MYRTLE BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA – I’ve got a good round of golf going but I’ve left myself short on my approach shot. I line up my putt for a 20-footer that I need to make to save par. I really need to concentrate, but the loudspeaker is pounding out Jimmy Buffett’s “Boat Drinks” and the Hawaiian waterfall is rumbling and my pale blue golf ball is stuck up against a fake rock. Earlier in the day I had teed it up at Tidewater Golf Club in North Myrtle Beach, a tremendous layout with undulating greens that resemble the figure of Read more
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ON THE CABOT TRAIL IN CAPE BRETON – It’s like going back to your high school reunion and finding that sweetheart from grade nine even prettier than you remembered. I drove the Cabot Trail once before. But it was with three kids and my wife in a mini-van maybe 16 years ago. They’ve since changed, of course, as kids do, but at the time I remember them looking at my wife and I as we drove along beautiful beaches and high sea cliffs and thinking we were crazy. “We’re not view people,” my daughter said, or words to that effect, Read more
This is from a story I wrote for the Toronto Star golf magazine on the explosion of golf in China… You can see it in the way the mainland Chinese line up outside the Louis Vuitton shop in Kowloon. You can see it on Shenzen’s dusty roads, where cars are now far more common than the bikes that crowded China’s streets only a dozen years ago. People who suddenly come into wealth have a habit of releasing their pent-up shopping frustration by indulging in all the biggest gadgets and latest fads of the people they’ve seen enjoying the good life. Read more
This is from a golf trip I took with some friends to the golfing mecca of America a couple years ago… PEBBLE BEACH, CALIFORNIA — My buddies and I had been back home for a week or so when I got an email from one of them talking about our early September trip to famed Pebble Beach. “Thanks for the trip to paradise,” he said. I couldn’t say it any better myself. I’m not one for getting nervous talking to athletes or celebrities or politicians, but I had a serious case of the knee-knocks on the first few holes at Read more
Here’s a post from a great trip to New Zealand a few years back. Awesome golf, great food and unforgettable scenery… NORTH ISLAND, NEW ZEALAND—You drive down a dirt road a half hour outside Kerikeri, a town of maybe 6,000 permanent residents. Suddenly there’s a plain, wooden gate that looks for all the world as if it’s meant to keep sheep off the road, which it probably is. It’s a level of modesty that befits this country that one local described to me as “second-gear.” But the golf resort that lies behind the plain fence is sheer glory. Kauri Cliffs Read more
