Tuckaway latest course sale

The Morning Nine for Monday, January 27, 2014

    Feeling a bit chilly? Warm up to golf with the latest edition of the Morning Nine:

    1. Add Tuckaway Golf Course in Crete to the list of courses that have been sold or put up for sale recently. Tuckaway, around the corner from the for-sale Balmoral Woods layout, also in Crete, was sold by the owning family for about $1.2 million, a source close to the family tells Illinois Golfer.
    Tuckaway, a John Ellis design that opened in 1960, will remain open. That’s in contrast to Woodbine, the Homer Glen layout that has been sold to the village and will close after this season to become a park, the clubhouse becoming the village hall. But like Woodbine, it’s a course that won’t beat you up. At 6,225 yards from the tips, it’s a place to learn how to play. It’s good news for beginners and seniors that it will stay open.

    2. In case you were wondering, Balmoral Woods will be open for business as well while the Mortell family has it for sale – and presumably after.

    3. Will there be more turmoil in the Chicago area golf business? The guess is yes, if only because rounds played have slid for over a decade now. It’s a difficult business locally and nationally. Cog Hill’s famed Dubsdread course only has handful of people on it at any given time some weekdays in the shoulder season, and that’s the best public layout in the area. If Dubs isn’t full, imagine how it is on other courses.

    4. The most sensible words from the PGA Merchandise Show’s State of the Game Forum in Orlando came from former USGA executive director David Fay: “We have suffered from real fallacies — fallacies of numbers. We don’t have 25-26 million golfers. I think that’s a myth. I think the real number is somewhere around 15 million golfers. And we have too many golf courses … out there that are under utilized. Let’s talk about 15 million golfers and let’s see what they (course owners) can do with these courses.”

    5. TaylorMade is planning to sell clubs and balls (more like oversize whiffle balls than golf balls) that don’t hew to USGA rules. Some people think this is a bad thing. Wrong. Anything that gets people to play golf, or some form thereof, and hook them on the game, is a good thing. Eventually, many will come around to buying “real” clubs that conform to the rules – and TaylorMade might make a second sale.

    6. It’s Phoenix Open week, so get ready for hooting and hollering on the famous par-3 16th – but no more caddie races, which have been banned by the fun police – plus announcements of six-figure crowds given by television announcers with straight faces. The aerial shots don’t show any more people than pile into a U.S. Open, and that’s rarely more than 45,000, so who are the people in Phoenix kidding?

    7. Back-to-back double bogeys and a slew of other bogeys for Tiger Woods en route to his 79 at Torrey Pines South on Saturday. If you’ve always wanted to play like Woods, now you can.

    8. Checked the Winter Olympics schedule and found sliding and ditching on it. Wait, that’s the traffic report. Enough with the deep freeze, already. When it’s too cold to go to a dome to practice, it’s just too cold.

    9. Finally, kudos to Jessica Korda from recovering from a shank – it pains us to write the word – on Saturday to win the LPGA’s season-opening tournament on Sunday. Guess that makes Saturday’s gaffe shanks for the memory.

    – Tim Cronin