Tour Announcements - Texas, New Mexico, Maryland and Carolina

So hats off to my buddy the Media Guru at Hooked on Golf for his nod to my service mark in his tour announcement a couple days back. Nice to see Utah in the house. As the great rock song says, "we gotta turn people on to Utah, noone seems to know."

I'm happy to announce, my tour has just extended and added a long east coast leg from Maryland to South Carolina. Tour starts at Black Mesa G.C. in New Mexico, then moves to Texas for a round at the Rawls Course, where I'll play with the University of Arizona head football coach and rock stars The Feds.

The tour then turns east to Maryland for two rounds, one at the fabled Baltimore Country Club some of A.W. Tillinghast's most revered work. Architecture experts will remember Brian Silva did a renovation of the East Course and Bob Cupp and Tom Kite redid the West Course.

This is a fascinating exercise in analyzing architecture and comparing and contrasting styles between different renovating architects, but also analyzing an architect's work and style over time. In the southern swing, I'll play Country Club of Charleston, (Seth Raynor) which is in the middle of a renovation by Silva (who is still quietly enjoying his well deserved victory in the renovation category last year for a Ross course, Brookside in Ohio), so I can compare renovations by the same designer of different original authors.

Then reviewing Baltimore West, I can compare and contrast with Kite and Cupp's original design at Liberty National. A mild debate has begun among experts in golf course design about this pair. Most agree that Cupp has undoubtedly earned a supurb record on the regional level and has scored a man sized hit at Pumpkin Ridge, he has not fed off that success and accelerated to the superstar level enjoyed currently by Engh, Doak, and Jeff Brauer, who have been decorated with multiple awards steadily since 1999. The addition of Kite, while "tournamentizing" course design (LibNat) does what the addition of any tour pro will do, inject little originality. Dye and Fazio still dominate the tournament venues, Dye for all the right reasons that noone notices (its his design) and Fazio for all the wrong reasons, i.e. his name is Tom Fazio.

Nevertheless, Baltimore West is a redesign and I'll be playing with member Dan Taylor, himself an architecture and design expert, so we'll get inside info on the reno and the member's reaction.

Finally, the tour shifts to South Carolina for rounds in Hilton Head and Charleston. The final tally is:

12 rounds
5 states
8 public
4 private
8 "top 100s"
3 time zones
3 rock guitarists
2 rock concerts
a head football coach and, oh yeah...
ONE MAN

How's that, Tony?