Georgia Golf – The Creek Club, Long Shadow are excellent choices for vacation, Masters week

I’ll write longer pieces over the next few days, but Masters week was made even more memorable by two excellent days of golf not far from fabled Augusta.  About ninety minutes away, Mike Young designed an excellent, affordable public course, Long Shadow G.C. in Madison, GA, just one mile off Route 20, the Interstate that connects Atlanta and Augusta.

With center-line bunkers, steeply undulating greens, and a routing which – rather than being the cookie-cutter doctrine of symmetry – showcases the strongest holes on the most interesting pieces of the property, the course should instantly make the list of must plays in Georgia.  Moreover, at $39-64, it’s a steal.  You can get in three or four rounds here for the same price as the latest Tom Fazio design.

I’ll write more on Long Shadow soon, but today let’s start the duscussion of Jim Engh’s The Creek Club at Reynolds Plantation.

THE CREEK CLUB at REYNOLDS PLANTATION

1100 Creek Club Drive

Greensboro, GA 30642

706.467.1681

www.reynoldsplantation.com

 

Design:  Six stars (all ratings out of seven)

Natural Setting:  Five and ½ – six stars

Conditioning:  Six stars

Value:  N/A Private.  Memebrships are $65,000 for the all courses at Reynolds except Creek Club, $90,000 for all five course including Creek

Overall:  Six stars

 

 

 

            People always ask me what the first rule is in evaluating a golf course.  The answer is somewhat altruistic:  judge a course on its value to the game of golf, not on what it cost to attain.  The owners of Reynolds Plantation may have known this as they planned the fifth course at their idyllic Georgia resort; they simply told the architect, “give us something different.”  They already had courses by Jack Nicklaus, Tom Fazio, Rees Jones, and Bob Cupp.  They weren’t pipe dreaming of hosting a TOUR event.  They weren’t interested in bragging rights from magazine rankings.  They wanted a unique course.  They wisely selected Jim Engh.

 

            People are slowly coming to understand the nuances of Jim Engh’s designs.  After winning three “best new course” awards in a row, people still thought it was because his courses were pretty.  “He gets all the sites,” said one of his friends, a golf architect himself.  “But Jim has a flavor all his own which is a really bold and creative interpretation of the design features he saw in Ireland and Scotland,” he continues.  “That’s the real reason why his courses are so good.  Sure, you’d have to trip over yourself to blow it on one of those sites, but Jim creates designs that are unique.  No one looks like him and it’s growing on people.  Plus he always comes in on time and under budget.”

 

            For his part, Engh was thrilled with the freedom and used the vast expanse of the plot to refine some of his older ideas and experiment with new ones.  He’s always loved his one-of-a-kind “muscle bunkers,” (where the sand is flanked by mounded sidewalls), large greens with distinct tiers, and player friendly sidewalls that kick errant shots back into play making the course easier for amateurs and providing many different ways to get close to a hole.  But with an easy-going, open-minded client, Jim could take some chances and create a design that stands out not only at the facility, but in the entire country.

 

            How successful was Engh?  I had the following conversation with one local PGA professional from a nearby course.  He has years of experience playing all the layouts at Reynolds:

 

            “What course has the best architecture?”

 

            “Creek Club.”

 

“OK, what’s second?”

 

“Creek Club.”

 

“Well, which has the best greens?”

 

“Creek Club.”

 

“Second best?”

 

“Creek Club.”

 

“What other course should I play besides Creek Club?”

 

“Creek Club.”

 

I got the picture and so did the members.  At first, they were concerned with the different look – the center-line hazards with imposing sidewalls rising out of the ground dramatically – assuming by implication that because it looked puzzling, it would be too hard.  But once they played it, they fell in love with it.  Many members have posted the best scores of their lives at the Creek Club in cluding two women, one who never before broke 80 and shot 78 and another who never broke par and shot 1-under. 

 

            Though the 6-1 drubbing his North Dakota Fighting Sioux suffered at the hands of Boston College during the 2008 NCAA Frozen Four hockey tournament was still fresh in his mind, even watching the team from his alma mater get squashed like floppy grapes in a Sonoma County winery couldn’t quench the fire in Engh’s heart for great golf course architecture.  He brightened instantly when we began to discuss how much his work at The Creek Club – the fifth and only fully private course at the Reynolds Plantation Resort.

 

            “They told me right at the get-go, ‘build us something completely different'” explained Engh.  So just like a master sushi chef whose patron says “Omakase” (“Surprise me”), Engh obliged.  “I tried to take conventional expectations of golf course design and pull their nose a little bit” he says, meaning it in an endearing way, not as an iconoclast.  “I just like showing people things they’ve either never seen before, or that they might have seen before, but just not quite the way I reproduced it.”

Coming soon:  Is it the Creek Club or the GREEK club?  Exactly how long a shadow will Long Shadow cast?