Few living architects are better than Steve Smyers at combining an understanding of golf shots and strategy with holes that possess immense visual flourish. Based in Florida, he’s designed courses and played in top-level amateur tournaments all over the globe. He joins Derek Duncan on the Feed the Ball podcast to discuss how he’s always evolving as a designer,…
Critics are typically charged with making judgments based on first or preliminary impressions. Movie critics don’t typically have the luxury of watching films over and over to absorb their intricacies. Wine critics can render reviews after rifling through dozens of glasses in one sitting. Book reviewers have to process enormous amounts of material on deadline.…
Coming Soon: A discussion with Steve Smyers is one of the most talented, knowledgable and friendliest designers in the business. He spoke with me about his newest course, Maridoe Golf Club in Dallas, as well modern technology, the effect of spin and his experience studying the world’s great golf courses. Episode to post on Monday.
[Note: This course is permanently closed. The review was originally written in 2011] Sugarloaf Mountain should be the model for future golf course designs in Central Florida, particularly those built in the scrub, orchard and sand hills regions west and north of Orlando. That is if there are any future golf courses. Unfortunately the course and development…
The opening tee shot at Tobacco Road is played through a gap between two steep grass-covered dunes to a partially obscured fairway. If played from the correct tees, getting the drive over and past the dunes isn’t difficult. But the fact that these battlements are there at all is a signal that this is not going to be a typical…
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…
Black Bear is located north of Orlando in a kind of rural badlands full of scrub, sand and pockets of wetlands preserves, though the site for this course is dry and fairly rugged. I call this “country golf” because there’s not much else around this slowly rolling property with scant trees and few people. The…
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…
The Champions Course at LPGA International is Rees Jones in all his stereotypical glory with repeated perimeter bubble humps and cartoonish bunkers. The uniformly round and oval greens look like they were designed by computers programmed to calculate perfectly spaced 1 through 5 pin positions separated by linear shelves and tiers. The entire site is flat and rotten with…
Walking Stick features one of the most distinctive natural features in Colorado golf, a gaping, rocky arroyo, yawning wide in anticipation of errant shots. Too bad it’s an almost irrelevant golf feature. Maybe architect Arthur Hills was shy about having public players hit over the chasm, or there was no affordable way to get golfers…