Reader’s Trip Report: Whistling Straits

A couple of months ago, Adam Sachs, a reader in Kansas City and a peripatetic occasional contributor to this blog, visited Whistling Straits, a course that’s been on my golf to-do list for a long time. Excerpts from his report:

I won a couples package to play Whistling Straits in a charity raffle fifteen or so years ago, but could never figure out a time to schlep up to Wisconsin to cash in on my luck. I goaded a client into inviting me to the PGA Championship two summers ago, and was awestruck by the beauty and seeming impossibility of the golf course. This summer, after a business meeting in Milwaukee, I finally played it.

Sachs was not predisposed to love the course, which had struck him as excessively artificial, in the classic Pete Dye manner:

To me, Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore represent the be-all and end-all of modern golf course design. I love that they had the vision and confidence to move so little dirt when they built Sand Hills, one of the finest golf courses on the planet, and that they considered about a hundred and eighty different possible holes before landing on their favorites. 

Nevertheless, he loved Whistling Straits, and describes his visit there as “one of the most beautiful and pure golf-course experiences of my life.”

The last four holes are magic. The photo below is of the seventeenth, a par three called Pinched Nerve. The bunker with the wispy fescue patch above it in the photo below guards the right front of the green, leaving only a narrow window for running up the ball.

I guess maybe it’s time to start thinking about booking a flight to Milwaukee.

Why Howard Was Completely Wrong About Our Buddies Trip to Nova Scotia

Eight friends and I recently spent four days playing six and a half rounds at Cabot Links and Cabot Cliffs, on Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia. There would have been twelve of us if three of the five lawyers in the original group hadn’t dropped out. The first lawyer to bail was Howard, whose principal objections were: (a) traveling to Cabot takes longer than traveling to Scotland; (b) playing two golf courses three times each is a waste of a good golf trip; and (c) overseas golf itineraries should consist solely of famous old courses that have been famous for a long time.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

It’s true that Cabot is slightly tricky to get to. Unless you have your own airplane, you fly to Halifax and then drive for three hours. But the flight is a breeze, especially by comparison with any flight to the British Isles—it’s less than two hours from either New York or Boston—and the drive, which follows the coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, is pleasant in itself, especially if, as in our case, you’re being driven in one of Cabot’s fleet of eleven-passenger Mercedes vans. And once you’ve arrived at Cabot you don’t have to travel again until it’s time to go home. (There’s an ice-cream stand across the street, but you can walk.)

As for repeatedly playing the same two golf courses, I think three rounds could be considered the minimum ideal exposure to any great golf course. Repetition on that scale is hard to pull off if you’re racing death to the end of your bucket list, but you can’t fully appreciate a course until you given yourself opportunities to make up for bad shots and stupid decisions in earlier rounds. Besides, the best courses improve with repetition.

Photo by Mike Bowman.

Both courses at Cabot also belong on the surprisingly long list of new and relatively new courses that hold their own in any comparison with the great courses of the past. (Cabot Links was designed by Rod Whitman, a Canadian protégé of Bill Coore’s, and Cabot Cliffs was designed by Coore and Ben Crenshaw.) And Cabot comes very close to my conception of the ideal golf resort.

Photo by Mike Bowman.

Our rooms—all of which overlooked both the golf course and the water—were nice, but not too nice. The food was good, but not ridiculous. The staff was unfailingly friendly and accommodating without ever seeming overbearing. The week after our visit, one of the members of the women’s version of our club’s Sunday Morning Group went to Cabot with a friend. They liked it so much that, before they left, they signed up for a return visit, in the fall. All the guys on our trip are going to go back, too, Howard be damned.

Photo by Mike Bowman.

Reader’s Trip Report: Pinehurst, North Carolina

photo 1

This year’s U.S. Open and the U.S. Women’s Open will be held at Pinehurst during consecutive weeks, beginning on June 12 (for the men) and June 19 (for the women). The U.S.G.A. has never tried that before, although my club has done it successfully with the men’s and women’s member-guests. Adam Sachs, a reader in Kansas City, recently traveled to Pinehurst with three friends to check things out.

Sachs 9

Sachs is the guy in the middle in the photo above. The guy on the left is Steve Swartzman, and the guy on the right is Chip Fleischer, whose fiftieth birthday was their excuse for taking the trip. They all went to high school together. We haven’t met Glenn Jordan, the fourth member of the group, yet, but you get the idea.

Pinehurst flag

From Sachs’s report:
Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore happily brought Pinehurst No. 2 back to its sandy Donald Ross roots in 2011. As for its altogether vexing, convex-shaped greens, our caddies Eddie Mac and Jamie liked to say, “Mr. Ross likes you to visit, but he doesn’t want you to stay too long.” The restored waste areas now define the course as much as the greens. We had top-notch caddies, a sun-drenched afternoon, and nary a gust of wind, so scoring conditions were ripe. I’d like to tell you we all managed to stay in the nineties. But I can’t.

No 2

Pinehurst No. 2 is definitely bucket-list material, but from now on my destination courses in the area will be Pine Needles and Mid Pines, just five miles down the road. Pine Needles has hosted three U.S. Women’s Opens in the past twenty years, yet the clubhouse personnel were low-key and friendly; the practice area was conveniently close to the first tee; and the golf course was full of rolling hills and (of course) pine needles. Our hands-down favorite course of the trip was Mid Pines: 

mid pines

I myself haven’t been to Pinehurst in about ten years, and I want to go back. And here, finally, in the photo below, is Jordan, the fourth man. He’s standing with Swartzman, even though the guy he went to college with is Fleischer. Jordan is a sportswriter for the Portland (Maine) Press-Herald.

chip (1)

Sachs also forwarded me an email from Swartzman, whose post-trip reflections support my theory that men get to know each other mainly through parallel play:
As I told Adam in the car (to Adam’s relief, driven by someone other than me) on the way home, I’m not sure what I’ll say when Evelina asks me what we talked about all weekend.  She’ll want to know what everyone’s doing and how old their kids are, and she’ll ask about everyone’s health, summer plans, sex lives, etc. Of course, we didn’t talk about any of that. Should I tell her about Chip and Adam almost choking at the thought that a waitress had farted after delivering our food (when in fact it was me)? Or about how serious everyone was about taking home a large glass boot? The great thing about gatherings like this is how little we talk about our lives, our cares and concerns, or the future.
I couldn’t agree more. They’ll be plenty of time for all that other crap in the grave. Meanwhile, check out these urinals:

urinals midpines