WESTFIELD, NJ – One thing is for certain: in the coming months you’ll hear a lot about Shackamaxon Country Club, just a half an hour west of the City, in northern New Jersey.
While the name of the golf course is indeed a double-breaking putt, if you think that’s tough, you should come and play the course. An old A.W. Tillinghast design from 1916, the course has had touch-ups from several designers and even hosted – get this for a name – the “PGA Tour 1955 Cavalcade of Golf,” (a new event that year), due to it’s remarkable length and relentless penal architecture. (It was 6,700+ yards back in 1916!)
RDC Group has recently purchased the Club, and that’s good news as their track record is excellent. Everyone in golf marvels at their resurrection of mighty Forsgate, the final course in the great architectural portfolio of the great Macdonald-Raynor-Banks Bloodline. Moreover, New York City golfers all celebrate RDC’s new management of Gil Hanse’s Tallgrass Country Club, a fascinatingly strategic design which is a great value to boot. Chris Schiavone is a Great Friend of Golf, (Capital G, F, and G), and he’s had remarkable success so far with those two courses. So there’s good synergies here, can’t you tell?
Even so, Chris will have his hands full at Shack. Tillinghast basically designed two types of courses – courses that would host large championships, and what he called “sporty courses.” Shack is one of his sporty courses. It has one of only two island greens that he ever designed, (after a semi-blind drive!?), the course frequently employs bracketing bunkers, and even has some ram-rod straight holes that could be from the architects that intervened between Tillie and Kay. Finally, it needs to cut down many of the Cavalcade of Trees that cramp play.
Still, it has good internal movement in the greens, and it has a fine mix of long and short holes. The par-5s are the most memorable, along with that island green at nine, (“We would hate that hole even more if it were 18,” quipped one member), and the par-3s are strong, if a little tree-choked at times.
RDC has hired Stephen Kay, who so successfully restored Forsgate for them, to start work on some nips and tucks to the bunkering, as well as a re-sequencing of the golf holes.
“We’ve been restablizing the bunkers so we can return them to the flash faces of Tillie’s day. We also re-ordered the holes,” Kay explained. Instead of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18 you’ll play 10-11-12-13-14-15-16-5-9-8-6-7-1-2-3-4-17-18. Got that?
Yeah, right. Thanks for the Cavalcade of Trigonometry. Sounds more like a safecracker’s code or football signals…Got a map? Guess what? They do! But it’s from 1916 and it’s got six holes that don’t exist, and it’s missing a few holes that do! That made for interesting and laugh-filled discussions between Suzy Abrams Jones, Head Pro Scott Barnaby, Kay, and myself.
“Jay, you’re giving me shingles!” Kay quipped when I kept trying to find non-existent holes on the map of the not-quite-to-scale course.
Anyway, it makes for a par 35-36=71 with three par-3s on the front, but one on the back (17…Tille liked it so much, he wrote about it), and two par-5s on the front but one on the back.
The re-sequencing has proved popular with members.
“I like it,” said one young member. “The long par-5 that used to be 10 makes a good start to the course and really moves along play.”
“We liked it too,” said a young husband and wife. “I get to play my favorite hole at number 2, the pretty par-3,” said the pretty girl. And we get some of the toughest holes out of the way early.”
Still, the re-sequencing leaves the closing hole as a short, bland par-4 with a tiny green that doesn’t fit well with the rest of the course. Perhaps they could re-re-sequence the back side so that it starts at the short par-4 13th and ends at the par-5 12th, a true summation of all the architectural ideas that came before, a cavalcade even…
If any redesign work is done, Kay is a good choice as he adheres to the concepts of the original architect and will make the course feel a seemless whole.
Indeed, a cavalcade of Tillinghast courses are either in restoration/renovation projects right now, or have been recently renovated. Paramount Country Club has tapped former Tom Doak associate Jim Urbina, fresh of his miraculous rescue of the greens at Tillie’s San Francisco Golf Club, and work is expected to be completed late this year. Fenway recently underwent a Gil Hanse restoration that turned the talk of all Westchester high society to golf course architecture.
