What's in a street name, you ask? More than you think. Golf courses, and not just those at the centers of planned communities, tend to bring associated street names with them, and those names can reflect the character and history of a given course in unexpected ways.
For example, directly across busy Fiske Blvd. from Rockledge (Fla.) Country Club is a neighborhood known as Fairway Estates. It's a normal enough neighborhood - not gated; just a grid of pleasant mid-century Florida homes - but in addition to streets like Palmer St. and Nicklaus Dr., there's also one named for the comparatively obscure Kel Nagle, whose lone major championship was the 1960 Open Championship. If that neighborhood were springing up today, who's to say it mightn't have been christened, say, Oosthuizen Way instead?
This phenomenon works with streets named after golf courses, too. Across the country at PGA West, several luminary golf courses are represented on the community map: Riviera, Firestone, Pinehurst, Oak Hill, Merion and more. Running alongside a few holes of the Nicklaus Private Course, though, is Tanglewood, a seeming outlier. I personally like the namesake, a Winston-Salem, N.C.-area muni course by Robert Trent Jones, Sr. But it's hardly at the same level of fame as the others mentioned. That said, in the mid-1980s, when the course was being built, Tanglewood would have been more prominent in golfers' consciousness, having hosted the 1974 PGA Championship. Golf history buffs may remember that Nicklaus was a factor in that event, but he lost the tournament to Lee Trevino. Most of us would probably lobby against putting the name of a course where I came up short in a major beside holes of my own design. Of course, most of us have 18 fewer major championships as comfort...
