This is the carry bag I used until recently, Sun Mountain's fully-divided Four 5. Note the sleeves for each club.

Golf magazines love to do these stories called “What’s in the bag?” where they look at the clubs a tour pro plays in excruciating details, as if replicating those irons and shafts will save your game. It won’t but you’d probably still be better off copying a tour pro’s gear than my own, unless you too want to struggle to break 90.

Where I know my equipment is on the travel front. After all, I play more different courses every year than anyone on Tour, and way more courses than a top player like Tiger Woods, and I don’t have my own jet or handlers to lug the stuff. I carry my own bags, to my car, on the shuttle bus, to the airport, into my hotel room, and whenever possible, on the course.

So in the course of my career as a travel and golf writer, I’ve tried lot of things and come up with some personal favorites for the traveling golfer, which might be especially relevant cold weather approaching and longer distance golf escapes on the horizon.

Carry Bag: I love Sun Mountain. There I’ve said it. I’m not paid to say it, like the guys on Tour and their equipment. It’s just hat over many years, Sun Mountain has earned my respect for innovation, consistent leader of the pack quality, and most of all durability. In an era when stuff falls apart more than ever, Sun Mountain is a throwback.

Here’s my story. When I was a younger man, in 1989 to be precise, the concept of the automatic stand bag was still brand new (for those of you under 40, this is the fun feature where you take your bag off your shoulder, the legs deploy and the bag stands. In prehistoric days, we used to lay the bag down on the ground next the green), my best friend bought an early model from Sun Mountain, a company we had never heard of, because the colors were cool. It had an early technology version of automatic legs powered by gravity, not a pedal and spring mechanism like those today. Anyway it worked. After a few years of heavy use, he got bored and moved onto another color scheme. He gave me the bag, my first “nice” golf bag ever. I used it, also heavily, for a few more years, and then seduced my something shinier, I got a new bag and gave it to my friend Joe (real name). Joe still uses that bag today. It doesn’t even look that used. The bag began this journey more than two decades ago.

That’s one reason why I love Sun Mountain.

Since then I have gone through a lot of bags, and inevitably the leg mechanism or the legs themselves break and fail, and the moment I set my bags down on a smooth surface like a hotel lobby floor, the legs flail and it looks like a drunk swimming. Or the zippers or pockets rip. The shoulder straps don’t usually fail, but they have. In short, I’ve used a lot of bags over the years, and now I am back to where it all began, with a Sun Mountain Superlight 3.5. That means it weighs three and a half pounds, about the lightest full-featured bag (lots of pockets, holds a full set of clubs) on the market. This weight is important if you are carrying. Yet it is super strong, super comfy, super everything.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did cross one Sun Mountain bag off my list of personal favorites. About a year ago I decided to try used to switch up a weight class to the 4-pound model, which happens to be the lightest fully divided bag on earth. Fully divided means there is a lined tube for each and every club, and on paper, this is a really good feature few golfers use. It is good because it protects your shafts, which at least in my club cost a lot more than the bag, and in some cases, more than the clubheads. If you are one of the wise golfers who have gone through a real custom fitting process, your shafts are probably the costliest thing you own in the way of golf equipment – and the easiest to damage. Especially if you walk, you might notice constant nicks around the shafts near the heads, and that’s caused by rubbing from the other clubs. I went fully divided to stop this, and as long as you don’t mind a slightly heavier bag that is still as light as most on the market, you might consider the same. Sun Mountain’s fully divided bag is the 4 Five, and it is unique among regular carry bags and you get more protection when playing, more when traveling, more all the time.

So why did I ditch it? I carry a lot of stuff, so maybe its my fault because the pockets on my bags are always bulging, but I found it hard to put the clubs in and take them out, and impossible to keep them in order and thus more difficult than with a regular bag to find the club I needed. In fact, I kept having panic attacks thinking I’d just lost a club, only to find its head hiding under another one. But it was having to lean on the clubs to jam them back into their tubes that did me in and sent me back to the Superlight 3.5. If you carry relatively little in the way of accessories, and have fancy shafts, you might want to give it a try. For me the noble experiment is in the past.

The first thing you’ve got to know when you go carry bag shopping is that golf club companies for the most part do not make bags, even is they do have a big logo slapped on them. My experience is that most major “branded” golf bags will fall apart pretty quickly, the exceptions being Ping and Taylor Made, while I believe alt he other come out of the same crappy Chinese factory. Ping which has a long track record of making durable, light and convenient travel bags, and has long been the favorite of college athletes and professional resort caddies. Taylor Made recently starting actually making bags and I tried one and it is fine, except the water bottle holder is really bizarre, apparently designed for those who hate their water bottle and want to lose it as quickly as possible. They do offer some flashy colors though.

Next: What Travel Gear is in my Bag?

It's hard to imagine the scale of Munich's Oktoberfest if you haven't been. There are more than a dozen "tents" like this.

200 years ago, Bavaria’s Prince Ludwig got married. He threw himself a crazed 5-day bash in Munich that put all other wedding parties in history to shame. Local residents liked it so much, that the party (not the wedding) became an annual event, known today as Oktoberfest.

The name is confusing because the event is actually in September, which is even better because it is now September.

That makes 2010 the bicentennial Oktoberfest, and bigger than ever. That is really saying something, because Oktoberfest is already recognized as the world’s biggest party, annually attracting about 6 million visitors in just over two weeks. Because of the historic nature of this year’s event, the heavily regulated Oktoberfest got permission from the government to add an extra day – for one year only – and the official estimate is than an additional attendance spike of 25% is expected.

That translates to roughly 7,500,000 beer swilling drunkards descending on Munich, or to put it perspective, as if almost everyone in New York City decided to visit one place to drinking.

What makes Oktoberfest so great? Duh!

I have been to Oktoberfest in Munich, and it is an awesome experience, a true bucket list item, and I am going again this year and have all the details arranged, but for most people this might not be the year to go unless you have strong stomach for crowds and deep pockets. Flights and hotels are already sold out, and word on the street is that the closest available rooms are about 250 miles away. Thanks to Europe’s great high speed rail network, party-goers will be coming from distant cities in other countries – just for the day. I’d hate to see what the train bathrooms look like on the ride home.

I’ll report back on this year’s Oktoberfest as soon as I get back and recover.

Here’s another way for the golf lover to experience the thrill of Oktoberfest closer to home. Mystical Golf, the venerable owner and operator of three top Myrtle Beach golf courses, the award-winning The Witch, Man-O-War and The Wizard, has an “October Fest” stay-and-play package. The deal is light on beer, but also light on the wallet, and the weather is great at that time (if there are no hurricanes). Available from October 3-31, the special rate is $297 per person, double occupancy. This includes three rounds of golf (one on each course) with cart and lunch included, plus two nights accommodations with breakfast at the Patricia Grand Ocean Front Resort in efficiencies and two-room suites.

True golf gluttons can squeeze in even more: A second same-day round “instant replay” is available for the $23 cart fee only. The way I figure it, if you play your cards right, you could probably get 5 rounds and the lodging for three C-notes, and as they say, you can’t beat that with a stick. Plus, they are really fun courses.

Here’s another option that includes both golf and beer (and pretzels, wursts and oompah music): the often unheralded Crystal Springs Golf Resort is by far the largest in New Jersey, the largest in the New York City area, and in fact the second largest on the east cost after Pinehurst, with six full sized layouts plus one of the country’s best short courses.

Did I mention it is the second largest golf resort in the US and one of the biggest on earth?

Like New Jersey itself, Crystal Springs gets little respect, despite some truly excellent courses, especially the highly ranked Ballyowen, the Number One public in the Garden State.

More importantly, they a have a big Oktoberfest, or as they describe it, a “HUGE Oktoberfest,” on Saturday, September 18. It starts at noon, so squeeze in a morning round, get hammered, don’t drive after because that’s just wrong, then stay at the resort and play again the next day, twice if your headache goes away.

Wherever you spend Oktoberfest, enjoy, and as my friends in Munich say, Ein Prosit!

Seriously, it's not all about drinking beer. Munich's Oktoberfest is more like a State Fair, with attractions for all ages. And lots of beer.

Vail's excellent Ski School is world class - but so is every other aspect of the resort. Courtesy of: Jack Affleck/Vail Resorts

Because I write about travel – especially ski travel – for a living, people constantly ask me for vacation advice. I love to help, but it takes time, so sometimes I cheat. When they ask, “What’s the best place to go skiing?” I usually just say “Vail.”

Vail is the straight-A student of ski resorts. With the possible exception of its excellent ski school, it’s not the very best at any one subject, be it food, lodging, or expert terrain, but across the board, Vail is very good at everything. In the High School Yearbook it would be voted “Most Likely to Please.”

It’s also huge, with several base areas and terrain so vast it can overwhelm. There are 31 lifts, 193 trails, and nearly 5,300-acres of skiing, including seven enormous bowls. To make Vail simple, here is everything you need to know.

Town: Vail is linear, stretching along the “front” side of the ski mountain. From east to west there’s Golden Peak, the simplest base area; Vail Village, the original faux-Swiss Alpine streetscape; Lion’s Head, which recently underwent a massive expansion and is the new center of the action; and sleepy West Vail, home to the large Vail Cascade Resort. Vail Village and Lion’s Head are the best locations, with tons of shopping and dining, but also the priciest, with lodging getting cheaper towards the periphery. All have lifts, and a free bus system links everything.

The all-new Lionshead base area and the Arrabelle Hotel (tower) are the current epicenter of Vail life. Courtesy of: Jack Affleck/Vail Resorts

Lodging: There are endless choices and a new luxury Four Seasons opening December 11. To date, the best luxury options are the boutique and expensive Arrabelle, anchoring Lion’s Head, and the wonderful Sonnenalp in Vail Village. One price point down is the charming 28-room Vail Mountain Lodge and the resort’s two biggest hotels, the Marriott Lion’s Head and the Vail Cascade. For more budget conscious folks, especially families, the best buys are myriad condos around all the base areas, which also have kitchens to save on breakfast (these can be most simply found through the resort’s central reservation service, Vail.com).

Dining: Vail has great and not so great food at every price range. For fine dining, the very best is Kelly Liken. The eponymous chef uses local farm fresh ingredients, but while this is a ubiquitous trend, she does it absolutely right. Close seconds include Larkspur, whose signature croutons of pan-fried mashed potato cubes are to die for, and the Game Creek Club restaurant, open only for dinner atop the gondola. My hidden gem is La Bottega, a traditional enoteca serving wines by the glass and delicious Italian small plates. For a burger or casual fare, hit Bart & Yeti’s in Lion’s Head. Next to the Arrabelle is a welcome addition, a gourmet gelato shop.

Skiing: The mountain is big and confusing, so try not to move around too much. Instead, break your visit into chunks, as each section has great terrain for multiple abilities. There is so much the website gives a detailed 4-day itinerary to see it all! The Back Bowls and Blue Sky Basin take several lifts to reach, so go for at least a few hours. If it’s a powder day, locals will go first thing, and so should you. On the front, Game Creek Bowl is a concise area with intermediate and advanced runs. In the center, just below Mid-Vail, are easy to reach double-blacks, with more good expert runs off the Northwoods Express Chair. There’s a good intermediate stash off the Mountaintop Express Lift and plenty of greens and blues at either end, far skier’s left or right. To help get your feet wet, there are guided mountain tours for all abilities, Blue Sky Basin Tours for intermediate and advanced skiers, and a 50+ Tour, all free daily. You can save cash with the EPIC Season Pass, cheaper than 10 days of tickets and also valid at nearby resorts including Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, and Keystone, or for shorter trips, the EPIC 7-Pack.

Vail has the most skiable terrain of any single mountain in the US - but it is the famed seven huge bowls that avid skiers come for. Courtesy of: Jack Affleck/Vail Resorts

New This Winter: The most exciting addition is Cinebistro, a movie theater serving snacks like a popcorn bucket of fried calamari!  On the mountain, new Chair 5 replaces the antiquated High Noon lift, a weak link that always caused bottlenecks accessing Vail’s bowls on powder days. At twice the speed and twice the capacity, it will improve traffic flow mountain-wide. Ski school adds “Adventure Sessions,” whose tagline is, “If ski school had recess, this would be it.” For advanced skiers who find the breadth of the mountain daunting, it reduces instruction to on-the-go pointers and adds tour guide and lift line cutting aspects to produce a best-of-the-mountain, best-of-conditions ski day with some learning at affordable group prices ($129 per person for no more than 5 skiers).

I found this handpainted image of Sleepy, one of the Seven Dwarfs, and for some reason it reminds me of Jim Furyk.

This has been a wacky year for golf, and it seems there are more good players with excuses why they did not win important tournaments than there are stories of how they won.

Tiger Woods, and his zero Majors this year comes to mind. It’s clearly not the knee (or neck) since that never stopped him in the past. With his family life in disarray and the subject of tabloid fodder, the once mentally toughest guy out there simply can’t seem to get his head in the game (but I’m still pulling for him).

In the same vein there is Sergio Garcia. Allegedly so distraught over failed puppy love that he can’t even be bothered to tee it up anymore, let alone win.

Mot famously we have “bunkergate” and Bubba Watson, who made a crucial mistake, even if an innocent mistake, to throw way his very good chance at his first career Major at the recent PGA Championship and pave the way for Martin Kaymer’s victory.

Today we have my favorite of all: Jim Furyk being DQ’d from the entire Barclays, the first of the FedEx Cup playoffs before the thing even started – for oversleeping.

It reminds me of Superbowl XXVII in 1991, when my team, the Buffalo Bills, lost one of the record three Superbowls they were destined to lose in quick succession at the quality epoch of their history. When the game started, superstar running back Thurman Thomas famously couldn’t play for the Bills because he couldn’t find his helmet. And he was a professional football player!

So Furyk’s name, for better or worse, will join this pantheon of lasting sports jokes, and he might even get a new nickname out of it. I’m pulling for Sleeeepy.

But the thing about Furyk is that we’ve all been there – or at least I have. As a frequent traveler, I have come to rely on the old cell phone alarm whereas once I carried a travel alarm clock. Sometimes you seem to plug it in but it never charges. That certainly happens with my iPhone, but then again, a lot of really crappy stuff happens when I use my iPhone and I have rattled on about that enough in recent weeks.

I guess the only difference is that when I am staying in halfway decent hotel, and my guess is the world number six Jim Furyk was not down at the youth hostel, and I have an early morning flight or something more important than breakfast to miss, I also get a wake up call. Just in case. After all, you don’t want to miss anything really important.

Like making an eagle in golf, skiing deep, fresh powder is as good as it gets!

Many golfers ski and many skiers golf, and both travel for their favorite sports.

I am one of those, and for about fifteen years I have been writing frequently on golf and ski travel all over the globe. Skiing is a little bit easier to get a handle on, since there are a lot less top ski resorts than there are golf courses and resorts around the globe.

I did a couple of ski pieces last winter for fun, but this year I have added a Ski Travel tab to this page, Larry Golfs The World, which you can think of as a mini-site for Larry Skis the World!

I will be bringing you the same, fresh, honest, irreverent and helpful content you can use to plan ski vacations that I have long brought you for golf.

If you have any doubt about the connection between of the two sports, stay tuned as I demonstrate how many ski and golf resorts are one in the same, including Top 100 and courses and PGA Tour venues. In several cases the top ski resorts are the top golf resorts, and vice versa, but in both cases, the best of each tend to be fun and beautiful places.

With Labor Day weekend just around the corner, the weather still says golf in most parts of the country, but in many, ski season is coming sooner than you might expect, so look for me to mix in the occasional ski coverage with plenty of golf stuff as the months get colder – and starting tomorrow!

Kevin Streelman, with his wife as caddie, playing with me in the pro-am of the 2010 Reno Tahoe Open.

After playing with him in the pro-am of the Reno Tahoe Open earlier this summer, I wrote about why I have jumped on the Kevin Streelman bandwagon of well wishers and expect the young relative newcomer to the PGA Tour to make some noise. He hits the ball really, really well, even compared to most of the PGA Tour pros I have played with, all of whom hit it in a way that is hard to believe.

So I was quite happy to see Streelman in a close second place after Friday’s round at the Barclay, even as several much more acclaimed pros failed to make the cut. Streelman hung tough in there and ended up finishing the tournament third, and while it was not the breakthrough Tour win I am sure he is eager for, it is the best finish of his nascent career, and an impressive showing against a crowded and talented field, and hopefully a big confidence builder.

Also of Barclays note, I am sticking to my guns and my ongoing prediction that Tiger will be back, and as Tiger-like as ever. It was his best outing in recent history, with two typically Tiger rounds, including his first journey to the top of the leaderboard in almost a year, since he won the Australian Masters last fall. He opened strong and finished strong, and while he struggled in the middle two rounds, it was his balky putter, not his swing hurting him, which is a much more short term problem of someone like Tiger and a much easier fix. In fact, if he made a few of the “easy” putts (for him, not for me!) he missed, he might have gone wire to wire.

In any case, so many folks in the golf biz have written off Tiger his year that I can’t wait to say “I told you so.” Except that I know the media, and when he does win again, all the naysayers will backpedal and loudly proclaim that it was only a matter of time and they knew all along. Watch. It will happen. Probably soon.

The new Rolex World's Top 1000 Golf Courses is a whole lotta golf book!

Maybe, maybe not. But even though it is brand new, just released, I will go out on a limb and say the first edition of “The Rolex World’s Top 1000 Golf Courses” is a pretty safe addition to any avid golf traveler’s library.

As for lineage, it is spawned by the folks who have long produced my favorite golf course rating tome, The Peugeot Golf Guide, which is an awesome book, but only covers Europe (and I mean covers Europe – top 100 courses in two dozen countries in painstaking detail, with pretty accurate quality ratings and every other bit of info you could need). I mentioned this book high on my list in a previous post on the Essential Golf Library, the top 10 books for the traveling golfer. I’d add the Rolex Top 1000 to that list.

Anyway, the concept and design is the same, the sponsor different, and the scope this time is the whole world. That means 362 courses right here in the US; 282 in Europe; 237 in Asia Pacific and 199 elsewhere.

At this point I need to qualify that while the journalists involved in doing these rankings are “anonymous,” and promised to remain “anonymous,” and I could not say if I was one of them, I may know quite a bit about the questionnaires and how the rankings were compiled and who was involved. So with that insider perspective, I will note that the caveat about the Top 1000 is that the selection of best courses is an imperfect science and I think the book seeks to cast a broad net: for instance, you could easily argue that the very best course in the Mariana Islands is not among the Top 1000 on earth, period, but if you omitted it, there would be no chapter on the Mariana Islands. So the book seems to prefer geographic diversity over all else, and in some ways that’s a good thing.

For $35 it is a lot of book, at over 1300 pages, and an easy reference, here and abroad. At the end of the day you need to ask yourself, if a trip comes up to Pakistan or Poland or Guatemala, do you have another golf book in your house that will tell you what courses to play?

The downside of this, or any book in the digital age, is how fast it can become obsolete – the China chapter does not even include the new Mission Hills Hainan, the second largest golf resort on earth. And I have to say, I think the ratings for the original Mission Hills, the largest resort on earth, are quite low, with the highest being 85 and the Faldo course, , arguably the resort’s best, getting just an 80? But If I want to dissect each of the 1000 entries, this blog is going to get too long, so I will stop there.

As far as the courses themselves, they are mostly top selections and while every rating on any list is arguable to a degree, they re generally on the ball. I opened the book at random for fun and actually managed to get lucky and catch a course I have played, Terme di Saturnia at a famed health and mineral springs spa in Tuscany. I think the rating (75) and comments were quite fair and accurate, along with the ancillary information and especially the map, because courses like these are hard to find. So based on my highly unscientific survey of one random course, this book is pretty accurate. I don’t want to talk much about the domestic courses where I may know people involved.

Before I move on, I’d like to make a shout out to my loyal readers in Germany. Ein Prosit! Go Martin Kaymer! You guys get 13 of the world’s top 1000 courses, including two that get relatively high 90 rankings, Hamburger-Falkenstein and Nick Faldo’s Sporting Club Berlin design. Since I have never played golf in Germany (though I have consumed a lot of beer and weisswurst), I’d like to hear from you: are these really the two top layouts in your country?

Each course in the book is ranked on a 100 point scale, and of the 1000 courses just 15 got perfect 100s. Since everyone in the golf business loves Top “fill in the blank” Lists, here are those perfect 15:

Carnoustie (sure)
Muirfield (sure)
The Old Course St. Andrews (predictable)
Royal Birkdale (haven’t been)
Portmarnock (very questionable)
Sunningdale New (huh?)
Royal County Down (Yes!)
Cypress Point (Haven’t been but I believe it)
Torrey Pines South (???)
Augusta National (predictable)
Pine Valley (Of course)
Bethpage Black (sentiment-based)
Oakmont (questionable)
Kingston Heath (great course but odd given that it’s probably not the best in Australia)
Royal Adelaide (ditto)

So as you can see, the book is going to a) ignite debate and b) cover lots of courses you’ll never be able to play. But don’t let that stop you from buying it. Golf writers need to make a living too!

You are looking at the most expensive new golf book ever released.

Why go on a deluxe trip to play the very best courses of Scotland, the birthplace of golf, with a high-end tour operator like Perry Golf or Haversham and Baker, when you just read about the courses instead?

 For the same price.

I kid you not. If you thought you seen it all, buckle up, because you have not seen what is being touted by its publisher as the most expensive golf book ever produced.

The price tag? $4,600.

“The Golf Links of Scotland,” is, to quote from the press release, “an ultra-deluxe, hand-tooled leather-bound tome that surely will be recognized as the ultimate hole-by-hole tour of the venerable Old Course at St. Andrews, as well as a tribute to 18 other top Scottish seaside links.”

It is being released on September 14th, which gives you exactly 3 months and a week to cash in your IRA to buy a copy as a Christmas present. The book is a collaboration between respected golf photographer and St. Andrews resident, Iain Macfarlane Lowe, and former Golf Magazine publisher George Peper. 

Of course, it is a limited edition – only 150 copies will be printed. It will examine in detail every hole on the Old Course using an interesting new concept of transparent overlays on aerial shots to show lines of play and yardages. The release explains that this will be “combined with the wisdom of ‘local knowledge’ professional tips [to] serve as a valuable guide to successfully negotiate the course.” They dot mention how you are supposed to carry it around the links, but I guess if you can buy this book, you can just get a second caddie to read it to you throughout the round.

After 130 pages devoted to the Old Course, Book Two covers eighteen other Scottish gems in an additional 170 pages. For those of you who lost count, that comes out to just over $15 a page.  Links courses warranting such luxurious coverage include Turnberry (which I love), Prestwick (ditto), Royal Troon (which I hate), and Royal Dornoch, Carnoustie, Muirfield, Royal Aberdeen, North Berwick and Kingsbarns. I love Kingsbarns but feel its newness is immediately suspect in such classic company. The again, I am not the target audience. If I had $4600 to blow without concern, I’d go to Vegas and enter a poker tournament.

Finally, each oversized, leather-bound copy features 23-carat gold leaf inlay and includes “an exclusive, unpublished photograph printed on the highest quality fine art paper and bound into each book,” signed and numbered by Lowe and “suitable for framing,” though if it’s bound into the book it would be hard to frame, I would think. 

For more information and to view sample pages visit the book’s official website, and to order, contact Lowe directly via email. 

But hurry – after New Year’s the price jumps to five grand. For real.

Lake Michigan is so big it's like an ocean, which is why The Straits course is such a good approximation of a Scottish links.

As soon as I saw the controversy swirling around Dustin Johnson’s 72nd hole penalty to knock him off the top of the Leaderboard at the last Major of the season, the PGA Championship, my heart dropped.

Not for Johnson, but rather for Destination Kohler and its Straits Course at Whistling Straits.

Destination Kohler is one of the four “Majors’ of American golf resorts. Rank them as you may, varying by quality of golf, lodging and facilities, there is little doubt that Bandon Dunes, Pebble Beach, Kiawah and Destination Kohler are the best of the best when it comes to golf travel. You could easily make the argument that across the board on food, facilities, golf, and lodging, Destination Kohler is number one in the country. I am not going to make that argument – at least not today – but I am going to implore you to go, and not be influenced by Johnson’s mistake.

As the announcers dutifully pointed out, the course has 1200 bunkers, or about 1100 more than the Old Course at St. Andrews, and probably more than any other course you will ever play. As you saw, some are quite small, and many look more like waste areas than the modern, precisely cut bunker. Almost every course in Arizona and any other desert setting, along with many in the Carolinas, including Kiawah, are lined with vast waste areas that encompass far more sand than there is to get in trouble in at the Straits.

I guess what I am saying is, the course is awesome, you should play it, and don’t worry about some rules official rushing out and changing your score after your round – they have great service, but I assure you that ain’t going to happen.

I’m putting my money where my mouth is and heading back to Kohler ASAP. I just got tickets to Milwaukee and will be eagerly teeing it up on the Straits, as well as the resort’s other fine courses, in just a few weeks and will give you full, detailed, course by course and comprehensive resort tips and info to plan your own trip.

Resorts and even countries (Wales in the Ryder Cup for instance) go to great lengths and pay big bucks to attract top tournaments so their courses can shine on TV, and make people say “wow, I’d love to play that!,” and I would hate to think anyone comes away with a negative opinion of this great course simply because Dustin Johnson failed to consider exactly what kind of sand his ball was sitting on. If you play golf a lot and you look at the back of the scorecard when you play, almost every course has special rules pertaining to specific boundaries, areas, or holes. But most of us, myself included, largely ignore such local rules and details – because we don’t play for our livelihood on the PGA Tour. If I did, I would read the rules sheet they make every effort to have players read, and if I had a full time rules official walking with me just to answer any question I might have, I would ask him about my ball being in the sand. End of discussion. I don’t blame Johnson, I feel bad for him, but having the media call this “bunkergate” and make like it is some conspiracy to steal his win is idiotic.

We all know that golf is full of arbitrary and often capricious rules and decisions on rules, and a lot of them make absolutely zero sense, and seem to exist solely so that old timers can get golf related positions as rules officials. But nonetheless, they are the rules these guys play for money under, so they ought to known and follow them – or at least consider them.

A couple of weeks ago, I poked fun at the weekly email roundtable conducted by the Sports Illustrated Golf Group for overwhelmingly concluding  – totally in error – that winning two Majors in one season on the LPGA Tour was more difficult than shooting 59 on the PGA Tour. In the aftermath of this bunker issue that they seem determined to make into a bunker controversy, I once again have to ridicule one of the comments.

John Garrity, contributing writer to Sports Illustrated, remarked nonsensically during the weekly SI Golf Group email roundtable that:

“I agree that those bunkers SHOULDN’T be considered bunkers.”

Agree with who?

You’ve got to be the only person who could say that with a straight face. Well, I don’t think your opinion should be considered an opinion. Maybe your opinion should be considered a chocolate milkshake, as long as we’re making absolutely no sense at all.

That’s sort of like me, when I play golf, rationalizing that the bogie I just made shouldn’t be considered a bogey because a birdie would make me a lot happier. Maybe when I get to Kohler I will tee it up under Garrity Rules and shoot the best score of my life.

Congratulations Martin Kaymer on winning the PGA Championship! I think we'll be seeing a lot more of you.

We’ve been hearing about the next Tiger Woods for years. Or at least someone who could stand toe to toe and challenge him without faltering, as the majority of the Tour has over the past decade. First it was Sergio Garcia (broken heart maybe, but no Majors, still). Then it was Camilo Villegas, whose certainly got game, definitely has style and still has time, but doesn’t have much in the way of winning hardware. Most recently was Anthony Kim, who missed the cut this weekend and continues to play blissfully Major- free. In between were many others, all come and gone.

But I think Martin Kaymer is for real. Sure he comes from Europe, which has not exactly been the breeding ground for great careers on the Big Show, with the notable exception of Nick Faldo and moments of brilliance from Padraig Harrington. But he was European Tour Rookie of the Year in 2007, which means young, talented and sets the stage for “up and coming.” He knows how to win, with five victories last year. It doesn’t matter if you are playing Nationwide or European or Eurasian Tour, you’ve got to be able to seal the deal and win when ahead and he has done that over and over again. Unlike many PGA Championship winners, and increasingly the winners of all the Majors, who tend to be one hit wonders, he has been playing well in Majors all year, coming off two top ten finishes in the US Open and British Open, tied for third earlier in the year at the World Golf Championships, and keeps getting better, peaking at the right time.

Finally, at the end of the Major, when the money and place in golf history and his career future was on the line, he stayed icy cool while his American opponents, including Bubba Watson, yet another heralded possible Tiger challenger of recent years, made big mistakes. Call Dustin Johnson’s bunker shot what you will, it was a moment where some doubt should have arisen for him, and the tournament makes it really, really easy to dispel any doubts by providing him with a his own personal walking rule assistant just to be sure. He should have asked – you could see it was sand. Bubba on the other hand simply choked and hit it in the water, more than full club short, the kind of miss you can’t make at that level of professional golf, tournament on the line or not.

Meanwhile as their nerves got the better of them, Kaymer did the same thing over and over: made big putts and put the ball in the hole. In fact, his putt on the second playoff hole to keep his tournament chances alive seemed to be willed into the cup, and act very reminiscent of one Tiger Woods.

Finally, you’ve got to love his post-victory comments. Because he doesn’t play well on Bermuda, he wants to enter more events in Florida and figure it out. No offense to Tiger, who I like a lot, but if he was in the same situation his response would probably be to never play in Florida again. In fact, Kaymer is taking the exact opposite mentality of the modern successful golfers who play as exclusively as possible in events and on courses that suit them, a sort of cowardly approach that I give Kaymer big kudos for bucking.