Remarkable Golf Courses

By Iain T. Spragg

Remarkable Golf Courses encompasses the extremes of the sport – from the highest golf course in La Paz, Bolivia, to the lowest, in Death Valley, USA; from the most northerly in the Arctic Circle to the most southerly in Tierra del Fuego.

The many quirks of the golfing world are covered, such as the 18th green the other side of the River Lea which is serviced by an electric ferry, or the LA golf course that has its own funicular railway, or the floating golf hole in Idaho, where it’s not just the pin position that’s changed every day, it’s the distance from the shore!

Golf courses that feature neolithic standing stones (Scotland), Roman roads (England), and ruined medieval castles (Wales) take their place alongside the old temples of Delhi or a UNESCO World Heritage bridge that is used to link the 9th and 10th at Angkor Wat.

There are the beloved classic courses of St. Andrews, Carnoustie, Royal St. George and Westward Ho!. There are spectacular golf courses hewn out of the Nevada and Arizona desert, green oases in a cactus-strewn, rocky landscape, along with Hawaiian courses fringed by barren black lava flows. But nothing can beat the thrill in Guatemala of lining up your drive on an active volcano at the Fuego Maya course.

In comparison there are the traditional wind-blown Scottish links, such as the Machrie Hotel on the island of Islay which has the most blind greens on any course, or the remote Isle of Barra where greens are only accessible via a kissing gate.

Fancy swapping countries mid-round? You can at the Llanmymynech club in Wales. At the fourth hole golfers tee off in Wales and putt out on the green in England. Remarkable Golf Courses brings together some astonishing stories with some extraordinary photography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Feb 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781911595755

Iain T. Spragg

Iain Spragg is a sports journalist and author with 20 years experience. He has written for a wide range of national newspapers including the Daily Mirror and The Daily Telegraph, while his book credits include Twickenham:100 Years of Rugby’s HQ, The World Cup in 100 Objects and Cycling’s Strangest Tales. He is the co-author of Remarkable Golf Courses (2017), shortlisted for illustrated sports book of the year.

Book preview

Introduction

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A serene scene at Golf Club Q in Anseong, South Korea, a beautiful course that didn’t quite make it into the list of remarkables.

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The hole marker for the most established contender for ‘golf’s longest hole’ in Satsuki, Japan.

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The unique river island hole at the Himalayan Golf Club in Nepal.

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A church encompassed by a golf course, St Enodoc in Cornwall, England.

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A hallowed spit of land where the river Eden meets the North Sea, the site of St Andrews’ Old Course.

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Golf and vulcanology seem to go hand in hand; there are many golf courses near volcanoes, in this case on Big Island, Hawaii, the Francis I’i Brown Golf Course.

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The Green Monkey Course at Sandy Lane, Barbados.

There are two kinds of remarkable golf course. Of the first variety there are tens of thousands, maybe more, and none of them are included in this book. These are the golf courses on which golfers have conquered their demons and put together the round of their life; a round in which all the golfing perils of slice, hook, top, shank and the yips disappear and the final score makes their handicap look like the invention of a rogue and a scoundrel. That course will remain forever remarkable in their eyes, just as the Worcestershire Golf Course in Malvern Wells, England, remains remarkable to me.

But even though the 14th hole of the Worcestershire is a stern test; a blind drive into a valley avoiding the old railway line, and pulling up short of a Swilken-Burn-like brook, it is not enough to make it into the book. Never mind the fact that the contoured, split-level green has rheumy-eyed senior golfers requesting their ashes be spread across it. Never mind that it is in the rainshadow of the Precambrian Malvern Hills that so inspired Sir Edward Elgar. It is simply a beautiful golf course, not a remarkable one.

The remarkable golf courses that have made it into this book include some of the best in the world and regularly jostle for places amongst Golf Digest’s top 100. Yet some of them wouldn’t come close. They are remarkable for other reasons. The Isle of Barra in Scotland’s Hebridean islands might not have much in common with the Himalayan Golf Club in Nepal, but both have greens that are protected from grazing animals by wire fences. To get on the green in Barra, golfers must pass through an old-fashioned ‘kissing gate’ that prevents the grazing sheep and cattle from wandering across the putting surface. The Himalayan course has gated greens but it also has the unique distinction that it possesses an island green, one that is sited in the middle of a river.

Neither of these two courses are grand in scale, and in a sport where length is often revered we have included one of the longest courses, Jade Dragon in China, which at 8,432 yards is indeed a monster length for 18 holes. The compensating factor is that because it is one of the most elevated golf courses in the world, the atmosphere is thin and balls travel up to 20% further. Never mind the fact that golfers are struggling for oxygen at that elevation, when the shot is made you get a lot more bang for your backswing.

The competitive nature of golfers has long driven golf club owners looking for a unique selling point to claim they have the longest hole in golf. Some have done this simply by extending back tees which have then fallen out of use and rendered the claim invalid. The course at Satsuki in Japan has a 964-yard par seven hole, which has stood the test of time. But in between writing and publishing this book a new challenger could easily take the title.

The world’s largest green is said to lie at the end of the 695-yard fifth hole, a par six, at the International Golf Club in Massachusetts, with an area in excess of 28,000 square feet. But given the increasing standards of grass maintenance how hard could it be to let the mower loose and increase the green size to claim that crown? So in this book we have treated the record breakers of golf warily, though with a sneaking admiration for the fourth hole at Kobe in Japan. That is an 188-yard par four and must count as one of the shortest par fours in golf. In contrast, the 19th hole at the Legends Golf & Safari Resort in South Africa is the longest par three at 631 metres. As the number suggests, the hole doesn’t form part of the standard round and players need to call on the services of the resort helicopter to get them to the mountaintop tee. Being so far away calls for a large green and though the temptation might have been to create one in the shape of a barn door, the architects have opted for an outline of Africa instead. As golf challenges go it doesn’t come much bigger than that.

Golf can be an inspiring game and as the writer P. G. Wodehouse maintained it can also provide some salutary life lessons. Sudden success in golf is like the sudden acquisition of wealth. It is apt to unsettle and deteriorate the character, is one of his classic lines on the game. He also professed, to find a man’s true character, play golf with him. Wodehouse, more than any novelist in the last 150 years, intertwined golf with his plots and in his many parodies of the English upper classes there is a lot of swishing with a mashie niblick. He played his golf at Royal Addington in Surrey and once gave his home address as one of the bunkers after deciding he spent more time there. Another great British literary figure, former Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman, is forever linked with the St Enodoc golf course in Cornwall. Apart from its undoubted beauty the course has the rare distinction of having the ancient church of St Enodoc entirely within the bounds of the golf course. Fittingly, Sir John is buried in the graveyard, the shortest of irons away from the course that once rewarded him with that most unprecedented three in his celebrated poem Seaside Golf.

In the search for remarkable golf courses we have gone to the extremes. Golf is played under the midnight sun in Tromsø, Norway, on the world’s most northerly 18-hole course, as it can at the Lofoten Links and the prodigious number of beautiful courses in Iceland. At the other extreme, the Ushuaia Golf Course in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, is the most southerly golf course in the world. After an energy-draining round, golfers can go back to the clubhouse and pick up a penguin, the grilled kind, not the chocolate-covered variety.

The course at Jade Dragon may be high, but La Paz in Bolivia holds the record for the world’s highest golf course. In Death Valley, California, golfers ignore the date-scavenging coyotes to play the world’s lowest course at 214 feet below sea level. And who says geologists have got no sense of humour? A little further up Death Valley from the aptly named Furnace Creek is the Devil’s Golf Course. Anybody packing their clubs and setting off to challenge el diablo will be sorely disappointed as it is the name given to a flat but infinitely craggy surface that even a scratch-playing Beelzebub would find hard to break 100 on.

Slow play may be the curse of the professional game and weekend golf at oversubscribed clubs, but there are some courses where it is no hardship to wait and take in the surroundings. Golf is played against the backdrop of some of the planet’s most remarkable scenery. In Sedona, Arizona, two courses have the incredible red sandstone outcrops of Sedona to marvel at, while at the Hornafjörður course in Iceland, the vast Vatnajökull ice cap dominates the horizon. But few can match the jaw-dropping landscape of the Upper Course at Whisper Rock in Arizona. Whatever is marked on your card at the end of the round is incidental to the experience of treading the fairways on what is a truly monumental golf course.

Nature has been involved in shaping golf courses for an aeon or two, but remarkable historical features occasionally make their appearance on the fairways as well. In Britain there is quite a bit of history scattered through the countryside and at Lundin Ladies in Scotland, the circa 4,000-year-old standing stones are unmissable hazards on the second fairway. The Painswick Golf Club in Gloucestershire, England, has made use of Bronze-Age earthworks originally created as part of an ancient hill fort and incorporated them into several holes. What looks like a Pete Dye- or a Tom Fazio-created mound was actually constructed by a wode-covered ancient Celt, keen on seeing off rival tribes and eventually the Romans. Pennard Golf Club on the Gower peninsular in Wales boasts a relative newcomer compared to these two. Their castle was originally constructed in the wake of the Norman invasion and the initial wooden fort was converted to stone through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Time and erosion has left it a romantic ruin.

All these historical features are managed with care, which leads us to another area of remarkable golf courses, built where land has already been exploited by man. The National Course in Indiana, Streamsong Red and Blue in Florida, and the Green Monkey course in Barbados are all built on former quarries or land that has been strip-mined. They are not alone in reclaiming once derelict land and putting it to good use, but they show the sophistication and degree of invention that golf architects have brought to the modern course layout.

The work of the original golf architects, men like Old Tom Morris of St Andrews and Harry Colt are also celebrated in these pages. Writing an exact chronology of the evolution of golf on the east and west coasts of Scotland can be a contentious exercise (though Old Tom had a hand in both). There are arguments for the Old Course at St Andrews and at Musselburgh being the oldest links. But Musselburgh has the plaque and also the rare distinction of being an extant golf course that was subsequently encircled by a horse racing track – and not one created within. What is certain is that Prestwick on the Ayrshire coast hosted the first Open Championship in 1860 and along with neighbours Troon and Turnberry vied with St Andrews, North Berwick and Carnoustie for golfing pre-eminence in the Victorian age.

As to the future, golf is still expanding its territory of influence, even if some of the more traditional courses are struggling. China has seen a rapid expansion in the middle classes and the passion for playing golf has matched the enthusiasm for driving Mercedes and Jaguars. A less predictable destination that is expanding its number of courses is Iceland. More people play golf in Iceland per head of population than any other country in the world and should you wish to play golf with a backdrop of volcanoes, fjords, glaciers, geothermal features and get attacked by arctic terns, then it’s the go-to destination for golfers. And like their Viking ancestors they’re not averse to stirring up a bit of trouble. They have abandoned the strict 18-hole format to their competitions and have vowed to set the number of holes on courses to suit the location and the people who want to play there, which is a remarkable move in itself.

Throughout this book there are many such stories. There is the golf course that has a tee in one country and its putting green in the country next door (no passport required). There is the course built by one man’s determination to combat racial discrimination and play the game he loved, and on a lighter note there is the golf course with the world’s most famous ‘named hole’. There are many truly beautiful courses that haven’t made it into this miscellany. For all these golf challenges there are the trusty top 100s found in golf magazines and on the Internet and whose inclusion on such a list automatically hikes the green fee. Take a trip to the Isle of Barra course, though, and you can play a round for £10 or purchase a life membership for £100. That wouldn’t even get you past the fifth hole at Wynn, Las Vegas.

Frank Hopkinson, 2017

Abu Dhabi Golf Club

Sas Al Nakhl, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

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The view over the ninth green from the roof of the clubhouse during the 2017 Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship.

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Henrik