For the purposes of this book, the Triangle is, in fact, a part of North Carolina's Piedmont. The area is defined by Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, municipalities best known, in the eyes of one of us anyway, for one major university (the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and two minor ones (North Carolina State and Duke).

(Quick: Which university did one author attend?)

Thus the Triangle boasts a mildly Bohemian and erudite air that sometimes borders on the obnoxious--particularly in Durham.

But there's more to the Triangle than college basketball and sororities. There's industry, tobacco farming, and Research Triangle Park, a massive real estate development dedicated to--you guessed it--research. RTP is inhabited by companies like Glaxo Wellcome, IBM and SAS Institute.

Golf-wise, the Triangle has been somewhat starved for public facilities. Unfortunately, there's little relief in sight, with no new courses planned on increasingly expensive real estate. Thankfully, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and Pinehurst are within easy driving distance, and there must be quite a pilgrimage to these areas on sunny weekends.

East of the Triangle, where Tobacco farming anchors the economy, life is a little more relaxed and gentrified: A couple of solid country club courses open their doors to the public on weekdays.

Despite the relative scarcity of good public golf in the Triangle, there are some gems. UNC recently hired Tom Fazio to redesign Finley Golf Course; locals, students, alumni, and others have hailed the revamp as extremely successful. It must now be rated as one of the top university facilities in the country. Also on that list must be Duke's golf course, renovated some years back by Rees Jones, whose father, Robert Trent Jones, brilliantly routed the course through some of the prettiest woodland in North Carolina. Some of the more modern development courses, like The Neuse, have garnered solid reviews from national publications as well.

But still, there's a big need for new courses in the Triangle. So, if you're a golf course developer, head over to Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill. You'll find that demand far outstrips supply.

One annoying aspect of golf in the Triangle is that many courses have a special Friday greens fee that's more than the weekday rate but less than the weekend rate. Most of us have to play hooky from work to play golf on Friday, so why should we be penalized? Makes no sense: Friday is still a school day. Sadly, most of the better courses employ this policy.