http://bobcullengolf.com Great Golf and Travel Writing Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:05:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Someday, someone is going to do a great biography of Tiger Woods. It will be a tragedy on a level with King Lear. It will feature a character as quintessentially American as Jay Gatsby. And it will end, I suspect, as dolefully as Citizen Kane. It will be an American classic. Tiger's life is that rich, that fraught with potential, that sad. The biography that finally nails Tiger in all his glorious and wretched humanity won't be ... ]]> http://bobcullengolf.com/golf/golf/personalities/1366/the-big-miss-essential-source-material-for-a-tiger-biography I have, I must confess, been a bit of a dullard when it comes to the golfing ritual of marking my ball so it will be unique and identifiable. When I opened a sleeve of balls, I took a red Sharpie and put one red dot under the number of the first one, two under the second, and three under the third. When my foursomes tossed balls on the first tee to pick partners for ... ]]> http://bobcullengolf.com/golf/golf/equipment/1361/one-way-my-game-will-improve-this-year With all the millions of words of pre-Masters coverage that will be written this week, you're likely to read a lot about Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Bobby Jones, azaleas, and the cathedral in the pines. You're not likely very often to come across this link: http://anthonypioppi.com/golf/blog/474/ngf-says-1575-courses-closed-in-011-19-opened It's a recent report by my friend and TheAPosition.com colleague Tony Pioppi, putting some numbers on the decline of golf in America. Last year, 157.5 American golf courses closed and 19 opened. Since 2006, there has been ... ]]> http://bobcullengolf.com/golf/golf/1337/how-augusta-national-hurts-golf (Geek Alert: This post will likely bore the hell out of all potential readers except the sub-category of golfers who know their handicaps to the tenth of a point.) Most golfers who maintain a handicap think they know what the number represents. It's the strokes they need to compete on even terms with a scratch player, even a touring pro. More sophisticated golfers know that, in reality, touring pros would have handicaps better than scratch if they bothered to enter ... ]]> http://bobcullengolf.com/golf/golf/1302/blog-what-a-handicap-really-means What's the most annoying aspect of a golf trip? To me, it's not the snoring roommate. It's not the ground ball I hit off the first tee because my back is still stiff from sitting in coach. It's not even the three-figure green fee on a course the locals pay $75 to play. It's traveling with my golf clubs. Everything about the process irritates me. First, it's stuffing the golf bag into the travel cover. Ever since golf bags got legs, that's been ... ]]> http://bobcullengolf.com/golf/golf/equipment/1255/blog-rental-clubs When I watch golf on television, I always choose an alternate channel to watch during the telecast's innumerable commercial breaks. Usually, my fallback channel is showing an old movie. When I am in mid-season form with the remote control, my timing is finely honed. I can switch to my movie as soon as the network golf director switches to a cutaway shot from the blimp. I can switch back to the golf without missing a shot. By ... ]]> http://bobcullengolf.com/golf/golf/1283/the-armchair-gallery-whats-up-with-separate-bathtubs It's been a tough couple of years for the PR staff at the Cancun Convention and Visitors Bureau. First there was that nationwide flu outbreak in 2009. It all but shuttered many hotels.  That died down, but there are still pernicious notions about Mexico floating around. One is that travel anyplace in Mexico is dangerous. Another is that Cancun is full of drunken college students sleeping four to a room and making noise till dawn. The image ... ]]> http://bobcullengolf.com/golf/golf/1211/moon-palace-a-stern-nicklaus-test By now it's become commonplace to notice that as Jack Nicklaus has aged, his golf courses have gotten more playable. Pop psychologists among golf writers theorize that the younger Jack rather arrogantly thought that anyone who wanted to shoot in the 70s ought to be able to do the things he could do: hit it long and straight off the tee, contemptuously stare down hazards, and bring it in to the green with a high, soft fade. The player ... ]]> http://bobcullengolf.com/golf/golf/1176/riviera-cancun-a-gentler-jack I have never designed a golf course, but I believe it when golf architects tell me that the hardest piece of ground to work with is dead flat. It was no accident that golf developed on the coast of Scotland, where thousands of years of wind and waves had shaped the sandy ground into hills, furrows and dunes. The natural Scottish links terrain was a big element in the game's appeal. People who would prefer to hit ... ]]> http://bobcullengolf.com/golf/golf/1149/playa-paraiso-a-boy-and-his-bulldozer Smack in the middle of the first fairway at El Camaleon, on the Yucatan coast south of Cancun, there's a cenote that says a lot about the intentions of  the course's designer, Greg Norman. A cenote is a sinkhole, caused by eons of underground water eroding and washing away the soft limestone bedrock in this part of Mexico. The cenote on No. 1 at El Camaleon shows a wide mouth, a dry floor covered in ... ]]> http://bobcullengolf.com/golf/golf/1118/el-camaleon-normans-best