QUALITY DESIGN, FROM LOGO TO COURSE

logo is a winged foot (plus a pair of crossed golf clubs). It’s identical (except for the golf clubs) to the logo of the New York Athletic Club, and for good reason. Winged Foot was founded in 1921 by a group that consisted mostly of NYAC members, though there has never been a formal connection between the two clubs. Donald Trump stopped coming to Winged Foot long before he ran for president, although he continues to pay dues. Like the rest of the nation, the club has mixed feelings about the president. Shortly after the 2016 election, one member remarked: “No notice about one of our members being elected to the highest office in the free world? Jeez, we get an email about who wins the Easter Egg hunt.”

TREE REMOVAL: ADDITION BY SUBTRACTION

I played Winged Foot West, in 1994, I didn’t like it one bit. There were so many trees overhanging the fairways and greens that when I thought about my round later I remembered the course mainly as a succession of dark, endless, leaf-lined tunnels. To avoid the branches and the groves of immense trunks, I had to hit my tee shots very, very straight—tough to do because I knew I also had to hit them as far as I possibly could to have a chance of reaching anything in anything. Winged Foot’s members at the time viewed the trees not as a problem but as a sacred trust. They had just published an updated edition of their official club history, and more than half the text consisted of loving descriptions of individual silver maples, honey locusts, dawn redwoods, and shagbark hickories, many of them labeled and located on full-page maps of the holes.