How much do lakes and other large bodies of water influence our perception of golf holes? Do we tend to overvalue holes, or courses, if they have big water backdrops, or does water make golf better or at least more exciting? How does one separate scenery from a hole’s intrinsic merits? This is a philosophical…
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…
From the time the earliest links were staked out, whenever that was, golf course “design” has been in a continuous state of development. That’s not to say it’s been a smooth or straight evolution–there have always been stops and restarts. Pete Dye almost single handedly reset the direction of golf architecture in the mid-1960’s following the pre-fab boomer period…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Hurricane Ivan cleared out most of the trees, and a good amount of ambiance, at Lost Key. In 2004 Hurricane Ivan ravaged Lost Key, located on Perdido Key between Pensacola and Gulf Shores, and the damage necessitated a full renovation. The old incarnation was either feared or hated by most players because it was brutally tight and unforgiving, built over murky…