The PGA Tour kicks off its season this week with the Mercedes Championship at one of the most beautiful places in the world, Kapalua on the island of Maui, Hawaii. This Lorne Rubenstein/Golf Observer article examines the work on Kapulua’s Plantation Course of the golf design team of Austin’s Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore, who have steadily become the best design team in the golf business over the past two decades:

Coore and Crenshaw are at the top of their games. Compared to some of the big names in course architecture, they’ve designed relatively few courses. That’s by choice. They keep their staff small, seven people just now, but, to appropriate a line often used about the late James Brown, the hardest-working man in show business until he died the end of December at 73, they might be the hardest-working men in the architecture business. Their projects are few, their commitment to each is huge, and personal.
Just about every one of the courses they’ve done since they met in the early 1980s is a must-play for architecture aficionados. . . . These are courses that almost uniformly are without affectation. They tend to sit low to the ground, offer multiple options for shots, include short, driveable par-fours, room to drive the ball, angles, and above all, they’re fun to play. Crenshaw’s two Masters wins came on an Augusta National course that hadn’t yet undergone the recent revisions that added length and rough and compromised the vision that Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie laid down on the property. It’s fair to say that the course provided his philosophical grounding.

By the way, Crenshaw is also an expert on golf history, which assisted him in becoming quite a good story-teller, too.
Meanwhile, the Chronicle’s excellent golf writer, Steve Campbell, previews the PGA Tour season here, and uses that article to pass along the following Tiger Woods crack about the always-entertaining John Daly:

What’s the career prognosis from here for fan favorite John Daly?
Bleak. Daly was 193rd on the money list last year, never cracking the top 25 in a stroke-play event. He has been down before, but now back problems are part of the equation. Given Daly’s distaste for work and fitness, don’t look for his talent to get him out of this mess. As Woods cracked last month at his offseason event, “Well, his back is bothering him because he’s got that front to deal with.”