Robert Allenby, a playoff winner at this event 10 years ago, opened with a bogey-free round of 4-under 67 under mild sunshine Thursday to share the lead with five other players among the early starters.

He was part of a strong Australian influence atop the leaderboard, with John Senden and Aaron Baddeley also at 67. They were joined by Martin Laird, Spencer Levin and PGA Tour rookie Ben Martin.

Stuart Appleby was in the lead until a double bogey at the turn, while Geoff Ogilvy was at 69. His round included an unusual par, when he used his sand wedge on the 10th green for a 70-foot putt.

The chip stopped just outside a foot from the hole.

Defending champion Steve Stricker opened with a 73.

(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

One way to think of the distinction is to think of Arnold Palmer, the King of Golf. One reason for his title is because (according to myth) he always went for every shot. He was, in sum, a master of ludology—he could hit the most difficult shots. Palmer only thought of hitting the best possible shot on every occasion. Of course, Palmer didn’t really, because golf is not just about hitting golf shots, but that’s how people remembered him.

People today tend to forget about a golf course’s narratological aspects, I think, for several reasons, one perhaps being Palmer’s example. But Palmer, despite a swing that most people think of as at best unorthodox, is also perhaps behind what might be a significant reason for narratology’s decline: the rise of golf pro at the expense of the caddie.

It’s a subject I’ve discussed before, but essentially the point is this: golf pros teach a particular way of swinging the club. They take no account of the particular situation a golfer might be in—every swing, on the practice range, takes place in an idealized space, with no reference to what happened before—or what might happen afterwards. Or, in short, the way Palmer played.

Learning golf from a golf pro is in Paumgarten’s terms, an exercise in ludology. What a caddie does, however, is quite different. The caddie’s job is to select the best shot for the golfer at that moment. It is not to find a shot the golfer might be able to hit with another hundred or thousand repetitions, it is to find the one that will work now—with reference to the shots the golfer has already hit during that round, and with reference to the ones the golfer will likely have to hit to reach the green. To put it in philosophic terms, the golf pro is a Platonist, dealing with ideal conditions, while the caddie is an Aristotelian, dealing with gritty reality.

Golfers, used to learning to play on driving ranges with instruction either from a golf pro or—perhaps more likely—a friend or relative influenced by the teachings of golf pros, become accustomed to the ideal space created by the range. They take each shot as a singularity, expecting to play the shot as if they would at the range where if they fail they can always just tee up another ball. They forget about the shots they’ve hit previously and forget their next shot should not be their best shot—the one they might be able to hit under ideal conditions at the range—but the one they are likely to hit. But the driving range is not the golf course, and ludology alone is not golf.

Golf, like videogames, has that other element described by Paumgarten—narratology. There is a story to each course, and each round played on every course has its own story. This is perhaps less surprising than it might appear—Milman Perry and Albert Lord discovered in the 1930s that epic poetry, like The Iliad or The Odyssey, was originally an oral form composed around discrete episodes, each of which had to be completed before moving to the next. Every poet or bard who recited or sang an epic might recite it slightly differently each time—using alternate line readings, perhaps—but each recitation took place within an organized frame. Just so, videogames proceed according to differing “levels,” within which the player might take any number of different actions, but that proceed until the end of the game.

Golf is played in that sort of space: each hole is like a “level” in a videogame, or an episode in an epic poem. The narratological aspect of a course is recognized by the fact that holes on particularly well-known courses, like videogame levels or episodes in an epic, have distinct names. The Odyssey for instance has episodes like “Scylla and Charybdis,” Level One of Donkey Kong is called “Barrels,” St. Andrews has the Road Hole and the 12th at Augusta National is “Golden Bell.” These names aren’t merely a useful shorthand to remember the hole, or simply picturesqueness. They are also reminders of what golf is—and at times, a clue as to how to play.

Those names are also reminders to golf architects that the job is not just to construct interesting holes, but also to string them together well. No golf course, for instance, ought to begin with the toughest hole—like a videogame, courses should begin with easier holes and gradually (or not so gradually) become more difficult. But that’s a relatively easy assignment. What’s more interesting—and perhaps a mark of a superior architect—is to construct a hole that depends for its interest upon an earlier hole, that builds upon the past.

The interest of the 8th at Riviera Country Club for instance depends on the fact that from the 7th tee the golfer has to hit a shot into a very narrow landing area. On the 8th tee the golfer has to choose between two different landing zones: a broad one on the right fairway and a tight one on the left fairway. Naturally, if the tee shot on the 7th was troublesome the right fairway on the 8th will look more inviting—but that sets up a more difficult approach to the green. It’s precisely for this reason that a good caddie can be helpful: a skilled player who for some reason had trouble on the 7th might elect to take the right side without a caddie in his ear.

That’s one reason why golf architects and caddies are natural allies—and both are enemies of that other reason narratology is often lost by golfers: the golf cart. To understand golf’s narratology needs a slow examination of each hole, which is to say that an appreciation of narratology requires walking.

Zipping from shot to shot means missing the connection of each shot to the next, and each hole to the ones following. Without those connections the golfer loses the plot, like the reader who reads The Odyssey for the battles, or the videogamer who uses the cheat codes. Riding a golf cart, in that sense, isn’t playing golf at all.

Most guides to golf courses, the kind the upscale courses put on their yardage books, are written by golf pros and as such are written from a ludological perspective. The pro tells you where to hit your tee shot and then how to hit the approach. I’ve never seen any guides written from a narratological standpoint, though I think these would probably be more useful.

Such guides would be written by way of at least two or three different viewpoints: one for the skilled player, which would probably be closest to the guides written by pros, and at least one other for the less-skilled player. I have rather an ambition to write such a guide at least for the golf courses I’m familiar with most. If Arnold Palmer is the King of Golf, perhaps there’s room for Kong.

Location: 1250 Capri Drive Pacific Palisades, California 90272. Ph: 310 454-6591

Date: Nov 21, 2010

Cuisine: American

Some member friends of ours graciously invited us to join them for some Sunday gluttony at the Riviera Country Club. Someone at the table must be a member to eat here as is typical with most clubs

The day was gorgeous too, the “rain” (LA has these little midnight drizzles we call rain) had washed the air clean and left us with a brilliant clear day. The old club house is gorgeous.

They have a rather extensive buffet brunch. Some good raw bar fare. Not the frozen stuff. Oh and Larry David was eating there too.

The extensive smoked fish section.

More smoked fish.

The obligatory introduction of “sushi” into nearly every buffet.

Beats, chicken, bay shrimp and avocado, and more.

Seared Tuna saldad, heirloom tomato caprese.

Terrines, meats, and cheeses.

Salad bar.

Round one of three — my plate.

The “warm section,” included eggs benedict, four types of sausage and bacon properly crisped.

Omelet bar of course.

The meats. Turkey because of the season, prime rib. I can’t handle carved meats this early in the morning.

The fresh waffle/pancake bar. The homemade glazed walnuts were killer.

My plate — round two. Notice the evidence of my preference for syrup on breakfast meats.  This plate was not recommended by my cardiologist. Sweet +  salty + fatty = Yum!

Half the deserts. Waffles were just a warm up.

More.

And the view right out the windows (the ocean is at the far end). A brief stroll burned off 0.05% of the calories. This was a very good traditional brunch. The quality level was extremely high. Like a snake, I will need no other sustenance for at least 24 hours!

Johnson, who had looked like the favorite after Saturday, got it first. He went six-over through the fourth hole after a triple, a double, and a bogey on holes two through four. Mickelson quietly snuck out of the picture after a birdie on the first hole—which he never duplicated the rest of the way. And Tiger bogey half the front nine to take himself out of contention shortly after the turn. This isn’t even to talk about Ernie Els or Davis Love or any of the others close to the lead—none of whom jumped out to claim the title when the leaders stumbled.

Part of Pebble’s mystique has been the name players who have won its Opens: Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, and Tiger Woods (Tom Kite, who won in ‘92, tends to get left out of the discussion). Certainly one way to judge golf courses is by the players that win there. But for every Ben Hogan there is a Jack Fleck, and there needs to be some independent means of judging. History cannot be everything.

That brings me around to something I’ve been promising for a while now: a report on Medinah’s grand re-opening of Course #3 in preparation for the next Ryder Cup in America, coming in 2012. I’m going to leave out all the nonsense that surrounded the opening itself and get right to the golf course. And if there is a word that describes the new-look #3, it is this: “Florida.”

Mostly this is due to the brand-new 15th hole, which actually looks a bit like it could be a hole on that other course I have been describing this spring, Chicago Highlands. It’s very open, unlike Medinah’s usual tree-induced claustrophobia. Water runs up the right side, just as it does on Chicago Highland’s hole 11, which is a specimen of “Cape” hole. Unlike a Cape hole, however, the water on Medinah’s 15th is there not so much to disturb the tee shot—though it will—as to guard the reverse-Redan style green.

The idea is to require a player rolling the ball along the ground to hit a left-to-right shot, while the better player attacking from the air comes into the green right-to-left. This is all well and good and according to contemporary golf architecture manuals. It even fits in with many of Medinah’s other holes, which often require a tee shot with one shape and an approach shot with the opposite shape. Nonetheless, there’s something off about this hole.

Geoff Shackelford, the golf writer and architect, noted in a post about Medinah’s re-do that he’s “having a hard time envisioning a lake looking natural up there.” “Hopefully,” he goes on to say, “it’ll have a fountain.” Well, it doesn’t—yet—but it does make the golf course look like every course the tour plays in January, February and March. The only thing missing, besides the fountain, is a car from the title sponsor sitting in the middle of the pond.

There is one concession to tradition about the hole: there aren’t any yardage markers as yet. I presume that will shortly be rectified, but there is something charming about simply eyeballing your approach. Also, unlike virtually every other hole at Medinah, it is possible to run a shot up to the hole rather than requiring a high-flying long iron. It is possible that it will turn out to be a great addition to the golf course: it does seem to have potential for drama, particularly given the match-play format of the Ryder Cup. The sort of drama that didn’t happen at this year’s U.S. Open.

Call it A-List Los Angeles.

L.A. County has plenty of high-end neighborhoods, from Palos Verdes Estates to Pasadena. But when it comes to finding the best mansions in town, there’s still nothing quite like the golden corridor from Beverly Hills to Malibu.

This Westside area boasts one of the world’s great concentrations of premier residential estates. The highest-price home transaction ever in California took place in this territory: the 2000 sale of an 8-acre Bellagio Road estate in Bel-Air by Dole Food Co.’s billionaire owner, David Murdock, to financial executive Gary Winnick in a $95-million deal.

Bellagio is one of a dozen streets that are among the most sought-after addresses, say veteran real estate brokers. Here’s a look at these streets and why they are so coveted.

Mapleton Drive, Holmby Hills. Home to the Playboy Mansion, Mapleton gets rave reviews for the quality and size of its properties, some of which back up to the fairways of the Los Angeles Country Club.

Arthur Letts Jr., who owned Broadway and Bullock’s department stores, was instrumental in developing Holmby Hills in the 1920s. Letts picked Mapleton to be the best street and the site of his own residence, according to Jeffrey Hyland, president of Beverly Hills-based brokerage Hilton & Hyland and author of “The Legendary Estates of Beverly Hills.”

Today the Letts estate is the home and famed party site of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner. The street has what Hyland called “a perceived value.”

“A buyer feels more comfortable where everything around is already established and well in the double digits,” he said — double-digit millions, that is.

North Carolwood Drive, Holmby Hills. Just around the corner from Mapleton, North Carolwood has been the address of a stream of stars including Tony Curtis and Sonny and Cher. Gregory Peck’s longtime home was sold in 2004 for about $22 million. Michael Jackson rented on the drive at the time of his death.

At 2 to 4 acres, these are some of the biggest parcels on the Westside. Like other premiere streets, North Carolwood has a uniformity of prices, homes and lot sizes that well-heeled buyers like. “If you just bought your home for $20 million and you see other homes that look like your $20-million investment, you feel good” about your neighborhood, said Drew Mandile of Sotheby’s International Realty, Beverly Hills.

Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu: OK, so it’s a highway, not a street. But this busy thoroughfare is the street address for a cluster of homes along Carbon Beach owned by the likes of DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen, restaurateur and Hard Rock Cafe chain owner Peter Morton and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.

Called Billionaire’s Beach, the line of oceanfront properties has protection from housing market changes because the owners never have to sell, said Stephen Shapiro, co-owner of Westside Estate Agency in Beverly Hills. “It’s like a private club, but they don’t have meetings.”

Bellagio Road, Bel-Air. Views of the Bel-Air Country Club and the ocean distinguish this leafy road paralleling Sunset Boulevard. The record-setting Winnick estate borders the golf course.

“Most all the lots are pancake flat, so these are very big estates,” Hyland said.

Bel Air Road, Bel-Air. Approached through the arch at the East Gate entrance of the community, this winding street has city and ocean views as it climbs. Tall, dense hedges allow only an occasional glimpse of the homes, creating an air of inaccessibility, wealth and power, said Brooke Knapp of Sotheby’s International Realty, Beverly Hills. Bel Air Road is convenient to Westwood Village and its markets, shops and restaurants.

Oakmont Drive, Brentwood. The private street at the end of Rockingham Avenue gets top billing for its secluded setting, large mansions and light traffic compared with nearby well-traveled streets. “Once you get to Oakmont it becomes quiet,” Hyland said.

Residents include conductor Zubin Mehta and philanthropist Eli Broad, according to public records.

La Mesa Drive, Santa Monica. This street is also known for its homes of similar value and size — some less than 5,000 square feet. Large trees, with roots that stretch a good foot or more above ground, help provide privacy. “There’s a consistency to the street,” said David Offer of Prudential California Realty, Brentwood. Building restrictions limit the scale, contributing to the uniform look. “People like the vibe,” Shapiro said.

The north side, with views of the Riviera Country Club, has a discernible premium over the other side of the street. Homes “on the rim” can bring close to twice as much as south-side properties, which back up to San Vicente Boulevard and pick up the traffic noise, according to Offer.

Maple Drive, Beverly Hills. There are the flats of Beverly Hills, an area with relatively small lots and commercial buildings. This isn’t it. Maple north of Santa Monica Boulevard boasts the largest lots among Beverly Hills’ flatland areas, and the homes have a continuity of design and landscaping. The street is quiet and traffic is light because a center divider prevents left turns onto Sunset, Knapp said.

Napoli Drive, Pacific Palisades. Properties on the south side of Napoli are prized for their views overlooking the Riviera Country Club. Having a backyard bordering a golf course is like having a park behind you, Offer said.

Amalfi Drive, Pacific Palisades. North Amalfi has canyon views to Will Rogers State Historic Park, while some homes on the south end have ocean and Riviera views. Over the years it has been popular with such entertainers as actor Cary Grant, comedian Jerry Lewis and singer Bobby Vinton.

Malibu Road, Malibu. This coastal street is shielded from busy PCH to the east, offering ocean views and a relatively quiet neighborhood, Shapiro said. Once they move here, homeowners tend to stay: The street has little turnover, Shapiro said.

Malibu Colony Drive, Malibu. Gates, 24-hour security and views of the Pacific make the street desirable, said Joyce Rey, who heads the estates division of Coldwell Banker Previews International. “It’s a pretty exclusive enclave,” the Beverly Hills-based agent said.

But the lots and houses, once cottages used as weekend places, are smaller than properties along Carbon Beach, which has “big, magnificent homes,” Hyland noted.

Of course, even the best streets have some drawbacks.

Pacific Coast Highway can become clogged with traffic; Mapleton – with its Playboy Mansion — is a regular stop on bus tours; and North Carolwood is a hot spot for sightseers.

The corners of Carolwood and Sunset and nearby Baroda Drive and Sunset have been staked out by three generations of the Hot Star Maps family since 1936.

Linda Welton, who has been selling the maps for 21 years, said she feels the Carolwood residents have come to accept and even appreciate her presence — her mother and maternal grandfather having paved the way.

Michael Jackson’s security people asked for one of her maps, then another, which they later returned with his autograph, she said.

These days Dr. Phil stops by to say hello.

“Once David Hasselhoff wanted to know how to get to David Beckham’s house,” she said.

Standing up straighter with a mock-stern expression, Welton recounted her response: “Are you expected?”

By Lauren Beale
This article was originally posted on March 27, 2010 by the Los Angeles Times.

I sometimes get asked just what the biggest difference is between the amateur and the professional games are, and about as often I want to say, “Amateurs always start on the first tee.” This is a smart-alecky remark, but it isn’t just smart-alecky. For over a century the United States Open sent every player off from the first tee the first two days of the tournament, a tradition that ended in 2002 at Bethpage in New York. Now, only the Masters and the Open Championship in the U.K. still start everyone on the first tee every day. Mostly nobody notices, in part because televised golf encourages a kind of schizoid viewing habit: we skip from hole to hole, shot to shot, seemingly at random, without order.

“Here’s Ernie at 11,” the announcer will say, never mind that the last thing we saw was the leaders hitting their approach shots into 7, and right before that we saw Player X finishing up at 18. All of this approaches the golf course like a deck of cards to be dealt at random: which is precisely the opposite of how the amateur player always sees a golf course, one hole at a time.

Pro golf, both on television and the way the players themselves experience it, is different. A golf course, like a book, is designed to be played in a certain order, which makes golf architecture different from other kinds of architecture or other kinds of art like painting or sculpture, as much as the brochures and the television announcers like to make mention of this week’s “breathtaking beauty.” Golf architecture though has just as much in common with temporal arts like music or narrative: what’s important isn’t just what’s happening now but what’s happened before.

Did the architect create the illusion that those bunkers weren’t a problem on the last hole, causing you to play safe on this one—or vice versa? Maybe two greens with similar-looking slopes will play differently because the grain runs differently on each. There’s a lot of games architects can play that take advantage of what we’ve learned—or thought we learned—on previous holes.

Mostly though the obvious tricks are easily discovered, or only work once. Courses like that are like murder mysteries spoiled after somebody tells you just how Mr. Green bought it from a rutabega poisoned by the maid, who turns out to be employed by and who the hell cares. What makes a course worth playing is one that continues to bewilder, even after you know the secret of it. Nobody gives a damn if you know “Rosebud” was the sled—Citizen Kane is still good. Good architecture, I would submit, tells a story.

Maybe the best example of what I mean is Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles, where the tour plays the L.A. Open every year. Widely acclaimed as an architect’s dream course, Riviera is also remarkably fun to play while still being one of the toughest tracks the professionals play every year. The first tee begins a few steps, quite literally, from the clubhouse, on a patch of grass high above the rest of the course. The tee shot drops out of the sky just as you do from the heights—Icarus (or Lucifer) plummeting, as Milton says, “toward the coast of Earth beneath,/Down from th’ Ecliptic, sped with hop’d success.” The first is the easiest hole on the course, a par five with the tee not only elevated, but a wide landing zone to receive the shot. The green is wide, and in general it’s a lullaby of a hole.

The second, however, turns the tables quickly. It’s a long dog-legged par four with out-of-bounds (the driving range) left and trees right: the tee shot is either to a narrow piece of fairway or the riskier shot over the neck of the dogleg on the right over the trees. Either way, the approach is to a very narrow green with deep bunkers left and a hillside with very tall rough on the right. The professionals regard a four here as dearly as a five is cheap on the first hole. Usually the second is the toughest hole on the course every year.

Whereas the first hole rewards the bomber, the second favors the straight-shooter. In other words, what worked on the first hole is exactly what’s penalized on the next, and vice versa. Riviera continues on like this all the way around the course, giving and taking away options throughout and always mixing it up: what worked on the last hole won’t necessarily work on the next; in fact, following the same strategy or style of play is exactly what leads to big numbers.

What’s really astonishing about Riviera is that it doesn’t matter whether you know what’s coming: just because you know the first hole is easy, and why, and the second is hard, and why, doesn’t change things. There isn’t any short-cut—such as is often found on the videogame Golden Tee for instance—that, once discovered, ends the problem the next hole presents. That ability to confound is something rare in a golf course. Most courses reward a particular style—Jack Nicklaus’ courses are notorious for rewarding high fades, the shot Nicklaus liked to hit in his prime.

The great courses, though, not only mix up styles, but also tell a story. As Rob says in High Fidelity, “You gotta kick it off with a killer to grab attention. Then you gotta take it up a notch. But you don’t want to blow your wad. So then you gotta cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.” Rob’s point owes something perhaps to Stanley Fish, the Miltonist, who argued in Surprised By Sin that the way Paradise Lost works is to ensnare the reader constantly, setting up one expectation after another, dashing each in turn.

At Riviera, for instance, the first two holes raise hopes and then dash them—or conceivably raise them to a higher pitch, should you somehow make a miraculous birdie on the second. The rest of the course continues to toy with a player’s mind. Two years ago Geoff Ogilvy, the Australian pro I’ve written about before, talked with Geoff Shackelford of Golf Digest about the short 10th hole and how important that hole’s place in the routing is:

“The eighth and ninth holes are very hard, but you know that the 10th and 11th [a reachable par 5] offer a couple of birdie or even eagle chances. So [the 10th hole] sits in the round at the perfect time,” says Ogilvy. “It’s definitely a much better hole than it [would be] if you teed off there to start your round when the dynamics just aren’t nearly the same.”

Sequence matters in other words even if, as at Riviera, players are guaranteed to have to start at least one round on the 10th hole because the first two days use split tees.

Medinah, where I usually work, often takes a lot of crap from the big-name golf writers on just that point: Bradley Klein, for instance, who’s not only the architecture critic for Golfweek but was also PGA Tour caddie and a professor of political science, doesn’t think much of the course. In 1999, he said it was “stunningly mediocre.” Klein doesn’t convince me. Maybe it’s because I am—maybe more so than anyone on the planet—familiar with the course, but it might also be that Klein either isn’t aware of the role of narrative in architecture, or isn’t familiar enough with Medinah to understand its narrative.

There’s a stretch of holes, for instance, that I think illustrate what I’ll call the High Fidelity or Paradise Lost principle pretty well: the ninth through the eleventh. The first and the last hole of this stretch are both dogleg-left four pars, sandwiching a long five par that goes directly into the prevailing wind. The ninth and the eleventh are both similar-looking holes to the unwary: both require you to choose either to try to carry the dogleg with a driver off the tee or lay-up with some other club. But the tee shot on nine is into the prevailing wind and uphill, while the eleventh is with the prevailing wind and downhill. What worked on the first one won’t work on the other. In addition, the tenth is so long, and into the wind, that the player usually thinks more club is necessary on the eleventh tee—but that’s usually exactly the wrong choice.

Medinah just underwent a renovation last year—again—so I will see how the changes went and report back on them here. What I wanted to do here first though was to describe a bit about how I’m going to understand that change, which is to evaluate the golf course through the story it tells. Playing the course as the architect meant it to be played is one advantage the amateur has over the professional. The PGA Tour isn’t far removed from the shotgun starts that are a feature of your typical pro-am event, where it doesn’t matter what hole you start on. But enjoying the structure, the internal logic, of course design is not only one of the game’s pleasures, but also I think a means of improving your own golf: understanding what the architect wants is a big step towards lowering your score. “But to convince the proud what signs avail?” Milton says in Paradise Lost, “Or wonders move the obdurate to relent?” Reading the signs in order, I think, is the amateur’s one advantage over the professional—it is a pleasure not unlike the bite of a noted apple.

My brother Shelley found it to be a place

Much like the city of London. I,

Who do not live in London, but in Los Angeles,

Find, contemplating Hell, that is

Must be even more like Los Angeles.

— “Contemplating Hell.” Bertolt Brecht.

“It’s a great place to live,” wrote Mark Twain about Los Angeles, “but I wouldn’t want to visit there.” But that’s what the the PGA Tour is doing this week at Riviera for the LA Open. I worked at Riviera some years ago for a season, and it is really one of the toughest—and best—golf courses on tour, if not worldwide. The reason for that is not due to any of the reasons generally cited when talking about a golf course: it isn’t particularly long, at least by tour standards; there aren’t any water hazards; and there’s really only one blind shot—though it’s maybe one of the most famous blind shots in golf. Simultaneously Riviera does a lot of damage to scoring averages and yet is consistently praised by the professionals year-in and year-out. The list of champions at Riviera is basically a list of Hall-of-Famers, from Ben Hogan and Sam Snead to Phil Mickelson and DL3. Yet for Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, the track off Sunset has been the Boulevard of Broken Dreams—neither has won here throughout their careers. Riviera, in short, is much like the city that it is set within: it’s different.

Start with the setting: the first tee is right outside the clubhouse on a small patch of grass elevated 75 or 80 feet above the fairway. The suggestion is both majestic and comforting; on a smogless day the Pacific is visible miles away, with the entire course spread below like a map—but rather than intimidating, the implication is aristocratic. All of this splendor exists for you; the tee box displays a fantastic view that nonetheless is maximally convenient. It’s about five steps from the locker room to the tee; there’s no struggle to achieve the vantage. That peculiar amalgam of spectacular natural scenery bent to serve aristocratic privilege of course just is Los Angeles. From there the first hole is short and fairly easy: just as the city of its setting can appear to new arrivals like an Eden, with its lovely weather and the vast quantities of surface politesse spilled about in every public encounter, so the first hole, though it is a five-par, makes Riviera seem like the day will be a cakewalking, lull-inducing stroll to par or better.

But that’s just what Riviera, or rather the original architect George Thomas, wants the golfer to think. The whiplash induced by the second hole rivals only the speed at which someone in Los Angeles will turn from introducing themselves to inquiring about your car, your house, and your yearly income. The second is a brutally hard hole, demanding a long tee shot over a dogleg, then requiring an uphill second shot to a narrow green surrounded on one side by a jungle and on the other a deep-and-steep bunker. And then the green itself is weird, with odd breaks. On the scorecard, the first hole is ranked seventeenth-most difficult, but the second hole is the most difficult. Second is first, as the loopers at Riviera say.

Every hole from then onwards has its oddities: both of the three-pars on the front side are some of the most unusual in golf. The fourth is well-known as one of Ben Hogan’s favorite holes; there isn’t a purer example, I think, of a Redan-style green anywhere other than the 15th hole at North Berwick, the original, or the fourth hole at the National Golf Links of America, where C.B. Macdonald first copied Berwick’s original. The sixth might be the craziest hole found outside of miniature golf: there’s a bunker in the middle of the green. Missing on the wrong side means either putting around the bunker or chipping over it, as Phil Mickelson once did some years ago. The eighth hole has two different fairways, meaning the player needs to choose a path before teeing off, and the tenth might be one of the most fun short holes in the world; it’s only 315 yards, but the green is tiny. The eighteenth is one of the most storied finishing hole in golf: in 1974, Dave Stockton hit a three-wood from 247 yards—it’s a four-par—and sank the putt to steal the tournament from Sam Snead, who by the way was 61 at the time. The tee shot is blind, straight up the hill out of the canyon you descended into after hitting your first shot back on the first tee.

That isn’t even to talk about the fact that the entire course—because it is set within a canyon whose lower reaches open to the ocean—slopes subtly towards the Pacific, meaning that putts can break the opposite of what they might look, nor the peculiar kikuyu grass that can grab a club in the rough. Nor the barranca grass infesting various swales that take the place of water hazards. What all of this means is that the golf course, with all of its quirks, rewards veteran players and not rookies, and the list of champions at Riviera, as mentioned, reflects that fact. Like Twain says about Los Angeles, Riviera smiles on those who’ve been there awhile—which is to say, as Bertolt Brecht might have had he thought more about Ben Hogan and less about the House Un-American Activities Committee, the winner in Los Angeles is usually the devil you know.

The 10th at Riviera C.C. (Geoff Shackelford)

A picture being worth the proverbial thousand words, I trashed my comments and drove over to the SI Vault to see if the curators had preserved an essay I wrote about Riviera’s 10th during the 1995 PGA Championship (won by Steve Elkington). I found it in a folder labeled “Literary Gems,” next to one of Dan Patrick’s Q&A columns. Titled “Short and Sweet,” it played off a number of Hollywood tropes. “What a performance!” it began …

… On Thursday, the 10th hole at Riviera Country Club wore a beret and wondered, in a boozy voice, if “ze golfair” would be interested in some stimulating postcards. On Friday, the 10th played the teenager with rolled-up sleeves who offered you a cigarette when you were 11. On Saturday, the 10th put on a striped jacket and stood outside a tent extolling the charms of Little Egypt. And on Sunday, when the PGA Championship was ripe for the taking, the 10th wore a trench coat and tried to entice the big hitters with promises of a nuclear device.

A hole has to have a lot of personality to get me that wound up. The 10th at Riviera is my favorite drivable par-4, and I suspect it is the favorite of most modern golf architects. Bobby Weed cited it as the inspiration for his 16th hole at the University of Florida Golf Course (See “This Old Course”), although he was probably forgetting that the Scots were building drivable par 4s before he was born — the difference being that the Scots also built unreachable par 3s. (The eight seaside holes at James Braid’s Girvan Golf Course, just down the road from Turnberry, seem to have had par assigned by dropping numbered stones from a helicopter.)

If Shackelford’s pic and my purple prose don’t satisfy your pangs for 10th-hole trivia, you can pig out on Steve DiMeglio’s recent piece in USAToday, which begins, “Short and sweet — and plenty dangerous.”

Or is that the first line of Steve’s bio?

Pavin has chosen Tom Lehman , Jeff Sluman, Davis Love III and Paul Goydos as the men to help him try and become the first American captain since Tom Watson at The Belfry in 1993 to win a Ryder Cup match on European soil.

Corey Pavin

“I don’t think it’s necessary to have four, I think it’s better for me,” Pavin said after announcing the vice-captains at Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles. “With four I can have one go with each match. With three you lose that chance.”

He added: “I want to know what’s going on and the more sets of eyes watching, there’s more feedback and hopefully I’ll make good decisions.

“The number of four is basically because there’s four matches on Friday and Saturday. Each round I want eyes on each match.

“I can’t watch everybody, and I want guys that can. It seems like four is better than three and five is too much.

“Maybe we’ll have 12 one of these years, one assistant for every player. But I think it’s a good number. It kind of allows everybody not to have to do too much, but it allows them to focus on players that need to be focused on.”

The second wedding I did this weekend was for Melissa and Hieu and it was held at Our Lady of the Woods Parish with a reception at the Riviera Country Club in Orland Park. Surprisingly, they had similar colors to the other wedding I did this weekend–but a totally different look and feel was achieved! 

Melissa’s bouquet was fantastic! It was huge and beautiful and full of color and texture. I loved it, she loved it–everyone loved it! The maid of honor and bridesmaid bouquets were made of white hydrangea, white callas and green cymbidium orchids-they also turned out fabulous. The calla bouts for the men in the bridal party were sleek and sophisticated and complimented the girls’ bouquets well. 

For this reception we did 3 types of centerpieces: #1) a bubble bowl with ti-leaf wrap inside and a mixture of white hydrangea, white and purple stock, white and green dendrobium orchids and Bells of Ireland; #2) a trio of cylinders with clusters of white Vendela roses, green button pomps and purple hydrangea; #3) and the final style was something the bride came up with herself: 8 square votive holders with candles arranged in a geometric pattern. All of the centerpieces looked great in the space and worked well with the deep purple overlays on the tables.

For the gift card holder I created my “signature” floral-rimmed large cylinder vase. We also added votives and vases for the bouquets to the head table along with the tossing bouquet.

Melissa and Hieu’s cake was totally unique–covered with raspberries by the bakery and then I added white dendrobium orchid accents to it. It smelled and looked delicious! 

In the first major ETF consolidation of the year, last week, Northern Trust officially liquidated all 17 members of its ETF family, the Northern Exchange-Traded Shares, or NETS. Simultaneously, the bank spent millions of dollars to sponsor a PGA tournament, the Northern Trust Open at the Riviera Country Club, and throw lavish star-studded parties around Los Angeles.

The Chicago bank paid to fly hundreds of clients and employees to the tournament, paid for their rooms at some of the city’s priciest hotels — the Beverly Wilshire, the Ritz Carlton and the Casa Del Mar — and shuttled its guests to the tournament in Mercedes.

According to L.A. gossip site TMZ.com, Wednesday, Northern Trust hosted a dinner with entertainment from the band Chicago. Thursday, dinner was held at a private hangar at the Santa Monica Airport followed by a concert from Earth Wind & Fire. Friday, the NETS were officially shut down. Saturday, Northern Trust took over the House of Blues, served salmon and filet mignon, and had Sheryl Crow serenade its guests. Female guests left with gift bags from Tiffany’s.

TMZ said Northern Trust paid Chicago $100,000 and the House of Blues $50,000. The other two bands declined to disclose their fees. Northern Trust also footed the bill for the entire tournament and part of the $6.3 million purse.

In light of the fact that Northern Trust took $1.6 billion from the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, there’s plenty of outrage over this egregious display of wasteful spending, especially since Northern Trust laid off 4% of its workforce in December. But putting that aside, couldn’t this money have been used to save the NETS?

It takes between $250,000 and $650,000 to bring an ETF to the market. Let’s say $500,000 each, or $8.5 million, to launch 17 funds. Then assume another $500,000 in annual expenses to run the funds, or another $8.5 million a year to keep the NETS operation afloat. While we don’t have a total cost for the party, from the TMZ data, it’s not hard to imagine the whole thing costing around $8.5 million, essentially what it costs to keep the ETFs afloat for another year.

Is the death of an ETF or an ETF company worth mourning? In the grand scheme of things, probably not. Definitely not by its competitors, but the ETF industry is still small, with just about 25 companies. So, less competition and fewer good ideas are bad for investors and the industry in general.

Of course, the ETF industry did go through a huge growth spurt from 2006 to 2008 as companies in a gold-rush-type spirit pushed out funds based on any idea that came into their heads. There were some great ideas, such as the commodity- and currency-based exchange-traded vehicles, and some incredibly stupid ones. Amidst a falling stock market and declining economy, investors are less willing to take a risk on an offbeat idea. So, consolidation of the industry was not unexpected. In some cases, that’s a good thing.

Among the stupid ideas we’re well rid off, let me point you to the Focus Shares. As the housing bubble popped these geniuses came out with the ISE Homebuilders Index Fund. Their other brilliant ideas were the ISE-CCM Homeland Security Index Fund, which tracked companies that did work for the Department of Homeland Security, and the ISE-REVERE Wal-Mart Supplier Index, which followed companies that derive a large portion of their revenues from sales to Wal-Mart.

Others like the HealthShares or the Claymore/KLD Sudan Free Large-Cap Core Fund were clever portfolio ideas, but much too narrowly focused to attract a large audience, especially in times such as these.

But the NETS were different. They offered investors the first way to invest in the world’s main global stock indexes. Instead of investing in a little known MSCI index of a foreign market, the NETS gave investors the opportunity to invest in a country’s actual benchmark. The NETS tracked London’s FTSE-100, Germany’s DAX Index and France’s CAC-40 Index, among others. The NETS were also the first to offer U.S. investors exposure to the Irish, Israeli and Portuguese markets. Also, they were run by Steven Schoenfeld, the man who wrote the book on indexing. In addition to being an indexing expert, Schoenfeld helped build the iShares business in its early days.

The NETS were reported to have $33 million in assets under management and charged an expense ratio of 0.47%, bringing in $155,100 a year. So, they weren’t paying their way, but it doesn’t cost that much to keep them going. These were young funds that needed to find an audience. So, it seems shocking that after all the time and effort to bring an ETF to market, a firm would give up on them so fast? In a down market, investors aren’t in the mood to invest, but you want to have products ready and available the moment investors come back.

While the ETF industry experienced a record number of fund closings in 2008, most of those came out of independent ETF shops. However, Northern Trust is a huge Chicago-based investment bank. According to Barron’s Dimitra Defotis, while the nation’s prominent banks are suffering and asking for money from the U.S. government, Northern Trust has a far more promising outlook.

“Unless you think the world is going to disappear in the next five years, our position as the leading wealth manager in the United States should serve us well as the U.S. market recovers,” CEO Frederick H. Waddell told Barron’s “On the institutional side, we continue to win significant asset-management and servicing mandates around the world.”

Barron’s says Northern Trust’s balance sheet is better than most other banks, because it avoided housing finance. In addition, it’s gaining customers from overseas institutions. Finally, it’s fee income, which accounts for more than half its revenue, came in at $4.2 billion last year.

So, with about $8 billion in revenues and $1.6 billion of TARP money, it seems incredibly short sighted for Northern Trust to have closed down the ETFs. And after spending about $8.5 million for a golf tournament and parties, it really wasn’t a lot to keep them open. In fact, this wasteful spending of government money for bonuses and parties shows how this isn’t just obnoxious, but actually detrimental to these banks and their customers. It is truly taking cash out of the funds necessary to run these banks’ operations. Businesses are being shut down so top managers can party. It’s nauseating.

I think the NETS were good products and I’m sorry to see them go. Since these ETFs were based on a good idea, I’m sure some other company will create similar products. Still, while the Northern Trust head honchos sang, “All I Wanna Do is Have Some Fun”, the ETF industry and investors are singing another Sheryl Crow hit: “The First Cut is the Deepest.”

Then, on Sunday at the Northern Trust Open, we get a classic Phil Mickelson Sunday. Lefty opened the day with a four-shot lead, and quickly worked on kicking it away after a first-hole eagle. Five bogies later, and Mickelson was two shots down with three holes to play.

Fortunately for Mickelson, the guy he was trailing has even more trouble putting away a tournament than himself. Steve Stricker has already shot himself in the foot so many times this year that he’s been reduced to walking on bloody stumps. Stricker had a three shot lead going into the final round of the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, before coughing that up with a dreadful Sunday 77 that included a quadruple bogey on the 10th hole.

Yesterday, it was a hook off the tee on the difficult 18th hole that sent Stricker to a costly 72nd hole bogey. When Mickelson responded with clutch birdies on 16 and 17, he was able to survive Riviera and claim his 35th PGA Tour victory.

What does this mean for Mickelson? Who knows. It’s clear that Butch Harmon hasn’t quite worked out all the kinks in Lefty’s driver. And the Winged Foot scar tissue? Looks not to be healed completely yet. Mickelson was essentially silent while Woods was out. Does he need Tiger in order to raise his own game? We shall see.

From the Foreword by Paul Marchand: “Finally! A book to help illuminate the Fred fascination. On the following pages you can enjoy some insight into all those qualities that make Fred Couples such a compelling sports star. His humor and humility have been his ever-present personality traits, and there has always been a real sincerity in Fred’s uncomplicated and unaffected nature. While looking so calm and relaxed, Fred performs his skills ‘right out of his soul.’” With his fluid swing and soft touch, Fred Couples has won thirteen times on the PGA Tour, including the Masters in 1992. And Freddie is clearly a favorite among the fans and players. His appeal lies not in the number of tournaments he has won but in his endearing nonchalance about his star golfer status. Fred Couples: Golf’s Reluctant Superstar is an illuminating look inside the life of a man who rarely bares his soul. Author Kathlene Bissell recounts stories of his days at the University of Houston with future CBS golf announcer Jim Nantz, of his turning pro on a whim and the ensuing struggle to break through on the tour, of his fulfilling a lifelong dream of a Masters victory and the emotional aftermath, and of his role in helping launch the current look in golf clothing. He hides behind a casual demeanor, but his career has revealed a raw determination to make it through the down times to remain at the top of his field. Fred Couples is an inspiring story for golfers and sports fans alike. Kathlene Bissell has worked in the golf industry since 1984. She has written for Golf Illustrated, Golf for Women, and Private Clubs magazines and formerly was media director for the Skins Game and the World Cup of Golf. She is a media consultant to golf businesses and founder of thegolfshow.net, a website devoted to various aspects of the game. She lives in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.

Sports Illustrated‘s Rick Reilly once compared Fred Couples’s appeal to chocolate’s: “Nearly everybody likes him, and most people like him a lot.” One of the game’s true talents, Couples is also one of its real enigmas; what you see–the languid swing, the untroubled walk, the easy attitude–seems to be what you get, and what you seem to get is pretty appealing. But that’s only part of the story. He’s not nearly as carefree and lackadaisical as he’d have us believe. Crushed by his meltdown in the 1989 Ryder Cup when he lost the final match for the U.S. and the cup went back to Europe, much of his great run of the early ’90s–including the 1992 Masters title–grew out of the resolve, rededication, and refocusing Ray Floyd helped him draw out of that experience. Similarly, much of his falloff in the late ’90s can be traced to family illnesses and the emotional toll they took.

A dogged researcher and interviewer, Bissell does her share of mucking around in the rough to find the complex competitor–and ultimately the decent human being–at Couples’s core. Her exploration of his relationship with his parents at the end of their lives is quite moving, and the breakup of his first marriage makes for pleasurably guilty reading. Interestingly, it’s Couples’s polo-obsessed first wife who offers the most stunning insight into his essence: “To Fred, nothing is worth the sacrifice of losing your peace of mind.” –Jeff Silverman

Fred Couples is available at Amazon for $11.66. To Order click here
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Other Products of Interest

• Total Shotmaking: The Golfer’s Guide to Low Scoring
• Every Shot I Take
• Golf Channel – Playing Lessons From The Pros: Fred Couples
• Fred Couples on Tempo
• Always By My Side: A Father’s Grace and a Sports Journey Unlike Any Other

The history at Riviera is rich.  As the host for the first US Open held on the west coast in 1948, Riviera was only slightly altered as the course was already in tournament condition, and after Ben Hogan won there three times in 18 months, it was given the nickname “Hogan’s Alley.”  Since then, it’s always been a favorite of the top pros (except for Tiger who only likes courses that are extremely long and force you to hit a high, spinny approach shot…yea, that’s right Tiger, suck it) and has a list of champions that includes Hogan, Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson, Fred Couples, Nick Faldo and Phil Mickelson as well as Charlie Sifford, the first African American golfer inducted into the Golf Hall of Fame, and who has a special exemption for the tournament named in his honor.

But enough about the history, what about the course?

Riviera starts off with a short par 5 with your tee shot hit from an elevated tee box and a cart path running through the fairway in the landing zone.  An approach to a boomerang shamed green with bunkers defending it usually can lead to scoring opportunities, especially when the pin position is on the left side of the green, but regardless of where the pin is, you almost have to hit a fade.

The 6th hole, a medium length par 3, features one of the coolest…um…features in golf course design…a bunker sitting smack, dab in the middle of the green, made much more difficult by a large ridge running through the middle.  The Sunday pin position is usually on the left side of the green and on the top of said ridge, meaning anything right of the bunker is dead, and anything left short requires some serious skill to get up and down.  It’s kind of funny that every new course steals Pebble Beach’s pathetic attempts at bunkerage when almost no new course designer looks at this feature.  Without that bunker, this hole would be an automatic birdie, but with the bunker there, the landing zones are quartered, and mistakes severely penalized.  Island greens are cute and everything, but you don’t need water or trees to make a par 3 tough…one of the coolest holes in golf, if you ask me.

Which brings us to 10, the greatest par 4 in golf.  Sitting only 315 yards, it’s essentially a long par 3, but even with today’s technology, it remains far from easy.  The smart play is to lay up, wedge it close and walk away with a birdie, but when you see 315, you almost have to go for it.  And that’s the beauty of the hole…it takes great restraint to play it “correctly” but if you decide to go for it, it’s a big gamble.  Sure you can have an easy bunker shot if you find the one directly in front of the green, but ANYTHING long is dead, leaving you with some work for a par.  Think about it…why would ANYONE go for this green when you can get a birdie with a long iron tee shot?  And I’m sure every pro has put that in the game plan, but whenever you see the TV action, 99.9% of pros go for it.  The only guy I can vividly remember playing the hole “correctly” is Jim Furyk, which should surprise no one.  But, unless you’re confident you can hit the green and get an eagle, there’s really no point in bringing out the big stick here, which makes this hole a mindf*ck of epic proportions.

The closing hole is as tough a test as you can get.  For all the mental challenges 10 produces, 18 is where the physical part comes into play.  At 475 yards, it’s not short by any means, though the advancements in technology have removed some of the teeth.  A blind tee shot that gets dramatically shortened by the increase in elevation leaves you an approach to a green that not only slopes, but is guarded like Fort Knox, sitting in an ampitheater with trees on the right and a very narrow strip of fairway leading into the green.  The green is elevated and undulating, and any approach shot that isn’t straight is going to lead to a bogey.  Simple as that.  For a course that challenges your strategy and forces you to work the ball, this finishing hole is, in a word, brutal.  While you’ll remember Charles Howell III hitting driver-wedge to get a birdie in 2007, the new tee boxes will make sure this kind of junk doesn’t happen often, and makes for a fantastic closing hole.

I’m a big fan of these styles of courses, a nice variety of holes that force you to work the ball.  The length is manageable for all players and every hole can be played differently.  You don’t need 325 yard drives just to keep up (which is probably why Tiger doesn’t like playing here) like you do at Doral, but, as I said in the opening, if your shots have integrity, they’ll be rewarded, and the history of champions here proves that point.

All I wanted to do was to visit the pro shop to pick up a cap and perhaps, look through the clearance rack for some memorabilia on the Nissan Open tournament or whatever it is called. The pro shop is pretty well stocked with golf equipment, framed pictures on the wall, golf balls, golf shirts, jackets, etc. As far as caps, they have a whole wall dedicated to caps. They have caps with their own logo, the Riviera Country Club and they have caps that read ‘Hogan’s Alley’. I picked up one of those because it’s classic.

On the way out, I noticed two kids that were hanging around the starter hut. I wanted to get a scorecard and some of the ball markers for souvenir. I overheard them say that they were going out for a twilight round. I turned to the mrs and told her that I was dying of envy. Being members there was one thing but I could imagine the allowances they were getting each week.

I don’t get it. . .really I don’t. Final round of The Nissan Open at Riviera Country Club. Phil Mickelson has played great all week. Comes to the final hole with a one stroke lead. Par to win. Loses his drive to the left (a push for the lefty), tries to muscle an 8-iron to the green. Comes up short. Chunks his approach, misses his putt and bogies the hole to go to  playoff against Charles Howell where he proceeds to lose to a par on the 3rd playoff hole.  Not a birdie. . .a par. Which means Phil had to bogey to lose. . .again. Phil was so bad in the playoff that on the first playoff hole Howell outdrove him by 70 yards! 70 yards!!! That’s how far I knock it by Pourout. 

What was on the line? Phil had the chance to come out of Riviera with his 2nd win in a row and the momentum of a champion one month before The Masters. What did he end up with? More bad memories. More bad mental pictures of a man who can’t seem to step up on the tee when it counts and hammer it down the middle, hit the freakin’ green and two putt for par to win the tournament.

Yes, I know he got it going for a while over the last 18 months and I was pulling for him. I like Phil, but crap . . .this isn’t hard. He is a professional. This is what he does for a living. Step up on the tee and make par. Not birdie. . .Par.  Kickers need to make it from 30 yards to win the game. Pitchers need to throw strikes in the bottom of the 9th with the bases loaded and golfers need to hit the fairway when it counts.

 Way to go Charles. Phil had the momentum and you took it from him. You earned that victory. Enjoy it.