Utopia Golf

The Buried Lies Cemetery -- and take a moment to parse the poetic levels of that phrase! -- is next to the golf course in Utopia Tx where the film "Seven Days in Utopia" was filmed . . . golf course seemed flat & uninteresting, really . . . . the best thing about the rather pious film was Robert Duval . . . about a down-on-his-luck pro golfer finding his game again . . . 

Cheater

P.G. Wodehouse wrote that the best way to discover a man’s character is to play golf with him. In his short story “Ordeal by Golf,” the narrator declares, “In no other walk of life does the cloven hoof so quickly display itself.” Donald Trump is an avid golfer, of course, as well as the avid proprietor of seventeen golf courses on both sides of the Atlantic. 
New Yorker Article

Jack's Beautiful 2nd shot on Benedictine # 5, par 5, 523 yds.

 THIS -- you may well say -- THIS is a bridge too far: to blog about imaginary golf achievements by an imaginary (cyber, rather than fastasitical, tho' let me be the first to say: Jack Nicklaus is Fantastic, still, if you see how i mean), on an imaginary golf course, built on very old software from a defunct vendor.

I mean, first of all, and no kidding, the Great Singularity is Surely Upon Us, imminently, if not sooner, so when i tell you that Cyber Jack is a clear harbinger of that Great Singularity, and make no mistake. I find that I must keep making the courses more difficult, as he is still improving, even as i have ratcheted-down his skills in the game controls (strictly so that he is not tooo goood, like striping his 3 iron 250 yds stiff to the pin, not so that i can beat him more often than not, certainly not).

And i suspect a certain amount of information sharing (and i say this strictly as an IT professional for-lo-these-40-years) behind the scenes between the game machine and cyber jack -- nothing too heavy handed you understand, just a thumb on the scale of luck, sometimes.

Just a little background: Benedictine is a course i made in response to my own perception that my courses had gotten just too hard. Jack was limping around in the low-80s and myself never broke par,
but i HATE that Driver-Wedge kinduv golf. I still put in MacKenzie-like camouflage, and trees (i am from east texas and i like trees as golf course features), and elevation changes, to keep it all interesting . . . just the length of the course changed . . . .like no 250 yd par 3s.

So #5, par 5, 523 yds, is no particular challenge to Big Cyber Jack, especially downwind. All the things that would flummox a duffer faze him not: not the water not really in play, tho' visible; not the tree-lined, sloping-to-the-water narrow fairway; not the contortured green that challenges even jack to hold . . . 

But look at this shot! Jack has played conservatively on his t-shot, away from the water, but behind this row of trees that hangs out in the short rough that intrudes into the fairway. This 1iron from about 250 yds has a slight fade off an uneven lie, that jack got over the first small trees, then under the loblolly-canopy. That first bounce is amazing to watch (I saved the shot 8^D . . . ) . . . 5 yds shorter or longer and he misses the green by a long shot, but that big bounce took all the starch out of the ball, then it trickles across the elevated corner of the green and back down to hole-high, stopping short of the sand trap . . . I . . . with my architects knowledge of the course, hooked my drive a little so it landed on the front of the green, and rolled down into the trap. That shot trace wasn't near so interesting.

The Woman Who Invented Augusta

Augusta National was a men-only club until 2012, when it admitted its first two women members, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a businesswoman from South Carolina. (Since then, it has admitted at least two more.) Surprisingly, given both its history and the history of golf, the club actually owes much of its original conception to a woman: Marion Hollins, who in the late nineteen-twenties created a golf club that the founders of Augusta National initially treated almost as a blueprint.

New Yorker Article

Samuel F. B. Morse, a distant cousin of the inventor of the telegraph. Morse had acquired an enormous piece of property on the Monterey Peninsula, a hundred and twenty miles south of San Francisco, and Hollins helped him develop it. The centerpiece of Morse’s project was the golf course known today as Pebble Beach—but Hollins built him an even better one: the Cypress Point Club, two miles to the north. When Morse’s chosen golf architect, Seth Raynor, died shortly after beginning work on Cypress Point, Hollins replaced him with Alister MacKenzie, a British physician, who had collaborated on several courses in the United Kingdom but was barely known in the United States. MacKenzie credited Hollins—in a memoir that wasn’t published until many years after his death—with the design of Cypress Point’s most famous hole: the sixteenth, a par three, on which the ideal tee shot has to carry two hundred yards over an ocean inlet, from the top of one cliff to the top of another. Raynor had said that the shot was too difficult, MacKenzie wrote, so Hollins dropped a ball to the ground and showed him that it wasn’t. Cypress Point is currently No. 3 on Golf Digest’s biennial list of the hundred greatest courses in the United States; Pebble Beach is No. 7.