You might think that the Tournament Players Club Sawgrass’s Dye’s Valley Course would be pretty comparable to the adjacent Stadium Course . They were built six years apart and share, roughly, the same property, the same architects, the same ownership and operators, the same evidence of enormous earth-moving and a majority of the same design features. There sure…
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…
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…
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…
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…