Courses that shaped me

I’ve been looking at golf courses pretty carefully for 60 years now. Ever since I first stepped on one, I have been unalterably in love, fascinated, acutely aware and also deeply appreciative. Here’s a short list of the most influential I’ve encountered and what they’ve meant to me.

Inwood Country Club, Inwood, New York

I grew up four miles away, and we used to pass by it in the family car while driving to Far Rockaway Beach. At the age of 9, I bicycled over, walked up the driveway, crossed a stone span over a pond (a faux Swilken Bridge) and stood on the right side of the 18th fairway. As I watched a tee shot butterfly down near me, I literally fell in love. I walked around the course that day in a daze. Years later they put up a plaque on the 18th where I had stood, but not for me. It was the exact spot from which Bobby Jones hit the 2-iron to the green in a playoff to win the 1923 U.S. Open.

Rockaway Hunting Club, Cedarhurst, New York

The first “magical” course I ever visited was right next door to the one I regularly caddied at. But RHC had a more classical heritage (Emmet,Tillinghast, Maxwell) and meandered through six different parcels, including a dreamy stretch on an isthmus along a tidal bay that you played your way onto and off with scary tee shots. Always made me think of “The Hardy Boys” to be here.

Royal Dornoch Golf Club, Dornoch, Scotland

I went here for the first time in 1975 and came back in 1988 on our honeymoon, when we walked the course at night while the fairways came alive with rabbits everywhere. I loved the walk from the second green to the third tee as the true coastal linksland holes along the marine platform reveal themselves. It was also the start of my fascination with Donald Ross, who grew up in town and was greenkeeper/pro there in the 1890s but had nothing to do with the present golf layout beyond a minor tweak of the second hole.

National Golf Links of America, Southampton, New York

I just finished caddying in the 1986 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills next door and went off solo, having just finished reading C.B. Macdonald’s “Scotland’s Gift” the night before. NGLA was the craziest, funniest, ballsiest, most outrageous course I ever saw. I wrote a story about it, “A Par at Macdonald’s Redan,” which ends with me in tears for the rare regulation play (5-iron, two putts from 30 feet) that I achieved there.

Sand Hills, Mullen, Nebraska

I was here opening weekend in 1995 and fell in love with the place during the hour-long drive through the native grasslands between North Platte and the front entrance. This was a revolutionary design that contrasted markedly from all the design glitz of the mid-1990s golf boom. One round with a contingent from Baltimore Country Club included their legendary superintendent Doug Petersan, who had previously been at Prairie Dunes Country Club in Hutchinson, Kansas, and knew this Nebraska soil and plant life as well as any agronomist. It really opened my eyes to what was possible by working with what was already there.

Highland Links, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia

This was back in 1997 when this legendary Stanley Thompson layout, designed in 1935, was just starting to emerge from years of neglect. Even under compromised maintenance conditions it was possible to get lost in the amazing, eight-mile journey from the first tee to 18th green along beachfront and through wetland marsh, open meadow and highland forest, with a magical quarter-mile stroll along Clyburn Brook between the 12th green and 13th tee. The round then takes you to the doorstep of St. Peter’s Church and releases onto a spectacular view of Cabot Strait and the Atlantic Ocean. No course I know of offers a more intense engagement with distinct, yet seamlessly integrated, landscape rooms.

Desert Forest Golf Club, Carefree, Arizona

The first real desert golf course from 1962, embedded in the Sonoran foothills north of Scottsdale. It went underappreciated for years. Not a single fairway bunker — except the large one of native desert floor that frames every hole. I have been enamored with the place since first playing it in 1996. I ended up writing the club history in 2004 and now come back once a year to play a round as an honorary member.

The Golf Club, New Albany, Ohio

I had seen dozens of Pete Dye designs before finally getting here in 2001, but it was a pleasure to see a relatively untouched, retroversion of his own work from 1967 replete with numerous refined touches. There’s the elegant dogleg sweep of the par-4 sixth hole along a creek; a ha-ha fronting the 10th green; and my all-time favorite Dye hole, the short par-4 13th with railroad ties deployed like medieval stakes to define alternative lines of play. The place is a gem and quietly kept that way by longtime director of grounds Keith Kresina.

Kawana Golf Course, Japan

I went there in 2019 to preview Olympic golf and ended up seeing two dozen courses between Tokyo and Kyoto, none more memorable than this stunner perched along a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Designed by Charles Alison in 1932 and built four years later, Kawana brings the golfer back and forth, to and along the oceanfront like no other course in the country. The rhythm, pacing and drama of the course form a lesson in elegant routing.

The Cradle, Pinehurst, North Carolina

I had heard advanced word about The Cradle, the 9-hole, par-3 course just outside the Pinehurst clubhouse. But I had no idea what a blast it would be until playing it in 2017. It was such a change of pace from the other Pinehurst Resort courses: instant fun, challenging, rewarding, easy and frustrating, and beautifully done in a very accessible and affordable way. I was so enthused I called up director of golf course and ground management Bob Farren, CGCS, while waiting on the second tee and he came out to meet me afterward. It’s now the most profitable nine acres in American golf and has helped boost the popularity of fun, little par-3, 9-hole courses everywhere.

The point of all this is simply to be grateful for the world of interesting golf courses: to appreciate the designers who created them and the superintendents who maintain them.