Quote:

http://tinyurl.com/25w8tg

InJCSince81

Can you post the link to that here? It was a nice photo.

GrovePath, there was a cool aerial photo in the article.

I managed to post it on wirednewyork.

PGA Tournament With a View of the New York City Skyline

New York Times
By DAMON HACK
Published: May 16, 2007

The Barclays golf tournament, a fixture at Westchester Country Club in Harrison, N.Y., since 1967 and the inaugural PGA Tour playoff event, will move to Liberty National Golf Club in Jersey City in August 2009, bringing professional golf closer to Manhattan for at least one year.

?Liberty has a lot of potential,? Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner, said Sunday during the Players Championship. ?With camera angles, 4,000 feet on the water and the Statue of Liberty very much a part of the landscape, it will look more like New York to the rest of the country when it?s on television. The golf course was built with hospitality in mind, and I think it will be a nice move in 2009.?

Although the Barclays ? formerly the Westchester Classic and the Buick Classic ? has been played at the same course for four decades, Finchem and the club?s membership agreed last year that Westchester would be its host for only three of the next six years, including 2007 and 2008, with an option for a fourth year.

That left the Tour with a gap to fill for its FedEx Cup playoffs, and Finchem chose Liberty National, a 7,400-yard layout designed by Tom Kite and Bob Cupp and built by Paul B. Fireman and his son, Dan Fireman, for $150 million.

Finchem said the Tour had not decided where the Barclays would be played in 2010 and beyond.

Liberty National, which opened last July, has gained acclaim among businessmen and politicians. Rudolph W. Giuliani and Robert K. Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, are among the club?s founding members.

Liberty National has built up plenty of cachet, with ferry and helicopter service, $1 million Belgian stone cart paths and challenging holes with panoramic views of the Statue of Liberty and the New York City skyline.

If the course holds up to professional competition and if the tournament is viewed as successful, Liberty National may continue as a PGA Tour site and also begin courting major championships, Ryder Cup matches and Presidents Cup matches.

?Though Westchester has been a great venue for years, Liberty is the next new thing out there for the Tour to sink its teeth into,? Dan Fireman said in an interview. ?It?s an exciting new venue for golf, and we hope to showcase it. Tiger Woods wants to conquer everything out there. Until he conquers Liberty, he hasn?t.?

Cupp, who collaborated with Jack Nicklaus to build Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio, called Liberty National his defining moment.

?Players, deep down, love to compete on hard golf courses, and the Tour likes to see 30-mile-an-hour winds,? Cupp said. ?The course has places to make birdies and places to make a bunch of ?others.? It?s a course that has every shot.?

In location and style, Westchester Country Club is much different from the wind-swept Liberty National. Westchester, nearly 600 yards shorter, is a classic course lined by large trees and dotted with small greens.

Before moving to August as part of the FedEx Cup playoffs, the Barclays was often overshadowed in its June date on the Tour calendar, one week before or after the United States Open. Woods, for example, who rarely plays the week before or after a major, has not played at Westchester since 2003.

Last year, when it was rumored that Westchester would cease to be a regular stop on the PGA Tour calendar, the Tour veteran Billy Andrade was among those who bemoaned a potential change.

?If you polled every player on our Tour and said name your top three or four, Westchester Country Club is in the top three or four,? Andrade, who won there in 1991, said last year. ?I hope we do whatever it takes to continue to play here because this is a fabulous venue.?

Although Finchem did not rule out returning the event to Westchester beyond the Tour?s deal with the club, he said he liked the idea of rotating the location. The lure of a course a stone?s throw from Lower Manhattan, he said, would only increase the tournament?s appeal.

?We wouldn?t at all have a problem with our home base being Westchester,? he said. ?It?s great as far the tournament goes. The only thing is, you are trying to reach and excite a metropolitan area of 10, 11 million and make sure it has a full flavor that is really part of New York. It would just make it a bigger event. That?s not to take anything away from Westchester at all. It?s just to say that we?re in the business of trying to make big events.?