Courses & Travel Archives - Hal Phillips

Late-Nineties Flashback: The Great Maine Golf Development Binge

Hal Phillips — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 14:37:43 +0000

[Ed. This piece from 1998 was assigned and purchased by, but to my knowledge never appeared in, Downeast Magazine. At that time, the U.S. was opening 400 new golf facilities every year. Maine golf development was equally madcap. When I moved to New Gloucester that same year, only Fairlawn GC and Poland Spring existed nearby. […]

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Iceland Travel: Where the Fun is Truly a Matter of Degree

Hal Phillips — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 21:40:11 +0000

While rounding a mountainous spit of land north of Husavik, my Iceland travel companions and I reckoned we’d better stop the car and get a picture. We’re honestly not the selfie-taking types, but 66.201 degrees was as far north as any of us had ever traveled before — or were likely to travel again. So we smiled […]

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Bikes, Beer, Biscuits & BBQ: Golfing the Hipster Mountain South

Hal Phillips — Tue, 04 May 2021 18:52:10 +0000

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (May 4, 2021) — Our lunch in the clubhouse up at Roaring Gap GC had been staid and sober, never boring but full of earnest, intellectualized discussions of course renovation and our round just completed on the charming Donald Ross design visible out the window. I’d been in North Carolina only 24 hours. […]

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GOLF Magazine goes Splendidly Small Bore with ranking of Golf’s Best Nines

Hal Phillips — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 14:43:57 +0000

Sometime this dark pandemic spring, probably late March, I got a call from Ran Morrissett, the North Carolinian who administers the GOLF Magazine course-rating operation. Starved for human contact as we both were, he and I chatted at length on various obscure but tasty course subjects. Somewhere during that extended natter he informed me that […]

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The Kittansett Club Stands Alone, Unclassifiable and Sublime

Hal Phillips — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 14:43:36 +0000

[Ed. This integrated piece appeared as a course feature and Walker Cup sidebar in LINKS Magazine during the summer of 2006. With the U.S. Senior Amateur visiting The Kittansett Club this week, it seemed a fine time to place this story “above the fold”.] Rolling down Point Road toward The Kittansett Club, past Sippican Harbor […]

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Replica Course Design, Golden Age Homage and the Sincerest Form of Flattery

Hal Phillips — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 15:21:13 +0000

[Ed. — The replica course design phase has faded somewhat. This piece ran in the September 2002 print edition of GOLF Magazine — back when the U.S. was still opening hundreds of new courses every year, replica and otherwise. Since 2008, the U.S. course stock has shrunk by some 150 courses each year…] By Hal […]

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Pandemic Scenarios Earn Connecticut Golf Rare Passing Grade

Hal Phillips — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 14:21:44 +0000

HARTFORD, Conn. (April 23, 2020) — Let’s first relate the cold hard facts, to contextualize things: Connecticut is a wasteland. I spent four college years there. Pretty much every part of the state exists as a satellite to some larger, more consequential place. It’s the world’s biggest suburb, in other words — and yet there […]

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SI Memories, Developmental & Professional, Come Thick & Fast

Hal Phillips — Mon, 07 May 2018 15:47:35 +0000

The late-2017 sale of Sports Illustrated, TIME Magazine and other titles to Meredith Publishing, a deal made possible by an infusion of $650 million from Koch Industries’ private-equity arm, has elicited both howls of indignation — from those who fear the further right-wing weaponization of information — and an ongoing hail of gauzy nostalgia, from […]

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The 2018 Ryder Cup won’t impress locals, but French Golf is pretty damned good

Hal Phillips — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 04:10:32 +0000

PARIS, France (Jan. 8, 2028) — The French do not follow the examples of nations, a fact that applies most stringently to their golf-crazy cousins across the Channel. This begins to explain the marked lack of great golf courses and accomplished players in a country so big, so populous, so temperate and so blessed with […]

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No Depression-Era concern Went Under quite like Dugmar Golf Club

Hal Phillips — Sun, 17 Sep 2017 11:03:14 +0000

By HAL PHILLIPSThe Swift River started rising in the rural Massachusetts town of Greenwich on Aug. 14, 1939. Soon enough the fairways at Dugmar Golf Club had become unseasonably soggy. After a time the bunkers and teeing grounds were completely submerged. Had the pins not been removed years before, their flags would have been some […]

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