Bruce Charlton joined Robert Trent Jones II in 1981 and the two have been building courses across the globe for nearly 40 years. The firm has earned considerable acclaim for their entire body of work, but their undisputed masterpiece is Chambers Bay near Seattle, site of the 2015 U.S. Open (won by Jordan Speith). Built…
Every golf course is designed for a different purpose, to fulfill a different function, for different people. They all, however, share one common obligation: be interesting. Jim Engh once said he was in the “image creation business,” and if there’s anything that can be said about his courses with 100 percent accuracy, it’s that none…
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…
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…
At first glance it might look like Team Norman mailed this one in. There doesn’t appear to be much to the course, especially against the backdrop of the property’s two overlord hotels, a Ritz-Carlton and J.W. Marriott. Granted, Norman didn’t have great material to work with — essentially a flat, soggy wetland preserve in south Orlando’s Shingle Creek…
LPGA International provides a good lesson why resorts and clubs should hire different architects when building more than one course. First, why not offer variety? Second, it’s insurance against the one of the courses falling out of style, or out of favor, as it did here. It isn’t often in a golf lineup that an Arthur…
Julington Creek Golf Club is the kind of course that’s hard to say much of anything about, good, bad or indifferent. Well, maybe indifferent. It’s basic, competent Jacksonville golf, which is to say it’s flat, roams enormously through a development, features a good bit of water and a few wetland crossings, and has little unique character.…
The short review of The King & Prince Golf Course (formerly known as The Hampton Club), out at the north tip of St. Simons Island and owned by The King & Prince Beach Resort, is 14 exercises in rather ordinary Lowcountry-style golf interrupted by an out-of-the-ordinary four-hole foray through a large Intracoastal marsh. The longer version is that…
For reasons that I cannot explain, all the vertical features and doodle-bunker shapes don’t bother me as much at Burnt Pine as they do on many other Rees Jones course from this time period. Maybe I’ve just played so much golf in Florida that I’ve come to appreciate how much more apathetic most courses would look…