Going around Red Hawk Ridge you can see the ideas and embryonic elements of the shapes and playability motifs that Jim Engh would further develop in the early 2000’s at a number of nationally acclaimed courses that launched him into the upper orbit of golf architecture. Built in 1999 in Castle Rock, just south of Denver, Red Hawk Ridge is a more modest…
I confess I’m not always able to wrap my head around Bob Cupp’s courses. The architectural features often feel out of sync — or out of proportion — with the properties and with each other. For example: Big holes with wide fairways leading to small greens; slender fairways on properties with lots of room; small bunkers where…
The Landing (née Port Armor, née Reynolds Landing), was the first course built on Lake Oconee in Central Georgia in the mid-1980’s, and for a while Bob Cupp had the only two courses on the lake when he followed this design a few years later with The Preserve (née The Plantation course) at Reynolds Lake Oconee (née Reynolds Plantation). Got that? Cupp once told me a…
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but apparently you can teach an old dog old tricks. I’m not saying Denis Griffiths is old, but at Old Union in north Georgia’s Appalachian foothills near Blairsville the architect created a look that might have come straight out of the early 20th century. Or before. Old Union is brightened with…
“A good idea is a good idea, forever.”–David Brent The above quote, proclaimed by Ricky Gervais’s character in the original British series The Office, is clearly false. Especially in real estate, where timing is as important as location. For the developers of Echelon, a would-be prestige-level golf community north of Atlanta, what seemed like a good idea in the early-2000’s…
If I had just one round to play and it had to be in the greater Atlanta area, with no access to private clubs, I’d probably take it at Cobblestone. The land is a paradox — it’s scenic with a lot of shoreline along Lake Acworth, but everywhere away from the water is steep, wooded…
Some golf courses are finessed into the earth, simply revealed or even discovered, as it were. Such is the mantra of naturalism and minimalism. The Oconee at the Reynolds Lake Oconee development on the other hand, screams, “I want land!” and goes and takes what it wants. The corridors of this behemoth are forged from the property’s…
Brazell’s Creek, part of the Georgia State Parks Golf Course system, is really two separate venues. Located in a hinterland roughly between Macon and Savannah, the original nine holes (of unknown origin, at least to me) rotate peacefully through the oaks and pines near the campgrounds of the modest Gordonia-Alatamaha State Park. The second nine, opened in…
The Stonemont Course at Stone Mountain Golf Club outside of Atlanta is what you expect from stock, mid-century Robert Trent Jones: a straight-forward, thick-waisted course full of tree-lined doglegs, big elevated greens pinched in front by bunkers and, yes, some runway tees. There’s a welcome what-you-see-is-what-you-get simplicity to the course as many of the holes play…
I’d love to be able to give the Lakemont Course at Stone Mountain Golf Club a higher score — parts of the property, in Georgia Stone Mountain Park, are quite beautiful, including five of the first six holes along Stone Mountain Lake with views of the big granite rock’s famous Confederate carving. There’s also no housing, and Marriott’s involvement has…