Asher Iyasu, Champion

Israel’s national amateur golf champion is the superintendent at Caesarea GC, the only 18-hole regulation course in the country. His name is Asher Iyasu, and he is one of tens of thousands of Ethiopian émigrés living in the Holy Land today. While they share the Jewish religion with their new compatriots, integration into Israeli society has often been difficult, marked by racism and discrimination. Tel Aviv-based journalist and professor Itay Goder pens an intimate portrait of a man with a beautiful relationship with golf, and the challenges he and his community face.

In Good Company

A new dawn is breaking over the clubhouse at Muirfield, home of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers and the lodestar  of golf’s most conservative instincts. As Muirfield seeks to catch the eye of the R&A Championship committee, the club invited McKellar’s multi-award winning  duo of Dani Garavelli and Murdo MacLeod through its famous gates and let them sample everything it has to offer – history, a legendary lunch buffet, its Kummel supply (the good stuff that members drink, not the other brand they serve to visitors). Muirfield now has women members and this summer it will host the Women’s British Open. Will this new mood of modernity and openness land the club what it wants most of all—to regain its spot on the Open Championship rotation?

The Forgotten Macdonald

It would be easy to think we know all we’re ever going to know about Charles Blair Macdonald. Not only is he one of the most well-researched architects in golf history, but he also described much of his life’s work in the game in an autobiography. How could one of his early-career designs fall through the cracks for over a century? Anthony Pioppi reaches back to explore a great American city during one of its most colorful eras—1890s Chicago—to tell the strange and colorful story of the Washington Park Club.

Heaven or Donegal

Geographically remote and politically ignored, the people who live in County Donegal, in the northwest of Ireland, are big on self-reliance and entrepreneurship. They need to be in order to survive. Lawrence Donegan makes the journey to the Rosapenna Hotel and Golf Resort, where the Casey family—Frank, Sr., his wife Hilary and their two sons—have built a generational legacy bringing pleasure to golfers from all over the globe and much needed economic sustenance for the surrounding communities.
St Patrick’s Links, designed and built by Tom Doak and his team, opened in the ghostly COVID summer of 2021 to rave reviews, and rightly so. It is a masterpiece of restraint and imagination. But more than that, St Patrick’s is a winning bet on County Donegal and its indefatigable spirit.