Tim Liddy, ASGCA, recently visited The Honors Course in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He spent time reviewing this top 100 golf course with a client from Savannah and then spent time with the superintendent David Stone. David, the only superintendent that is a member of the Tennessee Golf Hall of Fame, showed Tim his work with the declining population of song birds. “We all know golf courses, with wetlands and turf, are great filters for urban watersheds but David’s work further illustrates how golf courses can be a great friend to the environment,” Liddy said. ” The Honors Course represents the best in golf on many levels; golf course architecture, the environment, turf science and amateur golf.”

THE HOME HOLE AT PDGC

This is the second part of my review and video on Pete Dye Golf Club. Normally when a course takes sixteen years to build, the end result is not good. Pete Dye GC though proves that sometimes the wait is worth it. The back nine is not as strong or compelling as the front, but it is a very good nine holes of golf. (Video after the jump)

The back starts out with a cape hole that plays to a green that has a waterfall in front of it. This is  a natural stream that has been diverted to pop out below the green. It then disappears into a pipe. This is one of the few areas of the course that could use a little work as I believe it could be made to look more natural. The next tee shot is a little awkward as it appears that they correct line is over the large bunker oon the left. There is actually no fairway over the bunker but a deep, rough filled hollow. A little local knowledge helps on the eleventh.

THE INTIMIDATING FIFTEENTH

The middle stretch on the back is a little weak with the short twelfth, a fairly generic Pete Dye par three thirteenth. The fourteenth is a good par four playing downhill to a large green. The fifteenth is a good par five with a lake running the length of the hole on the right. This again is fairly typical Pete Dye but it is a good hole.

The sixteenth is a good downhill par three that can be played with a running shot. The seventeenth is another short four, but features the most undulating green on the course. This one of the dew greens where one would want to spend a lot of time just goofing around. The course then finishes with a another strong cape hole.

All in all the back nine is a solid nine holes of golf. While the front is clearly the class of the course, the two nines combine to create a stunning golf experience. So is it better that Ballyneal or Friars Head? Probably not, but it may be Pete Dye’s best golf course. It deserves its spot near the top of the Golfweek’s modern rankings. This is a course worth going out of your way to try to get to and play.

For the front nine video and review, click here.

LOOKING BACK DOWN THE SHORT SIXTH AT PDGC

I traveled up to Pete Dye Golf Club deeply skeptical about its lofty perch near the top of Golf Week’s modern rankings (#4). I have long admired Pete’s work, but a could a course in the mountains of West Virginia that took sixteen years to build really be better than Friars Head, Ballyneal and Chambers Bay? (Video and review after the jump)

After playing the course on a beautiful spring morning, I can tell you that the Pete Dye Golf Club belongs in the upper echelon of courses built since 1960. At that rarefied air, it is tough to differentuate which course is better than the other, but PDGC is a spectacular course, beautiful, challenging, and strategically interesting. The front nine has to be mentioned in any discussion on the best nine holes in golf. Its that good.

It reminds me of Yale, a course that I am obviously fond of. It is big and bold, but not in a contrived way. It has a defenite sense of place that other architects have achieved by using native vegetation. Pete instead uses the streams, rocks, exposed mining areas, a mine shaft, and the nuclear/coal plant that poke above the horizon on number five. All of this combined with well thought out holes full of strategy, interesting greens, and the ability to walk the course, make the front nine a unique and compelling golfing experience.

Standout Holes:

No. 2

No. 2- A great cape hole playing over a natural creek. Two bunkers sit on the far side of fairway right where the natural spot to bail out would be. A good drive is a must on this hole. The long green is perched above two deep bunkers and the creek. This is a solid golf hole. It sets the tone for the rest of the golf course in its bold use of the terrain and massive features.

No. 5

N0 5- The fifth is a great par five with a stream that runs along the entire right side of the hole. A good tee shot forces the player to make a decision between attacking the green that is set hard above the stream or laying up over a set of bunkers to a blind landing area. The line for this lay-up is often one of the towers from the coal plant in the distance.

No. 8

N0. 8- This is another great par five. Mr. Dye does a great job throughout the course of giving the player a defined landing area but hiding the area that may be the ideal spot from which to attack the hole. here he shows the plyer the right side of the fairway, but the ideal line which can’t be seen, is down the left along a line of bunkers. From this angle the player can run the ball up to the green which sits below them guarded by a massive bunker to the right that sits next to exposed rock that has been mined. The setting is quite beautiful and unique.

THE GREEN ON THE EIGHTH

This video was shot during a trip out to Bandon at the end of February, just as Jim and Tom Doak were pulling the last few holes of Old Macdonald together. We were discussing the yet to be finished seventeenth green and Jim quickly dropped to all fours and starts playing in te sand to help illustrate what they have envisioned.  Jim goes on to discuss how he likes to work, some of what he learned from Pete Dye, and some of his general thoughts on how courses are built in the dirt. For anyone interested in golf course design and construction, it is an interesting look into the mind of one of the most famous design associates (now elevated to co-designer for Old Mac) working today.

For more with Jim Urbina and Punchbowl Golf click, here and here

THE FIFTEENTH AT PRINCESS ANNE

I caught up with Tim Liddy in March and we shared an enjoyable round at Chechessee Creek. We sat down for a Guinness afterward and he was nice enough to let me ask him a few questions on video. (After the jump).

I worked with Tim at Princess Anne Country Club in Virgina Beach during the summer of 2007. Tim had won the job of completely overhauling an existing course that wound through an old neighborhood. The old course was generic and frankly not very good. The result of the renovation was a very playable, fun golf course that has many classic elements.

I was impressed by Tim’s willingness to try new things. He has had a good long career as Pete Dye’s righthand man and he could go about cranking out copies of his masters work, but is clear from Princess Anne and also his recent work at the Dukes Course in Scotland that he is eager and even hungry to continue to evolve as an architect. I enjoyed working for him because it allowed me to gleam something about Pete Dye’s way of thinking about design. I hope to work with Tim again in the near future.

LAKE PRESIDENTIAL'S PAR THREE NINTH

This Tuesday I ventured out to Lake Presidential, a new daily-fee course forty minutes from DC in PG county. There I met up with Troy Miller, assistant director of golf design at Landmark Land Company, which designed and now manages the course. Troy and I went to graduate school together at UGA and it was great to catch up with him while playing a solid, new course. Landmark’s design team is populated with former Pete Dye associates and that relationship is evident in the final product at Lake Presidential. The use of angles, the flat bottomed bunkers, and the size and shape of the greens is very reminiscent of a lot of Dye courses. I was pleasantly surprised though, to find a good number of allusions to classic architects like Donald Ross and Seth Raynor.

NUMBER TWELVE AT LAKE PRESIDENTIAL

The grass faces of the bunker bulged and moved like the best examples of those architects work. There were a few bunkers dropped in unexpected places that greatly added to the strategic interest of the course. The course, especially the back nine, lays on the ground, carved out of the forest.

The course was challenging, yet not overwhelming. There is decent width on most holes and a few forced carries. My main criticism of the course deals with some of the contouring around the greens. Too often the fronts of greens fell off into an overly steep run up making the aerial game the only one possible. On occasion, the transitions from some of the greenside bunkers into  the greens themselves,  were a little severe making recovery shots almost impossible to these smaller than average greens. There is lots of short grass around the greens and I will be anxious to go back in peak season to see if they can get these playing firm and fast (with an abundance of catch basins, this might be difficult). If they can, there will be a lot of fun shots from these chipping areas.

Lake Presidential is a good addition to the DC golfing scene. Priced at slightly less than the other daily-fee courses in the area, it provides decent value. While hamstrung with a routing completed by Greg Norman in 1995, the crew at Landmark did a very nice job creating a course that has both brains and brawn.  The surrounding real estate development impacts the course negatively on the front nine, but the back nine is mostly isolated from this blight. With the current state of the economy, I don’t think we need to worry about that changing anytime soon.

THE APPROACH TO THE TENTH

I would be remiss in not mentioning that this course is basically unwalkable. There are some long transitions from green to tee as well as some severe hills and gullys to navigate.