Great golf holes - 3rd at Windsor Park GC, Japan

They may not be the most aesthetically scalloped bunkers in golf but this mid-fairway spine of hazards makes the third at Windsor Park Golf Club a challenge from the start.

Too many par-5s comprise a dull, two-shot slog before an interesting approach. Here, however, you either aim between the jaws of the two lines of bunkers guarding the right side of the fairway, your reward being to open up the green for your second, or you play comparatively safely down the left.

The longer hitters then have the option of playing well short of the green or else getting as close as they can but having to aim for a much narrower fairway.

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.

Birkdale designer and some home truths

His grandson might be taking some flak for Royal Birkdale's revamp but there may be no more fitting a man to put his name to an Open Championship venue than Frederick Hawtree.

It seems that Fred, who knocked the Lancashire course into its current shape 77 years ago, was firmly of the view that golf should be open to all, once declaring that "manners matter and money does not". He was the co-founder of the National Association of Public Golf Courses and the Artisan Golfers' Association and had a bigger hand in my own golfing life than I realised.

I lived in Birmingham for 18 years and while I played golf much more then than I do now, I cared considerably less about golf architecture, so it never occurred to me to ask why the calibre of public courses in and around England's second city is so renowned.

According to this article, however, Fred Hawtree was responsible for all but one of them.

Further south, it is still possible to play his very first project, at the delightfully-appointed Croham Hurst club in Croydon, Surrey (reviews here; aerial here) which opened in 1912 and was a joint design venture with James Braid (although Golf Digest suggests that Braid was largely a figurehead).

Elsewhere in the Hawtree portfolio, it would be remiss of me to omit mention of his work at Sweden's Bastad Golf Club. Many of us have referred to the odd 'bastard golf course' in our time, of course, but this is the real deal...

Enjoy the Open. God is once more in his heaven.

The wait goes on for Ross's Rackham golf course

Seems like those sweating on the fate of Detroit's Rackham Golf Course - a Donald Ross design - will have to sweat a little longer, as appeal court judges mull over the city council's proposal to sell the municipal course, which could leave it at the fate of housing developers.

You can zoom in on a sharp aerial of the course here. Tinkering to accommodate roadworks means that only the back nine remains of Ross's original work, which is reviewed at the latter end of this piece by golf architecture scribe Jeff Mingay. Lose Rackham, it must be said and you also lose the origin of one of the most beautiful golf course photographs you could wish to see...

The Save Rackham site has full details on the fight to save the course, while GolfWeek has been looking at the fate of municipal courses in general.

Vagabond comes good with book to Dye for

Not only does Vagabond Golfer Joel Zuckerman have a new book out on the courses of Pete Dye but Joel's site and blog contains much useful stuff itself, particularly if you too are a travelling golfer.

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And as if to prove the gorgeous seamlessness with which this blog is put together, Bill Fields has a fascinating look at the hole genre of which that pictured left is the undisputed flag-bearer...

"You can get too much water on a golf course," Hogan said late in his life. "I think every golf course needs a little water, on one or two or three holes, just for aesthetics..."

A hickory treasure chest of golfing history

Lovers of golf in general will be delighted to discover this treasury of reading matter in The Society of Hickory Golfers' library but there are five architecture articles in particular, by James Braid, Harry Vardon and Pete Dye.
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Good to see my fellow golf blogger Jay Flemma getting some mainstream exposure, courtesy of this feature on golf in the Detroit area, for the Golf Channel.

Beer 'n' Browsin' Week on The Golf Course as Art

I'm wearing my fisherman's hat in Scotland this week, so I'll keep the blog ticking over today, Wednesday and Friday with links to some good reading matter I've had on the back burner for just such a hiatus.

Ray Tennenbaum's archive gets us under way. Ray is my kind of scribbler; happy to write on a variety of subjects, such as travel, comedy and of course golf.

For those of us oldies who like our monitor to replicate the magazine experience, it would have been great if all his golf pieces were reproductions of the original layout, as with the first article - Golf and the City - but content is king and there is some interesting stuff here.
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It was while reading this article on Tiger Wood's course design project in Dubai that a thought occurred to me, quickly followed by a cursory search on Google.

Good news: it would seem there's no 'Wounded Knee Golf Club' out there as yet, Tiger. Claim it while you can...


[pic courtesy of Robert Brook]

Now that's what you call an outcrop...

How strange that just a couple of days after considering the 15th at Pound Ridge Golf Club ("...roughly half the balls that hit the outcropping will bounce back onto the green, and half will ricochet 'somewhere else'") I should encounter the mother and father of outcrops at the 14th hole on southern California's Oak Quarry course.

Designed by former Tour pro Dr Gil Morgan and the Schmidt-Curley partnership, the course breathed new life into Jensen Quarry, which had supplied much of Los Angeles' limestone and marble since the early 1900s.

Nowhere is the contrast between old and new more dramatically manifest than on the course's signature hole at 14:

"This signature par 3 hole was rated the best in southern california. The tee shot spans the quarry and must land on a small peninsula like green. Intimidating but fair, it is best to trust your swing and go for it! The bail out area short right of the green is always an option when confidence is low."

Two Guys Who Golf describe it as "one of the most beautiful golf holes I have ever witnessed!...one that will remain embedded in your memory" and I'd say their course photographs actually do the place as a whole more justice than those on the club's own website.

Definitely Exhibit A for the defence when golf goes under the environmental microscope. And for the snappy Johnny Bristol soundtrack accompanying their homepage, Schmidt-Curley Design are The Golf Course As Art's architects of the month by a country mile...

Pound Ridge opens Saturday

It's strange to think that Pound Ridge Golf Club is Pete Dye's first project in New York state but looking at the website for this public course, which opens on Saturday, you could almost take a stab at the designer even if you didn't know him, just by looking at the holes.

I don't doubt for a minute that Pound Ridge could be great fun to play, as long as you're perfectly honest as to which of the five tee boxes you'll fire from, but I find that a lot of Dye courses don't sit comfortably on the terrain.

I get the impression that if the great man thinks a hole must be tweaked a certain way to maximise its challenge and your pleasure in rising to it, then he's not overly fussy about the architectural convention of making that tweak look like it was part of the natural landscape.

Once again, some of the mounding in the hole photographs looks stark and lacks subtlety (see the 8th and 16th, for example, although the 7th looks a welcome exception) and the scattergun bunker placement is too faux links for my taste.

Credit to the club, though, for including a couple of press reviews on its website that don't gloss over Dye's eccentricities. Age is certainly not wearying his mercilessness - the 12th to 14th stretch looks like real eye-of-the-needle stuff, no matter which tee you start from.