Slammer & Squire, the original course at World Golf Village, is overshadowed by the companion Palmer/Nicklaus collaboration, King & Bear, which the resort did far more to promote when it opened in 2000. This puts the Slammer in a double bind because, since its development in the late ’90’s, the entire WGV and Hall of Fame complex near St. Augustine has failed to attract the passionate…
One of the most inspirational views in American golf is off the deck of Ben’s Porch at Sand Hills Golf Club after you’ve taken the mile or so cart ride up from the clubhouse. The entire Sand Hills panoramic opens before you, a diorama of green ribboning across a whipped and weathered horizon with players marching…
In almost all cases golf courses are a jarring abstraction against their environment. No matter how evolved they may appear, there’s nothing natural about their shapes, their presence or their reason for being. Golf as we know it does not appear accidentally in any ecosystem. They are not random mutations but rather invasive species. But…
The topic of how courses are judged in comparison to their neighbors comes up quite a bit here. Often it’s fair to make assessments about a property based on other proximate courses, but sometimes looking left and right instead of straight ahead makes for lazy analysis. In the case of Augusta Country Club, however, there’s just no way around it.…
One of my favorite stories of Pete Dye involves the construction of the Ocean Course in 1989. Hurricane Hugo had just come aground at Kiawah Island and Charleston, upturning everything he’d built to that point. With the site razed and most of the coast evacuated, Dye ventured out alone and began reshaping the course, pushing up dunes and moving the holes out…
With a lovely, forested site (though not one necessarily great for golf), recurring views of Lake Oconee and the surrounding development’s once deep pockets, you’d think The National’s 27 holes would comprise some of the most spectacular destination golf in the Southeast. In actuality, the National bats in the middle of Reynolds Lake Oconee’s (formerly Reynolds Plantation) lineup. That’s…
Suddenly, Wisconsin has become a powerhouse golf destination, at least as unlikely a place for extraordinary public play as Nebraska has become. The state hit the big stage in 1988 when Pete Dye built Blackwolf Run’s original 18 at Destination Kohler. That begat another 18 holes and, several years later, 36 more for the resort at Whistling Straits, including the famous Straits Course on bluffs…
From the time the earliest links were staked out, whenever that was, golf course “design” has been in a continuous state of development. That’s not to say it’s been a smooth or straight evolution–there have always been stops and restarts. Pete Dye almost single handedly reset the direction of golf architecture in the mid-1960’s following the pre-fab boomer period…
What does it say about Tom Fazio that the finest work to come out of his studio might be a public course in Florida that you can play for $50? It doesn’t square with the closed-door, big budget design extravaganzas we usually associate with Fazio, does it? He’s never built many public courses to begin with, much…
Depending on your view, having two courses as diverse as Mission Inn’s Las Colinas and El Campeón can either mean you have variety, or that you simply have an A course and a B course. Land planning concerns (read: selling houses) dictated that Las Colinas would be nothing like its older, tightly routed sibling, but the younger course does…