Slammer & Squire, the original course at World Golf Village, is overshadowed by the companion Palmer/Nicklaus collaboration, King & Bear, which the resort did far more to promote when it opened in 2000. This puts the Slammer in a double bind because, since its development in the late ’90’s, the entire WGV and Hall of Fame complex near St. Augustine has failed to attract the passionate…
One of the most inspirational views in American golf is off the deck of Ben’s Porch at Sand Hills Golf Club after you’ve taken the mile or so cart ride up from the clubhouse. The entire Sand Hills panoramic opens before you, a diorama of green ribboning across a whipped and weathered horizon with players marching…
In almost all cases golf courses are a jarring abstraction against their environment. No matter how evolved they may appear, there’s nothing natural about their shapes, their presence or their reason for being. Golf as we know it does not appear accidentally in any ecosystem. They are not random mutations but rather invasive species. But…
The topic of how courses are judged in comparison to their neighbors comes up quite a bit here. Often it’s fair to make assessments about a property based on other proximate courses, but sometimes looking left and right instead of straight ahead makes for lazy analysis. In the case of Augusta Country Club, however, there’s just no way around it.…
One of the reasons Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw’s golf courses are held in such high regard—by architectural cognoscenti, by magazine ranking panels and international developers—is that they’re so often, so obviously, brilliant. The pretext is that they’ve been hired to construct courses on some of the greatest sites made available in the last 40 years. But when they get there, they…
Suddenly, Wisconsin has become a powerhouse golf destination, at least as unlikely a place for extraordinary public play as Nebraska has become. The state hit the big stage in 1988 when Pete Dye built Blackwolf Run’s original 18 at Destination Kohler. That begat another 18 holes and, several years later, 36 more for the resort at Whistling Straits, including the famous Straits Course on bluffs…
What does it say about Tom Fazio that the finest work to come out of his studio might be a public course in Florida that you can play for $50? It doesn’t square with the closed-door, big budget design extravaganzas we usually associate with Fazio, does it? He’s never built many public courses to begin with, much…
Someday we’ll be able to talk about Ballyneal in the northeastern corner of Colorado without referencing Sand Hills, as I’ve already just done. It’s kind of like how it took about 15 years for every new violent, ironic crime movie not to be viewed through the lens of Pulp Fiction. Such is the advantage of being first—you get to…
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,…
[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…