Boyz in the mood...

So we're sitting around a while ago, me and my golfing mentor (the Doral Lama), watching the Masters and waiting for the pizza guy to show up, scoping out the latest Golf Digest Places to Play Guide to plan our annual summer golf trip. That's not a bad day right there. We've done Myrtle, Ocean City, Pinehurst, south Florida, Arizona, Jacksonville and Ohio (yeah, we're still wondering about that one though we did discover Longaberger, which immediately vaulted into the top 10, no small feat, that), and Williamsburg/Virginia Beach, some of them multiple times. And as we're checking out the latest course ratings and rankings we notice that Michigan has a bunch of 4 and 5-star courses plus my boy is a Wolverine, so we'll hold off on Bandon Dunes and Monterrey Peninsula until next summer and Michigan it is.

We had a few main event courses picked out - Arcadia Bluffs and Bay Harbor, so now it was just a matter of filling in the undercard of the rest of the trip, sort of like...having decided on the centerpiece meat dishes for the family BBQ you have to wrangle a bit about the various sides and appetizers, simple in theory but more trouble than it should be. But, then again, you never know when you might unexpectedly discover a diamond in the graduated US Open rough, though it becomes harder and harder to surprise and almost impossible to astonish.

So to the Golf Digest guide we go. As I mentioned, Michigan had a boatload of 3-1/2 and 4 star courses, so it was merely a matter of doing some Internet cross-referencing to get the locations and logistics down. But just for kicks, we flipped through the guide to look up some of our local Maryland/Virginia standbys and what do you think we found? Huh, go figure, almost every course in the area - from the trappiest, most uninspired muni to the over-hyped must-play condo-lined upscale daily fee country-club for a day - all of them were at least 3 stars in the Golf Digest guide. Let's put it this way, if some of these places merit 3 stars, then Pinehurst #2 must rate like, oh, I don't know, 18 stars. So the heretofore indispensable GD guide had become, well, a touch unreliable.

Scroll back to the Ohio trip. Despite my friend's skepticism (Ohio was simply an uninspired flat waythrough on the way to Michigan to his mind) the Golf Digest top 100 list had come out for that year and there were at least 6 courses that were within proximate distance of each other, or close enough that you could fashion a reasonable excursion. So what was the upshot of our venture - well, disappointing, to say the least. I mean, think about it, top 100 - in the country. You're expecting some pretty serious golf courses and only two of them would be included in my own top 100, so, not exactly a successful trip. To put it in non-golf terms - imagine going to Mario Batali's NY dining mecca, Babbo, and you find out that Batali's in Mali on holiday and Mario Andretti is running the kitchen or you've laid out some serious scratch for ducats to the latest Broadway smash starring Meryl Streep and you get understudy Merrill Hoge in drag or...ok, I think I'm done showboating...

Subpar golf and the dismality that is Ohio - not great.

Great. Kind of a misunderstood word, lately. Akin to: "of the ages", as in "a fight for the ages", "sweet", "boy that was a sweet play", "killer", like "that chick has got a killer body" or even "mad", used in the classic "that was one mad dunk, yo". When did "really good" become better than "great"? Lately, everything is great - that was a great game, what a great party, I loved the restaurant, wasn't the food great? Boy, that was one great movie!!

If everything is so great, why do I see so much out there that blows? I guess great has become the new mediocre. It must be a nice life to eat at great restaurants, see great movies every weekend and play great golf courses wherever they tee it up. Yessiree, a night out at the Olive Garden, followed by the latest send-up starring the indomitable Will Farrell and next day, a foursome at a 4-star Golf Digest course, complete with perpetually aerated greens, rocks in the bunkers and a $5 surcharge for range balls on top of the C-note you've ponied up for greens fees. Gee, that does sound great.

So that's it for now. I'm gonna head to the range. I shot a lousy 96, though I did have a world-class double bogey save. It even bordered on being great.