Rob Griffiths says one of his passions is golfing. He also spends a lot of time with technology and writing for MacWorld. So, naturally he ends up writing about Google Earth and his experience learning how to create a tour of a golf course. He takes a golf course he’s recently played, called Great Blue at Heron Lakes in Portland, Oregon, and creates a tour of the course in GE 
where he flies you along the ideal play for each hole. Hit the “Play” button after selecting the ‘Great Blue’ folder for the tour. You will see where your tee-off drive should land, then your lay-up, and the green. Then on to the next hole. The course has a high resolution satellite photo, so you can see the details of the course. I like the fly-through of the course. For his readers (who may not have GE) he also put up a video showing the fly-through. But, the GE fly-through is better. (Shortcut tip: if you have the ‘Great Blue’ folder selected in GE 4 beta – click in the GE viewing window, then you can just hit ‘p’ to play the tour; in GE 3 – just click F10 to play the tour. I’m trying to convince Google to support F10 in GE 4 as well).
There are a number of golf course web sites now supporting Google Earth for visualizing the course. For example: Golf Nation (GEB writiup), Bunkershot, and golfworld.fr has a placemark collection showing golf course all over france.
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.
Nice article and the flythrough Rob did is a good one. In the article you referenced a number of sites that are using Google Earth to show courses, the one that you left off that is head and shoulders above the rest is Eyespygolf.com, go to http://www.eyespygolf.com They have 16,000 courses and are doing the mapping referred to in your article, at least theres one of Augusta National on their home page.
Regards,
Local128
You will see where your tee-off drive should land, then your lay-up, and the green. Then on to the next hole. The course has a high resolution satellite photo, so you can see the details of the course. I like the fly-through of the course.