Beauty and the Beast - Couples takes a rise out of 'resort golf'

They say dog owners often end up resembling their dogs but it seems you can't say the same about golf course designers and their courses. Fred Couples might have been the Little Easy as a player but there's nothing laid-back about his track at The Rise, in British Columbia.

I'm using 'his' a little loosely here. If anyone noticed a certain irony in the man whose 'signature course' this is claimed to be admitting on camera that "My expertise is coming in and just touching the corners of a Picasso," he didn't mention it when the club's website was being put together.

But then this whole 'signature' concept has been largely rumbled, anyway, so credit where it's due to architect Gene Bates...

Maybe if Fred had been a little more hands-on, some of the club's older patrons wouldn't be stocking up on the Deep Heat, for it seems The Rise is well-named and as what goes up must come down, you'll also encounter The Fall, The Climb, The Drop, The Contour and The Exhaustion.

Factor in "the knee-high fescue that borders many of the fairways" - just what the senior citizens' fourball ordered - and you realise that "the ultimate in resort community living" comes at a price that is not just measured in dollars.

While we self-appointed course connoisseurs can get picky, though (and Robert Thompson doesn't hold back) I sometimes wonder if we overlook a certain innocence we once had and which many golfers still do - namely that when a course looks as gorgeous as this, we didn't actually give a rat's behind what the gradients were like, what the rough was like or whether the bunkers were a tad overdone.

We just played golf. And considered any aches afterwards as a reasonable tariff.

So even if it helps if the caddies here are of Nepalese extraction; even if a surfeit of blind shots rules out love at first sight and even if the regulars end up with calf muscles like a district nurse, I'm prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt. Those contours, climbs and plummets make The Rise look like an adventure and I can't dislike any course that plays like an adventure.