Black Mesa Golf Club – Espanola, N.M.

BLACK MESA GOLF CLUB
115 State Road 399
Espanola, NM
505.747.8946
www.blackmesagolfclub.com

 Architect:  Baxter Spann
Par – 72
Excitement Level – 10/12
Difficulty – 9/12
Cost – weekend $64, add $18 for cart, M-Th, $55, twilight $35
shoulder seasons offer bargains
Yearly Memberships – None

Design – Seven stars
Natural Setting – Six and ½ stars
Conditioning – Five and ½ stars
Value – Seven stars
Overall – Seven stars

 

Tees                           Yards             Rating            Slope

 Black                         7307               73.9                141
Blue                           6719               70.5                136
White                         6277               68.6                130
Green                         5871               66.9               125
Gold                           5162               71.2                125

 

            Two extreme personalities dominate golf course developers: those who know that great golf course architecture is what makes an enduring, world class golf course and those who think money and a brand name designer can buy a major championship venue.  The folly of the latter cannot be overstated.  Using their riches like a hammer, think money can bludgeon aside opposition, criticism and common sense with a wave of their wad.  Such men have built gaudy monstrosities for decades.

 

Eventually, the economics and facts betray them as peddlers and purveyors of bombast.  No amount of French cologne, Italian leather or reflections in a double cognac can insulate them from the public perception that they perpetrate a fraud upon golf.  Conversely, men like Mike Keiser (who built Bandon Dunes) show how genius creates a legend and show how great golf course architecture draws from poets the literature of the age.

 

            I can’t say for sure how far along the “legend” road Eddie Peck, owner of Black Mesa Golf Club will go, but his life is serene right now – good enough to even justify wearing his trademark rose colored glasses.  He has his three loyal dogs, Augie, Roscoe and Yardley scampering around him as he plays golf at his home – his own golf vision – Black Mesa near Sante Fe, New Mexico.  He smiles warmly as he takes a puff on an Arturo Fuente Hemingway Signature cigar.  He takes quiet, dignified pride in the high desert masterpiece architect Baxter Spann’s hard work fashioned.

 

Make no mistake, the opening of Black Mesa is a watershed moment in the battle for mainstream acceptance of the neoclassical, strategic courses blossoming around the country.  It up-ends the homogenized, flavorless “waterfalls and real estate,” “harder is better” penal designs that blighted the landscape from 1960-1990.  We now can clearly see the high water mark of the golf design craft.  Even hardcore, well-heeled travelers giddily squeal over the course like teenage girls over a new Dave Matthews Band CD.

 

Indeed, Peck and architect Baxter Spann might also be inclined to joke that it’s “Tobacco Road West” for it was an impromptu visit by Spann to Strantz’s Carolina sandhills masterpiece that inspired Spann to go for broke, design outside the box, and ultimately build one of the three most critically important golf courses to open in our generation (the others are Bandon Dunes and Tobacco Road).  Spann wrote in an interview with Ran Morrissett:

 

“Just before getting into [planning] the final routing of the course, I had played Tobacco Road.  I was blown away by the dramatic features there and by some of the chances Mike Strantz took on the design of that course.  I also knew that many felt that TR was “over the top” or overly severe in many places, but to me it was not any more severe than many of the great places in Ireland or Scotland that are revered by everyone.  There just haven’t been enough guys who are willing to risk working “on the edge” to create something that breaks away form the routine, formulaic golf hole design patterns that have become so prevalent in America.  Tobacco Road slapped me in the face and made me realize what wild and exciting golf holes can result when conventional wisdom and traditional limits are abandoned in favor of fresh creativity and vision.”

 

Thankfully, for the game, Peck understood and embraced the same concepts.  He allowed Spann a free hand to incorporate just a few blind or semi-blind shots and to incorporate heaving, contour-filled greens as the course meandered through around and sometimes over the dramatic bleak jagged black hills that tower over the desert floor and loom on all sides of you as you play.  Astonishingly, on a site with this rugged, heaving topography, they moved only between 100,000 and 200,000 cubic yards of earth to build the course.

 

Spann accomplished three astounding feats while moving so little earth.  First, each hole is completely distinct in layout from every other hole.  Moreover, no two consecutive holes run in the same direction and all four par threes play to different points of the compass.  Next, except for the twelfth hole, the bunkers are completely organic, with shapes following the existing grade of the terrain and designed as though there were blown out by the wind.  Finally, remarkably lucky in that the site stands on silty sand, an extreme rarity away from the coasts, Spann designed open routes to the greens and allowed the fast and firm conditions fostered by sandy soil to promote the ground game as well as the aerial game, benefiting all calibers of golfer.  In that respect, even though it’s in the high desert of New Mexico, Black mesa has a distinctly Irish flavor.  Instead of grassy dunes, the corridors of play are jagged, knife-edged rocks.  If Mordor had a golf course, it would be Black Mesa.