during the 1980s, I didn’t partake for long stretches of my subsequent adulthood. There were a few one-off experiences during The Aughts, when I consumed the same 3 to 3.5 grams that folks routinely scarfed during the second Reagan administration. But I mainly left them alone — because a standard 20th-century dose of 3.5 grams could mean a 7- to 9-hour commitment. Easy to carve out, as a college student, over a weekend. Not so much when one is working 9 to 5 with a wife and small kids.
However, I’m here to report that shrooms are back, in a very different but curiously familiar way, particularly among my Gen X and late-stage Boomer cohort. Psilocybin products remain technically illegal in Maine, for now. But not in California or several other states… Ain’t federalism and the U.S. Postal Service grand?
The difference 40 years can make has proved both fascinating and nuanced. Four or five years ago, a buddy of mine revealed that he’d been procuring his mushrooms in a unique form: from a vendor who, when he wasn’t painting houses, gathered the particulate, or shake, from the bottom of a 1-gallon plastic storage bags. He’d fill and sell cute-little 1-gram capsules that, I discovered, represented the perfect microdose. Perfect for me anyway.
Nothing psychedelic, mind you. As with THC and alcohol, everyone processes these chemical compounds differently. I never got an acid-style trip out of psilocybin shrooms, no matter how many grams I gobbled. These 1-gram shake capsules produced a delightfully toned-down buzz that lasted 2-3 hours and didn’t continually lobby my brain for more, more, more. You know, like other white, powdery drugs I associate with the 1980s.
For example, I caught Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew’s spectacular “Remain in Light” review, early in August. They went on around 9 p.m. After parking the car and popping a gummy, I remained plenty wide awake and ready to have fun till midnight. A most pleasant stimulant. Plenty sober enough to drive home. No trouble sleeping afterward.
Today, of course, gummies are the in-vogue medium for shrooms and cannabinoid THC, and there exists an entire universe of delivery media: chocolate, root beer, oils and tinctures, salves and creams. I frankly prefer to smoke the kind bud: Its old-school results remain immediate and predictable, for me. Yet that’s precisely the noteworthy thing about these manufactured products: By paying attention to gram dosage, one can monitor and enable only the buzz one desires — no more, no less. Brands differ, but my older, wiser friends and I have found consistency within most any manufacturer’s product line.
That unknown variability had always annoyed me when it came to homemade hash brownies, or pot cookies: How strong are these? “Uh. I dunno, dude.” Not a science.
The corporatization of dope has its drawbacks, as well, but it has delivered to the marketplace consistent expectations and results on the buzz front. It’s no mistake that beer menus today routinely include the percentage of alcohol for each pint on offer. The legalization of weed and other products has influenced an entire industry in this way.
Critically, the active ingredient in shroom gummies is stronger and calibrated differently compared to the analog method. According to the National Institutes of Health, “a 25 mg psilocybin fixed dose is approximately 2.5 grams of dried Psilocybe cubensis mushroom. However, it is important to note, there is intra- and inter-species variability of psilocybin content.”
I’m intrigued by the way all these particulars, including our understandings of dosage, have evolved in the course and context of my own life. Back in 1985, the fall of my senior year in college, I went to visit a friend at UMass. A buddy of his had a bunch of mushrooms and asked me to move some for him, back at my own institute of higher learning. This I proceeded to do, in addition to partaking myself, chaperoning other folks on maiden voyages, and eventually microdosing — though that terminology had not yet been coined. Still, I’d pop a cap before a party. Another time, I remember downing a fat stem before the annual Nebraska-Oklahoma football game, the day after Thanksgiving. Nothing like a mild shroom buzz to watch nimble quarterbacks prosecute the triple-option wishbone.
While arguably ahead of their time, these casual microdoses eventually gave me pause. The worry: I was beginning to normalize the shrooms by microdosing them, however responsibly I may have been doing so. To my 21-year-old mind it felt immature, perhaps reckless, maybe even a slippery slope. When the supply was depleted, I didn’t seek out more. For decades, I considered shrooming only on special occasions, at the suggestion of others. A couple times I took the plunge but most of the time I demurred.
Now, on the verge of 60, all these folks around me are microdosing pretty much exactly as I had my senior year in college! What had seemed reckless back then is now prosecuted with great intention and precision, by demonstrably reasonable old people. And Talking Heads are back on tour in support of an album released in 1980. Amazing.
I’m not the least bit surprised the Maine Legislature approved last September a commission to study the possibility of legalizing psilocybin; or that elsewhere shrooms are now being prescribed to people who struggle with depression and PTSD. Everyone’s different, and even the big doses never made the walls breathe or the trees talk — not to me. What they can do, for a time, regardless of dosage, is take one completely outside of one’s self, to a place where one might examine his/her own experiences in completely new ways.
I remember one young man in particular whom I chaperoned on his first psilocybin experience, back in the day. He was sitting on the tailgate of a gigantic ‘70s-era station wagon, calm and contemplative, but he’d clearly been laughing with great vigor. One could see it in his eyes. “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever done,” he told me, without any trace of irony, anxiety or pride. “I’m never doing it again.”
With the experience of decades, I wish I could have responded, Hey, I get it. Next time — if there is a next time — try taking one third as much.
AUGUSTA, Ga. — Is it me, or did the 2024 Masters Tournament concluded last month exude a subtle-but-fascinating Antipodean vibe? I’m not talking about the field itself (though I do think ESPN and CBS could have done with an Aussie Cam, to track the progress of Mssrs. Davis and Smith), but rather the course itself. I came away convinced that the 2024 presentation at Augusta National Golf Club has subtly moved closer to the Sand Belt stylings of Royal Melbourne, as opposed to the iconic American parkland for which ANGC has for many decades served as standard-bearer.
The Good Doctor, Alister MacKenzie, laid out all 18 holes at ANGC (with Robert Tyre Jones) and all 36 at RMGC (with Alex Russell) some 90 years ago. In Georgia, architect George Cobb subsequently authored several changes during the 1950s and ’60s. Yet most golf fans recognize that, between major championships, this golf course is routinely renovated and tweaked. Last week’s telecast revealed a few new cupping areas, enabled by reworked contours on and around the putting surfaces. A few loblolly pines have also gone missing, some by design, some due to old age, and some out of an abundance of caution, due to the massive tree limb that fell to earth during last year’s tournament.
Augusta National rarely comments on any of these adjustments, as we’ve come to expect. What’s more, its broadcaster partners scrupulously (some would say obsequiously) follow the club’s lead in this regard. As do the course design and construction professionals who carry out this annual off-season adjustment work.
Still, I noticed a few things that felt new, and all of them struck me as rather Australian.
First, the bunker edges at Augusta National are looking more and more like something we’d see at Royal Melbourne, Kingston Heath or Metropolitan. I’m not sure when this edging practice actually started, in Augusta, but this year I noticed for the first time just how much of the soil profile is visible at the top of the greenside bunkers especially. Either way, this is very much a stylistic flourish associated with the top courses in Australia, especially those in the famed Sand Belt region south of Melbourne.
The modifier design nerds like to deploy when describing this style of bunker edge is “sharp”. The definition of said edge is indeed very neat and clean, and balls don’t trickle down a collar or embankent into these bunkers: They drop in, directly. To be clear, I’m not about to claim that this style was instituted course-wide this past winter. More likely, it’s been introduced already, perhaps in a few spots, and expanded to include most every green complex, save 14, where no bunkers exist.
Aussie/Sand Belt bunkers and those at Augusta National have long shared two more qualities: steep faces and flat bottoms. This shared characteristic typically means a ball hits the face, doesn’t embed, and rolls back down to a fairly level bunker floor. This architectural choice has a competitive aspect (anything buried in the face would result in a terrifically difficult recovery shot) and an ease-of-maintenance aspect. It also looks smart.
We can agree Augusta National’s bunkers have presented and played this way for years. It seems to me the club has finally added this soil-forward edging presentation to fully complement the effect.
Twelve years ago when I moved to Maine from Greater Boston I traded an apartment in a relativly leafy suburb for one in the heart of downtown Portland, an act which obliged me and my two cats, Scott and Zelda, to become urbanites. This, as I explained to Scott at the time, was admittedly counterintuitive. Not many Massholes go north to seclude themselves from the great outdoors. But I did assure him, as he was the more adventurous of the two litter mates, that someday he’d be an outdoor cat once more.
Five years later, having taken on a wife, child, dog and sole proprietorship, I delivered on that promise. We moved to rural New Gloucester and Scott, once an indoor cat against his will, was free again to roam the countryside as he pleased. Zelda did too, of course, but she’s always been more of a homebody. The former Ms. Sayre never experienced the thrill of the wild that her furry companion did. For months after our arrival in The NG, Scott would prance through the sliding door into the house and pause to look up at me, his whiskered face beaming with squinty-eyed satisfaction. “This is AWEsome,” he clearly communicated to me. “You’re a man of your word.”
Scott died Friday morning, so this particular memory and scores of others are rushing over me just now. He’d been sick: a horrible earache and weight loss associated with what the vet presumed to be kidney failure, a common and ultimately fatal issue for 15-year-old cats like Scott. I hadn’t seen him all of Thursday — a problem because he needed his anti-biotic pill. A couple weeks earlier, during an initial round of similar treatments, he had disappeared for 48 hours and I thought, with great sadness, that he might have taken off for good rather than endure the indignity of another forced pill-popping. But I did find him; he was under the bed in our guest room, resting amid the sagging, tattered under-linings of the box-spring.
That’s where Silas found him Friday morning. I reached in to give him a soothing pat before the tricky matter of extrication, but his fur was oddly cool to the touch.
•••
I am a cat person. Dogs I’ve learned to appreciate but I shall always prefer a cat’s snuggability, cleanliness, independence and innate poise. They would appear possess a self-respect that lends more meaning to their affection. Dogs are great, but they appear to be pre-programmed to slobber love on humans regardless of who the humans are, or how they treat dogs, because it’s implicit that dogs will starve without human care. They are truly dependent whereas cats, if they feel mistreated, will withdraw their affections and treat you with the appropriate wariness, or they’ll simply run off and take their chances with some other human, dining on voles they kill and consume in the meantime.
By the same token, when a well-treated cat lets down its defenses and makes itself vulnerable to your love, it really means something. I’m not one to anthropomorphize unduly, but human-feline relationships feel, to me, more interpersonally genuine.
This story in The New York Times, published mid-February 2024, struck a chord. Not because I’m a golfer, but because I’ve written quite a lot about abandoned golf courses, the re-wilding of courses, even the resuscitation of courses gone fallow. As long ago as 1994, the NYT has even seen fit to quote me on the subject of how many golf courses is enough, and how many legitimately eco-friendly credentials an operative golf course can claim.
This recent Times piece proved a solid piece of reporting, and the comments section was chock full of even more examples of layouts that have been returned, in full and in part, to open space. In each case, everyone appreciated the fact that here was a gorgeous piece land where the public could now hike, walk their dogs, bird-watch, etc.
In a golf economy where 150 courses were shuttered annually — a culling the U.S. golf market endured every year from 2008 to 2021 — what to do with former course properties proved a fairly pressing issue. But that market correction appears got have stabilized. There were approximately 90 golf course closures in the U.S. last year (as measured in 18-hole equivalents), according to the National Golf Foundation. There were also more new course openings in 2023 than at any time since 2010: 24 18-HEQ.
For a variety of reasons, the golf establishment will always be expected argue for just how sustainable golf courses should be, as golf courses, and how many of them (and what sort of facilities) we really need, full stop. But it’s important to think about these issues in two different ways:
First, the issue actually hinges in critical respects on access. The real problem, in America, is that private clubs here are so very private. The idea that non-members in a particular community might use a private golf course property as open space is pretty much anathema. Whereas, in the U.K. and Australia, and across Europe, it’s common place. There, even the most private clubs often double as places where non-members can play golf — but also walk their dogs, cross-country ski, even hike. More important, this ethos trickles down to all courses, where golfers treat the property as a playground, while an even larger population of non-golfing locals treat them as quasi-public spaces.
We don’t do that here in the United States. Our private clubs are very exclusive in comparison — and this attitude trickles down, too. One doesn’t see walking paths for non golfers (and their dogs) even at public and municipal courses in the U.S. Why not? This is something the golf course industry can and should work to address. Why not build community walking and biking trails through public courses, which account for some 90 percent of the golf course facilities in America? Read all those comments on the Feb. 2024 NYT story above: Folks just want to walk these properties with their dogs, maybe hike a bit, or ride their bikes on these decommissioned course properties. If this is what the community seeks, and these activities can be enjoyed inside and beside operative golf courses, why not be a better neighbor? Who knows, you might sell more food & drink in your grille room, or find new customers for your banquet facility.
Second, it’s critical that golfers and non-golfer alike recognize that courses offer a level of flexibility that other development categories do not. As February’s NYT story illustrates, even golf courses that viably served a golf population for decades can pivot to other public services quite quickly and easily. I’m not sure that I agree with the subhead above: that most courses are in some way “paved over”. Many of the golf courses closed down the last 20 years were decommissioned to make room for housing, something desperately needed in this country. If that’s what we mean by “paving,” that’s another outcome I can live with. Yet here again, not all developments allow for such repurposing, not with such relative ease.
[Ed. This piece appeared 25 years ago in a magazine called TravelGolf Maine founded by a fellow named Park Morrison. It didn’t last long (1998-2001) and, sadly, Park passed away last year. I’m including the story here because surely it never made it online — and because it appeared, in print, under a favorite pen name of mine. Another serendipitous fact: When I traveled to Lovell, Maine to “research” the story, the course ranger, lounging in a cart parked by the first tee at Lake Kezar CC, was none other than Bill Bissett, retired athletic director at Hudson (Mass.) High, one of the schools covered by The Hudson Daily Sun, where I served sports editor from 1989-90.]
By Henry Choi
Opinions differ when it comes to appraising so-called schizo layouts, those courses where one nine barely resembles the other. In northern New England — where scads of nines were laid out in the 1920s and ‘30s, only to be expanded many decades later by different architects — the issue is more salient than perhaps anywhere in America. Because there are just so many of them, the question remains: Does one decry the stylistic divergence or applaud the diversity?
Two courses in the border regions of Maine and New Hampshire inform the debate. North Conway Country Club and Lake Kezar CC are separated by 20 miles. And yet, the nines on each course feel even further apart, light years in fact, when it comes to style, terrain and vintage. That both tracks remains such good fun tips our fledgling debate toward applause.
This part of New England is remote but hardly underdeveloped. The resort nature of North Conway, N.H., cannot be lost on first-time visitors to its eponymous, semi-private country club, where the 1st tee is set back just 50 yards from a bustling main drag replete with myriad factory outlets, hotels and restaurants. Indeed, the clubhouse at NCCC sits directly beside the Conway Scenic Railway Station, a massive, red-roofed, Victorian-era structure painted a vivid shade of yellow.
It’s quite a sight, but nothing like the vista next door. The 1st at NCCC (the image above) is one of the great opening holes in all of New England, a 418-yard par-4 with long views of Cathedral Rock in the distance and, of more pressing concern, O.B. all along the left side. It takes some real concentration to block it all out and belt one — right over the train tracks! — to a fairway 70 feet (!) below.
Don’t get the wrong idea, however. The remaining golf at North Conway CC isn’t about dramatic elevation changes. At all. After this inaugural plunge, the course plays entirely in the subtly contoured flood plain of the Saco River. It’s scenic — with the river running through it and White Mountains surrounding it — but it’s relatively flat and eminently walkable.
The opening nine here dates to 1928, when Ralph Barton, a protégé of Seth Raynor, reworked a older, rudimentary loop. The charm of these opening holes lies in the subtleties of their small, steeply pitched greens guarded closely by deep bunkers. The 4th is a wonderful short hole, a make-or-break 140-yard pitch to a putting surface that falls away steeply on all sides. Every so often the land here does move with surprising drama. The 354-yard 5th plays right along the river; the back tee calls for a drive across a bend in the Saco to a swaled landing area, which is then crossed by a stream at 240 yards. The green looks harmless enough, until you look over the back side and see the ground fall away steeply some 20 feet.
The second nine at North Conway arrived much later, in the mid-1960s, courtesy of New Hamster-based architect Phil Wogan, and no — the two loops do not go together stylistically. The front side putting surfaces are set mostly at grade, while the bulk of Wogan’s greens are raised up in mid-century mode made fashionable by Robert Trent Jones, Sr. Yet the backside putting surfaces are quite cool and challenging in their own right, especially the saddle job at the par-3 13th — and the epic volcano that sits at the business end of the sublime-but-potentially-cruel, 434-yard, par-4 14th.
