Central Texas Golf News

Johnson has Magic Touch at Valero Texas Open

Cedar Rapids native Zach Johnson, who firmly announced his presence on the PGA Tour with his win at the 2007 Masters, has quietly turned San Antonio’s La Canterra golf course into his own personal “Field of Dreams.”

Saturday Johnson flirted with a 59 en route to a course record round of 60 to vault into the lead, and eventually sealed his second consecutive Texas Open title with a 10-foot birdie putt on the first hole of a Texas-style sudden death shootout with James Driscoll on Sunday The win was the sixth of Johnson’s PGA Tour career.

Golfers today are constantly bombarded with fancy marketing messages from equipment manufactures vying for their business. Amidst all the flash and hype, how can the average player know what will actually help their game? It can be diffi cult to differentiate the gimmicks from those products that offer a true technological advancement. One company that is absolutely the “real deal” and worth checking out is Boccieri Golf: maker of the Heavy Putter.

In order to truly value the Heavy Putter you must get to know its inventor, Stephen Boccieri. A scratch golfer and nuclear engineer, Boccieri applied the skills from his day job to his passion, spending his spare time evaluating equipment from all major manufacturers. He was puzzled by the structural inconsistencies that existed across the board and soon began modifying the equipment to improve performance, an admittedly self serving task as he was searching for ways to better his own game.

On the golf course, a few feet can be the difference between finding a hazard and landing in a safe spot with a good angle to attack the pin, and club selection is often an integral component in reducing distances to the cup if you're able to find the putting surface.

GreenFinder Golf GPS , a system that utilizes already-exisiting global positioning systems on your iPhone or Blackberry to calculate the distance from the golfer to various targets on the course, is a simple, convenient and affordable way to improve your golf game by having the right club in your hand and the information necessary to make the right play.

From meeting professionals descending upon the city for a important convention to families in town for an annual vacation, all walks of life seem to share the feeling that San Antonio is indeed the heart of Texas.

In 2008 Travel + Leisure magazine listed San Antonio among America’s favorite cities for the second year in a row, focusing on the Alamo City’s ability to provide diverse attractions at affordable prices without sacrificing quality and entertainment value. The city is home to the famed River Walk, which is in the process of a $345 million improvement project, and the historic Alamo.

San Antonio’s Southwest Greens can turn a golfer’s backyard into their very own personal playground by utilizing the state-of-the-art materials on the market to create a cutting edge fully-customizable putting surface. Why choose Southwest Greens, what range of services do they offer and how much does it cost? Golfer’s Guide sat down with owner Kevin Detmer to find out.

Adjust the Head. Adjust the Weights. Totally Optimize You

If it’s not at the very top of the list, TaylorMade’s new r9 Driver is certainly among a small group of the most anticipated equipment offerings of 2009.

Called the most advanced and finest performing driver in the history of golf club design by TaylorMade, the r9 will feature full adjustability in that it will combine three moveable weights with the company’s newest technology – Flight Control Technology (FCT).

The club is widely-considered to be the most adjustable and customizable driver ever. The TaylorMade r9 can adjust to your game by offering user-configurable center of gravity, face angle, loft and lie, giving you up to 75 yards of side-toside adjustability – enough to correct even the nastiest of slices.

In My Hand I Hold A Ball,
White And Dimpled, Rather Small.
Oh, How Bland It Does Appear,
This Harmless Looking Little Sphere.

By It's Size I Could Not Guess,
The Awesome Strength It Does Possess.
But Since I Fell Beneath Its Spell,
I've Wandered Through The Fires Of Hell.

A Hill Country Beauty That’s Getting Prettier!

Thirty-seven thousand. 37 thousand. 37,000. Any way you spell it, it’s a big number. And that, gentle golfers, is the number of rounds of golf played at Scott Shreiner Municipal Golf Course in Kerrville each and every year. That works out to a little over 101 rounds per day, every day 365 days per year.

You may be tempted to leap to the conclusion that a course that gets a beating like that, day in and day out, would display some battle scars: tee boxes and fairways with wall-to-wall divot marks; green surfaces beaten into a state of ugly scar tissue by unrepaired ball marks; cart paths in disrepair; ball washers that don’t wash balls; you’ve seen all these signs of abuse on courses that don’t have 37,000 rounds played on them in two years! But you won’t see any of these “hard use” symptoms at Shreiner.

The most common question I get at The Tobacco Haus is “What do you have that’s new?” Well, this is the time of year when new cigars are released, and there are three new cigars that are really excellent smokes.

CAO (pronounced C A O, not Ciao) releases at least one new cigar a year, but I think this years Lx2 is the best cigar CAO has released since the 2001 release of the Brazilla. The CAO Lx2 (“Ligero-times-two”) is a medium to full-bodied, full-flavored cigar, and is named for the priming of the tobacco plant which produces a leaf that is dark, strong, and spicy.

After being homeless for more than a decade, the Texas Golf Hall of Fame is relocating to one of the most historic golf sites in the state: San Antonio's Brackenridge Park.

Part of a $7.5 million project in the center of downtown, the new Texas Golf Hall of Fame and Museum will be adjacent to San Antonio's famed Brackenridge Golf Course, Texas' first public course that will re-emerge in December from a remarkable restoration of its 1915 A.W. Tillinghast design.