Cashiers Valley, enveloped in the Blue Ridge Mountains with craggy stone faces, thundering waterfalls, majestic forests, and wilderness areas of unique flora and fauna, has always drawn visitors. Its moderate climate, slower pace, and friendly people have encouraged visitors to stay and, increasingly, to relocate. The residents have preserved a strong sense of place as they embraced the bonds of kinship and community through the years. This is all connected to a powerful religious base and a strong cultural heritage tradition. Today Cashiers Valley retains the charm of an isolated mountain village that welcomes guests. The photographs in this volume were gathered from many local scrapbooks, long forgotten and yellowing with age. Community residents are eager to share their photographs and memories of days gone by.

The story of one man’s quest to become the first person to play each of America’s 100 greatest golf courses in a single year, an odyssey that brings him face to face with the gulf between his impoverished childhood in the Jim Crow South and the successful executive he became. When he set out to play each of Golf Digest’s America’s 100 greatest golf courses in one year, Jimmie James knew he was attempting the impossible. But then again, he’d spent his entire life defying the odds. James was born invisible. His birth certificate, long since filed away in some clerk’s office in East Texas, recorded facts about him that were deemed most relevant in the late 1950s: “colored” and “illegitimate.” His great-great-grandmother was enslaved, and his early life was confined by the privation and segregation of the late Jim Crow-era South. Four decades later—having put himself through an HBCU and determinedly risen through the executive ranks at ExxonMobil—he embarked on his journey to play the 100 greatest golf courses in the United States. In a single year. From the first tee at Augusta National, the distance between the world he grew up in and the world of extreme privilege to which he’d now managed to gain access was impossible to ignore. Playing from the Rough is a remarkable memoir of race, class, family, and the power of perseverance, as James braids his love of golf with reflections on the path that took him from childhood poverty to the most exclusive and opulent golf courses in America.

Whether readers play for fun or for serious sport, this guide will encourage them to live their ultimate golfing fantasies at the world's premier courses. Each golf course has been selected for its interest either as a challenge to play, a place of outstanding beauty, a famous occurrence, or the brilliance of its design.

This book offers readers behind-the-scenes tales from Americas master architects themselves in their own words. Elite designers such as Tom Fazio, Jack Nicklaus, Pete Dye, Rees Jones, Robert Trent Jones Jr., Arthur Hills, Arnold Palmer, and others share their personal anecdotes related to the creation of some of the worlds most famous courses: from run-ins with snakes to bulldozers sinking in quicksand, to holes created by accident, such as the famed island green 17th at the TPC at Sawgrass.

Skyscrapers. Sports. NASCAR. Nature. Culinary delights.A world-class, can-do city. A crown jewel of the New South. • A personal, practical perspective for travelers and residents alike • Comprehensive listings of attractions, restaurants, and accommodations • How to live & thrive in the area—from recreation to relocation • Countless details on shopping, arts & entertainment, and children’s activities Our insider, Craig Distl, a native of North Carolina and a longtime Charlottean, has been a journalist for the Charlotte Observer, and his articles have also appeared in Charlotte Magazine, Southern Sports Journal, and Golfweek. His writing has received awards from such organizations as the North Carolina Press Association.