I am back in Chicago to play golf again and this time my friend Hayes is not with me so I wont be getting any of his Grandma’s pot roast. Too bad, that was one tasty meal. Fortunately, my friend and partner in the annual Ridley Cup golf tournament, Steve, has just moved to Chicago from Manhattan and graciously offered for me to stay at his place while I’m in town. He literally just moved having been in his house for less than 2 weeks, so the fact that his wife agreed to let me stay with them is amazing . . . especially considering that she spends her days single handedly juggling 1 year old twin girls. Thanks Wendy! My first stop while in Chicago this time is the Chicago Golf Club which is the most important golf club in America that you have likely never heard of.
I am originally from Nebraska having been born in Omaha and living there until I was 12 years old. Every summer when I was a kid my parents would load my brother and me into the family Chevette and drive west across the state, Clark Griswold style, as we made our way to Fort Robinson for vacation. Along the way we’d stop in small towns and at tourist attractions to see the sites of Nebraska. Many times we passed through portions of the sand hills region so when I started my Top 100 Golf Odyssey I was excited to finally have a reason to return to my roots after more than 25 years away. It was a trip I was anticipating for numerous reasons.
I’ve always loved Louisville, Kentucky. I’ve visited Louisville about a dozen times in my life for a multitude of reasons. When I was in college my roommate's parents lived there and we would sometimes make the 4 hour drive from Virginia Tech just for a weekend of some nice home cooked meals. We also stopped in with his folks many times over the years while we were on our way out west to ski and while traveling around the country chasing our favorite bands. Oddly, out of all those times that I went to Louisville, I never made it to the Kentucky Derby. I had the opportunity to go every year but for some reason or the other I never made it. I’ll have to change that one of these days.
Back in March of this year I received an email from Jeff, a member at Victoria National Golf Club, inviting me to join him for a game sometime. Of course I immediately accepted and we made plans that would suit both of our schedules since Jeff lives several hours away in St. Louis and would be traveling to the club as well. Victoria National is located in Newburgh, Indiana, near Evansville, and I determined that the most sensible approach would be to fly into the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport and rent a car so I could make a few other stops along the way and create a little golf trip of it.
At 4:30AM the alarm clock went off and instead of my usual slap at the snooze bar I happily jumped from bed and started the day. After getting cleaned up and dressed I hopped in my car and drove to the airport in order to make my 6:46AM flight to New York’s LaGuardia airport. Fortunately, my plane took off on time and by 8:00AM I was safely on the ground in my destination. After getting my clubs from baggage claim, a short shuttle ride to the car rental desk and a little standing in line I pulled out of the Hertz parking lot and began following my GPS unit’s directions to take me to Garden City, New York.
In the late 1990s David McLay Kidd was hired by Mike Keiser to design and build a golf course on a section of the 1200 acre parcel of land he owned along the rugged coast of Oregon. Building a golf course in such a remote location was a HUGE leap of faith on Mr. Keiser’s part as the “Build It And They Will Come” philosophy was not exactly a tried and true business model at the time. However, like all great entrepreneurs, Keiser did not let the critics and detractors discourage him and he forged forward. This wonderful new course, Bandon Dunes, opened in 1999 and became the backbone upon which the resort would build for the next couple of years.
After we finished up at Pacific Dunes in the morning the big question over lunch was if we really wanted to go back out into the severe weather for our second 18 holes of the day. We were tired from fighting the wind, we were soaked completely to the bone and the weather wasn’t really showing much sign of letting up. Of course in the end there was really no debate. If you’re not golfing at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort than you had better be sleeping because there isn’t much else to do. Obviously we were going back out . . . it was never even really a question.
My group arrived at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort on the evening of Tuesday June 1, 2010 and were scheduled to start playing the next morning on Pacific Dunes. More than half our group was here for the first time and all of us were extremely excited as we walked out of McKee’s Pub that night after dinner. On the way back to our rooms we discussed the forecast for bad weather and hoped that as usual the weather predictors would be wrong. Back at our room we finally settled down and went to bed like anxious kids on Christmas Eve with visions of birdies dancing in our heads.
Eugene Country Club was organized in 1899 which makes it one of the older clubs on the West Coast of the U.S. The original golf course was situated on 30 acres of land and consisted of nine holes with sand greens. In 1923 the club purchased the land where the golf course sits today and Chandler Egan was hired to design the golf course. The new course officially opened for play in 1926.
In 1967 Robert Trent Jones was brought in to work on the course and decided to reverse the entire routing.
The Olympic Club was founded in 1860 under the name San Francisco Olympic Club and is recognized as the oldest athletic club in the US. At the time of inception the club focused on physical fitness as golf hadn’t yet made it across the pond. In 1918 The Olympic Club took over the struggling Lakeside Golf Club and introduced golf to its members at a new location on Lake Merced separate from the downtown clubhouse.
Almost immediately the club decided to replace its one golf course with two so land was acquired and Willie Watson was hired to do the layout of the two courses. In 1924 the Lake and Ocean Courses were opened. A third course was added in 1994 which is a par 3 nine hole course designed by Tom Weiskopt and Jay Morrish called the Cliffs Course.
Please just let me find it . . . Is that really so much to ask? . . . Just give me a chance . . . All I’m asking for is a chance. These thoughts raced through my head as I walked to the left side of the 18th hole at San Francisco Golf Club. The 18th hole is a 508 yard par 5 and I REALLY would like to make a birdie here. Under normal conditions I should be able to reach the green in two, but today the wind is blowing something terrible and I floated a weakly cut drive to the middle of the fairway well outside the “go zone”. With the ball lying slightly above my feet for my second stroke I hooked the shot out of sight and now I’m literally just hoping I can find it. All I want is to have a chance to knock my third shot on the green so maybe I can roll a putt in for the birdie. To me, this seems like a more than reasonable request.
Back in 2007 when I started this Top 100 madness I began telling my family and friends about my quest in hopes of making some contacts that would be able to help me along the way. When I told my Dad he suggested that I get in touch with his friend Jim who lived in San Francisco, was a very avid golfer and had played a number of Top 100 courses over the years. Jim and I started communicating via email and stayed in touch fairly regularly over the next 3 years. Early in 2010 when I began laying out my “wishlist” schedule for the year, a trip to Northern California in May seemed like it might fit my plans quite nicely so I contacted Jim to see if he would be able to help. Fortunately, he said to leave it all to him and thats just what I did.
I had not been to Arizona since I was about 14 years old so my memory of the area was pretty limited. I was excited to be getting back out there as an adult and see what this desert living business was all about. Although the main mission of this trip was to play at Stone Canyon Club in Oro Valley outside of Tuscon, I flew into Phoenix because it was a little easier from a travel logistics standpoint. This trip would consist of a warm up game in Phoenix and then on to the Tucson area for two more games there and then the red eye back home Saturday night in order to arrive home in time for Easter Sunday festivities with family and friends.
One of the real challenges of playing the Top 100 courses in the US is getting the timing right. A large percentage of courses on the list are in locations where the optimal time to play them is between May and October which means that the months of November through April can be very slow when it comes to working on the list. After about a year into the quest I learned a few things from my rookie mistakes. One of those lessons was to try to save the courses in locales with warmer winters for the months between November and April which is exactly how I ended up in South Carolina in December.
When thinking of golf in Atlanta one name immediately comes to mind . . . Bobby Jones. Robert “Bobby” Tyre Jones, Jr. is unquestionably the greatest and most well known amateur golfer of all time. He stands as the only golfer (amateur or professional) to win all 4 major tournaments in a single calendar; a feat known as a Grand Slam. In 1930 Bobby accomplished this by winning the British Amateur, British Open, U.S. Open and finally the U.S. Amateur. After successfully completing the Grand Slam Mr. Jones officially retired at the top of his game and moved along with his life.
I had but one goal for my trip to The Honors Course in Ooltewah, Tennessee. The sole thing I wished to accomplish for this trip was to simply not drive past the entrance to the club. That's all . . . see the turn, make the turn. No u-turns . . . no mulligans. Easy, right?? Beautifully simple, yet inexplicably complex.
Every person I had talked to about The Honors Course had told me two things. First, that I must turn left at the giant propane tank and second, that I would miss the turn and drive right past the entrance. I really don’t see what is so difficult about this. Giant propane tank, left turn. Really, a six year old could handle this. I called Vegas before I left my hotel and the odds on me making the trip with NO u-turn was 45-1. Not very good.
Now that I’m nearing the halfway point on my quest to play the Top 100 golf courses in the U.S. things are beginning to get a little more interesting. The low hanging fruit is starting to vanish and I’m beginning to see just how difficult a challenge I have set myself up for.
One of the questions that I get asked regularly is “What are the toughest courses to gain access to”. The few public courses on the list are the only bona fide easy ones, and the rest vary in degree of difficulty when it comes to arranging play. Certainly there are a number of standouts that far exceed the others in their difficulty.
Located just outside of Philadelphia, Aronimink Golf Club was incorporated 1896. In the early years the expanding club outgrew a couple of sites in Philadelphia before eventually settling in their current location, Newtown Square, in 1926. With 300 acres of freshly acquired land, the club hired well known golf course architect Donald Ross to lay out their new golf course. Legend has it that Ross was upset from having one of his course designs rejected by another Philadelphia area club and vowed to create a masterpiece at Aronimink that could not be duplicated. Talk about being at the right place at the right time!
For over a century the mountains of North Carolina have served as a summertime oasis for those who wish to enjoy the cool temperatures found here during the peak of summertime and the beautiful changing of the seasons in the fall. Ever since George Vanderbilt constructed his world famous Biltmore Estate in 1895 the mountainous areas of North Carolina have been synonomyous with leisure activities. A number of decades after Mr. Vanderbilt began entertaining guests in Asheville and several hours away in the Sandhills region of North Carolina a young man by the name of Ellis Maples was quickly developing a reputation for himself in the golf community.
For the last 3 years I have made an annual pilgrimage to New York for a summer golf trip. The first year I played one Top 100 course, the next year I played two and this year I was going to try for three. Quaker Ridge was one of the places I really wanted to play but I didn’t have any contacts. Unlike some of the other New York area Top 100 courses, Quaker Ridge keeps a very low profile. There have been no majors contested there and it is considered a bit of a hidden treasure - so much so that the course’s nickname is “Tillie’s Treasure” after the architect A.W. Tillinghast.
Sebonack Golf Club opened in 2006 to considerable hoopla from the press. Located in the golf mecca Southampton, Sebonack is just a pitching wedge away from National Golf Links of America and not much further from Shinnecock Hills which made it controversial from the start. The course itself was an unprecedented collaboration between two architects, Jack Nicklaus and Tom Doak, each bringing distinctly different styles to the project. The press also had a field day reporting on the costs associated with the new club. The numbers being bandied about to buy the land, build the course and join the club were astronomical by normal standards.
So there I was in New York’s Westchester County, sitting on the couch at my friend Jay’s house watching the rain come down outside as I wondered if I would be playing at Winged Foot Golf Club later in the day. This was a serious case of deja vu. Exactly 1 year and 12 days prior I had been sitting in the exact same spot watching rain come down outside the exact same window and wondering if I would be playing at Winged Foot Golf Club. Last year the rain came down in a monsoon style downpour and then stopped dead.
“Love reading your blog. Now is the time to go to Kohler for Blackwolf Run and the Straits courses with the rates being very, very low. I'm a member at Olympia Fields so if in town give me a buzz. Best wishes on your quest.”
Back in April of this year I received the above email from Al, a visitor at my website. As I have mentioned in other posts about Chicago courses, when I started this quest I did not know a mortal soul in the Chicago area and playing the six Chicagoland Top 100 courses was something I was concerned about. This email was as good as striking gold as far as I was concerned! .
Chicago was one of the cities that caused some concern for me when I started the Top 100 quest. At the time I did not know one single person that lived in Chicago and six of the Top 100 courses are in the Chicagoland area . . . That made me more than a little worried that this was going to be difficult. I slowly started asking around and eventually stumbled onto a couple of leads. Hayes, my roommate from college and friend since the 7th grade had grandparents in Chicago so I contacted him to see if they might know anyone who belonged to any of the clubs. Unfortunately they did not.
If I were to start my own golf club today I would hope it came out looking exactly like The Golf Club in New Albany, OH. The Golf Club was founded in 1967 by Fred Jones with the simple goal of having a private club where he and his friends could play golf and enjoy themselves. Mr. Jones managed to piece together a 400 acre parcel of land and then took a chance on a virtually unknown architect by the name of Pete Dye to build his golf course. When the project was finished a world class golf club was left as a monument to their partnership.
Thanks to my fellow Top 100 golfer Larry Berle I'm playing The Golf Club today with his friend Bob.
Columbus, OH is one of America’s great golf cities and, at the time of my visit, home to four Top 100 courses. My friend Larry Berle who has played the Top 100 himself and wrote a book about it was kind enough to arrange for both of us to play at Double Eagle Club and The Golf Club with one of his friends who happens to be a member at both places.
I arrived in Columbus on Friday night and the weather forecast was pretty iffy for Saturday. For once I was prepared and brought my rain gear in the event that it was needed. Upon checking into my hotel I got on my computer I found emails from both Larry and from our host telling me that Larry was unable to get a standby flight out of Minneapolis and was going to miss the weekend. Air travel is always an adventure.
I wasn't quite sure what to expect as I headed to Wisconsin to play Whistling Straits. Despite its high ranking of #22 on the Top 100 list, I wasn't overly excited to play it. From what I could tell about the course from my research on the internet and from watching events played there on TV it was probably not going to be my kind of course. I was hoping to be surprised. After a huge debacle getting from Richmond, VA to Wisconsin I was eventually rerouted to land in Milwaukee instead of Madison. While Milwaukee is closer to Kohler it caused a bit of a logistical problem for my other plans on the trip.
After finishing up my morning game at Whistling Straits I hopped in the car and drove about an hour south to Milwaukee where I would be playing Milwaukee Country Club. The Milwaukee Country Club was founded in 1894 and was strictly a social and family club at the time of its birth. Just about a year later golf was introduced to the club and land was leased for a 9 hole course. In 1909 the club found out that their lease on the land would not be renewed and they moved to the present day location. In 1929 the new course designed by H.S. Colt and C.H. Alison was opened.