Sanctuary Cove's par-3 13th--a missed opportunity?

It may not win any beauty awards but Sanctuary Cove, one I-95 exit south of Brunswick, manages to be both elegant and stimulating without resorting to the kind of earthwork and artifice that so regularly apears on poor sites.

With so little to work with—just a development in a flat forest of pine, palmetto and scrub on the edge of the Little Satilla River coastal marshes—Mark and Davis Love III’s design turns tricks with classical elements to make the nondescript property appealing and stimulating (their office, by the way, is just a few miles from here on St. Simons Island).

It’s a lesson in how to transform undistinguished land into strategic golf. Not by sculpting every square yard but by shaping selectively at certain focal points; by building steep, striking bunker faces; placing hazards boldly on lines of play; subtly concealing the fronts and other parts of the putting surfaces; and creating high contrast green complexes that rise profoundly above the relentlessly level grade.

This is how courses used to be built out of necessity, when shaping large features was difficult and expensive, which makes the Love Group’s taste and restraint even more admirable. Sanctuary Cove comes off as a poor man’s throwback course, something like a Yeamans Hall for the everyman–less natural movement perhaps, and less room and scale, but a lively game carried off to similar effect.

There’s no doubt a purposeful though not overwrought Seth Raynor influence here. Bunkers are flat-bottomed and rectangular, greens are angled sharply behind coffin and strip bunkers, and the elevated putting surfaces have quiet Raynor/MacDonald qualities.

You'd be forgiven if you mistook Sanctuary Cove's 11th for something made by Seth Raynor.

I particularly love greens like the 1st with its flared wings, the mini-inverted Biarritz at 4 (with a ridge rather than a swale), the connected double plateau at 6, the punchbowl aspect to the par-3 8th, and the deep running L-shaped green at 10.

The centerline bunkers at the reachable par-5 12^th and short par-4 15^th are maddening because they’re perfectly placed. In fact, almost every hole has one unique, defining feature. But since there’s such a lovely Raynor flavor, I have to comment on a missed opportunity: the par-3 13^th, which opens up to the marshes beyond, would have been a perfect spot for a strong version of an Eden hole. [Note: Fred Couples consulted on the Sanctuary Cove design.] (90)

The Golf Club at Sanctuary Cove

Waverly/Brunswick

Architect: Love Golf Design

Year: 2006

From the sky: Sanctuary Cove's 15th, a drivable par-4.

A representative look back at Grand Haven's first.

The two-shot holes are probably the strength of Grand Haven, a moderately high-end daily fee located in Palm Coast on Florida’s Atlantic side. A couple of bruisers measure over 460 yards, and most of the ones in the 340 to 380 range are classically Nicklausian, meaning they’re strategically sensible if not particularly creative.

One of the tougher ones is the 436-yard third that calls for a big cut drive over a marsh followed with a draw iron over bunkers, unless you’re one of those people who drives it 320–then it’s just a straight flip wedge in. Oh well.

The other Nicklausian trick here is the setting of almost all the greens axes at roughly 45-degree angles behind deep bunker complexes, so you have to be pretty brave to get the ball all the way to back pins. Up to this point we’re used to Nicklaus designing courses with the “A” player’s eye for position and reward, but there are signs creeping in at Grand Haven of a softening of style that would become much more developed two years later a mile or so up the road at the Ocean Course at Hammock Beach Resort (formerly Ocean Hammock).

If you can summarize this style evolution anything it’s a rounding down of the features and a more sculpted look around greens. The par four 4^th bleeds right into a large shaved chipping area, something I don’t remember seeing from this design team before. And dare I say it—the little bump that is the putting surface at the pretty par-3 14^th sitting in an oak grove is really quite sexy, a cruder precursor to work Team Nicklaus did later at courses like May River near Hilton Head.

The 18th, with the Fox Cut channel beyond.

Each nine stretches out and back in opposite directions along what’s called the Fox Cut channel of the Intracoastal Waterway, but most of the holes sit away from it, down amid the oaks and hammocks and undergrowth and strips of random wetlands. But despite some nice green complexes there’s nothing very special happening here (and please let’s not talk about the island green 8^th). Nevertheless, sometimes underexposed, not-overwrought Nicklaus-haus courses such as this can be just as satisfying than the large-scale signature productions. 86

Grand Haven Golf Club

Palm Coast/Daytona Beach

Architect: Jack Nicklaus

Year: 1998

The Commanderie de la Bargemone is made in the perfect slaking style.

The other day while shopping I felt myself compulsively pulled toward an aisle stocked mainly of pink and rosé wines. It was unusually warm outside, mid Southern springtime in full force and things getting sticky, and the thought of a brisk, cold rosé had officially laid its hands on me.

For many wine drinkers, the impulse to turn to rosés in the late spring is biological, an annual marker of the onslaught of long days and hot, sweaty weather. With their bright acidity and slate-y, slaking vivacity, rosés are made for the heat and the outdoors, for impromptu afternoon cocktail gatherings on sun baked terraces and patios.

A problem, though, is that not all rosés are brisk, slate-y or slaking. Some are dense and punchy with ripe red fruit flavors. Some border on the sweet. Some are merely flaccid. Since rosés are made from red wine grapes they can easily tend toward richer red wine qualities. What we want this time of year, however, is something texturally closer to white wine, minerally but with light berry, earthy tones.

To make rosé, vintners leave the crushed juice in contact with the grape skins for a short amount of time, just long enough to impart the desirable color, tannin and other enriching elements into the wine (red wine macerates in the skins for much longer).

The village of Tavel is known for focused, striking rosés.

Naturally, how long that contact lasts, and what the character of the grapes are, will determine the color and intensity of the finished rosé. Almost always, the darker a rosé’s hue (some border on being fully red), the more rich and concentrated the wine will be.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Some wine drinkers prefer a more robust, juicy rosé. Red wine drinkers often begin with more concentrated rosés and move gradually toward lighter and more brisk styles.

To me, buying a rosé is relatively straight-forward. I look for wines that are salmon- or lightly rust-colored, and I don’t mind if they’re even paler than that. What this means is that the juice had fleeting contact with the skins and what I’m likely going to get will be lighter in body with an acidity unburdened by overly ripe fruit, tannin or oak.

Secondly, I look for where the wine comes from. I have more success getting rosés in the slaking style from regions in the south of France–Provence, Languedoc-Rousillon, certain villages in the Rhone region like Tavel, etc.–than anywhere else. This part of the world is famed for rosés, and the particular grapes that are used most–cinsault, carignan, syrah, among others–can produce focused, profound yet sleek wines.

This is the color I look for.

In my experience it’s more common in other wine regions–perhaps those with less of a rosé tradition–to find examples of extracted, deeply red rosés. Especially if the red grapes employed tend more toward power and aging–cabernet sauvignon, merlot, tempranillo. Sometimes these wines are tantalizing, fresh and vivid. Sometimes the added weight and concentration is simply gilding the lily.

No matter where it comes from, it almost always comes down to color. The darker the pink (or red), the more fruity and powerful the wine will be. But if it’s hot and sticky outside, and you want that refreshing, slate-y blast, look for wines that are on the paler shade of pink. Your thirst will be slaked.

Sugarloaf Mountain's 13th drops a very unFlorida-like 100+ feet downhill.

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 (including a dormant housing component) was built just as the global economy—and the real estate economy specifically—began imploding so the entire project has been in jeopardy of collapsing since the day it opened. As a result, not enough people have seen the course, and even if golfers were more aware nobody’s going to be in a position to build anything like it for a very long time.

That’s a shame because The Mountain, as it’s called, is the first design around these parts to capture the potential of this distinctive Florida ecosystem. It’s draped over the top of a mountain–okay, it’s a big hill–of sand at one of the state’s highest points 30 or so miles from Orlando. It sits on the northern end of Lake Wales Ridge, a narrow chain of giant, rolling ancient sea dunes that stretch over 100 miles north to south down the center-west section of the state. There are a lot of rather wooly, rural pockets of elevated land along it that people don’t really know about, but typically developers have built and crowded with homes the naturalness out of those that do exist. That’s not the case here.

From heights to lows--the 4th green sits in a grove near some of the only water on the property.

The site has some remarkable topographical movements, highlighted by the 507-yard par-4 13^th that cascades about 150 feet from tee to green. But the beauty of the course–and what can be taken from it going forward–is its natural appearance, the way the architecture evolves from the ground and subtly bleeds into the surrounding oaks and scrub. The pedestal green at the dainty par three 11^th looks like it abruptly sprouted from a field of sand and bush.

The routing has plenty of room to breath as it rides across the terrain and banks and accelerates against the slopes, and while the up-and-down character of the holes isn’t necessarily unique the width and the way they play at running angles against them is. It adds a sense of adventure and attack to the site’s rusticity, and a new interpretation of an old theme.

A couple of the holes don’t really work for me like the par-3 8th that plays over a rimmed retention pond to a semi-blind green and a slender, uphill and mostly blind par-5 18th whose scale seems out of place with the rest of the course. But as you would expect from this architectural team the putting surfaces are suave and remarkably creative (check out the size and internal movement at the 257-yard par-3 17^th), moments of bold elegance amid a sea of native unrest.

I don’t think this is in the first tier of Coore and Crenshaw’s work, but it’s light years ahead of almost everything else in Central Florida. (93)

Sugarloaf Mountain

Minneola/Orlando

Architect: Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw

Year: 2006

The tiny par-3 11th is one of the most distinctive short holes in Central Florida.

The Sherling Nine's 3rd hole as an example of the kind of land we're dealing with. (Taken from "sabram" on GolfWRX.com)

Cambrian Ridge is the best and worst of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail all in one place. It’s on an absolutely brutal site with way too many steep slopes plunging into lakes and gullies and its full of holes that begin on one level, play to another and finish on a third. There’s little connection between fairways and greens—much less one hole to the next—with water, streams, field bunkers and sunken depressions frequently standing in the direct and only line to the hole. If you like that kind of thing, this place is awesome.

The other side of the coin is that you’ve got 27 holes here in a quite lovely setting that shows you sights not normal for south central Alabama. You may cross paths with some unexpected wildlife and the shallow foothills provide a peaceful backdrop to some strange, rollicking golf.

For marketing reasons the courses on the RTJ Trail were designed to be difficult, extreme and ostentatious, and I have no problem with that. You cannot convince me that there’s not room in golf for these types of courses, or that there’s no audience for it. If you think there isn’t, you’re old, you’re wrong, you’re stuffy, whatever. Humbug.

But there’s something at Cambrian Ridge that works less well than at other difficult sites like Oxmoor Valley, Silver Lakes or certainly Grand National, which doesn’t come close to having this property’s difficulties.

Perhaps it was that Cambrian Ridge was part of the second wave of Trail sites that opened a few years after the inaugural courses, and designer/builder Bobby Vaughan (who worked closely with Roger Rulewich) felt he needed to push the design even harder this time around. Because the holes feel like they’re just going through the motions of attacking the most challenging parts of the terrain out of routine or resignation.

Of the three nines, the Canyon course, in particular, is hopscotch bordering on the ridiculous. It’s full of rugged elevations and daunting carries into semi-blind greens. It’s faith golf—like a trapeze artist disengaging from one performer, you simply trust someone or something will be there when you come down.

The Sherling nine is the most scenic, especially with 3-7 playing around the rim of the Sherling Lake, and probably the most balanced too. The par-4 5^th, a Cape-style hole with a tee shot over an arm of the lake, is also the precursor for two very similar holes that were later built at Birmingham’s Ross Bridge site.

Sherling's uphill drive, heading toward a double green. Wicked cool, right? (sabram/GolfWRX.com)

Two of the most nerve-wracking holes on the property are the parallel 9^th holes of the Canyon and Sherling nines. They play on opposite sides of a deep, native ravine, meeting at a blind double-green fifty feet above. Like I said, if that sounds cool, you’ll like this course. It’s a good thing neither hole is longer than 370 yards. (87)

Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail—Cambrian Ridge

Greenville/Montgomery

Architect: Roger Rulewich

Year: 1993

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 as it was atop murky coastal wetlands with holes cut from a claustrophobic forest of sand pine and scrub oak (you know it might be challenging when the scorecard recommends 5-handicaps play from the 6300-yard tees). Hitting it crooked was not an option.

Lost in all the complaining was the fact that the course had a fantastic set of highly contoured green complexes set at angles over some rather evocative cape-and-bay style bunkering.

This amoeba-shaped bunkering was added in 2004.

The hurricane eviscerated most of the suffocating tree cover while the reconstruction did the same to the bunkers. To put it another way, they’ve been Palmerized.

Once smaller and more scaled to the intimacy of the holes the refurbished bunkers, including new ones that were added, are engorged and stereotypically nebulous. An element of restraint and proportion has been sacrificed.

If anything was gained from the changes, and that’s arguable, it might be a sense of continuity. Instead of taking a heart of darkness voyage through the trees, the entire site is now opened up, and while that does allow you to get a wider sense of the whole property it also means you can see the high-rise condos that were added post-Ivan from just about everywhere. Perhaps not the ambiance trade-off one would wish.

While the holes are now much more exposed the omnipresent wetland barriers are no less forgiving and have to be directly breached at 9, 12, 15 and 18. At least there’s no longer the feeling that balls are going to be knocked out of the air by branches, which was a possibility around the greens at holes like 10 and 11.

The only structural change is the new par-3 16^th that’s been carved out of old par-5 16^th (the new 17^th is a par-4, the old 17th is gone), probably because the owners , WCI, wanted a “signature hole” to show off to the new condos next to it. Still, for all the criticisms the experience is memorable and I’d nominate this as one of Team Palmer’s better overall efforts. Or it was, before Ivan blew through and gave them a reason to screw with it. (86)

Lost Key Golf Club

Perdido Key/Pensacola

Architect: Arnold Palmer

Year: 1997/renovated in 2006

The 10th hole is still narrow, but it used to be completely walled in by pines.

The Checklist

We know the tie will never make its way back into sportswear, Ryan Moore’s noble efforts to resurrect it in golf notwithstanding (perhaps because pairing it with a billed cap reduces the look to neo-punk skater uniform?).

But ties today are almost exclusively relegated to formal occasions and for men in certain professions–attorneys, politicians, bankers, those in hospitality management positions, etc. Even then, sadly, it’s little more than the last piece of armor donned each morning before the bloodying of the troops begins.

One of The Checklist’s most heeded rules when it comes to attire is this: it’s always better to overdress than underdress. You’ll never be ridiculed for wearing a suit or even black tie to a formal evening engagement. You will, however, be looked upon if you wear shorts, or a polo shirt, flip flops, or sneakers to the wrong occasion while everyone around you has dressed with care.

Alexander Olch

The Checklist prefers to extend this rule beyond formal situations–we elect to try to look smart and put together in most situation. Taking the wife, girlfriend or partner out to dinner? Wear the tie. Neighbor’s outdoor cookout? Tie. Kids birthday party? Why not–set an example.

Gitman

What kind of tie? Don’t overstress it, but you can’t go wrong with something seasonal from Alexander Olch (wool in winter, seersucker in summer), something linen from rag & bone, a classic bar stripe from Gitman, or a knit from Polo or, if you live in the South like we do, Sid Mashburn. Hell, even J. Crew, H&M and Urban Outfitters have very fashionable options.

Sid Mashburn

Whatever it is, here are a few basic guidelines. 1) Narrow, not wide. 2) Don’t wear it too long. 3) Don’t be a slave–stripes on checked shirt, plaid on stripes, it’s OK, it can work. 4) Personalize it: with jeans, sleeves rolled, tie bar, under a sweater, make it your own.

The world has two kinds of men. Those who have to wear ties, and those who choose to wear ties. Be the latter.

The iconic setting of Harbour Town's 18th.

An unfortunate downside, however, is the influence it’s had over other courses in the region. This was one of the original Lowcountry courses built, and because it’s so good it gave license to claustrophobic fairways overhung with live oak. The look became the regional imprint even though almost no other courses around here have the strategic DNA to accompany it. I don’t know what else could be done with all the dense native tree cover other than to just clear it and widen everything out, but there’s never been much of an effort around here to escape the narrowness.

That’s not Harbour Town’s fault. The entire concept of the course (not to mention iconic individual holes like the par-4 13^th with it’s skull-shaped green perched above sleepers and a spacious apron bunker) was a game changer and a rejection of the big, modern productions of Robert Trent Jones the cadre of architects imitating him had been building.

Players must have thought Pete Dye insane when they first saw greens like the 13th.

We all know about the last three holes (16 and 18 are overrated, in my mind) but other corners of the course continue to surprise me. In addition to the all-American 13^th, the 9^th—a ridiculously slender 332-yard hole to a minuscule V-shaped green with bunkers tucked in the apse—defies convention to this day. The par five 15^th isn’t much until you get close to the green and have to deal with its unorthodox contour on the approach (elevated front right, falling away) and then with your putts. The par-3′s are one of the great collections in golf and, personally, the 6^th has always mystified me due to the small, angled putting surface, especially when the pin is back. (93)

Harbour Town Golf Links

Hilton Head

Architect: Pete Dye, with Jack Nicklaus

Year: 1969

The essence of Lowcountry golf: Harbour Town's 17th.

It's difficult to conceive of Augusta National without imagining Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus or Arnold Palmer striding the fairways.

There is no point in trying to “rate” Augusta National.

Putting an evaluation or rating on the golf course would be like doing a movie review now of “Star Wars.” It doesn’t matter. Commenting on Mark Hamill‘s flat delivery, the anti-intellectualism of the “Force” or the cheapening effect of Han Solo‘s dues ex machina arrival in the Death Star battle royale will only make people laugh at you.

Some things, no matter their flaws, live in critic-proof bubbles. Like Augusta National.

Doesn't matter...doesn't matter.

Augusta National is no longer–and can no longer be, and maybe should no longer be–judged on objective merits. It’s popularity is far too great and its greatness (real or perceived) far too reaching for it to be held to any standard but its own. Simply put, it doesn’t matter–Augusta National represents too many things besides a golf course.

It’s unlikely that anyone with the exception of the members can perceive the course outside the context of The Masters, and probably they can’t either. The golf world has known the tournament and Augusta National together for over 75 years and has been watching The Masters on television since 1956. No course in the world enjoys that kind of historical-tournament-television visibility.

Neither is any other course known so intimately by so many who’ve never been there. But it’s not just that it’s the most famous course in the world: its brilliant exposure also refracts perceptions of how almost all golf courses are viewed. For better, or as many argue, for worse, Augusta National has become the cultural archetype of greatness.

Decades of watching players slash and stride through its Arcadian chambers of pine and azaleas has put in the public mind an immutable image of what golf nirvana should be. For obvious reasons, nobody expects their home course to look like Pebble Beach, America’s other great exported golf fantasy. But every club member and weekend slapper believes their bunker sand could be a little whiter, their greens could run a little faster and their lies might be a bit more cushioned.

The golf industry has spend a lot of time in the last decade selling the idea that we should embrace less lush turf and that brown is beautiful. Not nearly enough people are biting. Can you really blame them? If you’re footing the bill for course maintenance you have every right to your own expectations. After all, few pleasures in golf are greater than putting on slick, PGA TOUR quality greens or stepping onto a microscopically clipped tee box, right? Augusta National is this ideal (and, perhaps, its progenitor) taken to a fantastical extreme, thrust violently, verdantly, in our faces, now in HD, every April.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter–would Augusta National be Augusta National without The Masters?

Few famous holes in golf have been edited more than the 11th.

Like Star Wars, Augusta National is a myth. It comes to us as an epic presentation that charges the imagination, a full-throated opera staged against a dazzling backdrop replete with heroes and villains, irresistible storylines and continually unfolding drama. Except when the movie’s over, you walk out of the theater; when The Masters ends you have, what?

The answer is that, instead of Tiger Woods standing over the second shot at 13, it’s the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and going for the green never crosses his mind. The millionaire with the hanging lie on 10 isn’t Martin Kaymer but a 73 year-old legacy partner at a corporate lawfirm in Atlanta. And whoever is hooking the 5-iron into the pond at 16 is surrendering just another in a string of double bogeys, not a green jacket.

And that’s the issue: every great club is played primarily by its members, and nobody ever sees Phil Mickelson or Fred Couples hitting the same shots they do. Conversely, nobody who plays Augusta National can stand over his ball anywhere on the course and not think of Jack Nicklaus or Seve Ballesteros in their exact same situation. Every round played at Augusta National is, in essence, The Masters.

One has to wonder if Augusta National’s lofty appearance in the various magazine rankings is based primarily on its ability to produce a mythic, televised drama. The rankings can’t be exclusively linked to it’s architecture because that changes all the time. And not just small tweaks to the greens and bunkering, either, like when George Lucas went back years later and added “new” extras to the old Star Wars, like a scene with Jabba the Hut. And for that, fans howled.

Many of the changes that have been made to the course, specifically the narrowing of the driving zones by the addition of rough and, in some places, stands of trees, have fundamentally altered the way the course plays. And yet Augusta National’s place in the rankings hardly moves–it hasn’t been out of Golf Digest’s Top 3 since 1985 (the first year they broke the list down by position).

It’s baffling to think that altering not only the character of the course but, more importantly, the strategies results in virtually no movement in the rankings. So if the design and strategies can be altered without impacting how Augusta National is rated, there must be some other intrinsic non-Masters quality that makes it so outstanding.

An attractive and difficult par-3, but if you didn't know it could you identify ANGC's 4th hole?

There’s no doubting the vertical elements of the property are excellent and vital to the design, and the routing is inspired, but they’re hardly unique. In truth the property is composed of hills, trees, ponds and creeks, nothing terribly different than dozens of other good golf properties around the country. There’s nothing specifically singular about the land or atmosphere, certainly not in the same way that Pine Valley, Cypress Point or Sand Hills could only be themselves.

In fact, just across the Savannah River less than 25 miles away are two other golf clubs–über-private Sage Valley and the Alister MacKenzie-designed Palmetto Golf Club–that possess many of the same inherent topographical advantages (long, pine-lined slopes; natural water features, isolated settings) and, in the case of Palmetto, a common design advantage. For that matter, Augusta Country Club, which shares part of the same property (the courses touch down near Rae’s Creek), has quite similar natural characteristics as Augusta National. What these three don’t have is a televised history.

Obviously we’re simplifying and Augusta National has tremendous individual holes and rhythm, but it still comes back to The Masters and television. Would the peculiar winds at Amen Corner that receive so much attention be as beguiling if no one was watching? Would the derring-do that the back nine par-5′s inspire be relevant with a bunch of 9-handicaps battling it out? Even the putting surfaces–world class indeed–are like the sons of 100 fathers with different greens created or influenced by MacKenzie, Perry Maxwell, Robert Trent Jones, George Cobb, John LaFoy, George Fazio, Joe Finger, Byron Nelson, Jay Morrish, Bob Cupp, Nicklaus and Tom Fazio. Do any other elite courses possess such a Mulligan Stew of green shapes and styles, from the tilted slopes of 2 and 12 to sectioned tiers at 8, 9 and 18, to the bubbling oceans of 1, 5 and 14?

And so, inevitably, we come back to the conditioning. Augusta National was always going to be beautiful because of the absence of outside intrusion, its graceful lines and diverse tree cover. It might have even had flowering shrubs and dyed water in the ponds. But without the eyes of the world on it, would the bloom be so mysteriously coordinated (apparently its easier to force a bloom than to forestall one), or would the club have really chosen to be the Industrial Light & Magic of the agronomic world?

It’s no crime that Augusta National’s prestige and lustre are indelibly twined to The Masters. If the golf course is one of the greatest in the world (of course it is), let’s just admit it owes that status to The Masters as much (or more) than to its architectural qualities.

Or to put it one final way, if this particular golf course had never hosted a tournament like the one it does, would it be considered the first, or third, or fourth best course in the U.S.? Would it be yet another rich man’s enclave like Shoal Creek, or Peachtree, or Sage Valley? Would it look or be anything like it is today?

I have no idea. Like I said at the beginning, it doesn’t matter–Augusta National is forever beyond rating. I’d be foolish to try. It’s a golf fantasy, and the only fools are the ones who don’t to get carried away with. Enjoy the fun. May the Force be with you.

The perimeter mounding at double green are out of style for a course built in 2006, but The Atchafalaya isn't shy about anything.

I admire what the architects did with this course. I believe if you’re stuck with a crap property and have to manufacture everything from the ground up, go ahead and turn the design loose.

The Atchafalaya at Idlewild is a little severe and anachronistic for when it was built—perimeter mounds, bulkheads lining water hazards, pot bunkers, a double green—but there’s no way to make this place look soft and old and heathery unless you’ve got an extra $10 or $20 million. There’s a reason why Coore and Crenshaw are so particular about the sites they work–they wouldn’t touch this with your bulldozer.

The property is shoehorned lengthwise between two dense bayous and a city park on the north on some of the only arable land in the immediate vicinity (it was formerly planted to…cotton? Soybeans? Sugarcane? I can’t remember). I’m told there are 175 acres underfoot but I’d be surprised if there are more than 125, and there isn’t much more than a foot of elevation change across most the site.

The design, especially the first nine holes, is as dark and murky as the surrounding Atchafalaya Basin, a massive swamp wilderness roughly 20 by 150 miles long vivisected by lakes, marshes, levees, canals, bayous, deltas, Cajuns, alligators, blood-sucking animals and of course the deep Atchafalaya River. This part of southern Louisiana is engaged in a perpetual war between the forces of such eerie, inhospitable nature and man’s attempts to engineer his way through it.

The sweeping par-5 3rd, buffered by severe wilderness.

That pretty much describes the golf, too—lakes, wetlands, forests of cypress and snakes versus crumpled, heavily engineered holes, big built-up greens with ambitious contour (check out the horseshoe contours of the long par-3 seventh’s) and raised moguls in between holes for protection and insulation. In your face!

The routing has some cramped spots like the tremendously awkward double dogleg par-5 13^th where a well-struck, semi-blind drive has equal chance of either drifting into a retention pond or leaving a mid-iron second shot into the green. The sixth, another par-5 that jerks quickly right then left around trees, isn’t much better. But overall the layout maximizes every available square foot as the 7,500 yard championship tees and 77.6 rating attest. Atchafalaya is not a course for the meek, but neither is this part of the world. It’s a good fit. (86)

The Atchafalaya at Idlewild

Patterson/Lafayette

Architect: Robert von Hagge, Michael Smelek, Richard Baril

Year: 2006

The Atchafalaya Basin is one of the most stunning, haunting places in America.