Barclays, Tiger and Liberty National

[John Kirk]

Michael Blake,

Great report from the inside.  Thanks a lot.

[Bruce Katona]

I watched the last 4-5 holes on HDTV, where you can see some of the landform and movement.  The course showed very nicely on a beautiful sunny August afternoon.

[Bill_McBride]

Someone I know who is playing this week at LN thinks the golf course is terrible.

That said, I look forward to playing it.

Ryan,

It's not my cup of tea either.

I got the impression that there was an effort to mix and match, with splashes of Shadow Creek strewn over the entire site.

I don't understand all of the "hyping" by the announcers when it comes to the quality of the holes and the golf course in general.

Is it true the construction cost was $250M? 

[Bill_McBride]

I have not played there yet, but did walk around the course sometime before seeding.  I find it hard to believe that the owners were so clueless as to fail to take some of the sand from the harbor dredging.  They easily could have recouped a good 50-70 milliion just like Bayonne.
   As for the club doing well to satisfy the membership--if so, then why are they so hurting for members that they had to fire the executive chef, general manager, and golf professional before the start of this season?   I have yet to meet anyone around metro-NY who has anything positive to say about the course.  Because sand was required for the capping of the site, the course being located on the water; and unreal opportunity for a true links course was lost.  Fortunately, a mile or two down the street, Bayonne got the feel right on a tight piece of property.

I'm confused, wouldn't a total sand cap with good maintenance practice be most likely to produce a links-type experience?

[Steve Lapper]

Bill:

 A) Yes, the total cost of construction was at least $250MM and after acquisition costs, substantially higher.

 B) Not if that total sand cap was not as well-compacted, planted with bentgrass, built around many, many artificial ponds, and over-watered regularly.

Doug:

  A) Phil, as much as I otherwise admire him, is being a pure shill here. He's been given a membership by the Fireman family (owners) and has accordingly been vociferous in his praise. This praise fails my smell test all day.

  B) LN will likely continue their pursuit of publicity and notice by "buying" up the very much for-sale PGA Tour organization and CBS. Whether it's future Barclays-sponsored events (after WCC decides whether to renew after 2013) or something else (get ready for the Reebok Challenge), they think all press is good press and the PGA will likely accommodate their desires in for the NYC Metro area.


John Lovito,

   Welcome back big guy!!! Long time no hear from. Are you back on this side of the pond yet? Have you seen your beloved PCC recently...it looks magnificent and is playing flawless!! Hooray!

All,

  I do not want to go into farther detail, but this club and course was built to sell RE that will likely never come further out of the ground and as such, will probably prove to be the ultimate poster-child for the now-broken business model of elite golf clubs built to sell elite RE. Like some other less publicity-driven clubs nearby, they suffer from silly pricing and underestimation of the intelligence of the NY-NJ private golf market. I am going to remain considerably restrained, and go little further, but can't resist once again reiterating just how nauseating the spin and bullshit foisted upon us by the club, CBS and the PGA Tour was. Never before, has Lady Liberty (a sturdy and regularly-viewed neighbor for me) looked so throughly commercialized and as such, trivialized. Rant over....have a nice week.

[Dan Herrmann]

Boy - I hated what I saw on TV - it looked as bad as Rich Harvest Farms.  But at least LN didn't have fake plastic swans in the pond like RHF has.

You know - after seeing LN and RHF, I think Donald Trump deserves to bump up a few notches on the ladder.  Sure, the waterfalls are nuts, but he does have Bedminster.

[Steve Lang]

  Dan,..  swans are a natural enemy of canadian geese and those plastic ones are used to keep the the geese out of the  area

[Steve Lapper]

Boy - I hated what I saw on TV - it looked as bad as Rich Harvest Farms.  But at least LN didn't have fake plastic swans in the pond like RHF has.

You know - after seeing LN and RHF, I think Donald Trump deserves to bump up a few notches on the ladder.  Sure, the waterfalls are nuts, but he does have Bedminster.

Dan,

 Yup....Not a single voice out-there had a complaint about the Bedminster venue that recently hosted the USGA Juniors.

[Dan Herrmann]

Thank the golf gods they're back at a real golf course, Ridgewood, next year.

[Richard Choi]

I played The Golf Club at Newcastle Coal Creek Course today and the similarity between it and Liberty National was pretty interesting. They are very very similar courses. They both have relatively narrow straight fairway with rolling ridges that go across the fairway.
They both also have similar shape bunkers guarding fairways and greens. Overall greens shape seemed pretty much the same as well.

The only difference was that LN had more green contours and had more shave areas around the green.

Which is not surprising since they both are done by the same designer, but it also means that LN seems very underwhelming to me, at least from the looks of it on TV.

[Peter_Collins]

Someone I know who is playing this week at LN thinks the golf course is terrible.

That said, I look forward to playing it.

Water is wet, bears poop in the woods, and tour players complain about difficult courses.   

I've never playerd LN or Bayonne, but after watching the tournament I'm  baffled by the criticism of LN.   It looked like a pretty straight forward course well routed to make good use of the wind as a strategic element.   For a group that champions minimalist golf course design the argument that the course is underwhelming seems odd.   Did you want more internal mounding, more manufactured elevation changes?

[Gib_Papazian]

Gentlemen,

I must be missing something. Judging by his upbraiding of LN, Shackelford could obviously see something in his Malibu bungalow that I could not seated next to my father in front of a new high-def flat screen.

The putting surfaces - though severe - looked wonderfully interesting. By extension, I thought the mow-outs and chipping areas introduced all sorts of challenging possibilities and cannot grasp why everyone is piling onto something so totally different than the mind-numbing sameness inflicted on the golf television viewing audience.

I'll go one step farther. Looking at the rolls, folds and contours of the greens, I commented that they looked similar to the small but complex putting surfaces at C&C's Chechessee Creek in South Carolina. If those greens had been designed by Mackenzie, everyone would be fawning over the daring collage of seemingly contradictory movements.

But because a bunch of sniveling Tour Prophylactics had a hard time reading them (read: ran into something that interrupts their parade of 3's and 4's), suddenly everybody wants to horsewhip Tom Kite and Bob Cupp. One can only imagine what Tiger and rest of the circus clowns would do if confronted by #1 at NGLA.

The golf course is not perfect, but I thoroughly enjoyed watching the event and feel that anytime a former garbage dump can be turned into something that rivets my attention on television, that is a good thing. Normally, I would rather pound nails into my sack than watch a regular tour event, but look at the star power atop the leader board. Anybody here not interested in seeing a playoff with Tiger, Ernie, Stricker and Paddy?

We were one putt away, which is all you can ask for. If the golf course is so capricious, why did the cream rise to the top? Tour guys generally hate Pete Dye and Mike Stranz courses, yet everyone with taste loves them.

It looks to me like the scorecard and pencil players are offended at the unusual nature of the golf course and would rather snooze through the "Who Gives A Sh*t Open in New Orleans presented by a company named after a city in Switzerland.



             

[George Pazin]

It looked like some of the greenside bunkers actually collected shots that hit the greens, but not necessarily in the right place, which is normally a good thing, I'd say.

Didn't notice much else, one way or the other.

I'll second Steve's annoyance over the trivializing of Lady Liberty, but that's more of an announcer issue than anything else. Did anyone on the telecast ever mention that Nantz is reportedly a member?

I always thought it would be neat to take one of the old abandoned steel mills around here and do a golf course reclamation thing.

[Peter_Collins]

Did anyone on the telecast ever mention that Nantz is reportedly a member?

According to ghin.com, Nantz maintains a handicap at two clubs in New York.  While hardly irrefutable evidence, it would seem odd to me that he would maintain a handicap at two clubs but not a third. 

[Mike Hendren]

Gyro, you remain an absolute gem.

Kindest regards,

Mike