The Tom Watson-designed Conservatory Course and its elaborate “Crystal Palace” clubhouse — both amenities to the Hammock Beach Resort a few miles away — were built and opened at extreme expense just in time for the global economic recession and the crumbling of owner Bobby Ginn’s resort and real estate empire. The Conservatory is located on garbage land not…
The Ocean Course at Hammock Beach Resort, originally called Ocean Hammock, surprised a lot of people when it opened in late 2000. One reason was that six holes touched on the dunes running along the Atlantic, something that rarely happens in Florida anymore. The other was because Jack Nicklaus and Nicklaus Design had built what was unquestionably a…
It’s impossible to talk about Pinehurst No. 2 without talking about the big convex greens. And it’s hard to talk about the greens without recalling Pete Dye’s old yarn about how they got the way they are. Dye played the No. 2 course weekly while stationed at Fort Bragg in the 1940’s. The greens then were not particularly crowned…
Poor Donald Ross. For decades since his death in 1948, Ross — and the spirit of Ross — has been forced to suffer the fate (and sometimes the indignity) of watching his golf courses stripped, stretched, overhauled, burnished and otherwise bastardized by generation after generation of greens committee and architect. Ross’s courses have probably seen more changes through…
Outside of his courses in New York, maybe, Rees Jones is probably better known for his work renovating and prepping courses for major championships than he is for his original designs. He earned the moniker “The Open Doctor” (his father, Robert Trent Jones, was the original Open Doctor) for his renovations of courses like The Country Club, Pinehurst No.2, Bethpage Black, Torrey Pines (South) and Congressional for…
I never saw this course prior to its 2007 bunker and green renovation but it couldn’t have been very interesting since it’s only marginally interesting after it. The property, in the middle of town, is dead flat with virtually no indigenous features to riff on (a drainage canal slinking through is the hazard highlight), and the…
If it’s true the Lake course at Grand National is the most balanced course on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail (perhaps), the Links is where all the unused parts and rejected ideas for it went. But Mulligan Stew can hit the spot sometimes, and at the very least you can expect flavor. That’s what you get…
You know how birds sometimes nest in odd places, taking eminent domain in an overlooked eave or post column you wouldn’t think any creature would find habitable? Amelia River is like that bird. For its home it chose a small chunk of land wedged between a road, an inside corner of two airport runways and the marshy cove of…
The International Course at this 36-hole complex a few miles southwest of Disney World was conceived to emulate the look and characteristics of Scottish and Irish links (there’s also the National course, designed in an “American” style). I’m not sure which links courses exactly, because I can’t think of any off the top of my…
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…