(Pic above: THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE THREE-PUTT, photo by Mike Mosely)
Golf Course Trades has a new webinar series of podcasts, interviews, and lectures that promises to be an interesting look at the golf, skiing, and resort industries.
On February 23, at 1PM EST, I’ll actually be hosting an interview where golf architect Mark Fine and head superintendent Mark Anderson talk about the recent restoration work completed at Copake Country Club, just south of Albany, New York.
We profiled Copake for GCT a few months ago, and the superlative job the club and Mark Fine did restoring this Golden Age, Devereux Emmet golf course should stand as a shining example of how a small public golf course can get just as brilliant a restoration as a big ticket country club.
You can register for the event here.
And you can read the article about Copake here.
From the article:
Savoring the elixir-like, forest-scented air, I scanned the countryside, reveling in the setting. To my left, the second fairway tumbled downhill between the Spectacles bunkers – two traps resembling the eyes of an alligator hiding in the water, waiting to pounce. A golfer, frozen in fear of embarrassing himself in front of the players on the nearby tee boxes and facing a dicey half-wedge pitch over the Spectacles, shanks his shot into the fescue instead. To my right, the group in front of us plays to the par-3 12th green, a small disc set dangerously on the edge of a seemingly bottomless drop-off. There’s a pained “AHHHHHHHH!” as a ball trickles into the greenside bunker. Far off in the distance the 14th fairway rises into a dizzying ascent. This confluence of holes is one of the course’s shockras – an old school, Golden Age crossover that provides an exciting mini-crescendo during the course of the round.
“Such is Copake Country Club, the little 6,300-yard public golf course that punches far above its weight. Built in 1921 “by either Devereux Emmet or one of his design associates,” as restoration and renovation architect Mark Fine put it, and opened in 1922, Copake will celebrate its 100th anniversary next year looking and playing every bit as strategic as when Emmet and friends completed the course for Sam and Sidney Zasuly as part of their Camp Copake Lake Resort, one of the original Catskill Mountains, Borscht Circuit playgrounds that, decades later, gave us Grossinger’s and the Concord.”
