Ian has been so kind as to help me put these shots up, as they were taken last spring, before I bought my digital camera.
Anyway, this is the much discussed Green Monkey, the super-exclusive Fazio course built in Barbados for the Sandy Lane resort. You have to stay at the pricey Sandy Lane in order to play it and when I teed it up there, my playing partner and I were two of only four golfers to hit the ball around the course that day.
There are some clear strengths and weaknesses to the course. It opens up quite blandly, as witnessed in the first shot taken of the opening hole, a mid-length par four.
#2 is taken from the tee of the second hole, which is actually quite strong and features an interesting green site. The shot is looking down onto the final holes of the front nine in th quarry.
#3 is a long par five towards the end of the front nine and the first hole to use the quarry. Though the photo is kinda washed out, the sea is in the background. Bunkering is overdone, but the hole features a great tee shot, elevated around 80 feet in the air and making the green reachable in two if you really blast one, despite being 600 yards long. This is the greensite looking back.
#4 is a par three that finishes the front, utilizing part of the quarry as does #5, a dogleg par five where players must contend with the quarry walls on their tee shots and approach.
#6 is the approach of a par five on the back nine -- a whole that utilized a large ravine to the right of the tee to force players to carefully determine how much they could bite off with their drive. The shot is of the green. In order to try for the green in two, players have to contend with the ravine and a large tree that guards the corner.
#7 is a par four that follows, playing down along the other side of the quarry that can by seen in shot #3
#8 is out of order -- this is the 17th hole, a long par par with a 250 yard carry over water from the tips, tees that were added without Fazio.
#9 is a shot of the 15th, a cool par four surrounded by the quarry and #10 is a shot some will have seen, an interesting, downhill par three with a pond in the background. The catch is the bunker on the right side is shaped like a green monkey. Over the top to me, but everyone takes a photo of it and all the magazines like to show it.
Overall impressions were that the attention to detail and the routing were impressive, the green sites a little bland, the bunker work a little too clean and several throw away holes to get you to the quarry holes. That said, it was better than Royal Westmoreland, which I played on an earlier trip to Barbados, and significantly better than Fazio's earlier work at Sandy Lane, the Country Club, which opened a couple of years earlier and is really mediocre.
The course owners, who count Tiger as a personal friend, have said they've wanted to build the best course in the Caribbean. They haven't -- but the Green Monkey does offer some thrills and is great fun to play.