The 2008 Senior U.S. Open will be held at the Broadmoor Golf Course July 28th-August 3rd. The Broadmoor is famous for being the place in Colorado for VIP guests to stay. They include nine presidents, John Wayne, Walt Disney, and Joe DiMaggio. The Broadmoor has 3 luxurious golf courses, and I will forever be able to brag that I got to play one of the courses for $3 when I played in a junior golf tournament more than a decade ago (please don’t ask what I shot; it’s a tough course). Unfortunately, I didn’t get to play on the East Course which is where the U.S. Senior Open will be held, but I still think I got my money’s worth.

Tickets to attend the Open are $40 for Thursday and Friday, and $45 for the weekend; kids can get in for free, and there are many package deals to choose from. Of course there will be great players vying for the championship including Hale Irwin, Bernhard Langer, Tom Kite, Ben Crenshaw, Tom Watson, Craig Stadler, Mark O’Meara and many others. 

The Broadmoor East Course, at 6400 feet of elevation, was the highest golf course in the U.S. when it was completed in 1918. It can be difficult to adjust to playing at a higher elevation. A typical drive can go substantially longer—around 40 yards longer. That’s great, but picking the right iron for your second shot can be tricky. There’s no set formula for determining how far a club will go, but usually the ball goes one club farther.

Of course there are many great tourist attractions in the Colorado Springs area, such as Pike’s Peak, Garden of the Gods, the U.S. Olympic Training Center, the Air Force Academy, Cave of the Winds, and Seven Falls, but there are also many great courses in the Colorado Springs area.

Pine Creek Golf Club has great views of the mountains. The front nine is a canyon-style course, and the back nine is more of a links style.

Patty Jewett is one of the oldest public golf courses west of the Mississippi. It has a very historic feel to it, and is a fun course to play. It has very reasonable green fees as it remains a municipal course.

Valley Hi golf course isn’t too far from the Broadmoor, and is Colorado Springs’ other municipal course. Spring Creek wanders through the course, and you’ll have to deal with it on a couple of holes.

Gleneagle Golf Course, located near the Air Force Academy, is a great course. There are plenty of water hazards on this course, and you’ll have to get around the windmill on the first hole.

Springs Ranch Golf Course is out on the plains, and the architect took special care in working the Sand Creek River Basin into the course. The course is also near the Colorado Sky Sox stadium (the Colorado Rockies AAA affiliate), so you can catch a baseball game after your round.

Bear Dance Golf Course has been ranked as one of the greatest courses in Colorado. It is located in Larkspur, north of Colorado Springs. There is plenty of wildlife to see, and it offers spectacular views of the Front Range.

Farther outside of town there are some interesting courses. Colorado is the highest state in the union, and has several courses over 9000 feet in elevation. It can be difficult to grow grass at high elevations, and even some people don’t do so well at those kinds of elevations. It’s great to get up into the higher elevations in the summer as it doesn’t get too hot. Mt. Massive, in Leadville, is a 9-hole course, and is the highest golf course in North America at 9,680 feet. The highest 18-hole course in North America is Copper Mountain, at 9,500.

All of the ski resort communities have great golf courses including Aspen, Vail, Breckenridge, Steamboat Springs, Crested Butte, Durango, Telluride and Winter Park. Of course these courses boast of some of the greatest scenery on earth—considering the altitude, it is literally breathtaking. You should definitely consider a golf cart. While the air is fresh, it is very thin and it’s easy to run out of breath.

Seeing the greatest players on the Senior Tour play for the U.S. Open Championship is only one of the great reasons to visit Colorado Springs this summer.

I can only imagine how I would have spent my high school years if it hadn’t been for golf. Not to say that I would have gotten into trouble, but I’m afraid I would have sat around playing video games or watching T.V. My friends and I spent most of our free time at the golf course when we were in high school. While golf is not a cheap sport to play, kids (through high school) can play much more inexpensively than adults. Most golf courses are anxious to help kids learn to play. Golfers are famous for gambling, and the pro from our club would bet on us against the pro for the club where the schools we competed against would practice. This gave him a financial interest in helping us play better, and he was always very helpful.

Cheap ways for kids to play golf

• Many golf courses have clinics where the club pro will give instruction and even some personal attention to kids. These are usually not too expensive, and well worth the money.
• There are plenty of golf clubs that provide reasonable memberships for kids. Even if you don’t get to play often enough to justify the cost of a membership for yourself, your kid probably has enough free time to get in a lot of golf.
• Buying used golf clubs can help keep costs down. If the kids are small enough, a set of junior golf clubs are very reasonable.
• Junior tournaments are plentiful, and usually very cheap. Kids get to play great area golf courses for a fraction of the normal greens fees.
• Most high schools have golf teams, and depending on the school, most kids have a real chance of getting to play for the team. This was great for me, as I got the benefits of playing high school sports, without having to do a lot of running like most other sports.

I think there are many benefits of playing sports beyond just getting kids away from the T.V. Golf, in particular is a game of integrity, and good sportsmanship. I’m grateful I had the opportunity to play golf when I was a kid.

I love watching the U.S. Open. They make the course so difficult, and I enjoy watching the greatest golfers in the world struggle. Taking pleasure in their pain does cause a little bit of guilt, but then I remind myself that the winner gets over a million dollars, and the guilt goes away. There has to be some pain involved in winning a million dollars.

The 2008 U.S. Open will be held this week at Torrey Pines in San Diego. Both Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson (ranked #1 and #2 in the world) consider the course their home course, so it should be very interesting to see what they can do. Torrey Pines is a public course, and only the second public course to host the biggest tournament in America. If you’re a San Diego resident, you can play Torrey Pines for about the same price as a typical course, around $50. For the rest of us, it will cost about $200.

Interestingly, Phil Mickelson, who plays left-handed, is right handed. He learned to play golf by mirroring his father’s golf swing, and he has used left handed golf clubs ever since. I personally think there is something to this, because in a right handed swing, the left hand is the dominant hand, and vice versa. Maybe we should all follow Phil’s example.

While it is a public course, all of the tee times are taken for the rest of this week, but you might be able to play in next year’s U.S. Open. All you have to do is have a handicap of 1.4 or better, and you can enter local qualifying. About 1 in 15 players advance from local qualifying to sectional qualifying. Your odds of getting past sectional qualifying to the U.S. Open jump up to almost 1 in 10. Occasionally this is the method of getting into the tournament some of the eventual winners have taken, including Michael Campbell in 2005.

Angel Cabrerra won last year’s U.S. Open, and statistically he doesn’t stand a chance at defending his championship. Since 1991, only Tiger Woods and Retief Goosen have finished better than 40th place the year after their championship, and neither of them finished in the top 10.

Of course PGA pros have the luxury of being able to switch their golf clubs in and out from week to week and even round to round to fit their mood, the course and the current strengths and weaknesses of their game, but here's a sampling of what some of the big names routinely use.

This is a great site for finding great deals on golf clubs. You can figure out what types of clubs suit your game.

Golf Clubs