Of a local Michigan note:

World Number one golfer Annika Sorenstam will be at Carls’ Golfland in Bloomfield Hills on Monday, May 8. She will be giving a clinic at 4 pm. Its free, but seating apparently is limited.

The Detroit News has an article on how the economic slump in Michigan is affecting the area’s golf courses. Michigan has more public golf courses than any state in the country, and the inhabitants are golf-mad. But as the domestic auto industry continues to slide, people just aren’t playing as much as they used to.

And there’s another angle that I’d never thought of. Many courses survived on profits from corporate outings and the like—things that are going by the wayside as corporations cut their budgets.

I know of one course that I liked to play that has closed ... its making way for a housing development. And I expect to see many more, as the sale of the land will reap an owner far more profit than a marginal course ever could.

I spent my afternoon and evening at the Michigan Golf Show at the Rock Financial Showcase in Novi, Michigan. It bills itself as the world’s largest golf show—and it certainly is huge. But I think it’s more like a tent sale—or a sidewalk sale than anything else. What it had was miles of tables of discounted clubs, balls and apparel. You can see a single vendor’s tables in the picture at right.

The vast majority of the clubs at the show seemed to be last year’s models—not a bad thing, but it contributes to the tent sale atmosphere. There also were a large number of clubs from what I would call “second tier” manufacturers like Dunlop and Rawlings.

I did see some good deals, though. Rock Bottom Golf had TaylorMade Rescue Duals—which are now selling at GolfSmith for $199—for $140. Quite a bargain. I also spotted a staff bag full of LaJolla Knife woods for $39 each. I’ve always wanted to give one of those funny looking clubs an extended test. But I passed.

At this point, though, I regret not picking up the $79 V-Steel 5-Wood that I saw. I’d like to get a new five wood, and the V-Steel has a good reputation.

Other vendors were selling component knock-off clubs, most of which looked pretty bad. There are some really good companies out there that you might call “smart followers” like GigaGolf and Pine Meadow who follow in the footsteps of the big names. And I’m a big fan of well-designed original components, like those made by GolfSmith and GolfWorks. But the ones at the Michgian Golf show were clearly subpar. The ones with the pseudo Nike swoosh and the R7 logo designs were particularly egregious. No real golfer would mistake them for the real thing, but they clearly were designed to fool someone.

Many of the smaller stalls there were the pro shops of local courses selling last year’s demo clubs, logo apparel and their excess baseball cap inventory. I bought a nice Callaway golf shirt at one of these for $10.

Another thing that tempted me were several booths with slightly used golf balls. I looked for some Black Max balls—I enjoyed playing those last spring—but none of them had it. If you were looking for ProV1s , though, you were set. The vast inventory of used Pro Vs makes me wonder if there are really that many incompetent golfers hacking these things into ponds—or if some of them were those Titleist knock-offs that were in the news a while back.

The markdown on the other balls I like to play—Noodles, DT SoLo and Callaway HX Hots wasn’t enough to get me to buy used.

Michigan is a golf-mad state, with more public golf courses than any state in the US—more than 850 at last count. Reflecting this obsession is A Golfing Michigander, a golf blog that focus on golf in the peninsula state. As a fellow Michigander, I applaud his efforts and look forward to reading it on a regular basis.

The only criticism I have of the site is that its on MSN Spaces. I tried to leave a comment on the stie, but to do so requires that I have an MSN Passport and that I log in. I have a passport, and tried to log in, but typed the password incorrectly and then was locked out of my account. I’ve always thought that Passport thing was a royal pain in the rear end, and on a blog, it’s a killer to comments and traffic.

So I guess I’ll just have to be content with reading the blog.

Whispering Pines
Grade: D

I took a day off last week for some mental R&R and ended up playing a course in Pinckney, Michigan called Whispering Pines.

Built in 1991, it measures 6017 yards from the middle tees with a slope of 121. But it's much harder than that. So hard, in fact, that I consider it an "unfair" course, and I don't think I'll go back.

The unfair part of Whispering Pines is that there doesn’t seem to be a safe landing spot anywhere on the course. Even tee shots that split the middle of the fairway ended up on sidehill lies, or on a difficult uphill (or downhill) slope. It was most discouraging to hit a good tee shot, only to watch the thing roll sideways off the fairway.

Now, I don’t mind a difficult course—in fact, I rather like the challenge of thinking my way around a course that’s really too much for my physical skills. But Whispering Pines didn’t seem to offer anywhere for me to “bail out.”

Back at school the next day, I found that I wasn’t the only one who considered it unfair. It’s apparently on the “do-not-play” list of some of the building’s better golfers.

On the positive side, its a very pretty course that manages to give a woodlands feel while winding its way through a golf course community. The visuals were the only reason this course didn’t flunk.