The Grill Room – Anticipation unlike any other

Writing from Chicago

Wednesday, April 9, 2025

There was a time when the Masters Tournament snuck up on you. There were stories in newspapers, and Sports Illustrated invariably devoted a cover story and color photo essay to it, and the golf glossies did the same, but that was about it. Maybe there was a short preview report on the local news. Maybe not.

You didn’t see the Masters until late Thursday night, when CBS ran a 15-minute highlight show. And if you were a kid interested in golf, you were in bed on a school night. So Friday night’s highlight show was the first look at Augusta National in a calendar year.

Saturday brought a 90-minute broadcast focused on the last four holes. Sunday, two whole hours, and coverage extended all the way back to the 14th green. And we were grateful to see that much. In black-and-white.

Today? This is being written at the 9 a.m. hour on Wednesday. In the previous two days there have been, between cable and online coverage, about 10 hours of broadcasts and interview feeds from Augusta, and that doesn’t count the endless hours Golf Channel provides on “Live From,” its best-in-class preview-preview-review shot.

At this hour, “Live From” is in full swing. So is “Masters On The Range” on CBS Sports Network and the CBS/Paramount and Masters websites. So is a two-hour practice round preview show on ESPN+. Three separate broadcasts, and it’s only Wednesday morning. Later comes four hours of coverage of the Par-3 Contest and more previews.

Come Thursday, when Scottie Scheffler attempts to match Jack Nicklaus with three victories in a four-year span, and Rory McIlroy attempts to slay the grand slam dragon that has vexed him for a decade now, there will be even more.

The 15-minute highlight show on CBS remains, a gift to cord-cutters. But ESPN is on all afternoon, has a morning edition of “SportsCenter” that cuts to Augusta early and often, and the Masters offers unparalleled online live coverage, with four channels, one for featured groups, one for the fourth, fifth and sixth holes, one for Amen Corner and one for the 15th and 16th, that run from when play begins at that point until it ends. You need a smart TV, two laptops and a phone to take it all in. It must add up to 40 hours a day on Thursday and Friday.

The Masters has gone from being the least seen major championship to the most seen. And, while it may not be the most important championship in the game – Jack Nicklaus, who reveres the U.S. Open above all, once called the Masters he won six times “the championship of nothing” – it is by far the most anticipated.

It arrives in the spring, when golfers in the frozen north are eager to swing a club themselves and work out the kinks accumulated over a winter’s hibernation. It takes place at a course unique for the combination it offers in beauty, strategic challenge, and, thanks to a rollicking succession of difficult and gettable holes on the back nine, the potential for seismic shifts on the leaderboard – manually changed in person, of course.

No tournament guards its traditions more faithfully. Lifetime exemptions to the winners. The green jacket emphasized over greenbacks. Genteel behavior on the premises, from the exclusion of cell phones to prohibitions against running and please, no hollering. And rock-bottom concession prices, more than made up for by the volume – at standard prices – of sales in the golf shops. Does anyone go to Augusta National and not buy something?

All of that would be unknown to all but those who attend except for one thing. The television coverage on CBS and ESPN is overseen by Augusta National with a velvet-covered iron fist. One-year deals and a list of dos and don’t longer than an omnibus bill assure that.

There are benefits and drawbacks to this. The benefits are an average of four minutes of commercials per hour – PBS might have more underwriting time per hour – and none of the sponsored malarky. A swing analysis isn’t sponsored by a copier company, it’s just presented. There’s more golf and less babble than any other sports broadcast around. CBS isn’t even allowed to smack its logo in the corner. If you’re watching the Masters on the weekend, you know you’re watching CBS.

That’s great. The drawback is the lack of journalism. CBS golf producer Sellers Shy already said there won’t be pre-and-post hurricane comparisons noting all the trees knocked down last fall, never mind that the more open look of the course is the story of the week. Jim Nantz still hasn’t mentioned Sam Snead shanking a shot on his last ceremonial tee shot that bloodied a spectator right between the eyes. Jack Whitaker once called the gallery “a mob” and was banned for right years. Gary McCord mentioned “body bags” and “bikini wax,” and after Tom Watson wrote a letter, was never seen again. And spying the first video – or still photo, for that matter – of a drunk who jumped into a bunker by the 17th green a few years ago will be a surprise.

The verbal contortions CBS announcers get into are worthy of needing traction to recover from. “Second nine” instead of back side. “Tributary” of Rae’s Creek instead of fork or arm. “Patrons,” a relatively recent must, instead of spectators or fans. It’s hilarious. And many writers gutlessly follow along. Maybe they think they’ll have to pay for lunch otherwise.

The golf, of course, is sublime. The course still has next to no rough and presents a challenge thanks to greens with more rumples than a frayed carpet. One most think their way around Augusta. The bomber-like length everyone has today has mitigated against that to some degree – the Women’s Amateur the club now hosts, at least for one of the there rounds, really brings out the strategy of placing the tee shot in the right place – but hit it in the wrong place too often, and you’ve got no shot at adding to the wardrobe on the back nine on Sunday.

When, Dan Jenkins once wrote, the Masters starts. But tune in before. Wallow in the beauty. Enjoy Dave Loggins’ little tune. Hope the next advancement in television is to send the scents of the azaleas and the dogwoods our way.

Aromatic or not, within reach of a peach ice cream sandwich or not, whether sneaking up or with a tsunami of advance word, the Masters is upon us. The toonimint in the garden off Washington Road is the best four days in golf.

– Tim Cronin

Remembering Rory Spears

Writing from Chicago

Thursday, April 4, 2025

Rory Spears was enthusiastic about golf and life.

Thursday morning, Arlington Heights police found the veteran reporter dead in his condominium. He had battled a health issue last year but had rebounded from it to get back to work and back on the course, and seemed perfectly fit and eager for the golf season to begin the last time this reporter saw him, at a recent Blackhawks game. He had spoken with a close friend as recently as Tuesday night. The cause of death is unknown. He was 65.

Rory Spears in the WNDZ studio, as posted on his Facebook site.

Spears had covered all Chicago sports for radio outlets. for four decades, including a five-year stint at WSCR in its early years, when it was a daytime-only station at 820 AM. From there, he branched out to freelancing for various radio networks, including NBC Sports Radio most recently.

But first in his portfolio was golf.

He hosted and produced the longest-running golf-oriented radio show in Chicago, airing weekend in season for more than 20 years, most recently on WNDZ-AM (750). He expanded that into a golf website, the Gog Blog, a play on the name of his show, “Golfers on Golf.” His work earned eight awards in the national competition sponsored by the International Network of Golf over the years.

For most of its run, Spears was regularly joined by DuPage County Park District supervisor Ed Stevenson, a PGA professional, Mike Munro, whose White Pine Golf Dome was a winter destination for more than a decade, and PGA tourist Bill Berger, who died last year. Led by Spears’ line of questioning and patter, they made an hour fly by, whether you were a listener or a guest.

Once upon a time, we brought him aboard a telecast of the Illiana Amateur as the analyst, and he was great.

He loved to cover golf – he was a fixture at the John Deere Classic at TPC Deere Run, the BMW and Western Open wen it was in Chicago, made sure he made amateur and local tournaments, and never seemed to miss the Radix Cup at Oak Park Country Club unless he was scheduled elsewhere. Aside from the play, he was lured to Oak Park by its distinctive mix of peanut butter and jelly for crackers at the halfway houses.

He could recount the history of courses and area pros for hours, debate the quality of layouts and tour players to the nth degree, and tinkered with his equipment endlessly. Just in the past fortnight, he was excited about getting fitted for a new driver.

He also loved to play golf, whether at area courses or elsewhere. He was lucky enough to make connections to play Pine Valley, Merion, Chicago Golf, and several other classic courses. Annually, he made a visit to Pinehurst to play and report about the famed resort’s improvements. He had and regularly updated a personal top 100 of the courses he played, but always had Rob Roy, the course he grew up playing and first worked at, on the list at No. 100.

He is survived by his parents, his brother Reid, and countless relatives. There will be a visitation on Sunday from noon-4 p.m. at Ahlgrim Family Funeral Home, 201 N. Northwest Highway, Palatine, followed by a service at 4 p.m.

– Tim Cronin

Youth will be served

Writing from Golf, Illinois

Monday, March 31, 2025

The beauty of youth is not only the innocence of the age. It’s also the scope of the overwhelming possibilities for those who have not yet seen the reality of life. Things like a missed tap-in, a broken promise by a pal, or a Cubs losing streak.

Four such youngsters, dressed in matching shirts and sporting fancy new golf bags, assembled at the Illinois PGA headquarters in this little throwback town on Monday afternoon to celebrate and preview their coming appearance in Sunday morning’s Drive, Chip and Putt National Finals at Augusta National Golf Club.

Brielle Downer, Hudson Hodge, Chloe Lee and Jack Kemper, Chicago's Fab Four, pose on Monday at Illinois PGA headquarters in Golf. (Illinois Golfer/Tim Cronin)

All four annexed their invitation to the championship round by winning their regional final bracket at TPC Deere Run last fall. All four have the chance to become a winner at Augusta – if they score more points than the other nine in their age group by hitting two drives longer, two chips closer, and two putts better.

Easy, it is not. Possible, it most certainly is. The parents, of course, are perhaps more giddy than the kids, as they’re along for the ride. But the four contenders from the Chicago area are thrilled with the opportunity. Here they are:

• Brielle Downer, girls 7-9 bracket, Lockport, most looks forward to seeing her friends and having fun. One of those friends, Eloise Fetzer, previously qualified out of the Chicago area, and this year qualified elsewhere, her family having moved to South Carolina.

“I having talked to her in a while but I’m excited to see her,” Downer said.

A student of Mistwood teacher Nicole Jeray, Downer says the key to her game is simple: “Practicing a lot and practicing every day.”

Thanks to watching previous DCP competitions, Downer and the others know just what to prepare for. She said she’s getting to within a couple of feet on the two putts routinely used at Augusta, the first an approximate 30-footer on the back of the 18th green, and the second about 20-feet downhill to the traditional Sunday pin placement, much like the winning putt Mark O’Meara sank in 1998, his big year.

• Hudson Hodge, boys 10-11 bracket, Clarendon Hills, says “the experience is going to be very cool. Just soak everything in, and do pretty well in the competition. I’m very excited for (going down) Magnolia Lane, and to see Amen Corner. It should be really fun with everyone there.”

Hodge chipped brilliantly at Deere Run to advance to the finals, and hopes to do so again.

“My best skills in past years has been the short game,” said Hodge, whom the wizened would consider too young to have a past. “But I’ll still have to work on that before then.

“When I won at Deere Run, I almost couldn’t believe it.”

• Chloe Lee, girls 12-13 bracket, Plainfield, has Jeray as her teacher as well, and goes into the Sunday finals with 10 healthy fingers. She advanced from Deere Run despite a broken middle finger on her left hand. Swinging a club in the Illinois PGA simulator, it was easy to see the power she can unleash from coiling at the top of the swing. She knows there’s more to golf than a big swat.

“I’ve been working on my putting a lot more,” Lee said. “When I was (at Deere Run), I was hitting it too soft because I got too nervous.

“I’ve seen (putts at Augusta) curve a lot more, because it’s really fast down there.”

The older DCP competitors are, the more pressure affects them. Lee calls herself “pretty good” when it comes to pressure. “I can definitely hit a ball,” she said. “I don’t get too nervous. I think I’ll be able to play.”

• Jack Kemper, boys 12-13 bracket, Winnetka, is the great-great nephew of James Kemper, who founded Kemper Lakes Golf Club and co-founded KemperSports, one of the leading course operators in the world. But Augusta is another world entirely.

“I’m just happy I made it there,” Kemper said. “That was kind of the win for me. I’m hoping to have as much fun as I can when I get there. I did not expect to get a bag. It’s cool.”

The success at Deere Run was the talk of his school when it happened, and classmates will be tuning in Golf Channel on Sunday morning to see how he does.

“I have one friend that kind of plays golf and he’s really excited for me to go,” Kemper said.

Kemper, an old hand at watching Drive, Chip and Putt, has been working on his chipping, where many come up short.

“I’ve been trying to recreate the chip,” he said. “I went to spring break in Orlando, so I’ve watched the chip and tried to recreate it. Same for the putts. I’ve tried to recreate them.”

Kemper, a student of Kevin Weeks of Cog Hill, is old enough to not only have watched the Masters for several years, but to get what makes Augusta National different.

“It’ll be really cool driving down Magnolia Lane, but I don’t really know what to expect until I get there,” he said.

Just that it will be, for him and the other 79 contestants, the experience of a young lifetime.

– Tim Cronin

The Grill Room: The season begins

Friday, February 28, 2025

Writing from Chicago

Calendars are meant for parking up, and for some of us – and perhaps you as well – today is a red letter day on it.

Today is the opening day at the Chicago Golf Show in Rosemont.

There was a much smaller show in Tinley Park three weeks ago, but this is the big one. This is the one where you can get a mini-lesson from a PGA pro to fix – or start to fix – a swing flaw. It’s where you can smack a few balls with a new driver or 5-iron from a manufacturer. A literal test drive, as it were. Where you can wander the aisles and pick up brochures for golf resorts, or even buy year or two-year old club to fill that spot in your bag and your game.

This is the 40th show under than name since it was started by local pro Steve Sidari in a meeting room in Schaumburg in the early 1980s. From there, it moved to the gym at Harper College, thence to Rosemont, where it’s ensconced on the second floor of the Stephens Convention Center for a three-day run through Sunday. Only the COVID-19 pandemic stopped it for a couple of years.

Amng others, the show’s lesson stage will feature Kevin Weeks of Cog Hill on Friday at 4 p.m.; nationally-known teacher Hank Haney on Saturday and Sunday at 1:30 p.m.; Mistwood’s Andy Mickelson and Nicole Jeray on Saturday at 10 a.m.; Chris Oehlerking on Saturday at noon; and Mistwood’s John Platt on Sunday at noon.

Friday ($8 admission for adults), the show is open from noon-6 p.m.; Saturday ($13), from 9 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sunday ($13), from 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

Test your game against the pros

The Illinois PGA runs a season-long series of tournaments every year, but until now, only the Illinois Open and Illinois Senior Open has been open to non-members. This year, the IPGA is inaugurating an Open Series, six one-day tournaments open to section pros, non-affiliated pros and amateurs with a handicap index of 10.0 or less. In other words, open. And with prize money taken from the entry fees for the leading pros.

The idea is, there are so many players chasing the rainbow and pot of gold that is the PGA Tour, there’s a pent-up demand for places to play aside from the Dakota Tour and sundry operations in Florida and other points south.

Players can enter one or all. The first one, at White Eagle Golf Club on April 28, already has 19 players registered. Other sites are Flossmoor Golf Club (May 21), Hinsdale Golf Club (June 9), Elgin Country Club (July 14), Aurora Country Club (July 28) and Bull Valley Golf Club (Oct. 8).

Everything you need to know is at https://ilpga.bluegolf.com/bluegolf/ilpga25/schedule/illinoisopenseries/index.htm?display=champ

Dome sweet dome

It escaped our attention in the fall, but a Quebec-based company has a plan to build a connected group of four massive domes adjacent to U.S. 30 in Oswego, under which will be a large practice range and a nine-hole golf course.

The Megalodome concept has already been approved by the Oswego Village Board, but final approval and all the details await another appearance by the company, which is said to be arranging financing. There’s no word on the total cost, which would include a clubhouse adjacent to the domes.

Each of the four domes would be 100 yards wide, 300 yards long and 110 feet high, dwarfing any individual dome in the Chicago area. The three domes covering the course would each have room for a short par-4 of up to 280 yards and a pair of par-3 holes, with bunkers, ponds and artificial trees.

The (www.megalodomegolf.com) website shows concepts of the design. We’ll believe it when we see it.

– Tim Cronin

The Grill Room: Nae wind, nae rain, nae gowf

Writing from Chicago

Tuesday, January 28, 2025 

For those of us not in the sunbelt – and lately, for many of those in it – golf these long winter weeks of short days means watching it on television or slugging balls into a simulator screen.

Or, on recent weekday nights, watching players slugging balls into a simulator screen on television. In other words, TGL. Tomorrow’s Golf League. (Really, it should be Tiger’s Golf League, but he’s being modest.)

Golf indoors with balls hit into a screen the size of one better suited for a drive-in movie and chips and putts played out on a rotating green that changes its shape more than Jackie Gleason on a diet is interesting, to a point. Seeing notables of the PGA Tour cavort on this playground in prime time is fine, but to what purpose?

Monday night’s contest between Tiger Woods’ Jupiter Links and Rory McIlroy’s Boston Commons was the best of the quartet played so far, decided 4-3 in overtime by a chip-off, like a weekend event at a country club.

However, while there’s money at the end of the line, one more $21 million pot of gold in an endless series of rainbows, the stakes otherwise seem as trivial as some club credit in the pro shop after beating the guy in the next row of lockers. Right now, all we have are guys on teams with names as phony as those in Roller Derby – really, Boston Commons? – playing simulated golf in ideal conditions under roof.

Therein lies the problem. Ideal conditions.

The arena is too comfortable for the players. It should be named Sofa, not SoFi. It’s as antiseptic as an operating room. They don’t need a referee, they need a doctor. Sterile conditions are fine for “Chicago Med” in prime time, but this is golf. As the Scots say, “Nae wind, nae gowf.”

Let’s remodel this new barn and add the reality the rest of us play in. Let’s add wind. Turn the joint into a wind tunnel worthy of testing a jet fighter. Add some giant fans that can put a 20- or 30-mph wind into the players’ faces or at their backs. Or over their left shoulder just to make it really hard.

Vary those conditions from hole to hole and from shot to shot, the same as it is in the real world.

Then let’s add in some spray, a heavy mist at times to further simulate real golf. Let the players feel it, program it into the simulator, and now let’s see how many pixelated fairways are hit. Let’s give that tee-fairway square the ability to tilt as well. No more flat lies in the fairway or rough, please.

Let’s see Tiger needing to hood a 3-iron into the wind from a sidehill lie to reach a green with a back pin guarded by a bunker 220 yards away with some rain in his face. Then let’s see Rickie Fowler try to hit the same shot. Then try to make a curling 25-footer with his pant legs flapping. We’ll hear that shot clock expiration buzzer plenty. (And get that to the PGA Tour pronto, please.)

Then, in lieu of the occasional hammer press, throw in an automatic press the way Sam Snead did to his pigeons at the Homestead for decades and maybe knees will start a’knockin.

Better than some hip-hop music and an artificial heartbeat in the background, no?

It would almost be real golf.

The most interesting games of this season’s NFL playoffs came when it snowed in Philadelphia and there was icy turf in Buffalo. To the pursuit of perfection was added the vagaries of chance. Long ago, thinking of such glorious inclemency, Steve Sabol wrote these words and John Facenda voiced them: “Do you fear the force of the wind? The slash of the rain? Go face them and fight them. Be savage again!” You can almost hear the music.

Golf needs a version of that, something that will make people talk about what they saw on a random Monday night over the water cooler on Tuesday and want to tune in again the next week. 

Or, we can wait for Patrick Cantlay to be funny. How much time do you have?

– Tim Cronin