New York Times, Thursday, January 1, 2015

Jill: One of my most glaring puzzle-solving weaknesses is total ignorance of anything related to baseball. After Jeff tired of my repeated grousing about baseball clues, we started brainstorming about how to incorporate non-baseball sports into a grid. How we landed on golf, I no longer recall, as I am even more stymied by golf than by baseball. The over/under PAR idea seemed like a tidy theme that nodded to the game without requiring any knowledge of golfers or other trivia. As for the themers, I love free-associating with words, so it's fun to come up with phrases in a puzzle like this — feels like a game of Taboo.

We are honored to have the first puzzle of 2015, and we hope you like it!

The grid to the right is what happened when I tried to do this one on my own. (I felt there had to be a progression from BOGEY to PAR to BIRDIE to EAGLE.) I didn't really like the themers. The fill. The layout. The solving experience. The author. But I proudly showed it to Jill.

"Hmm," was her reaction.

She's very considerate of my feelings. Canadian-esque, I might say.

Thankfully, I had the wisdom (dare I say, genius) to bring her on board so we could tear it down and create something a whole lot better. Sometimes I wonder how my wife's brain works. Normally when someone says "I need a seventeen-letter phrase incorporating the word EAGLE," you don't expect people to respond. Ever. (Then again, people often ignore me. For good reason, I'll admit.) But Jill blurted out THE EAGLE HAS LANDED within roughly 16 microseconds. I did some puffing out of my chest and blurting out things like "well, that one's kind of obvious, isn't it?" But I deigned to go with it. So generous am I.

The gridwork was a bear. Stacking PAR above or below each of the themers proved incredibly challenging. There was no intention to purposefully have POOL PARTY and WATER PARK be such long answers — short answers like PART and PARDON failed miserably in roughly a thousand-billion different ways, none of them quite working. Finding this particular arrangement was just a stroke of luck, one of those things where if you try a thousand different things, one might actually work.

Hope you enjoy! (And for those still confused by the theme, EAGLE, BIRDIE, and BOGEY are golf terms for two under par, one under par, and one over par.)