By Irvine City News staff

Orange County is one of the world’s 50 great golf destinations, according to Golf Digest Magazine. Irvine is a top draw for visiting and local golfers, too, with excellent courses both public (Rancho San Joaquin, Strawberry Farms, Oak Creek and nearby Tustin Ranch golf clubs) and private (Shady Canyon Golf Club). The city’s golfers enjoy year around playing conditions, and have easy access to teaching pros and golf academies, and golf businesses all located in the city.

The city of Irvine-approved plan for the Orange County Great Park includes a new 227-acre, 18-hole golf course with a clubhouse and practice facilities, set within the 688-acre part of the Great Park funded and being built by FivePoint.

Recently the Great Park Golf Course has been mischaracterized as a Links-style course. Insiders and golf experts confirm that there are no plans to create that kind of course at the Great Park.

In fact, a true Links course should be “by the sea, built upon purely sand.” So says Irvine’s golf design expert, Todd Eckenrode, whose firm has created great new golf courses and restored many classic and historic ones.
The course proposed for the Great Park is actually a meadow course, which Eckenrode says is “a wonderful, natural look” for California courses.

Golf offers a life-long form of recreation and exercise. Golf is also “an excellent platform for teaching youth life skills and core values, such as respect, courtesy, honesty and integrity,” says Tim Casey, the retired city manager for Laguna Niguel.
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As the president of the OC chapter of nonprofit First Tee, Casey has seen the benefit of golf as a teaching tool for at risk and underserved kids. In 2015, more than 3,200 OC kids participated in the First Tee programs. Irvine ranks third in the number of participants, Case says. “Our Board has often discussed the Great Park as an ideal permanent home for our chapter if it includes a new public golf course.”
 

It only took 22 years, but the L.A. Rams are back in Southern California. The NFL football team left Anaheim back in 1994, having played in OC since moving from Los Angeles in 1980. The Rams final game at Anaheim Stadium (a loss to against Washington) only drew 25,705 fans.

The team started that season at training camp on the campus of UCI, the third summer the team spent in Irvine, including 1991 and 1992. And there are reports, as of yet unconfirmed, that the team again known as the L.A. Rams will return to UCI to train this summer.

Things will be much different than the last time the Rams trained at UCI. Back then Chuck Knox was the coach (he’d be fired a few weeks later), while future Hall of Famer’s Jackie Slater and Jerome Bettis were among the best players still on the losing team. Slater was a grizzled veteran who would retire after the next season as the only player ever to be with the same team for 20 years. Bettis was traded to the Pittsburg Steelers in 1996, and went on to stardom as “the Bus.”

Time will tell if any of the players at this summer’s training camp will end up in the NFL. If the Rams’ number one pic in the draft, quarterback Jared Goff, is one of them, it bodes well for the team’s next decade or more.
Football fans will have ample opportunity to get to know the players trying to make the Rams roster. The team will be featured on HBO’s unscripted show “Hard Knocks,” which offers an up-close and personal look at training camp in August and early September.

If the Rams do indeed train at UCI, the show will bring a good deal of attention to the city and the university, as well as revenue. Back in 1994, Ed Carroll, then UCI’s associate athletic director for financial affairs, said having training camp on campus was a boon to the school. “There’s the publicity value of having them here,” Carroll said in an LA Times story. “They pay for facility use, housing, food service, parking ... it’s a good chunk of change.” Plus, most practices are open to the public, so there will be a bit of an influx of customers for local restaurants and bars.
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While we don’t expect to see Rams players out and about in the city much if they do train here (camp is a grueling endeavor), we’ll keep readers informed of any superstar sightings at the Anthill Pub or across the street at Eureka!