The question of how to shape courses in mountains or heavily wooded properties is an interesting one. Beyond engineering issues like cuts and fills that all courses of this variety share, every architect since golf courses moved inland has had to make decisions about how to present unnatural sites, including what the shapes and depths…
The original designer of this resort course tucked up in the canyons of the Blue Ridge Mountains just south of the North Carolina border was not a golf course architect and, as of a few years ago at least, purportedly still lived on the property. He actually did a great job of routing the course…
The Frog was easily one of the top two or three public venues in the greater Atlanta area until a few years ago when a large multi-club organization acquired it and put into mostly private rotation. I haven’t met too many people who enjoy driving long distances through heavy traffic to play disjointed, real…
The design at Mystery Valley, near Stone Mountain about 30 minutes east of Atlanta, is attributed to Dick Wilson but I suspect his then-associate Joe Lee is responsible for pretty much all of this course. After a struggle with his health and alcoholism, Wilson died in 1965, a year before Mystery Valley officially opened, and Lee and Robert Von Hagge…
Sod-wall bunkers with crisp upper lips. Wall to wall fairways. Sandy areas bleeding into the underbrush. Greens that bubble out like last gasps of the fairways. When this describes a course in Australia, our mouths water thinking of clubs like Commonwealth, Victoria or Metropolitan. When they describe a golf course in Naples you start thinking “gimmick.” I suppose there’s no…
Turnberry Isle in North Miami is a tale of two resorts. The first was a swinging 70’s-era “Love Boat” style romper frequented by Hollywood luminaries (according to photos — I wasn’t there) like Jack Nicholson, James Caan, Elizabeth Taylor, O.J. Simpson, Burt Reynolds and an international cadre of sheiks and princes. It was a place where personalities made the accommodations irrelevant — they were the…
Regatta Bay is a pretty good name for a golf course, calling to mind swift vessels, salty ocean air and the sporting life. It doesn’t particularly have much to do with this course. You can almost see Choctawhatchee Bay from one of the holes but otherwise there’s no sea or sea-like qualities, and the marina where all the really big…
Panther Lake has always been considered the marquee course between the two at Orange County National. It’s an engaging design with strong personality and fine individual holes, and you’ll like them even better if you’re a low-handicap player who can fly the ball high into elevated greens with bunkers and other dangers guarding their fronts. My choice, however, is the other…
When The Raven course at this mega-resort opened in the late 1990’s it was meant to signal that northwest Florida finally had the major, marquee destination course the region had always lacked. Turns out $12 million can get you a pretty good and pretty interesting golf course, but it’s not enough to swing golf’s spotlight all the way…
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…