These People Live Among You Files: Golf Tattoos

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I'm sure these are all wonderful, tax-paying, something-fearing-American Americans. That said, to celebrate a new tat-heavy show debuting tonight on NBC, my colleagues at Morning Drive asked viewers to submit their golf themed inked-up torsos, limbs, digits and other areas.  Here is the full list of golf-friendly body art.

Some are genuinely lovely tributes.

Some are funny in a bar-fight kind of way.

Another is a fascinating tribute to Dr. MacKenzie.

Yet another could earn the person a call from Augusta National's lawyers.

And a few could use better lighting to prevent them from looking like those dreadful online photos you see when trying to figure out if Dr. Spaceman should take a look at that mole.

My personal favorite is the foot with coordinates to Muirfield Village ingrained for safe keeping.

Enjoy!

Another Course Bites The Dust; A Dozen We'd Like To Have Back

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Imran Ghori in the Riverside Press-Enterprise reports that the Pete Dye-branded Moreno Valley Ranch, once home to a Nike Tour event, closed its doors on August 25th.

The course goes to auction September 1st with an openign bid of $3.6 million for the 27 holes and clubhouse.

On the sad topic of lost courses, GolfAdvisor.com's Jason Scott Deegan looks at a dozen shuttered golf courses that we all regret having seen gone to seed.

Video: Sunningdale Has Gone To The Dogs

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No leashes (except around the clubhouse), sausages during the round and no lost balls (for some). What's not to love?

Here's a superb ESPN feature tied to today's coverage of the Senior Open Championship at Sunningdale Old.

And here's Ran Morrissett's very recent review of this classic venue.



R.I.P. Jerry Weintraub

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One of Hollywood's last moguls was a huge golf nut too. He held court at places like Madison Club and produced several popular films, including the Ocean's Eleven franchise. He golfed with Presidents Bush and Reagan and Sinatra too.

Jerry Weintraub died of heart failure at age 77.

Jerry Tarde recently wrote in Golf Digest about playing in a sixsome with Weintraub at Madison Club.

Golf in America's Jim Gray profiled Weintraub and talked to him about his storied career and philanthropy along with his love of the game.

"Homage to a Special Kind of Caddie From a Special Kind of Era"

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Michael Bamberger pays tribue to Dolphus Hull, aka Golf Ball, who caddied in a different era.

Bamberger writes at golf.com:

In his prime, he ran Calvin Peete’s golf game, just as surely as Jack Welch ran G.E.

He had a long, fruitful, volatile relationship with Raymond Floyd—and Raymond’s wife, Maria—going back to the 1960s. “I fired him six times,” Floyd once told me. “Maria hired him seven.”

The caddie-player relationship was different then. The caddie was less of a technocrat and more attuned to the emotional state of the golfer. At least, Golf Ball was like that, as was his running mate, Herman Mitchell. You could fit three Balls in Mitch, who caddied for Lee Trevino for years. They were Mutt and Jeff, but they both could play and they both had the empathy gene—the ability to really understand another person’s plight—embedded in their DNA