The Book on High Bridge Hills, the Unabridged Anniversary Edition

High Bridge Hills Golf Club in western New Jersey is unheralded but likely not underrated, under-appreciated but probably not under-subscribed. I say this as someone with quick access to the Internet who has been to the golf club exactly twice.

My first observation: Fun track.

My first question: Who knew?

We played High Bridge Hills the last week in April. For golfers who live west of New York City or are willing to travel an hour twenty west of the Big Apple, it offers an outstanding value with season rates between $51 (after 1 p.m. weekdays) and $79 (before 1 p.m. weekends), and off-peak discounts for local residents, which is understandable as the course is owned by the Borough of High Bridge. Designed by Mark A. Mungeam of Mungeam and Cornish (yes, that's renowned golf course architect Geoffrey Cornish), High Bridge Hills opened in midsummer of 1999 so, owing partly to our enthusiasm for milestones, a timely report makes all the more sense as High Bridge Hills marks a significant anniversary this summer.

Ceremony aside, High Bridge Hills (HBH) is routed over the treeless slopes, hills and moderate valleys of an old farm. Aside from the imposing red barn sited on the highpoint of the property, the course's distinctive visual flavor -- and much of its challenge -- resides in the unobstructed windswept terrain, the hillsides, valleys and swales, and, most significantly, the tall fescue grass that grows untended and gnarly, blowing in the wind from spring through summer. These tall grasses, which are essentially the secondary rough, constitute a visually intimidating golf-ball-swallowing menace hazard for anyone not in control of his tee shot. "If you hit into it, don't count on finding yours," writes Kevin McKay, High Bridge's director of golf. "You may find others, but never yours."

With that said, I went anticipating a three-star experience because my best available bookshelf resource -- Golf Digest's Places to Play (2002 edition) -- had given it exactly that number. My expectations were more than met by the golf course. High Bridge is memorable and had me easily recalling all holes two weeks after playing it. HBH was challenging in the 20- to 25-mile-per-hour winds we played in but not preposterously difficult, although I'm mindful that the rough hadn't yet reached mid-season ferocity. Later, when I saw HBH listed among a New Jersey golf association's top 30 public courses in the state, I thought it belonged comfortably in that group.

Would I go back? Would I recommend it to friends? The short answer to both is yes. Aside from the course, HBH has a few key virtues, foremost among them accessibility. From New York City and the populous northeastern part of New Jersey, the club is three miles north of Interstate 78 (via Route No. 31 at exit 17) but once you're playing, you're fairly removed from reminders of modernization and encroaching suburbia, save for a few westerly vistas that include the scenic Spruce Run Reservoir and one immense example of Alan Greenspan's housing bubble suburban tract housing. If you happen to be close enough to consider HBH as a practice facility, it has a well-maintained grass range and a large practice putting green where, thankfully on a return weekday afternoon visit, I saw no sign discouraging chipping.

The other outstanding attribute of High Bridge Hills that distinguishes it from its peers is that it was built and is owned by the borough and, hence, is a muni. It's testament that very good things can get done under government auspices, although the story is more complicated than that simple observation. Frank Hannigan, the former USGA executive director, authored a 1999 Golf Digest story of how HBH came into existence over 10 years ago. The story is strong on explaining how the project was financed, but it also has a decidedly optimistic tone so as to share borough revenue projections without injecting a scintilla of  skepticism that should accompany any projection.

Thoughts on Fillies Who Should (and Should Not) Run With the Boys

This is the season of the filly who can compete with (outrun, actually) the boys, so I kept seeing symmetry between Rachel Alexandra's emergence, entrance and impressive performance in Saturday's Preakness and the emergence, entrance (via LPGA Qualifying School) and impressive performance of Michelle Wie in last week's LPGA Sybase Classic held at Upper Montclair Country Club just west of New York City.

Perhaps other readers who are horse racing fans and golfers sense the similarity, if not parallel progression. Of course Wie isn't competing against men anymore and when she did, other than the curiosity factor, nothing much came of it.

To the similarities, however, we go. These can't be judged the salad days for either the LPGA or thoroughbred racing. Whether it's the backstretch or the betting window, attendance or other barometers that measure interest, thoroughbred horse racing is in slow, inexorable long-term decline. (I'm sure counter arguments can be made citing stud fees and yearling sales, but if I were a betting man, I know there are a lot more venues for me to make a legal wager these days than Aqueduct-Belmont-Saratoga and Monmouth...)

Making Pinch Look Like a Putz or Paging Richard Hertz

It's not like us to be holier-than-thou, but when the once-august New York Times tees it up like this, well, we can't resist cracking one down the fairway.

To wit: The tiny ad in Monday's paper for The Links at Shirley Golf Course in Shirley (Long Island, NY) says: "Come Sink Your Putts in Shirley."

The way I heard the joke (about 15 years ago) was: "Golf is a lot like marriage. You have to play by the rules. You have to be considerate of your partner. And you have to sink a lot of putts."

Get it! It was mildly funny then. Adding the play on "Shirley" brings it to a truly sophomoric, two-by-four-over-the-cranium level of wit. And this at The Times, which had employed, at one point, an editor in charge of standards and still has an ombudsman (whom I haven't read since they got rid of that guy who loved the Red Sox).

Anyway, times being what they are -- and by this I mean Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. just sold his new building, threatened to shut down The Boston Globe in order to break a few unions, and borrowed money from a Mexican sugar daddy media baron to make ends meet -- I guess revenue is revenue!

I'm told by a friend in Florida that the ad made the editions that are circulated there. It's on the same page, D7, in the suburban New York/New Jersey editions as Bill Pennington's golf column and the jump of Larry Dorman's account of Henrik Stenson's victory Sunday at The PLAYERS championship. So, give credit to the Links at Shirley for (GROANER ALERT!) being able to drive the green and put its putts in the hole! Of course, this oversight and/or indiscretion was likely made by someone in ad sales so I fully expect that Dorman and Pennington won't be quoting Richard Hertz or Heywood Jablome anytime soon. -- Robert Lohrer

Four-Letter Word for Frustration With Sticks: _ _ _ _

There ought to be a word for combining two great pastimes. You know, something that describes putting together distinct activities simultaneously. Doubleheader doesn't do it, because that's consecutive. I'm thinking eight to ten letters.

In any case, The New York Times Sunday crossword did just that -- combining golf and the redoubtable, always fun but not unsolvable Sunday puzzle -- with lots of golf clues and punny, funny golf answers.

Here are the seven clues.

22-Across: Where golf bag handlers congregate inside the clubhouse? 12 letters (Hint: Tune in the Golf Channel Tuesday night.)

26-Across: Golf clubs tossed into the drink at Pebble Beach? 19 letters (Hint: more than one word)

40-Across: Tendency to throw one's club after sinking a short stroke. 18 letters

63-Across: Like golf courses that let you play the full 18? 13 letters

83-Across: Competitions to see who can drive a ball farthest in the rain? 18 letters

101-Across: Thoroughly undeserved under-par result? 19 letters

109-Across: Fairway club swung quickly? 12 letters

It's Monday morning and with Sunday being Mother's Day, I didn't get a look at the Sunday puzzle until late Sunday night, so I'll give myself part of today and then hand it off to she-who-must-be-obeyed and see if we can't run the table. -- Robert Lohrer

The Players, Across the Generations

Maybe it's all that footage of past champions at The Players that gets us thinking this way: golf across generational lines, albeit just the last few generations, since The Players dates from 1974.

Watching Jack, Lee & Lanny in the 1970s; Kite, Couples & Love in the 1980s on through the '90s; Tiger, Phil & Sergio since the mid '90s. It's a most entertaining championship on a singular golf course -- although the early years were contested at a number of other venues before Pete Dye completed the TPC at Sawgrass.

Styled to a Tee always makes note of how the sportswear has changed -- tighter in the '70s, loser in the '80s and getting tighter again, especially on Phil, Sergio and Camilo -- but there's something else we're wondering about as we take particular note of the generation of American golfers now in their 20's. This comes to mind after watching Sean O'Hair, 26, notch his third victory with a win last week at Quail Hollow.

The other American golfers in their 20's with two PGA Tour victories apiece are the 29-year-olds, Charles Howell III and DJ Trahan; 28-year-old Nick Watney; J.B. Holmes, 27; Dustin Johnson, 25; and Anthony Kim, 23. It's a small group and I'm almost sure I've forgotten someone. And we wonder what will become of this group, or the other onetime winners in their 20's: Hunter Mahan, 26; Lucas Glover and Johnson Wagner, both 29, among them.

To get a better feel for the future, we looked into the past. History would indicate that at least two or three of these guys will break from their peers and put together the kind of career that has distinguished the best players from generations before. Or maybe that doesn't have to happen. Maybe, in the wake of Tiger's resounding superiority, there will be a change in the generations-old paradigm of a handful of guys totaling double-digit PGA Tour victories and one, two or three majors. Instead we'll have player parity, with re-established but far lower expectations for individuals other than Tiger?

For a minute, let's look at the dominant players in the generation that came of age just ahead of Tiger. Led by Phil (age 38, 36 victories); Vijay (age 46, 34 victories); Ernie (age 39, 16 PGA Tour victories but many more international wins); and Davis Love III (age 45, 20 victories) -- all have double-digit PGA Tour victory totals and at least one major. There's another group, slightly less fearsome, including Jim Furyk (age 38, 12 victories) and Justin Leonard (age 36, 12 victories), who can count double-digit wins and a single major.

Before them, there was the American generation of Payne Stewart, Couples, Mark O'Meara, Paul Azinger and Mark Calcavecchia, those players who've joined the Champions Tour in the last two years or will in the next three. All five have double-digit wins. Stewart won three majors, O'Meara two, and the other three have one each. Kenny Perry, by virtue of age (48), would seem to belong to this group. By virtue of his competitiveness, he seems to have a foot in this generation and the one slightly younger. What he doesn't have is a major title.

So, with those types of trends in mind, who's your pick for the breakout foursome in the generation just after Tiger, the players ages 20 and over? Or the breakout individual? If you want to jump a generation and prophesy that the next breakout star will be from among the teens: Rory McIlroy, Danny Lee, et al., would that make the 20-somethings Golf's Lost Generation?

Or, in the re-established world where Tiger is so dominant and PGA Tour fields are increasingly peppered with international players, will Sergio, Adam Scott, Justin Rose, Luke Donald, Paul Casey, Ian Poulter and Camilo Villegas simply claim the PGA Tour wins that might otherwise have been claimed by American golfers? 

There is a final possibility and it goes something like this. If you examine the generation of players before Stewart-Couples-O'Meara: the generation that included Watkins, Floyd, Crenshaw and Irwin, the latter group distinguished itself by reaching in the neighborhood of 20 wins. Stewart's peers did so by approaching or just exceeding the 15-win mark. It may be that Tiger, Phil and Vijay have collectively amassed such an enormous total that players in their 20's and early 30's may be considered Hall of Fame material with between eight and 12 victories. -- Robert Lohrer

The Island Green: What a Dive!

Rich Lerner of The Golf Channel had a nice, to-the-point interview with Pete and Alice Dye concerning the inspiration behind the island green, the famed 17th at TPC Sawgrass.

I'm nearly certain Rich said divers find 155,000 balls in the basin surrounding the 17th and that the public plays 40,000 rounds a year on the course.

By comparison, I came across this: Brian McCallen's Top 100 Courses You Can Play, published in 1999, makes reference to a 1998 report in Golf Journal that stated divers dredge up 120,000 balls at the 17th with roughly 40,000 rounds per year.

So, if we take these numbers at face value, the only conclusion -- as the number of rounds is the same in both reports -- is that, collectively, as golfers, we're getting worse.

(Parenthetically, I add, this cries out for further examination. When balls are retrieved, does the count include the ones dumped to the right of the 16th green, as the two greens aren't very far from each other? How closely are the balls counted? McCallen's citation uses the word "approximately." Then there's the issue of what becomes of those balls. Either way, the numbers do seem to be going the wrong way.) -- Robert Lohrer

Future of the Golf Press: All Bets Are Off

Here it is, all 19:37 of fresh Tiger-licious Tiger Chat, pre-Players Championship version, 2009.

We had Larry Dorman of The New York Times asking Tiger an interesting question -- and eliciting a pretty good response -- about how the Stadium Course in 2009 compares to the 1994 version upon which Tiger won his first U.S. Amateur.

Golf Digest Magazines'/Golf Channel's Tim Rosaforte asked Tiger to address David Feherty's manic-funny post-Quail Hollow interview at 16:05, then followed up by asking how a growing family might be changing Tiger's perceptions of travel. Tiger responded genially to the first and, by his standards, was downright expansive on the latter, speaking for 50 seconds, as such matters clearly are personal territory.

The pre-tournament and post-round conferences were once the sole terroir for the working golf press to harvest quotes and anecdotes, insights and innuendo. Now they're on the Internet sooner than you can transcribe them. And that's increasingly, if not exclusively, the trend at major championships and as the Tour works its way from California to Florida across the Sunbelt and north. What could be better for a golf fan? What could be more enervating for the print golf press?

The golf press -- mostly the newspaper variety whose thinning ranks have been well chronicled -- once had these as their private office. Now that cable television and more-robust video-enabled websites have brought them onto our flat screens and laptops, the utility of the press itself might be parsed. Only the sharpest writer, shaping an expert essay, or working a wholly original angle, is going to trump nearly 20 minutes of pure Q&A with Tagger.

Let's back up first, and give credit where it's deserved: The conferences are the most orderly and efficient way for the working press to do its job, and they'd probably go away if the press weren't attending in person or via teleconference.

Local Knowledge: In Praise Thereof

Some of the most intriguing golf courses are those found slightly off the beaten path, unheralded, that don't announce themselves to you by way of their state or national ranking. Not that there's anything wrong with being ranked. It's just that what goes into certain course-ranking concoctions is far more than meets the eye.

So pencil me in if you're playing that municipal course down by the beach where, on occasion, they do have to turn away tourists in flip-flops, where you can spray it off the tee and burnish your recovery shots off hardpan. Same goes for that mountain-pasture track where the screen door slams on the golf shop and the flies buzz in the gauzy light of high summer afternoons. Give me a golf course where the charm quotient is as important as the slope rating and I promise to share its coordinates with only those who can appreciate the same.

I'm the kind of golfer who saves those state and regional maps of daily fee, resort and municipal golf courses -- the ones where the little flags are dropped throughout the state -- whether the state/region is a car ride or a plane ride away. Someday I'll use this, I think.

I'm the kind of golfer who believes Golf Digest's 100 Greatest Courses is an abstraction, a pipe dream through a beauty-contest looking glass that heaps praise -- mostly deserving -- on a minuscule minority of intensely groomed, extravagantly manicured courses but does a disservice to dozens, if not hundreds, of superb courses just as beauty pageants raise and distort the expectations placed upon all women. The point of the comparison being, do you think there are beautiful women beyond those who stand on stage at the Miss America Pageant? Of course there are beautiful, smart, sexy women almost everywhere you turn. The beauty is in the eye (and imagination) of the beholder.

So it is with golf courses. There are great tracks all over the country. Each has its own character and history, idiosyncrasies and, yes, ineffable charm. Hey, in the lazy days of July and August, a pastureland course with a Snickers shack at the turn and greens as slow as sand can be far more charming than a too-tough course where you're $10 down (before you hit your first shot) in tips to the valet, the cart boys and the starter.

I'm the kind of golfer who actually misses Phil "the Scooter" Rizzuto and those stream-of-consciousness meanderings he'd undertake late in Yankees broadcasts that began with, "Wanaque, you know, there's a golf course out that way. What a great little place..."

(And I'm not even a Yankee fan. On the subject of New York baseball, I'm a strict unilateralist. In other words, when it comes to being a New York baseball fan, there is not and never will be room for multilateralism. When I was a kid, if you were under 12, there were two kinds of fans. Real baseball fans who liked the Mets or the Yankees and, conversely, loathed the crosstown non-opponent -- in the era before the arrival of ersatz inter-league play. The second kind of fan was the phony who said he liked both or, worse yet, actually switched allegiances depending on which was playoff-bound.)

What does any of this have to do with golf? The Scooter, it turns out, had this knack for name-dropping golf courses, usually in outlying New Jersey suburbs. It would take some dissecting and posthumous research but it would be fun to know how many golf-course shoutouts he actually gave in his years as a Yankees broadcaster.

And while there are other sites that will tout their local courses, Styled to a Tee sees no reason not to join in the fray, singing the praises of the deserving courses in our neck of the woods: Metropolitan New York-New Jersey and Connecticut. It's unlikely our loyal readers will come directly for stories about those courses, but those who google the courses will find our notations. We're not waiting for invitations to Shinnecock/Baltusrol/Winged Foot and Liberty National. Instead, our offering under the heading of Local Knowledge will be a decidedly less selective, more price-sensitive set; one that is far more accessible and, but for the history of hosting professional and major championships and carrying some outrageous slope rating, nearly as interesting. -- Robert Lohrer

Phil Says It Ain't Sew

It's with mixed emotions that I report that Phil Mickelson has no interest in making a commercial go of his own signature apparel line. I say this because Phil himself is very much sending mixed signals.

It's come to this: Phil the Thrill's daily fashion choices are now eagerly awaited, at least by those who have nothing better to do a small community of golf-style bloggers.

There he was again Thursday in Charlotte, brandishing his super-stylish short game and a forest-green polo with four-button placket and distinctive button-under collar; the custom-made too-short sleeves with a pair of amply cut white -- linen, perhaps? -- trousers that were a perfect fit for the humiture of Charlotte. (Of course, playing partner Davis Love III -- hereafter "Dapper Davis" -- had a slight edge from the waist down by pairing his Polo pants with classic saddle shoes while Phil went with all-white shoes. I think some of these things come naturally to Davis, he of the long and stylish swing and a closet crowded with Polo classics.)

But back to Phil. Camp Mickelson sent word directly to Styled to a Tee a few weeks back that Phil has no interest in affixing his name to his own golf sportswear line, even as he seems intent -- let's face it, aggressively so -- on sporting an altogether different look from his peers. Regardless of his (lack of) commercial ambitions, his dress has never been more analyzed and scrutinized. The Wall Street Journal even took note of Phil's repeated flirtation with "The Full Cleveland," the white shoes/white belt pairing that is now commonplace among the Tour's younger set. The Golf Girl, Dogs That Chase Cars, the Khaki Crusader, and even the redoubtable Geoff Shackelford have fanned the flames surrounding Phil's fashion choices. Hey, here's an idea: Bring Phil to New York for an appearance on Project Runway. The challenge for the designers: Create a golf wardrobe that's stylish and distinctive but doesn't veer off the road into John Daly-esque clownishness.

Maybe the exposure will be the trigger that flips Phil's switch. Why should golf sportswear labels -- Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, among them -- belong primarily to the deceased and superannuated?

Experimentation is Phil's modus operandi, be it with wedges, drivers, recovery shots or strategy off the tee on the 72nd hole of a U.S. Open. It's golf, the guy has a resume that's second to one, and more in the bank than most public companies. Why shouldn't Phil be synonymous with some fairway flair? -- Robert Lohrer

Open Caption: "So, Joe, did I tell you that Tiger gave me a putting lesson?"

It's Open (Caption) Season on President Obama and Vice-President Biden. This photo was taken Friday, April 24, by Pete Souza, official White House photographer, and comes to Styled to a Tee courtesy of Hart Schaffner Marx, the President's suitmaker.

Here are some starters:

If you want to break 90, work on your short game.

In a world that welcomes odd putting grips, the President embraces one that seemingly had come and gone.

"Joe, if I make this, Specter jumps parties Tuesday at noon."

"I could make a lot more of these six-footers if you'd hold still on my backswing!"

 Submissions are welcomed encouraged. -- Robert Lohrer