Mystery Valley’s Iconic Georgia Look
The design at Mystery Valley, near Stone Mountain about 30 minutes east of Atlanta, is attributed to Dick Wilson but I suspect his then-associate Joe Lee is responsible for pretty much all of this course. After a struggle with his health and alcoholism, Wilson died in 1965, a year before Mystery Valley officially opened, and Lee and Robert Von Hagge had been handling most of the firm’s work for several years before that.
The course wanders a beautiful property with holes that sweep up and down long lanes of pine bound by a core routing that’s rich with doglegs and frequent changes in direction. It looks like iconic Georgia golf: if you knew nothing about golf here but what you saw on television, these fairways would feel very familiar. It’s also the closest thing I have to a home course in the Atlanta area.
The elevation changes aren’t necessarily severe but do pose some interesting challenges, like with the par-4 9th where good drives can travel too far across a plateau landing area and leave a downhill lie to an abruptly uphill green. The par-4 17th falls into the same category with approach shots playing from a low, sidehill spot uphill to a blind and wickedly canted green benched into a slope. And the drive at the long 18th must carry the crest of a hill but also avoid bounding down the hard right-to-left pitch into the trees.
There are some problems. The short par-4 third is wedged too tightly around a small retention pond. The 556-yard 14th rumbling around an uphill bend toward a severely sloped green is one of the nicest, most natural holes in the metro area, but it’s followed by one of the worst, the undisciplined downhill par-4 15th with two lakes pinching a narrow landing area beginning at about 160 yards out.
The course seems so strong today because it was very good originally; it was considered one of the better places to play in the Southeast when it opened. It could use some updating, however, because it has the potential to be even better — in my world I’d give a local architect like Mike Riley the budget to redo the bunkers, enlarge and re-grass the greens and possibly cut down some of the slopes like he did at The Standard Club — but really this course is still tremendously fun and just fine as it is. (86)
Lithonia/Atlanta
Architect: Dick Wilson
Year: 1966