This is the first of three parts to run over the next few days. Links to original reviews of golf courses and golf communities visited are provided.
Like the economy, my travel schedule slowed down and then picked up a little this past year. I played a choice few outstanding golf courses, all east of the Mississippi, and started and ended the year with just about the same handicap index rating (9.2, for those who care, or want to give me a few strokes). In other words, I have nothing to complain about. Here’s hoping we all encounter a better economy and more rounds of golf in the coming year.
My year started in the early days of January at the heralded and private Bull’s Bay Golf Club in Awendaw, SC, just off highway 17 and a few miles north of Charleston. Bull’s Bay is one of those clubs that has mostly skated by the recession because its deep-pocketed owner considers it more important to collect friends and fellow golfers than to obsess about
Awendaw, SC's Bulls Bay Golf Club winds its way through coastal marshland, aided and abetted by the late architect Mike Strantz, who addes sweeping waste areas, huge fairways and well-protected greens into the mix. It is one of the most playable (i.e. fun and challenging) courses on the east coast.
Weather dogged me the rest of January as I made my way upstate in South Carolina, where a few patches of snow that lingered after a freak storm kept me from playing the golf courses at Savannah Lakes in McCormick and Timberlake on Lake Murray, 30 minutes from the state capital of Columbia. My trip up north from the Myrtle Beach area, however, was not for naught as I made a slight detour to stop Holly Hill, SC, and Sweatman’s, a plain but legendary barbecue palace that is only open Fridays and Saturdays. This is one legend that lives up to its billing, the pork unadulterated by anything but smoke, slow cooking and natural moisture. I have eaten barbecue all over the south, and I have not had it any better than at Sweatmans.
I did get in nine later that January week at the recently renovated Orangeburg Country Club in the South Carolina town of the same name; state golfers put Orangeburg near the top of their lists, its flat and classic Ellis Maples layout a great walk and a lot trickier than it looks. At just $119 per month in dues for those who live 30 miles or greater from the club, it is worth the trek a few days each month.
The Golf Industry Show in Orlando in February was an eye opener for me, my first trade show. I listened to a lot of complaints by golf club owners about how certain online tee-time consolidators were ruining their businesses by driving prices down. Having visited scores of public golf courses in the last few years and noted that their own first instincts in the recession were to cut their green fee prices, the wounds seemed self-inflicted. The rest of the show was rather light on excitement and vendors.
National Golf Club's Jack Nicklaus greens are currently undergoing renovation, the result of which will be to soften the severe sloping but to pull the surrounding bunkers closer to the putting surface. The Southern Pines golf community should have its golf course back by March.
One of our dedicated readers invited me to visit The National Golf Club in Southern Pines, and I was eager to take him up on it since, like Myrtle Beach, which I know very well, Pinehurst is synonymous with both buddy golf vacations and golf retirement homes. I’m glad I went; the National Club golf course, by Jack Nicklaus, displayed some of the largest, most multi-level greens I have played, and the spanking new cottage I stayed in was a study in well-furnished comfort. As the year ended, National began a renovation to restore the 20-year old greens to their original glory and to soften some of the slopes. We look forward to the results next spring. For those looking to embed themselves in the classiest golfing mecca east of the Mississippi, the National community will fill the bill.
My month of March ended with a round of golf at one of the premiere courses in the southeast, the Secession Golf Club near Beaufort. A Connecticut friend, Larry –- love that name -– is a national member at Secession and invited me to join him and a few of his buddies for a round. Former PGA star Bruce Devlin designed the course for walkers only, and Secession boasts one of the rare caddy programs in the Carolinas. The golf course is pure delight, not a clunker hole among the 18 and a few that are memorable (including a par 3 with a waste area just below the four-foot high bulk head that keeps the green from falling into the marsh; I stubbornly tried to play a lob wedge out of the waste, and wasted a shot).
The green at the 2nd hole at Philadelphia Cricket Club is surrounded by bunkers and a clubhouse, which comes into play.
I was mostly a golf spectator in April, following my son around two entirely different golf courses during the final leg of his college golf career. The Philadelphia Cricket Club was a stark reminder of the way golf used to be played, on courses not brutally long but certainly brutal at times. At the par 4 2nd hole, for example, the stream that bisects the fairway at midpoint is the least of the challenges. The pin on the day of the college tournament was a mere 30 feet from the edge of the clubhouse; I cannot say that, in 50 years of golf, the clubhouse has ever come into play. Later in April, my son’s career-ending tournament was held at Bay Creek Golf Resort on the Delmarva Peninsula, home to two smashing golf courses, one by Jack Nicklaus and one by Arnold Palmer, the first golf community in which the two legends each contributed a design. Bay Creek, which is about 45 minutes from Norfolk over the impressive Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, is something of a bargain for those seeking a high-quality weeklong golf vacation as well as those looking for a lifelong golf vacation (i.e. retirement home). You can leave New York City, for example, at 6 a.m. and get in 18 before the sun goes down on a summer day at Bay Creek. Prices for condos start in the $200s but a nice array of single-family homes are also reasonably priced, and within mere strides of the Chesapeake Bay.
A few of the holes on the Jack Nicklaus course at Bay Creek bump up against the Chesapeake Bay, including the par 3 4th.
After my son’s graduation from college in Virginia, our peripatetic family (San Francisco, Oakland, London) celebrated at the Wintergreen Resort in the Blue Ridge Mountains, just 45 minutes from Charlottesville. Wintergreen’s two golf courses, one by Rees Jones (27 holes) and one by Ellis Maples, could not be more different. Maples’ Devil’s Knob runs along the very top of the 3,850-foot mountain, a couple of hundred yards from where the chair lifts deposit skiers for their long runs downhill in winter. Balls fly farther up there, which is to say that stray shots can more easily stray off the edge of the mountain. Jones’ Stoney Creek layout plays out along the valley floor but, nevertheless, features enough changes in elevation, and plenty of water and sand, to make it the slightly more challenging of Wintergreen’s designs. Like Bay Creek, condos and single-family homes at Wintergreen are reasonably priced and suitable as either vacation or permanent residence. Come to think of it, for those seeking one coastal and one mountain home within 4 ½ hours driving distance of each other, Bay Creek and Wintergreen would make for an ideal combination -– from a golf and cost perspective.
Next: Classic golf courses crammed into seven months