LAS VEGAS – Sin City is as subtle as a gold-sequin sport coat.
Along the Las Vegas Strip on any given night, water cannons blast skyward to omnipresent musical accompaniment. Crowds of tourists gawk at skimpily dressed street performers. Headliners’ faces are splashed 50 stories high on casino hotels designed to separate mostly sane people from a chunk of their retirement funds.
Love it or leave it, it’s all right there in your face. If what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, that’s because no other place in the U.S. – short of New Orleans during Mardi Gras, maybe? – could handle it. Or just as likely, would want to.
Plopped into this slice of the Mojave Desert, not 500 yards from the Strip, sits the most Vegas of golf holes: a 249-yard par 3 over a pond and creek to a green situated at the base of a roaring man-made waterfall. No. 18 (pictured atop this story) at the newly renovated Wynn Golf Club is a do-or-die kind of challenge, one roll of the dice to win all the money or finish with empty pockets.
If great golf holes fit seamlessly into their environment – think No. 18 at Pebble Beach or No. 12 at Augusta National– then consider adding this closing one-shotter to the list of must-sees. Like the rest of the Strip, there’s nothing natural about this oasis, meaning it fits perfectly into its brash surroundings. Make a great play on No. 18 and you might – might! – get lucky. Throw out a meek effort and forget about it. The hole is bold, loud, somewhat insane and possibly brilliant, depending on your success. At the least, it’s certainly memorable.
In other words, it’s as Vegas as Vegas can be when it comes to golf course architecture. The hole used to be a par 4 that played over water to the front of that waterfall, but a giant convention center now sits where the old tee box was located. The all-or-nothing par 3 better fits the Vegas vibe anyway.
As with the enveloping and ever-changing skyline of the Strip, much of Wynn Golf Club is brand new, despite golf having been played on the site since 1952 when it became the Desert Inn Golf Club.
Steve Wynn purchased the resort in 2000, and the Tom Fazio-designed Wynn Golf Club opened in 2005. But that layout was shuttered in 2017 as the operators of the adjacent Wynn Las Vegas hotel and casino considered other uses for the ridiculously valuable land on which the course sits, and the resort lost millions of dollars in revenue from green fees and other golf-attributable casino earnings.
After scrapping plans to build a lagoon on the site with new hotel rooms and restaurants, Fazio and his son, Logan, were called to breathe fresh life into the abandoned track. Wynn Golf Club reopened in October with eight new and 10 refurbished holes, playing to a par of 70 at 6,722 yards.
“I think the emotion for the Wynn Golf Club is, it is a very distinct, unique, one-of-a-kind place,” Tom Fazio said. The hotels and casinos and general Las Vegas buzz are ”part of the experience. So I think the Wynn Golf Club … is something that maybe can’t be reproduced.”
The layout ranked ninth in Golfweek’s Best list of casino courses in 2017 before its closure. The reopening date didn’t allow enough time for the renovated Wynn Golf Club to rejoin the Golfweek’s Best list for 2019, but expect to see it back near the top in years to come.
And while the relatively secluded Shadow Creek north of the Strip long has held the No. 1 spot on the Golfweek’s Best casino list despite allowing few tee times, Wynn Golf Club is taking a different approach. Tee times can be made by resort guests 90 days in advance, and general public play is open with 30-day advanced bookings.
With a green fee of $550, Wynn Golf Club clearly is not for everyone. But for deep-pocketed fans of the luxury hotel and its high-stakes gaming rooms, the return of the course offers a fantastic diversion and a chance to tee it up without ever leaving the hustle and bustle of the Strip.
Not that all 18 holes are so over the top as the closer. The first 17 are, for the most part, merely beautiful and unlikely, a respite from canned casino air where high-rollers can see the sun and play the game on surprisingly rolling terrain.
The course sits on a relatively tight 129 acres, but through some sleight of hand that would make a Vegas magician proud, the holes never seem crowded. There are a few spots where a terribly wayward tee shot can find a neighboring fairway, but the streams and foliage – a very un-desert-like 100,000 shrubs and 7,000 trees – create a separation that feels somewhat natural even if it took a fleet of bulldozers to move all that earth.
“With the creation of the Wynn golf course, the idea was to incorporate not only the challenge from vegetation, but also relief and contour and framing and definition and also some excitement in the terrain,” Fazio said. “So we went from being a flat, narrow golf course (with the Desert Inn) to being a rolling, elevated, framed kind of a setting. So that was really the overall process, a totally different environment.”
A shallow valley runs through the center of the property, allowing for several elevated tee shots to fairways that roll down before climbing back to the greens. The player can see it all from most tees – perfect for resort play where golfers aren’t familiar with the layout. There are few tricks, just solid challenges into multi-tiered putting surfaces.
The newly installed Dominator Bentgrass greens were fully grown-in and in excellent condition for the reopening, as was the rest of the turf of Tifway II Bermuda and seasonal rye overseed. It’s hard to believe such turf could exist at the end of summer in the middle of the desert, and superintendent Jason Morgan deserves a tip of the cap for the superior conditioning.
“There’s so much detail that went into that golf course in a short space of time, and Jason was the guy in the field making it happen,” Fazio said.
The course’s six par 3s stand out. It might be expected that so many short holes are in play, as land was surrendered to the construction of additional conference space at the resort. Despite the plethora of par 3s, though, this is no sideshow pitch-and-putt. The best of the bunch might not even be the “wow”-inducing 18th but the 209-yard 12th, which drops downhill to a green guarded front and left by a creek.
“If you had to rank them best to least, it would be hard to do that because there is no least,” Fazio said of these par 3s. “We don’t deal in anything that’s least.”
Best and least are opinions, of course, but the hole that might leave a few golf architecture fans scratching their heads is the 442-yard, par-4 14th.
The 14th green runs from high-right to low-left, and mature trees block the left half of the green. Tee shots must be placed well to the right near a bunker if the player is to have any shot at a far-left pin. If a player hits a tee shot down the center of the fairway, a dramatic hook would then be required to feed the ball across the green and reach any hole on the left. A player could try to roll an approach beneath the branches and across several mounds, but that would be the equivalent of splitting a pair of 5s at a blackjack table – just because you can doesn’t mean you should. A safer shot to the right can leave a 50-foot-plus putt.
Basically, it’s a very hard hole where the strategic demands begin on the tee shot. It’s a big ask for many resort players.
But, again, that’s Vegas. The odds are never stacked in the player’s favor. It’s best to just take a shot and enjoy a setting that you likely will never forget.
Now about that green fee . . .
Wynn Golf Club has one of the highest costs of a daily-fee course in the U.S., charging $550 in season, $50 higher even than before the course was shuttered in 2017. That sounds prohibitively expensive for many players, but there are plenty of guests in the adjacent Wynn hotel and casino who spin through a lot more on the slot machines in less time than it takes to play a round of golf.
Brian Hawthorne, the resort’s executive director of golf operations, said there’s a lot of value baked into that fee when considering the location on the Strip as well as an all-inclusive experience that includes forecaddie and rental clubs if needed.
“And if you keep somebody from gambling for four and a half hours, we might be saving people money,” he said with a laugh.
So while that kind of green fee is not for every golfer, Hawthorne is right. As he said, “There’s different price points for every type of customer,” and many of the luxury resort’s guests simply aren’t worried about price. This is, after all, a Forbes Five-Star property that uses Rolls-Royce limos to whisk preferred guests back and forth to the airport.
More options in Vegas
There’s a lot more to Las Vegas than the Strip, and while it might not be a classic golf town, there are plenty of interesting options to keep players out of the casinos. Here’s a sampling from a recent trip:
TPC Las Vegas (Courtesy of TPC Las Vegas)
TPC Las Vegas | Par 71; 7,104 yards
Built in 1996, this Bobby Weed and Raymond Floyd design is about a 25-minute drive west of the Strip near the base of the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.
With plenty of elevation changes, several of the sculpted fairways curve out of sight but with enough room to make a few bad swings and keep playing the same ball. Overall, a fun romp through the desert on a solid design in excellent shape on a course (formerly named TPC at the Canyons) that hosted PGA Tour and PGA Tour Champions events for more than a decade. TPC Las Vegas is No. 13 on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play in Nevada.
The Wolf at Las Vegas Paiute Golf Resort | Par 72; 7,604 yards
The Wolf is the newest (2001) of three Pete Dye tracks at this complex owned and operated by the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, and this 18 is generally considered the most difficult of the three.
Fairways and playing corridors offer plenty of width, which is welcome as the wind frequently kicks up across the exposed course about 40 minutes north of the Strip. The desert views and isolation are worth the drive, offering a completely different setting devoid of houses and towering hotels.
The conditions are immaculate, but pick the proper set of tees on what the resort calls the longest course in Nevada. The Wolf is No. 9 on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play in Nevada, just ahead of its sister courses (Paiute’s Sun Mountain is No. 10, and the Snow Mountain Course is No. 11).
Bali Hai Golf Club | Par 71; 7,002 yards
Located on the south end of the Strip, this fun course is perfectly situated to serve the various groups that frequent its fairways. The halfway house is the property’s nerve center, serving drinks to bachelor parties and corporate golf days.
The Lee Schmidt and Brian Curley layout, which opened in 2000, is near McCarran International Airport and features a fair amount of elevation changes and some 4,000 trees that help create separation in the often forgiving playing corridors.
With a green fee that can be less than a quarter of the price to play the newly reopened Wynn Golf Club, it’s a solid choice. Bali Hai is No. 47 on Golfweek’s Best list of casino courses.