Most golf courses look the same. They have about 300 yards, six holes, and a clubhouse. The greens are always the same size and shape, the fairways are always in the same places, and no one is ever out of bounds.
The course at Kennedy has all those things, but it’s different from other courses. It’s like a little town with a library and a park and a post office. It’s also kind of like an airport: you can’t see it from far away because it doesn’t have any particular shape, so you never know if you’re getting close or not. But once you get there you realize it’s unique.
The estate of the late Robert F. Kennedy in Michigan’s Oakland County is a destination for golfers, but it’s not going to have a course named after his widow, Caroline. The reason: Caroline Kennedy wouldn’t like it.
“She didn’t want her husband’s name anywhere near golf,” said Scott Sprague, the chief executive of Robert F. Kennedy Estates, which oversees the property.”We’ve had this discussion over and over again with Mrs. Kennedy,” he said. “She doesn’t like golf.”
The Kennedy Golf Course is named after John F. Kennedy, but it is not really a golf course at all. It is an urban planning project that went wrong. The golf course consists of a few holes around a lake and a few more holes in the middle of an office park. The lake is for show, so that people will take photos of their kids playing on the lake, which they can then use on their company’s Facebook page, where their bosses and coworkers will see them.
The office park is the real point of the project. The planners assumed that the office park would be full of new companies, like Google and Facebook, which would create jobs in the area. But now that they have been here ten years, they are empty. Who wants to work in a place where there are no other employees to talk to?
And so as development pressures mount, as all big cities do, developers have moved east into places like Schenectady or Binghamton. If you want to be close to the city without being part of it, you go for a golf course instead of Google headquarters, and you build yourself an office park instead of a shopping mall.
Before anyone can build an office park or golf course there has to be land available for the
When I was a kid, I used to play golf on a course in the suburbs of Boston. One day after my round, my father took me aside and said, “Son, when you grow up, you’re going to have a lot of money. So you need to know how to spend it.”
He gave me a card with a phone number on it. The number was that of the White House. It was one of those situations where if you called the President he would answer the phone himself.
“You call the President,” he said, “and tell him that you are interested in building him a golf course. Tell him you can’t afford an architect but that you can afford to hire one.”
“How much do I say?” I asked. “A million dollars,” he said.
I thought it over and then made the call. After waiting for about half an hour, the President called back himself and told me that he wanted to meet me at his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard for lunch. He also said that I should bring along my father because he wanted some advice about the project from someone who had been young once too. And then he hung up and my father told me that we had just met his hero.
No one who plays there will ever forget the feeling of walking down the fairway and suddenly looking up to see the edge of the golf course hanging over you. The view is so dramatic that it’s enough to make you hit a good shot even if it’s not really what you wanted. That is the metaphor I use in my blog, because there are no others that do as much justice to it.
The golf course was designed by Robert Trent Jones, who designed two other famous golf courses: Augusta National and The Olympic Club. Both are spectacularly beautiful, but in different ways. Augusta is a classic old-world course, with its long par 5s and rolling fairways. The Olympic Club is newer and has a more modern feel, with its bent grass greens, but also with its spectacular mountain views. When I play there, I often think of how much money The Olympic Club has spent on upgrading their putting greens, but at the same time I’m glad it doesn’t have to spend as much on water because if it did that would take away most of the drama from their views
Most golf courses are boring. They’re a place to sit and wait for something interesting to happen, like two players struggling to get even with each other, or the odd birdie or par.
If golf was a game played in an office, it would be a waste of time, because no one would ever have to go there. But golf is not a game; it’s a sport, and as such it has rules. A game has no rules except those that make it interesting. Golf has rules about where the ball can go and what it can bounce on and whether you have to play from the same spot every time you go out.
These are not stupid rules; they’re sensible, which is what you want if you’re going to be playing golf for fun. They give the game structure, so that over the course of 18 holes you don’t end up spending 90 minutes trying to get from point A to point B with no idea of how long your journey might take or whether your ball will never come back at all.
It is an article about a course that is better than others, and it has lots of graphs and charts.
The tone is professional because it’s for a real newspaper, which means it’s being written by a real journalist. The reader will be able to infer from the tone that the journalist has taken his job seriously, and that he knows how to do it well.