Wisconsin offers some of the best public-access golf in the U.S., with elite courses that match up well with more well-known destinations.
Wisconsin has cheese, beer, snow and the Packers – everyone knows those. Perhaps surprising to those who don’t follow the sport closely, it also has more than a handful of the greatest golf courses in the United States.
Most people think of year-round sunny spots for good golf. Florida. California. Arizona. But by one significant metric for judging elite public-access golf, as compiled by Golfweek’s Best national panel of raters, the Badger State tops all those solar-drenched hot spots.
Golfweek ranks courses by compiling the average ratings – on a points basis of 1 to 10 – of its more than 750 raters to create several industry-leading lists of courses, including the popular Best Courses You Can Play list for courses that allow non-member tee times. These generally are defined as courses accessible to resort guests or regular daily-fee players.
By averaging the scores of the top five public-access courses in each state, Golfweek has compiled a list of the top states for ultra-elite golf. Wisconsin ranks second in the U.S., behind what might be another surprise for some: Oregon. But while Oregon tops the list based mostly on the strength of Bandon Dunes Golf Resort’s four ranked courses, Wisconsin offers a much broader swath of great golf.
Wisconsin’s courses average a whopping 7.56 on the 2020 Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list, behind Oregon’s 8.00. That puts Wisconsin ahead of California (7.55), Florida (7.34) and North Carolina (7.17). The median score among the 50 states is 6.28. For those with regional rivalries, Michigan is ranked No. 7 on the list with a 6.94 average for its top five courses, Minnesota is No. 16 at 6.47 and Illinois is No. 28 at 6.21. Take that, Bears fans.
Not surprising to golf aficionados is that Whistling Straits tops the state’s list of best public-access courses. The Straits course in Mosel, along the bluffs above Lake Michigan, has hosted three PGA Championships and will be the site of the 2021 Ryder Cup, the typically biennial matches between the top men tour pros from the U.S. and Europe that was pushed back from 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. The Pete Dye-designed supergiant founded by Herb Kohler has become the face of Wisconsin golf on television since it opened in 1997.
Mammoth Dunes at Sand Valley in Wisconsin (Courtesy of Sand Valley/Evan Schiller)
But the Straits is hardly alone in excellence. In the past 15 years three other stalwarts have gained a large chunk of the national spotlight. Sand Valley, No. 2 in the state on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play, opened to great acclaim in 2016 with a Ben Crenshaw/Bill Coore routing that focused on classical design among massive sand dunes. Sand Valley’s Mammoth Dunes by David McLay Kidd followed in 2018 and has moved to No. 3 in the state. Lawsonia Links, at No. 4 the only top-ranked public-access course in the state built before 1960, still draws a crowd, and No. 5 Erin Hills opened in 2006 and hosted the 2017 U.S. Open.
It’s been quite the public-golf boom for a state with a relatively short golf season.
Badger state, be proud.
Erin Hills in Wisconsin (Courtesy of Erin Hills/Paul Hundley and Travis Waibel)
Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play 2020 in Wisconsin
1. Whistling Straits (Straits)
Mosel, (No. 7 on Golfweek’s Best Modern Courses in the U.S.)
2. Sand Valley (Mammoth Dunes)
Nekoosa (No. 30 Modern)
3. Sand Valley (Sand Valley)
Nekoosa (No. 32 Modern)
4. Lawsonia (Links)
Green Lake (No. 66 Classic)
5. Erin Hills
Hartford (No. 80 Modern)
6. Blackwolf Run (River)
Kohler (No. 93 Modern)
7. Whistling Straits (Irish)
Mosel (No. 167 Modern)
8. Sentry World
Stevens Point (m)
9. Troy Burne
Hudson (m)
10. Blackwolf Run (Meadow Valleys)
Kohler (m)
11. University Ridge
Madison (m)
12. Wild Rock
Wisconsin Dells (m)
13. Geneva National (Gary Player)
Lake Geneva (m)
14. Big Fish
Hayward (m)
15.* The Bog
Saukville (m)
* New or returning to the list; c: Classic, built before 1960. m: Modern, built in 1960 or after
Golfweek’s Best Private Courses 2020 in Wisconsin
1. Milwaukee CC
Milwaukee (No. 45 Classic)
2. Blue Mound
Wauwatosa (c)
3. Oneida
Green Bay (c)
4. *Minocqua CC
Minocqua (m)
5. West Bend CC
West Bend (c)
* New or returning to the list; c: Classic, built before 1960. m: Modern, built in 1960 or after
The members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on our 10 criteria. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings on each course are averaged together to produce a final rating for each course. Then each course is ranked against other courses in its state, or nationally, to produce the final rankings.
The short course joins a growing list of fun, creative par-3 courses around the world that provide a break from longer traditional courses.
Forest Dunes already had two of the best golf courses in Michigan, but now there’s even more reason to visit the resort in Roscommon.
Forest Dunes this month opened its new Short Course, a 10-hole, 1,135-yarder designed by Keith Rhebb and Riley Johns, the designers of the popular Winter Park Golf Course near Orlando.
The Short Course is situated between Forest Dunes’ original course designed by Tom Weiskopf, which ranks No. 3 in Michigan on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list, and the Loop, a reversible Tom Doak design that ranks No. 4 in the state. The holes measure between 65 and 110 yards.
Forest Dunes Short Course (Courtesy of Forest Dunes)
“We essentially had carte blanche from (Forest Dunes owner Lew Thompson), which was awesome, and really the only way we could get the project completed in time,” Rhebb, who also works frequently as a shaper for Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, said in a news release. “You don’t often get the chance to get super creative when designing courses, but with the Short Course we really had the opportunity to have some fun with it. Lew wanted it to be fun and always engaging, and we were able to express that in the design.”
Forest Dunes Short Course (Courtesy of Forest Dunes)
The news release said “the Short Course’s creative greens were constructed to funnel balls toward pin locations, improving the likelihood of holes-in-one, while a few tee shots tempt players to make use of strategic slopes and banks instead of flying it in the air. The greens showcase a variety of subtle shapes, many being bowl-shaped and some resembling catcher’s mitts or tabletops.”
Forest Dunes Short Course (Courtesy of Forest Dunes)
Thompson said in the release that music, bare feet and eightsomes are all fair game on the new par-3 course if that’s what it takes to make the game more accessible and fun.
Forest Dunes Short Course (Courtesy of Forest Dunes)
“When you come to Forest Dunes, we want you to have a good time,” Thompson said. “What Keith and Riley have built is bringing a new life and energy to the property. It’s going to bring people together and make their time here more enjoyable.”
Adding short courses is a growing trend for operators of premium golf destinations, with the 13-hole, par-3 Preserve at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon and the nine-hole, par-3 Cradle at Pinehurst in North Carolina serving as prime examples. The shorter courses can attract families and novices as well as serve as a fun break from larger, traditional courses. Cabot Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, home to Cabot Cliffs and Cabot Links, also recently opened a new par-3 course, a further example of the trend.
Walking is a key ingredient for design success, while cart paths alter how an architect lays out a routing, often with negative consequences
Just as walking makes for a better golf experience, a walking-only course yields a better golf design.
Walking a course connects you to the land. You get to feel the movements up and down, side to side. Your point of view is from within the painting. The transition from one hole to the next is direct and compelling, and between shots you can talk with your playing partners. Walking is healthy – physically, mentally and socially.
Designers want to build courses for walkers. We want you to experience the course the same way we explore the site and find the holes. Imagine the experience at a museum: You want to flow naturally from one room to the next. If after each room you had to get in your car and drive down the street to get to the next room, you would see the same art but it wouldn’t make for the same experience.
Let’s examine three ways that carts and cart paths hurt the golf experience.
A winding golf cart at Indian Wells Golf Resort (Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)
Aesthetics and playability
When a path is inserted into certain terrain, it almost always impacts the aesthetics.
“The visual of a cart path trail was the biggest single negative,” said Mike Keiser, owner of Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon, on his decision to be a walking-only facility. “You had to see carts and the path, especially around the greens.”
Think of a hole that plays through a valley, one of the most compelling landforms around and one that naturally draws you in. A path breaks up that landscape, not only visually but from a playability standpoint that impacts shots and how things move within the valley. A ball hit slightly offline hits the path and heads to a worse fate.
Green-to-tee connections
One of the most important elements of any course routing is the connection from green to tee.
Green locations are often determined by interesting natural landforms. A designer will find a great natural spot and try to locate a green as close to the natural feature as possible. In many instances, a designer will try to locate multiple greens near one big feature. Alister MacKenzie was a master of such, with ample evidence at Cypress Point and the Valley Club of Montecito.
But when paths are required, it limits how these features can be used and how players can move from one hole to the next.
A more recent example of great connectivity between greens and tee boxes is Bill Coore’s routing at the newly opened Sheep Ranch at Bandon Dunes. Coore has been lauded for coming up with a routing that maximized the compact site. One spot that will garner attention is the 16th hole, a par 3 that plays along the cliff past a large dune to a double green – shared with No. 3 – set on a point above the Pacific Ocean.
About any architect on earth would put a green on that promontory. The original Sheep Ranch course designed by Tom Doak – a 13-hole predecessor to the recently opened 18-hole course – had a green in this spot as well.
Coore’s routing has skilled players walk to the back of the 16 green and play a tee shot over a 100-foot cliff to the 17th fairway. With a walking-only layout this works beautifully. The flow is ideal, and the walk is short.
Adding a path to that promontory would create multiple problems and contaminate the hole and the setting. If you tried to put the path on the outside of the dune, you run into the portion of the green used on No. 3. Walking eliminates those kinds of headaches.
Firm turf and ground-game options
Fescue turf has many wonderful qualities, but perhaps most appealing is its firm surface with lots of ball roll. This makes it the ideal turf for links-style golf played more along the ground.
But one thing fescue does not like is cart traffic – the grass just doesn’t flourish in high-traffic areas. Having carts would essentially eliminate fescue as a turf and the desired firm-and-fast conditions. This has a huge impact on the design of a course.
Chambers Bay in Washington was built as a walking course, and it would be hard to imagine cart paths in such a landscape. (Courtesy of Chambers Bay/Martin Miller)
When designers know the turf will be firm, it places a great emphasis on the ground plane and all of the micro-contours within the playing field. Strategy changes, bunker locations shift, grassing lines change and more. Imagine playing the Old Course at St. Andrews and taking the ground contours out of the equation because you could fly your ball to the hole and stop it on soft turf – it’s a fine example of form following function.
Unfortunately, golf carts have become such a staple of American golf that course designers must factor them into a design.
When designers are asked to consider carts and cart paths, they have a playbook they pull out. Knowing the challenges of carts and paths, good designers go to great lengths to minimize the impact.
The first way designers try to minimize the aesthetic and playability impacts of the paths is to eliminate them all together. If that is not possible, we push for only green-to-tee paths.
When paths are required, we try to hide them. The first way is by location, finding a route you don’t see as you play the hole. When that isn’t possible, we try to hide them through earthworks or landscaping. And sometimes we try to hide them in plain sight by using materials that match the adjacent landscape.
I will never forget a meeting in 2005 on this subject. My colleagues and I made an impassioned plea for the new Chambers Bay course in Washington to be walking only. We explained in great detail how carts would prohibit us from utilizing natural features for the green sites at Nos. 6, 10, 12 and 16. We outlined how the aesthetics and playability would be compromised and that we couldn’t have firm-and-fast fescue if we used carts. We had image boards showing holes with paths and without. When we finished, the management team presented financial projections with and without cart revenues.
Ultimately it was Pierce County Executive John Ladenburg’s call to make. And while I was on the edge of my seat sweating bullets, Ladenburg got up and finished a meeting with the line: “We will call it Chambers Bay, and we will walk it in 2007.”
From my perspective, it was the single most important decision of the entire project. With that one sentence, Ladenburg set Pierce County on a path that would deliver the Pacific Northwest its first-ever U.S. Open.
Hopefully owners, operators and developers will think long and hard before adding paths in the future. Their decision will not only impact the golf experience, but course design as well. Gwk
– Jay Blasi is a course architect who also works with Golfweek’s rater program. This story originally appeared in Issue 4 – 2020 of Golfweek.
By the end of 2020, MacCurrach Golf Construction will have completed its 33rd year and more than 100 projects.
It started with a typical argument between a father and his teenage son.
The son, 14-year-old Allan MacCurrach III, was tired of cutting the grass at his home for free, and wanted his father, PGA Tour agronomist Allan MacCurrach Jr., to start paying him.
When the debate got heated enough, the teen asked his father why he couldn’t arrange a job for him at an ambitious project in Ponte Vedra Beach: the construction of the TPC Sawgrass Players Stadium Course.
“You wouldn’t last two weeks out there,” he was told.
“Just try me,” the youngster said.
He did.
Allan MacCurrach III got the job in the summer of 1979, working under Stadium Course architect Pete Dye. It began a lifetime of passion for the process of moving and sculpting the earth to form 18 holes of emerald finery, for everyone from 20-handicappers to the greatest players in the world to sink a tee into the ground and lose themselves for a few hours in nature and the ancient sport.
Years later, when the father would ask him how business was going, the son would reply: “just working on that third week.”
By the end of 2020, MacCurrach Golf Construction will have completed its 33rd year and more than 100 projects, a combination of new construction and renovations — the latter of which can be just as challenging.
Allan MacCurrach III (lower left) founded his golf course construction company in 1987 and has built or renovated more than 100 courses since then. With him at their Oak Bridge Golf Club renovation site is his son Allan IV (center), company president Brian Almony (lower right).
There are few Jacksonville courses that have not experienced the MacCurrach touch. His company, with around 100 employees operating more than five dozen pieces of equipment ranging from bulldozers to small shaping machinery, built the original designs at the Slammer & Squire, Palencia, the St. Johns Golf and Country Club, Eagle Landing, Atlantic Beach Country Club, Amelia National and Windsor Parke.
MacCurrach Golf also gets offers beyond the First Coast. The company built notable designs such as Streamsong Red, Black and Blue courses, the TPC Tampa Bay and LPGA International.
In recent years, with new golf-course construction limited, MacCurrach Golf has been hired to do renovations at the TPC Sawgrass, the Sawgrass Country Club, Pablo Creek, Oak Bridge, Timuquana, Hidden Hills, both courses at the Omni Amelia Plantation, the Jacksonville Golf and Country Club and the Jacksonville Beach Golf Club.
Outside the area, MacCurrach Golf has done restorative work at famed courses such as Seminole, Shinnecock, Bay Hill, the Medalist, the Sea Island Club, Southampton, Canterbury, Inverness, Harbour Town Golf Links and Kiawah Island.
MacCurrach Golf was recently cited by Golf Inc., a trade magazine, for being the construction company involved with its best renovations of 2019 in two categories: the Sea Island Club Plantation Course in St. Simons Island, Ga., for public golf and the TPC Sugarloaf near Atlanta for private golf.
“We’ve gotten awards before, but never in two categories at the same time,” the 54-year-old MacCurrach said.
REPUTATION BRINGS MORE BUSINESS
Along the way, the company has established a reputation for integrity that brings in a high volume of repeat business.
For example, MacCurrach has handled three renovations of the fairways and greens at the TPC Sawgrass and every year when the San Jose Country Club closes for two weeks, he gets the phone call.
“We have about 25 projects per year and about 23 of them are repeat customers,” he said.
There’s a good reason.
“He’s an honorable man … he embodies everything the game of golf is supposed to be,” said former TPC Sawgrass general manager Bill Hughes, now general manager of the Country Club of the Rockies in Colorado. “With Allan, it’s not about the money. It’s about making the customer happy.”
“He’s the best there is,” said Ponte Vedra Inn and Club director of golf Jim Howard, whose Ocean Course is undergoing a MacCurrach golf renovation that will be completed by Labor Day. “He’s always on time and on budget.”
An employee of MacCurrach Golf Construction uses heavy machinery to mold the 17th green of the TPC Sawgrass Players Stadium Course in 2006 as part of a renovation project.
San Jose general manager Rocky Staples said the reputation of MacCurrach and his staff are “impeccable.”
“He’s always fair with his bids and he has great respect for the architect’s vision,” Staples had. “I love the guy. I love his team.”
MacCurrach and his team can work fast. In 2006, they stripped the sod from every fairway of the TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course, trucked in 10,000 tons of sand and re-sodded in 17 days.
They can also fan out. In the past two years, he has had overlapping projects on the First Coast, Georgia, Virginia and Massachusetts.
“You can have a great design, but at the end of the day, the guys in the bulldozers have to do the job to make it a great golf course,” said M.G. Orender, president of Hampton Golf who has worked with MacCurrach on new and original designs on the First Coast. “Allan and his guys are the best.”
San Jose and the Ponte Vedra Club Ocean Course are two of the active projects MacCurrach Golf is handling in the area. Others include Pablo Creek, the Sawgrass Country Club, Oak Bridge and the University of Virginia golf course.
And in 2018 MacCurrach finished Dye’s final design, an ultra-private course at the White Oak Plantation in Nassau County that is owned by Guggenheim Partners CEO Mark Walter — who also owns the Los Angeles Dodgers.
It was the 18th and last time that MacCurrach built or renovated a Pete Dye design, which is no accident. Aside from his father, MacCurrach had no greater mentor or role model than Dye.
Hughes said the two are kindred spirits.
“Allan is a man of the dirt, just like Pete was,” Hughes said. “He has a feel for the land.”
LEARNING BY DOING
“The Gardner” was at it again.
It was the nickname laborers on the TPC Sawgrass project in 1979 and 1980 had given Pete Dye for his habit of grabbing rakes or shovels out of their hands and showing exactly how he wanted a fairway or green contoured.
Sometimes it was less subtle. On more than on occasion, MacCurrach said a crew would think they had a green, tee box or mound finished. But Dye would suddenly appear on a bulldozer, and proceed, as MacCurrach recalls, “to just smash everything you had done because he didn’t like it.”
MacCurrach was part of a group that finished the third green of the Stadium Course one day — until Dye plowed through the green with a bulldozer, his way of telling them to start over.
“I was riding home with my father that day and told him, ‘that damn Gardner is nuts,'” he said. “The green was perfect.”
But young Allan found out that Dye has his own definition of perfect.
“That was the genius of the man,” MacCurrach said. “He would never settle. He wouldn’t sleep on it unless he was 100 percent satisfied. He was inspiring to work for because there was an energy about him. You knew you were working on something special.”
MacCurrach’s first job was “picking up sticks and digging holes,” on the property that would become the TPC Sawgrass. But young Allan took an interest in heavy equipment and Dye taught him how to use a bulldozer literally by letting him dig in the dirt like a little kid with a toy.
“After I was done with whatever jobs they had me doing during the day, Pete would let me get on a bulldozer with lights and I pushed dirt up and down on the driving range,” MacCurrach said. “It was a big, muddy mess and you couldn’t do any harm. I just pushed dirt from here to there until about 1 or 2 in the morning.”
MacCurrach would then retire to a cot in a construction trailer, get about four hours of sleep, and then repeat the process the next day.
VAGABOND SETTLES DOWN
For the next three summers, until he graduated from Sandalwood, MacCurrach worked for Dye. After the TPC Sawgrass was finished in 1980, MacCurrach spent the summer between his junior and senior year working on the Honors Course in Chattanooga, Tenn.
The next summer it was on to Castle Rock, Colo., to help Dye build and Plum Creek Country Club.
Then came a course in North Carolina. Then Georgia. Along the way, MacCurrach got an associate’s degree in golf course management at the University of Massachusetts and even branched out from under Dye’s wing, working for 1982 Players champion Jerry Pate on a course in Michigan.
“I was a vagabond,” he said.
Eventually, MacCurrach had to develop a bit more structure than that. He decided he could handle a job on his own and wrote a proposal to the owner of a planned golf course.
“He started asking me about workman’s comp and general liability … stuff I had never heard of,” MacCurrach said. “I told I’d get back to him.”
MacCurrach leaned on Dye, his father and another architect, Dave Postlethwait, for advice.
MacCurrach Golf was incorporated in 1987 when Allan was 22 years old. Within two years he landed a project in Georgia and two courses on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail in Alabama.
Windsor Parke was the first local project. MacCurrach scored his biggest deal in 1997 when he was hired to build the first World Golf Hall of Fame Course, the Slammer & Squire, and the offers have come tumbling in ever since.
RETOUCHING THE CLASSICS
It was during the Slammer & Squire project that MacCurrach was walking around the property one day and saw a young man neck-deep in a trench in the blazing sun, working for $7 an hour.
It was Brian Almony, a recent graduate of Lake City Community College’s Turf program who had moved to St. Augustine.
MacCurrach liked the work ethic the young man was showing. It became not only a lifelong friendship but a business relationship, with Almony eventually rising from that muddy trench to become the company president.
“His talents are where my weaknesses are,” MacCurrach joked. “People actually like Brian.”
MacCurrach began doing more renovations of “classic courses,” those built primarily before 1960 and designed by some of the most famous architects in history.
The names ring out. MacCurrach has done renovation on courses designed by Donald Ross, Walter Travis, A.W. Tillinghast, Harry S. Colt, Seth Raynor, Dick Wilson and Herbert Strong.
MacCurrach Golf has done 40 classic course renovations. The company uses laser technology, robotics and GPS to rebuild greens, fairways and bunkers as closely as possible to the architect’s original design, but often it comes down to someone coming down from the bulldozer, grabbing a rake or even getting on hands and knees to mold the earth by hand.
“You’re always thinking about the designer, and you also think about the great players who have been on those courses,” Almony said. “It’s very humbling.”
COMPANY SURVIVES DOWNTURNS
Renovations have constituted the vast majority of their contracts since the recession in 2008. MacCurrach said the company’s revenue fell by half that year but he was prepared.
“We were well-capitalized and did not have to lay anyone off,” he said. “We stayed committed to our people and we knew what assets we had, how much money we had and we knew what our door-closing number would be. We never got there.”
Despite the current economic downtown because of the coronavirus pandemic, MacCurrach has more than enough business and said the company has exceeded its revenue record in each of the past five years.
“We’re doing a lot of face-lifts,” Almony said. “We like to think of them as new designs on old pieces of ground.”
MacCurrach said having passion is the key.
“We’ve worked with 59 architects and most of those guys are fanatics, passionate,” he said. “They know what they want and they want it right. I love that. We thrive on that.”
MacCurrach’s passion trickles down through his employees and it’s one reason most of his customers only have to dial seven digits to reach him.
“I don’t have enough good words to say about Allan,” Howard said. “There are a number of national construction companies people could go to and we take multiple bids when we want to do a renovation. But we always settle on Allan.”
Once used as a parking lot, TPC Harding Park in San Francisco has been transformed into a major-worthy host.
Every once in a while, Tom Smith pulls out a blue folder with dozens of Polaroid pictures from the 1998 U.S. Open as if he’s settling a bar bet. Smith, the general manager at TPC Harding Park, wasn’t there that week when the national championship was contested across Lake Merced at Olympic Club and Lee Janzen hoisted the silver trophy. But the photos are visual proof for any doubters of Harding Park’s parking-lot pedigree.
“Look at all those vehicles,” Smith says as he flips through photos for a host of onlookers in his office. “Here’s the third green looking back down to No. 7 covered in cars, and the 18th fairway, row after row of cars. It makes you wonder: Would it have ever crossed these fans’ minds that they were parking on a course that one day would be the host of a major championship?”
The running joke in the lead-up to the PGA Championship now scheduled Aug. 6-9 at TPC Harding Park – at least before fans were barred from attending because of the global coronavirus pandemic – was that cars should be parked on Olympic’s fairways this time. Situated on a bluff in the southwest corner of the city and surrounded on three sides by Lake Merced, TPC Harding Park has become a darling of the golf world and ready, at last, for its finest hour. The story of its rejuvenation from beloved-but-neglected course to major worthy is a saga involving class warfare, city history, backroom politics and even a Shakespearean storm.
Tom Smith shows a photo of cars parking on a fairway during the 1998 U.S. Open. (Adam Schupak/Golfweek)
Named after President Warren G. Harding, an avid golfer who died at the Palace Hotel while visiting San Francisco, the course opened in 1925 and was considered the second-best muni in the world, next to the Old Course at St. Andrews. The imaginative flair of Scot Willie Watson and Sam Whiting, who had teamed to design Olympic Club, stamped Harding Park’s greatness for the princely sum of $300. Construction on this striking piece of sandy, naturally rolling terrain cost $295,000 and left a worthy rival as neighbors to the Bay Area’s famed private courses, San Francisco Golf Club and Olympic Club.
Harding Park’s sterling reputation was sealed as host of the U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship in 1937 and 1956, as the site of Byron Nelson winning the San Francisco Open in 1944 and 1945, and where major winners Ken Venturi, George Archer and Johnny Miller cut their teeth in their youth.
Venturi, the winner of the 1964 U.S. Open, grew up not far from the 12th tee and played his first 18-hole round at Harding Park at the age of 13 with a set of hickory-shafted clubs. (For the record, he shot 172; in the 1952 club championship he set the course record, 63, which stood for years.) His father, Fred, was the starter at the course and operated the pro shop with his wife, Ethyl. Venturi won the PGA Tour’s Lucky International on home soil in 1966, his last Tour victory, but after 1969 the conditions of the course and its dated facilities sent the Tour packing.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, but the fact the course’s net income went directly into the city’s general fund is widely regarded as responsible for the years of deferred maintenance. Dandelions dotted the fairways, bunkers became like quicksand and greens were shaggy battlefields. With an understaffed and underfunded maintenance team, Harding Park became the quintessential scruffy, beat-up but beloved muni.
“It broke my heart,” Venturi told the Los Angeles Times, referring to the course’s deteriorating condition.
Harding Park hit rock bottom when it was converted into a parking lot for the 1998 U.S. Open and no one seemed to care. Well, one person did. It would take a fearless leader willing to endure a quixotic quest to spearhead Harding’s turnaround from run-down muni to a championship track for the world’s best players.
Sandy Tatum on the 18th hole during a practice round for the American Express World Golf Championships at Harding Park in San Francisco in 2005 (AP/Eric Risberg)
Frank “Sandy” Tatum, who won the 1942 NCAA men’s individual golf championship as a student at Stanford, was just that man. He first set eyes on Harding Park in 1939 as a competitor in the San Francisco City Golf Championship, known affectionately to Bay Area golfers simply as The City. He went on to play the event 40 times, reaching the quarterfinals once. Tatum and fellow devotees of the course believed the bones of Willie Watson’s superb routing remained.
“The quality of the place just fixed in my being,” said Tatum, who died in 2017 at age 96, in a 2003 story in Golf Digest.
Tatum persuaded PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem to attend a dinner with him and powerbrokers Charles Schwab and former Bank of America executive Gene Lockhart, and Tatum made his pitch that Harding Park could again be a shining example of the best that public golf represents. Finchem was sold, especially with Tatum’s inclusion to build a First Tee facility, a program conceived during Finchem’s watch and designed to bring golf and its core values to inner-city youth. In July 1999, Finchem and Tatum were joined by San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown to announce their desire to renovate the course and bring the 2002 Tour Championship to town.
It didn’t take long for opposition to the plan to form. Friends of Muni Golf, led by a quartet of men dubbed “The Four Horsemen” and concerned they’d lose access to affordable golf, sparked great debate, and the political machine delayed approval for several years. In the meantime, the Tour Championship was promised to Atlanta, but Finchem committed to take the occasional Tour event to Harding Park if the course was deemed worthy. Tatum, a lawyer by trade, clung to his vision like a life raft during a storm and overcame one legal and political obstacle after another.
The turning point was a city bureaucrat realizing the availability of $16 million from an Open Space bond issue – state money given from the 2000 passage of Proposition 12 – to fund the project and to be repaid by the course’s profits. (The project eventually ran $7 million over budget.) A separate deal was hammered out that allowed city residents to continue to pay reasonable rates as part of a green fee plan that rakes most of its revenue from out-of-area golfers. In March 2002 the city’s board of supervisors approved the project 11-0.
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Venturi was hired as a design consultant, and under Tatum’s watchful eye, Chris Gray, the lead architect at PGA Tour Design Services, Inc., restored the luster to the cherished design, returning the best attributes to the narrow, cypress-lined fairways for modern play. Nothing came easy with this project, and it endured another setback along the way: Its new irrigation system failed during a deluge that flooded the course, and it cost nearly $2 million to replace it.
“I almost felt a metaphysical aspect was at work, that there was something supernatural that wanted to kill the project,” Tatum told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Despite all these hardships, fantasy became reality and Harding Park reopened in 2003, giving Bay Area public golfers a world-class course to call their own (and operated as part of the Tour’s TPC network).
“I would argue it’s a best practice for local government and the private sector anywhere,” said Phil Ginsburg, general manager of the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department. “Local government can’t do it alone. We don’t have all the resources we need. We have lots of competing demands and this golf course wasn’t in very good shape, but a partnership between the city’s political leadership and the city’s civic leadership and the golf community really made this happen.”
The first day of play at Harding Park was reserved for golfers who didn’t belong to private clubs. There was a blind draw with slips of paper for each player that had signed up for the 120 available slots.
“I looked in the drum and thought there must be 700 names in there,” Tatum recalled to The Times. “There were 7,500.”
“It used to be basically a clover field out here,” said Tiger Woods, who played the course frequently during his Stanford days, ahead of his victory at the 2005 WGC American Express Championship at TPC Harding Park. “It’s just hard to believe what they’ve done.”
No. 7 at TPC Harding Park (Gary Kellner/PGA of America via Getty Images)
Only through Tatum’s tireless work did Harding’s restoration spring to life. In recognition for his efforts, the city placed a commemorative plaque in front of “The Tatum Tree” near the first tee bearing the words: “San Francisco honors Frank ‘Sandy’ Tatum Jr. for his invaluable gift to the City – the renaissance of a treasured jewel, Harding Park Golf Course.” A new clubhouse, funded with $8 million in private donations, also bears his name.
“I didn’t want them to do that, but if they did, I wanted it to be subtle,” Tatum said at the reopening. “There was a sign so big I thought I’d trip over it.”
Woods and Rory McIlroy both won World Golf Championships at the course, as did a U.S. team in the Presidents Cup (another is scheduled here in 2026), and three Charles Schwab Cup winners have been crowned here. But all of those were “an audition,” in Tatum’s words, for the major championship he envisioned. Tatum, who served from 1972 to 1980 on the U.S. Golf Association executive committee, including a two-year stint as president, dreamed of a U.S. Open, but the Wanamaker Trophy will do just fine. The PGA of America, in search of a site for its first PGA Championship on the west coast since 1998, signed an agreement in City Hall in 2014 with San Francisco’s late Mayor Ed Lee, a golf enthusiast.
“It’s affirmation of what I thought that golf course could be,” Tatum told the San Francisco Chronicle when Harding Park was awarded the PGA. “This development really verifies all the thoughts and feelings I had coming into this project.”
Ginsburg compared it to hosting the Super Bowl at a public field, and when asked to summarize what staging this championship means to the community, he never hesitated. “I can do it in five letters,” he said. “P-R-I-D-E.” Gwk
This article originally appeared in Issue 3 – 2020 of Golfweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Gil Hanse, Tom Doak and Beau Welling offer renovation services to help restore historical public-access courses in Washington D.C.
The renaissance of community-oriented golf in America continues apace.
In June the National Park Service, the agency that controls the three federally owned golf courses in Washington D.C. – Langston, Rock Creek and East Potomac – awarded the right to negotiate a new lease on the properties to a recently established non-profit, the National Links Trust.
The NLT’s co-founders, Will Smith and Mike McCartin, are well-known in golf architecture circles. The pair met in the Landscape Architecture graduate program at the University of Georgia, and both served as shapers for Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf in the 2000s. Though they assembled a strong team of corporate and community leaders, partnered with Troon Golf on the management side and convinced star architects Doak (East Potomac), Gil Hanse (Rock Creek) and Beau Welling (Langston) to offer their restoration services pro bono, they still believed theirs was a dark horse bid.
When the National Park Service chose their proposal, McCartin said, “We went from the ‘This is so amazing and exciting’ phase to ‘Oh man, there’s so much to do.’ We have to put our heads down and make it all happen.”
It’s worth noting Smith and McCartin are both D.C. natives with a keen understanding of how the federal courses are woven into the fabric of the community. In the past, it was common to see urban golf projects that envision rewarding investment with a major championship windfall, sometimes at the expense of the clientele the course had previously served. Even if locals get a break on green fees, McCartin pointed out, “When you’re charging visitors $300, you have to cater to the $300 golfer, and it changes the welcoming, inclusive nature of the place.”
In contrast, the NLT centers affordability and accessibility at the heart of its plans.
Historical photo of Rock Creek Golf Course in Washington, D.C. (Courtesy of National Links Trust)
“We look at these courses as gateways to golf for people who have never played,” McCartin said. “You hear it so often from people who grew up in the area – East Potomac, Langston and Rock Creek are the places where they first learned to play, where they explored golf and grew a love for the game. That’s such a key component of a healthy golf ecosystem. If you take that away, there’s a loss of culture and history that’s developed around these courses, but it’s also bad for the health of golf generally, to not have places that are natural starting points.”
Smith and McCartin concede that they face a significant fundraising challenge in the years to come—the three complexes need millions of dollars of repairs to overcome years of deferred maintenance. But they are confident the NLT’s nonprofit structure will prove attractive to donors.
“We believe that the greater golf community, both in D.C. and nationwide, will support us in this mission,” Smith said. “They’ll see that restoring these places, and the programming we want to surround these places with, will have such a great benefit to the community and the game of golf.”
The First Tee is already on board, as is “Golf. My Future. My Game.,” a nonprofit working to foster greater diversity in the golf industry. There’s a strong chance an Evans Scholars-style caddie program will emerge as a source of employment for local youths. Environmental groups, such as the Anacostia Watershed Society, are also on board.
The NLT’s plans for the architectural rejuvenation of the D.C. courses are catnip for golfers. Two of the three courses have serious pedigree: Rock Creek was laid out by William Flynn of Shinnecock Hills and Cherry Hills fame, while East Potomac, a reversible Walter Travis design on an island in the Potomac River, boasts vintage aerials to fire the imagination of any design aficionado. (It’s no surprise that Doak, designer of The Loop – the lauded reversible layout at Michigan’s Forest Dunes – was drawn to this latter project.)
It’s not yet clear in what sequence the renovations/restorations will take place. McCartin and Smith suspect the most bang for the initial buck might be found at Rock Creek, which boasts a prime location yet is the worst-performing of the three facilities and where the back nine has been closed since last summer.
East Potomac, for its part, has jaw-dropping potential, but its restoration would best be handled in concert with repairs to a damaged, century-old sea wall. As an engineering and environmental-mitigation task, East Potomac is likely to dwarf its sister courses in both expense and complexity.
Langston holds plenty of promise as well, as a portion of its back-nine routing tracks out onto an island in the Anacostia River where the clearing of invasive vegetation would unlock an array of appealing vistas.
McCartin said that regardless of how the projects unfold, though, “Our goal is to provide continued access to each of the properties at all times, to the extent that we can.”
Historical photo of Langston Golf Course in Washington, D.C. (Courtesy of National Links Trust)
Elevating the quality of golf without a corresponding rise in green fees is a proposition any golfer can get behind. But the D.C. courses always have held significance beyond the game itself. All three are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a reflection of the crucial part they played in the battle against Jim Crow. Black golfers fought for equal access to the D.C. facilities – East Potomac began its existence as a segregated, white-only course—from the beginning.
According to the National Park Service, “African American activism on the golf course had local and national impacts,” spurring Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration to desegregate the entire national park system in 1945. PGA Tour star Lee Elder – the first Black man to play in the Masters – gave lessons at Langston as a young man and managed the course for a few years in the late 1970s. The NLT and NPS share the mission of preserving and educating the next generation on the immense cultural and historical influence of these facilities.
The NLT still needs to finalize the terms of its lease with the government, but after that happens, projects could begin as early as this fall.
Shortly after Barack Obama entered office in 2009, he compared the American ship of state to an ocean liner rather than a speedboat – “It doesn’t turn around immediately.” Change may happen slowly in the nation’s capital, and it may take as much as a decade for the golf community to see the full impact of the National Links Trust’s transformation of Rock Creek, Langston and East Potomac. In this case, patience is required.
The 9-hole layout has become a cult favorite and led Golfweek’s Adam Schupak to drive 411 miles to play it on Adamski’s record-setting day.
SOUTH PITTSBURG, Tenn. – Fireworks greeted my arrival at Sweetens Cove Golf Club. Best. Welcome. Ever. I mean, I know I’m a big deal but that was a little much. I kid. But seriously, as I pulled into the parking lot, the sky lit up like the Fourth of July.
Spoiler alert: They weren’t for me. It turned out Sweeten Cove’s general manager, Matthew Adamski, had just completed his 200th hole of the day – and he wasn’t done yet – as part of a fundraiser for Folds of Honor, which was as good a reason as any to shoot off some Roman candles.
Sweetens Cove was my pit stop on the way to Memphis for this week’s WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational, a 411-mile, one-stop drive from the Avis car rental shop in Jacksonville, Florida. Yes, much like the Blues Brothers, I was on a mission from God to play the much-hyped nine-hole course that ranks No. 49 in Golfweek’s Best list of modern courses. I had a full tank of gas plus a six-pack of bottled water, and I was wearing sunglasses. Hit it!
No. 4 at Sweetens Cove
Patrick Boyd, the course’s former general manager, told me I wasn’t alone in making a long drive to Sweetens. He estimated that 70 percent of the golfers drive at least 90 minutes to two hours to get there. In the winter the parking lot is packed with license plates from Northeast and Midwest golfers looking to escape the cold.
I’ve written before – as has my colleague Jason Lusk and many others – about Sweetens Cove being golf’s Little Engine that Could, a King-Collins design with an ownership group that includes Hall of Famers of football and tennis, respectively Peyton Manning and Andy Roddick.
“When it first opened, there would be more planes in the sky than there were golfers,” Boyd recalled. “Those who knew about it had it to themselves.”
I got a taste of what that must have been like as the course was closed Monday, which allowed Adamski to attempt to break the course record of 252 holes played in one day on this year’s Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year. (The world record for most holes played in a cart in a 24-hour period is 851, set by Canadian Robb James in 2004 at Victoria Golf Course.)
There was steam rising off the mountains in the distance as I teed off, remnants of a storm that had just blown through the valley. Between the time I crossed the Tennessee state line and the time I pulled into the unpaved parking lot, the clock flipped to the Central time zone. In other words, more daylight for Adamski (in a Peyton Manning-decked-out cart with a Tennessee Vols flag) and me (hoofing it) to get in some holes.
I wasn’t going to catch him, so what I did to save a few steps was hit one drive (or occasionally two) and then two approach shots – one to a white flag and one to a blue flag on each green, so I could get the full experience before hightailing it to Memphis.
Sweetens Cove lived up to the hype. Boyd – who is now the business mind behind National Custom Works, a boutique maker of handcrafted custom-forged irons, putters and persimmon drivers – calls it a playground, and that’s an apropos description. There are endless possibilities to approaching these wildly imaginative greens, which total over 100,000 square feet.
I made a rookie mistake when I overshot the par-5 third green with my second shot. I thought I had hit a nifty chip to set up a short birdie putt, but as I stepped closer to the green I watched my ball trickle past the hole, down the false front and off the green into a collection area. I made six. It wouldn’t be the last time I chipped off the green.
At the par-3 fourth, I let Adamski play through for the first time. He was running on fumes. “I’m going to crawl into a ball when this is over,” he said.
But just like the little engine that could in the children’s book, Adamski pressed on when I shot him some words of encouragement. “I got this,” he said. And he did – he finished in the gloaming having played 254 holes and making an impressive 46 birdies. (That has to be some sort of record for most birdies in one day, right?) For the record, that is 28 spins around the nine-hole layout plus two holes more for good measure.
The view of the fifth hole at Sweetens Cove Golf Club (Adam Schupak/Golfweek)
The 293-yard, par-4 fifth joins the list of my favorite short holes. Boyd prefers the seventh, a 313-yard par 4 that is also all about angles. It’s the smallest green on the course at about 5,500 square feet.
“It looks like it came out of Prairie Dunes,” Boyd said of the Perry Maxwell gem in Kansas. “It’s got huge movement and fall off.”
The par-3 ninth at Sweetens Cove (Adam Schupak/Golfweek)
My pitch-shot approach didn’t hold the green, and I chipped off it trying a bump and run to the front pin placement there, too.
No. 6 is a cape-style green along the water, and No. 8 is modeled after a Biarritz. I loved the variety. If I had one complaint, it is that there’s no yardage markers and my laser gun didn’t pick up the reflectors on the flags and kept giving me wildly inaccurate numbers. But once I accepted that the device was useless, I really enjoyed the old-school challenge of eyeballing what club to use.
My 9-iron at the par-3 ninth hole sailed into the back bunker, which ended a rare bunker-free round – I’m glad I avoided the crevice in front of the fifth green, an homage to Pine Valley’s Devil’s Asshole if I’ve ever seen one. From the bunker I aimed a good 20 feet left of the blue flag on the upper tier and let the slope works its magic to within 5 feet of the hole. Best sandy I’ve made all year and a shot I will long remember.
The slope of the green can be your friend if you hit into the back bunker at the ninth hole at Sweetens Cove. (Adam Schupak/Golfweek)
Sweetens Cove is everything you’d want in a nine-hole course – especially for as little as $35 to play it, and $150 for an all-day (weekend) cart pass. There’s little out of bounds, it’s generous off the tee and the greens have so much movement and slope that they are bound to give you fits if you’re out of position or don’t execute your intended shot.
“If there ever was a second-shot golf course, this is it,” Boyd said.
I left anticipating the chance to play it again – or maybe 255 holes in one day. Sweetens Cove is sweet.
Tiger Woods and TGR Design to build short par-3 course at Pebble Beach Golf Resorts to replace Peter Hay Golf Course
Tiger Woods and his TGR Design firm on Thursday released plans to transform the Peter Hay Golf Course at Pebble Beach Resorts in California.
Woods and his team will build a nine-hole par-3 course with holes ranging in length from 47 to 106 yards. The total length will be 670 yards. They also will build a 20,000-square-foot putting green and plans include a new food and beverage venue with a large outdoor seating area.
The short course will be between the Pebble Beach Pro Shop and the Golf Academy, just a few hundred yards from the famed 18th green of Pebble Beach Golf Links.
The plans for Tiger Woods’ redesign of the Peter Hay Golf Course at Pebble Beach Resorts. Photo courtesy of Pebble Beach Company
Woods said his design philosophy for the short course will focus on playability, creativity and fun for any golfer, including families and those new to the game. The result will feature dramatic movement with the terrain, plus four holes playing directly toward Carmel Bay to capitalize on the long views of the water. Each hole will be distinct from the previous course.
“Everyone who plays this golf course is going to enjoy the playability of it,” Woods said in the press release. “Golfers will have the choice to play nearly any club off most tees and around the greens, which will make them think and channel their creativity. It will also play differently from day to day depending on the tee and hole locations and wind direction. It’s going to be a lot of fun. I can’t wait to play it.”
With one exception, the length of each hole will correspond with a significant year in Pebble Beach’s history, and plaques on tee boxes will tell those stories. The exception will be the second hole, a replica of the stellar, seaside par-3 seventh hole on Pebble Beach Golf Links.
“Pebble Beach is such an iconic golf destination, we want guests to feel the entirety of that spirit when they play this course,” Woods said in the press release. “We also know not everyone who comes to Pebble Beach will have a chance to play the U.S. Open course, so we wanted to create the opportunity for all visitors to experience one of its most famous holes.”
The course is scheduled to open in the spring of 2021.
“We are thrilled to elevate the quality of our short course to a level consistent with our other world-class golf courses,” Bill Perocchi, CEO of Pebble Beach Company, said in the release. “You can see the genius of Tiger Woods and TGR Design come to life when you walk the site, the way it all fits together. I expect all aspects of this new facility will be very popular for junior golf events, resort golfers, outings, resident hang-outs and everything in between.”
Woods and his firm have built several courses including Bluejack National in Texas, which ranks No. 47 on Golfweek’s Best list of modern courses in the United States, and El Cardonal at Diamante in Mexico, which ranks No. 25 on Golfweek’s Best list of courses in Mexico and the Caribbean. He also is building Payne’s Valley at Big Cedar Lodge in Missouri, 13 holes of which are currently open for preview play.
Sand bunkers can be expensive to maintain and are often the first thing to show wear. It wouldn’t be surprising if this trend catches on.
(Editor’s note: June 1 is the opening of Sheep Ranch, one of the most highly anticipated course openings of the last decade. Golfweek will have additional coverage all day long, including hourly photos on Instagram, and an Instagram Live with Golfweek Travel Editor Jason Lusk. Follow us on Instagram here.)
As part of today’s #SheepRanchDay, celebrating the opening of the newest track at Bandon Dunes, Golfweek Travel Editor Jason Lusk was asked about the Bill Coore- and Ben Crenshaw-designed course that omitted sand bunkers.
How come?
Ever-present wind, Lusk told JuliaKate Culpepper.
“It’s hard to explain how strong that wind is,” Lusk said. “I’ll give a quick example — along the cliffs I hit a drive that went about 350 yards, and I don’t hit 350-yard drives. Into that same wind along the cliffs, I hit a very solid drive that went 140 yards. It’s a 220-yard difference on the wind on a tee shot.
“Now when that kind of wind comes blowing it up across the golf course with traditional bunkers, the sand flakes out, it creates these little tornadoes in bunkers and you see the wind spinning in the sand. You see that sometimes on the other Bandon courses, particularly on Old MacDonald, to where you’ve actually seen it flying across the property.”
That type of wind damage makes it difficult for crews to keep the course in working order. And with Sheep Ranch’s amazing seaside views, there’s rarely a break from the wind.
“That requires that the maintenance crew goes out and actually waters the bunker to keep the sand inside the sand traps. If you don’t do that, all the sand blows out and you’re left with these hard-pan, exposed bottoms and that’s no good because then you’re constantly doing maintenance to the bunkers,” Lusk said. “You’re going to have drainage problems, you’re going to have sand blown all over your greens. It’s just a mess.”
Because of this, Coore and Crenshaw decided to look back into the past for an answer.
“They were looking at a way to try to not have the sand blow out so much from these bunkers and the easiest way to do that was to have no bunkers,” Lusk said. “So Bill Coore said that he looked back he and Ben Crenshaw looked back at an old book called ‘The Links,’ which is from the early 1900’s and I’m paraphrasing here, I don’t have the book in front of me right now, but it says that someday there will be a site with such blessed beautiful natural contours that you don’t need sand bunkers.
“And Bill Coore said if ever there was a chance to build that course, Sheep Ranch had those contours.”
Lusk noted that sand bunkers can be expensive to maintain and are often the first thing to show wear. It wouldn’t be surprising if this trend became more popular.
“You’re starting to see this with some other courses around the country,” Lusk said. “More and more people are experimenting with leaving out, if not all, then at least some bunkers, because bunkers are a maintenance nightmare and that adds to the cost of running a golf course.”
Two par-3 holes at the Sheep Ranch share a massive green on 100-foot cliffs above the Pacific Ocean, one of the most dramatic sites in golf
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(Editor’s note: June 1 is the opening of Sheep Ranch, one of the most highly anticipated course openings of the last decade. Golfweek will have additional coverage all day long, including hourly photos on Instagram, and an Instagram Live with Golfweek Travel Editor Jason Lusk. Follow us on Instagram here.)
BANDON, Ore. – There are plenty of cliffside holes to love at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort’s new Sheep Ranch, which opens June 1 and features nine greens on the 100-foot cliffs above the beach and Pacific Ocean below.
But the focal point clearly is the giant, undulating, made-for-selfies double green perched atop Fivemile Point.
One piece of advice: If you’re afraid of heights, don’t look down. Plenty of photos and drone videos show the steepness of that edge of North America, but it feels even more dramatic when you take a break from reading putts to sneak a peek westward.
Jutting toward giant rocks breaking free beyond the water’s edge, the double green built by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw is the target for Nos. 3 and 16. Both are par 3s, with No. 3 playing a mere 120 yards off the back and the 16th playing 151.
Simple, right? Short little par 3s, flip in a wedge or short iron, maybe make a putt and walk off with a smile? Not so fast. The wind that sometimes howls across Fivemile Point has to be felt to believed – it’s not an exaggeration that some players might discuss a four-club wind with their caddies. Balls that climb high into that breeze could land anywhere. Great fun.
No. 16 plays northward along the cliff to the massive double green atop Fivemile Point at Bandon Dunes’ Sheep Ranch. (Courtesy of Bandon Dunes Golf Resort)
The green is massive, with separate tall dunes blocking the right-side entrances to both holes. No. 3 plays almost directly west from the interior of the course, while No. 16 stretches along the cliff from a tee box set south of the green. The highest portion of the green serves as the front for No. 3 and is not really in play for No. 16. From that high point it’s down, around, over lumps and swales to the lowest portion of the green just a step from the cliff’s edge.
If the surface of the double green has any likeness at the entire resort that features four other highly ranked courses, it might be the Punch Bowl putting green, which isn’t even part of an 18-hole course. The Punch Bowl invites players to sip cocktails and compete against each other on a ridiculously large practice green that falls away from the first tee of the Pacific Dunes course. Likewise, players happily could spend hours tumbling balls across the double green atop Fivemile Point, if only there weren’t another tee box waiting.
Speaking of that next tee: The rear corner of the double green even serves as the par-4 17th’s back tee box, from which strong players can send a ball over the cliffs edge, across the yellow gorse and toward the ancient stumps of trees and fairway beyond.
For years the site was the focal point of the site’s previous 13-hole course, also called Sheep Ranch, that was built by Tom Doak and Jim Urbina. But that routing didn’t host much play, and Fivemile point was mostly a distant dream for players looking north from the No. 7 snack shack on the resort’s Old Macdonald course.
The double green for Nos. 3 and 16 at Bandon Dunes’ Sheep Ranch sits atop 100-foot cliffs above the Pacific Ocean. (courtesy of Bandon Dunes Golf Resort)
Now it’s the new reality, and it will be among the most-talked-about acreage at the resort. Think No. 7 at Pebble Beach or No. 16 at Cabot Cliffs for North American cliffside comparisons – the site is that dramatic, with perhaps only No. 16 at Cypress Point surpassing it for heroics.
“Five Mile Point is a focal point for the whole property, no question about that,” Coore said. “It was that way with the original Sheep Ranch, and it’s the thing people talk about the most. It was the face of the Sheep Ranch property, I guess. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say it’s the cornerstone. You certainly won’t forget it.”
