By FRED SEELY
Jacksonville Golf News
The TPC Stadium Course and its surrounding area will get
more of a facelift than we've previously heard after the 2016 Players.
The
course will get a near-total renovation and that's not all, as the clubhouse
will be spiffed up and even the parking lot will be reworked.
The only big casualty will be the Web.Com Championship. Even
though its Valley Course will be intact, the rest of the place will be a mess
so look for it to move to another area course.
• Web.Com CEO David Brown sold his oceanfront Atlantic Beach
home recently. Buyer was Jaguars QB Blake Bortles.
• The Father-Son event in Orlando later this year has an
early favorite: Davis and Dru Love. Davis's game is on the upswing as he
readies for the Champions Tour and Dru isn't a kid anymore. The rising junior
at U. of Alabama won the Georgia Amateur.
• You won't see goofy golf for at least another year as the
Open will be at Baltusrol and the PGA at Oakmont in 2016.
It was contrived golf at its worst in 2015 at Chambers Bay and Whistling Straits, the former certainly gone forever from major consideration and the latter heading for the 2020 Ryder Cup, which might be okay as the circus needs a circus tent.
Beware: we hear bad things about Erin Hills, the Michigan course that gets the Open in 2017.
It was contrived golf at its worst in 2015 at Chambers Bay and Whistling Straits, the former certainly gone forever from major consideration and the latter heading for the 2020 Ryder Cup, which might be okay as the circus needs a circus tent.
Beware: we hear bad things about Erin Hills, the Michigan course that gets the Open in 2017.
There's a wonderful course in Northeast Florida called Long
Point, which became member-owned when the Amelia Island Plantation was broken
up in bankruptcy with the Omni folks taking over the resort. The members are
now The Amelia island Club and the building of the course gave us one of golf's
great lines.
The island is mostly marsh and, even back in the mid-1980s when
the course was built, there were all sorts of regulatory hoops to jump through.
Course designer Tom Fazio commented, “When I started on Long Point, I had two
kids. When I finished, I had four.”
•There's a neat annual event at Highlands CC in the North Carolina mountains when former Walker Cup players have a weekend reunion to help club members raise money for the local hospital. There were 24 Cuppers this year, including Tour winners Jerry Pate and Bob Murphy.
•There's a neat annual event at Highlands CC in the North Carolina mountains when former Walker Cup players have a weekend reunion to help club members raise money for the local hospital. There were 24 Cuppers this year, including Tour winners Jerry Pate and Bob Murphy.