Sometimes lost in discussions about golf courses and sites and design is the understanding that golf is, fundamentally, a sport. We wield specialized equipment, wear standardized uniforms of a sort, and take what skills we have onto prescribed playing courts of roughly the comparable configurations and durations. With this in mind it’s not misguided to…
Let’s dispel with the obvious right away: no course built in Florida, on any kind of bermuda, zoysia or paspalum grass, is going to play like a links course. With that out of the way, the New Course at Grand Cypress Resort is an earnest and worthy ode to the Old Course at St. Andrews. Ground contour and the scuttling reaction of balls over firm…
I know there are people who prefer the Rolling Oaks course at World Woods to Pine Barrens. Let’s just say I won’t be planning a golf trip with them anytime soon. In the context of what else is available in Florida, Rolling Oaks — one of two Tom Fazio-designed options at this tremendous daily-fee outpost an hour north of Tampa — is actually one…
Mission Inn, located 30 minutes or so northwest of Orlando in what remains rural and still underpopulated citrus country, is one of Florida’s oldest and in many ways most charming resorts. Doors opened at the original Floridian Hotel in 1924, but the first golf course, now called El Campeón, dates back to 1917. The Beucher family…
The lovely 10th, working back toward the sea, shows how smart bunkering can give fairways sinuous movement within straight hole corridors. (photo: thebreakers.com) No one alive today can tell us if the original course at The Breakers (now the resort’s Ocean Course) is anything like it was 90 or 100 years ago. But when you go there, it sure feels like golf from…
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…
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…