When the Golfblogger reviews a course, it’s always with an eye to the bargain: a fun design, with playable conditions at a reasonable price. The course I play most frequently is a mere $15 a round. For that, I get greens in great condition, fairways of well-mowed clover and something resembling grass—but no dirt spots—and the necessity of using most of the clubs in my bag. Most importantly, it’s fun. 

A golf course that does all that gets a good grade on my scale.

There are, however, golf courses that fall so far outside those parameters that no review can be offered—only an appreciation.

Forest Dunes is one of those. There’s a reason it’s in GOlf Digest’s list of the top 20 public courses.

Located in Roscommon, Michigan—the middle of nowhere, really—Forest Dunes is an other worldly experience. Cut through sandy pine barrens, I think that it must offer the general public a glimpse of America’s most celebrated of courses, Pine Valley.

There’s not a single bad hole on this Tom Weiskopf design. Every one offers options for angles and club choices. Studying the yardage book is a must.

That’s not to say that Forest Dunes is difficult. There’s no doubt that it can be, but the judicious placement of tee boxes makes it accessable for all skill levels—so long as you play to your actual handicap. As Dirty Harry Callahan once said “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

There are four sets of tees, ranging from 7,141 to 5,032 yards. The course rating is 74.8, with a slope of 142 from the longest tees, and 72.3/137 from the “blues.” (They’re actually labeled as I through IV). At it’s shortest, the course is a 69.8/128. There also apparently is a set of “junior” tees, where the course measures just 3,000 yards.

I played the blues, and thought it challenging, without being overwhelming. I shot a 95, which I think is not bad—maybe even excellent—for a first playing. There are just so many things to think about on this course.

Forest Dunes’ scenery is wonderful. Whether running through a pine forest, through sandy dunes or along a marsh, each hole was both different and memorable. And yet, as carefully crafted as the layout is, there’s still a raw, wild feeling to it. The front nine is cut through a pine forest, while the back nine opens up, with more dunes, marshes and waste areas.

I’d like to describe my favorite hole, but I can’t. Each is worth playing over and again.

And here’s a first for a new “destination” course: it’s eminently walkable—so much so that I wonder why anyone without a mobility handicap would ever consider a cart. I played in long pants, and never broke a sweat.

Course conditions were absolutely immaculate. The fairways are like carpets (another reason to walk—your feet will never light upon such soft grass), the greens perfect, the sand fluffy. Even the waste areas seem to have been weeded and groomed.

The only downside is the price: at $150 a round, I really can’t justify ever playing it again.

But maybe I will. It’s that good.

Visit the gallery for a photo tour of the course.

The PGA of America is making an effort to bring Greg Norman to the PGA Championship at Oakland Hills in suburban Detroit in August.

“I’m hoping we can get him to play here,” PGA of America CEO Joe Steranka said Monday at the club in Bloomfield Township, where he was speaking to the Detroit Economic Club. “He would be a special invitation. We’re going to talk about that this week with our executive committee that approves those invitations.”

That would go a long way toward making up for the Tiger deficit. I’ve already got my tickets, and if Norman shows, I know who I would be following.

However, Norman has made it pretty clear that he’s not going to expand his playing schedule.

Fresh off her disqualification at the LPGA’s State Farm Classic, Michelle Wie has accepted an invitation to play in the Reno-Tahoe Open next week. It’ll be the eighth time she’s teed it up against the men. She has yet to make a cut.

“It’s not every day that a woman is given the opportunity to play on the greatest tour in the world,” Wie said “This is a tremendous opportunity for me to learn from these great players and take those lessons to the LPGA. This is another step in the process of making me a better player.”

I hope one of those lessons is in signing scorecards.

I took the family to see Wall*E the other day and we all were enamored with the “humanity” of the little bots. Here’s one that very successfully mimics a players manerisms while setting up a putt.

Club Count

An all-too-frequent sight on my rounds of golf is a guy in a cart driving back down the fairway toward the previous green. Invariably, he’ll stop and ask “Did you see a wedge on the last hole?”

More often than not, I’ll have the club in my bag. When you hoof it, you see a lot of things that guys running around in carts don’t.

I also find a lot of clubs lying about that no one comes to claim. I don’t know whether they’ve been discarded for bad behavior, or simply forgotten. At the end of the round, I’ll give them to the pro, who tosses them into a bin with other abandoned sticks.

I’ve never personally left a club near a green. That’s because as a walker, I take my clubs with me wherever I go. But it’s easy to see how it happens. You park the cart by the green, pull out your putter, a wedge or two and your chipping iron—just in case—and schlep the whole pile down to the green. Then after getting up and down, you head back to the buggy with your putter, forgetting the other clubs in your celebration.

When I was learning the game, my pro friend told me that I should always place my spare clubs across the flag as I lay it on the ground. That way, I would be reminded to pick it up when I returned the stick to the cup.

But not everyone follows that advice, obviously.

To help those hapless hackers, a company called Club Count has developed technology that counts the number of clubs in your bag.

To use it, you insert your clubs into the fourteen slots, and the press the button on a plastic box hidden in one of the bag’s pockets. You then stand back as the device assesses what’s present.

During your round, the bag activates if two or more clubs are pulled for longer than eight seconds. Upon returning the clubs to the bag, it counts to make sure everything is in its place.

If your return fewer clubs than you removed, a short alarm goes off, and two lights on the sides of the bag begin to flash. It’ll stop when you return the missing clubs.

I’ve deliberately played the last two rounds from a motor cart, and also run it through a good deal of testing in the garage. It worked very well in nearly every scenario I could think of.

It works if you have fewer than 14 clubs at the beginning of a round; if you pull 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or more clubs. It works if you return one out of four, or two out of six, or all but one in any combination. And it works with both graphite and steel shafts.

In short, the Club Count simply works. With this bag, there isn’t any reason to leave a club behind again.

The bag itself is top quality, and has a heavy duty rubber top. There are plenty of pockets—although one is occupied by the club counting unit. It’ll serve you well for many years in the back of a cart.

It’s a great product—with one major issue: the warning beep is set at too high a pitch. I simply can’t hear it.

Now, it wouldn’t be too bad if it was only the occasional deaf GolfBlogger using the bag. But that high pitch is going to be out of the hearing range of a large number of players. As it is, the flashing lights work perfectly well for me, but I’m used to seeing lights go off instead of hearing beeps (my phones are set this way).

When hearing starts to go—as in, say, 80 million retiring baby boomers who spent their youths listening to high decible rock music—it’s the higher frequencies that go first. That’s why so many older men seem to have trouble hearing their wives. Female voices are at the high end. I can’t understand most women and childrens’ voices, but have perfectly normal hearing in the range where most men’s voices lurk.

It’s not just a problem with the Club Count, but with nearly every bit of electronics out there. Those dang beeps are just too high. And it’s not a matter of the volume. No matter how loud something is, if you can’t hear that frequency, you can’t hear it.

Club Count could make this an A+ product by tuning the beep down to at least a midrange frequency.

But that one issue aside, this is a product that I think would be useful and a good buy for people who play redominately in carts, and who from time to time forget to bag all their clubs. I can safely recommend it.

Congratulations to Padraig Harrington. Starting out the week with a wrist so badly hurt he thought he might not play, Harrington now has won back to back Open Championships—something only sixteen other men have done in the tournament’s 137 years.

That’s a pretty exclusive group:

Old Tom Morris (1861 - 62)
Young Tom Morris (1867, 1868, 1869)
Jamie Anderson (1877, 1878, 1879)
Bob Ferguson (1880, 1881, 1882)
J.H. Taylor (1894, 1895)
Harry Vardon (1898, 1899)
James Braid (1905, 1906)
Bobby Jones (1926, 1927)
Walter Hagen (1928, 1929)
Bobby Locke (1949, 1950)
Peter Thomson (1954, 1955, 1956)
Arnold Palmer (1961, 1962)
Lee Trevino (1971, 1972)
Tom Watson (1982, 1983)
Tiger Woods (2005, 2006)

And now, Padraig Harrington. He’s shown that he’s a great champion, digging deep to play a superb round despite the weather conditions.

I wonder if anyone will continue the injury-to-victory theme in the PGA Championship in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, the fairy tale that was Greg Norman’s ride came crashing to an end with a 77.  It will be said that Norman was just reliving some of his past bad finishes, but I really don’t see it that way. This was a triumph for Norman, not a disaster. At age 53, when he has no right to be in contention, Norman finished third at the Open Championship, ahead of notable younger players like Jim Furyk, Phil Mickelson, Trevor Immelman, Retief Goosen and so on.

In all, it was an exciting Championship—especially when Norman pulled ahead again at the turn. I was anticipating a back and forth there over the last round. It wasn’t to be, but it still was fun nonetheless.

For his part, Norman apparently has absolutely no intention of expanding his playing schedule:

“I’m going to play the next two weeks, the Senior British Open and the Senior U.S. Open, and that’s it. I don’t plan on playing any more golf after that for a while. I have a lot of other work to do.”

Interestingly, this finish qualifies Norman for next year’s Masters. Stay tuned.

Holy Smokes! Greg Norman leads the Open Championship. His two-over-par 72 has him in first by two strokes.

If he somehow manages to win this, it would be an even bigger event that Nicklaus’ 1986 Masters win. It’ll make everybody forget about what’s his name with the leg injury. It’ll also go a long way toward getting people to forget the 1996 Masters debacle.

Of course, Norman has a long history of final day major meltdowns, so it wouldn’t be a surprise to see him tumble back to earth. There was the 1996 Masters collapse; the 1986 final round 76 in the PGA Championship that gave the tournament to Bob Tway; the 1987 Masters he lost on the second playoff hole, and the 1989 Open Championship in which he lost a four hole playoff after carding an X on the final hole.

Norman is 1-for-7 when he has the lead, or a share of the lead on the final day of a Major.

Still, on Sunday, Norman could continue his fine play and replace Julius Boros as the oldest winner of a Major. Boros won the PGA Championship at age 48. Incidentally, Boros also had the 54 hole lead in the US Open in 1973, when he was the same age as Norman. Johnny Miller won that tournament at Oakmont.

Mrs. GolfBlogger couldn’t be more thrilled. She thinks Norman is the best looking guy on the course. So does Mrs. GolfBlogger’s mother.

I don’t see any reason why he won’t win.

It’s funny that Norman was actually playing in the Open Championship as a sort of practice round for the Senior Open next week.

More about Norman’s 72. Tom Watson said that given Saturday’s conditions, 75 was a reasonable par. So Norman’s 72 was a terrific score.

But Ben Curtis’ 70 in those 40-mph winds was absolutely astounding. That moved him from 38th to a tie for fifth with Anthony Kim and Alexander Noren. I have to admit that in 1983 when Curtis won the Open on his first try at a Major, I thought it was one of those Jack Fleck moments, and that we’d never hear from him again. But he’s turned out to be a good player.

Curtis’ playing partner, Phil Mickelson, shot a 76, and fell to 13 over.

If Sergio Garcia thinks he has bad luck, he should have watched Jim Furyk today.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed on Norman, but there’s also an outside chance of an even bigger story: 20-year-old amateur Chris Wood has an outside chance to win. He’s six back, but given the weather, he may have a chance.