A Distant Whiff of Ross — Wilmington Island Club
For years this club was an amenity to members and guests of the General Oglethorpe Hotel, one of the grand buildings of the East Coast (designed by the old firm of Schultze & Weaver, architects of New York’s Waldorf Astoria and The Breakers in Palm Beach) that stood, and still stands, imperiously along the Wilmington River between Savannah and Tybee Island. Later it became the Sheraton Savannah Resort and today it’s comprised of privately owned condos and has no affiliation with the golf course across the street.
Golf Digest ranked the course the top public destination in Georgia in the early 1970’s, demonstrating how flat, literally and figuratively, public golf options were at the time.
The property is unsurprisingly level and breezy with the only interesting feature an irrigation canal that was expanded several years ago to form an even more obvious water hazards that cuts across four holes, albeit in rather un-strategic locations. Around this same time the nines were flipped, a hole or two rebuilt, and several others renumbered in order to get the current configuration.
Ross did a nice job originally of formatting the holes into about every square foot of space on this small triangular section of land (there’s no evidence Ross was on-site during the build, but he was nearby renovating Augusta Country Club the year this course opened, so he might have seen it personally).
There’s not much variation to the holes, although some strong moments exist on the second nine like the 13th, 14th and 15th, the latter of which must contend with the water.
The greens are mid-sized with mostly back-to-front contour and some rounded edges, and some very standardized bunkering protects their front thirds. There’s a certain old-time charm here but to get truly interesting golf on this site you’d really have to build back up the bold and detailed putting surfaces and bunkers that I assume were once here, and this course just doesn’t have them. (83)
Savannah
Architect: Donald Ross/renovated by Willard Byrd in the 1960’s
Year: 1927