News:

Welcome to the Golf Club Atlas Discussion Group!

Each user is approved by the Golf Club Atlas editorial staff. For any new inquiries, please contact us.


Tommy_Naccarato

The Eagle Has Landed...... Now with pictures
« on: November 25, 2005, 10:33:21 PM »
Well, some dummy forgot to bring his camera with him this weekend, but will try to get a few with my camera phone later this weekend, but to let you all know, there is a really great golf course in the Coachella Valley that would probably blow most of you away.

Congrats to Tom Doak and on-site guys Eric Iverson and Kyle Franz and the rest of you at Stone Eagle.

You guys did a magnificent job.

The site from way above the 10th green which is at the bottom of the screen. Credit the pro, Greg Cosgrove for making the hike. The 11th is just to the right.


The 18th


The 11th--a wild a wooly and ride downhill. As pure of a ground game hole as you can get on your approach.


Two from the 19th



« Last Edit: November 28, 2005, 07:29:27 PM by Thomas Naccarato »

A_Clay_Man

Re:The Eagle Has Landed......
« Reply #1 on: November 25, 2005, 11:16:53 PM »
I know there are some more recent pictures. But here's one til Thomas  gets his groove back.


Jfaspen

Re:The Eagle Has Landed......
« Reply #2 on: November 26, 2005, 12:42:40 AM »
KP V  :D

Tommy_Naccarato

Re:The Eagle Has Landed......
« Reply #3 on: November 26, 2005, 09:53:20 AM »
In the past, I had suggested that this may be one of my least favorite types of pieces of land to put a golf course. Tom told me during visits when they were building it, it was probably going to be really difficult to make golf work--let me tell you, the golf works--at least for me.

This maybe another one of those places one might want to visit when wanting to study routing and how to route a golf course. He's got deception all over the place with wall to wall fairways wider then the state of Texas. Not an ounce of rough. Tom has seemingly read a lot of Max Behr as of late and when I had originally thought some of the greens were going to be a bit too small during construction, quite obviously I was being a little too baked by the Coachella Valley heat.

From the Tee, (the back tees) this maybe one of Tom's most dramatic. I'm still completely enamored with two of the more relatively sedate holes, #4 & #11 which balance out what will be some of the more obvious popular ones like #6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 18, & 19 (checking you guys to see if you read that correctly, #19 is my favorite par 3 on the course, although I have yet to play it thanks to darkness) There is a deceptive formation fronting the green on #11 that has been masterfully shaped into the fairway which can throw one off pretty good, especially when trying to figure out where the pin is in relation to the green. Adam, if you have a image of #11, please do post it.

Right now, I'm off to play Brian Curley, Lee Schmidt  & Fred Couples Plantation, which to me is another excellent golf course. The weather out here is P-E-R-F-E-C-T. (sorry to rub it in, but that one was for Dr. Childs)

 ;)

A_Clay_Man

Re:The Eagle Has Landed......
« Reply #4 on: November 26, 2005, 11:59:19 AM »
Thomas-
 I don't have the holes numbered. But here are a couple more.




A_Clay_Man

Re:The Eagle Has Landed......
« Reply #5 on: November 26, 2005, 12:12:44 PM »
Bill- I dont get that feel from the picture. Maybe TN can comment on it's playability.

I know for a fact the sixth at Apache is raised on the leftside near the fairway bunkers.

It does appear that TD did not fight the land here, which I believe is why the bunkers at AS 6th, have lost the turf surrounding them, on the FW side.


Gib_Papazian

Re:The Eagle Has Landed......
« Reply #6 on: November 26, 2005, 12:27:21 PM »
Why, at first glace, do those bunkers look at bit C&C'ish?

Concur on the KP V idea.

#2. Tommy: It makes my day that you are back chasing the pellet. Keep it up. You are almost there.

"Never surrender. Never Never Never Never."

-Winston Churchill

Craig_Rokke

  • Karma: +0/-0
Re:The Eagle Has Landed......
« Reply #7 on: November 26, 2005, 12:56:36 PM »
Tommy-

In relation to the Irvine area, where is Stone Eagle, as well as the
Schmidt, Curley course?

Steve Lang

  • Karma: +0/-0
Re:The Eagle Has Landed......
« Reply #8 on: November 26, 2005, 01:03:03 PM »
 8)

Can't help seeing those pics and think Black Mesa gone brown
Inverness (Toledo, OH) cathedral clock inscription: "God measures men by what they are. Not what they in wealth possess.  That vibrant message chimes afar.
The voice of Inverness"

Steve_ Shaffer

  • Karma: +0/-0
Re:The Eagle Has Landed......
« Reply #9 on: November 26, 2005, 01:59:21 PM »
Craig

Stone Eagle is in Palm Desert(www.stoneeagleclub.com ) and Plantation is Indio, both of which are in the Palm Springs area east of LA.

Steve
"Some of us worship in churches, some in synagogues, some on golf courses ... "  Adlai Stevenson
Hyman Roth to Michael Corleone: "We're bigger than US Steel."
Ben Hogan “The most important shot in golf is the next one”

Tommy_Naccarato

Re:The Eagle Has Landed......
« Reply #10 on: November 26, 2005, 09:23:43 PM »
From my standpoint, I can't think of any course where I have wanted to play from the tips more. The tee shots from back there are some of Tom Doak's very best. Lots of interesting strategies from them also. I can also visualize more tee boxes added in the future simply because of the ridiculous equipment and how much further EVERYBODY is hitting it. (including myself)

The playability from those tips is outstanding--get ready for lots of challenge and deception. Max Behr lives. (I mean this) Tonight, I caught some evening glass with a few of the others after the grand opening gala that occured today. (I played The Plantation with Brian Curley and then went over there later on.) and for the fun of it, we started playing from the next set-up. Two holes later we went back to the back to the tips. Mind you I'm hitting the ball the furthest I have ever hit it in my life.

The course is more then challenging, but I'm sure out here in Lotusland, it's going to have its detractors simply because they live in a euphoria of Ted Robinson delight.

Tom has simply built the very best course in the Coachella Valley, and frankly speaking, I do think its going to be one of those deals where people playing there are not going to like it at first (as a golf course) because they don't play anything like it. But later in the week after their rounds, they are going to start remembering shots; they'll start remembering features like the deceptive mound short of #12 whose top leading edge sort of dips and replaces the front edge of the shape of the green thus making the shot even more deceptive from the fairway, and leaves about 20 yards of fairway length left to cover--stuff like that, well I think it will turn their heads ala Linda Blair.


A_Clay_Man

Re:The Eagle Has Landed......
« Reply #11 on: November 27, 2005, 08:31:22 PM »
How cool would it be if someone who knew how to effectively use the seach engine, found that original post by Doak proclaiming he would build a course the likes the desert had never seen?
« Last Edit: November 27, 2005, 08:32:07 PM by Adam Clayman »

Jay Cox

  • Karma: +0/-0
Re:The Eagle Has Landed......
« Reply #12 on: November 27, 2005, 09:57:33 PM »
Adam, I apparently am not that good at the search engine.  But I did dig up a bunch of Tom's old comments on Stone Eagle in the early planning and construction phases -- reproduced below.  I think they're pretty interesting, esp. the ones describing the planning of a specific feature that we (at least the ones of us lucky to be out there) can see now.


3 / 29 / 2004
We do detailed contour drawings for big earthmoving projects, too -- the job we're planning in Palm Desert has so many grading lines I can't look at it for too long without getting a headache!

But we would never tell a client that a contractor could just take that drawing and feed it into a machine and wind up with a great golf course.  I believe strongly that ALL sites are "the type of site that required [the architect's] time because there were constantly decisions needing to be made by him."  Do you feel the same way, or not?


8 / 19 / 2003
The routing I've been working on the past year and a half for Stone Eagle in Palm Desert is similar to what you describe, Mike.  We've got several holes that are sharply uphill and downhill on the same scale as Pasatiempo 1-9-11-12.  

I'm a bit nervous about how well it will work.  I'm comforted by the fact that the uphill holes are playing right into a mountainside so they won't be playing "blind to the sky."  But I'm certain that shelving all the holes into the sidehills was not the answer here ... especially since you overlook most of the golf course from the starter's shack and it would be a shame not to be looking up and down the holes.


8 / 31 / 2004
However, the site I am working with in Palm Desert is very hilly and there will be many strongly uphill or downhill holes.  I've been thinking that was a good thing, because it will make the long uphill par-4's play much longer than the card says ... like #11 at Pasatiempo ... and some of the downhill par-4's will be in that awkward drive-and-half-wedge category.  

The visuals on our uphill holes will be much better than normal because all of them are playing directly up into a mountain background, which is so steep that it's VERY hard to perceive just how much uphill you are looking.  It will take a lot of local knowledge, but I'm sure it will cause problems for the one-time visitor or rater.

It wasn't so much that I was looking to do this in the routing, it's just where the most interesting holes were, and about the only way I could make the golf course fit onto the site physically.  But I'm sure there will be "shot distortion."  Is that a bad thing, a good thing, or just a fact of life on a hilly site?

P.S.  The poster child for "shot distortion" is the Plantation course at Kapalua.


10 / 31 / 2004
There have been lots of sites that were more challenging than Shadow Creek.  The TPC at Sawgrass, which was two feet underwater when Pete started, is just one example.  So are Yale, Lido, and the Stone Eagle course we're doing now in Palm Desert.


12 / 16 / 2004
Tom P:  What National should have done was either a) keep grazing the cows, or b) place some of the holes a bit closer together so they could mow everything between them a la St. Andrews, and vary the sizes of the turfed areas instead of having them all of a similar width.  We are essentially doing this in Palm Desert now to break up the "desert" look of that site.

4 / 21/ 2005
For the record, Stone Eagle does have a water feature which is now complete.  I haven't seen the finished form yet, but I asked Eric Iverson about it just today, and he told me I would be really pleased with it, that they made it look about as natural as you could for water in the desert.  (The water feature is located in two deep natural washes which run through the site into the irrigation pond, next to the 4th green and 5th tee.)

You're welcome to bash the waterfall all you want, of course, but I don't really see the point.  Features like this really don't have much to do with the quality of the golf, pro or con ... so the only reason to rip them is if someone thinks they are actually an important feature.  In the case of Stone Eagle, the water feature isn't even the main feature of the fourth or fifth holes.  The ravines and the rock outcroppings are the feature.


7 / 23 / 2005
I don't know that Stone Eagle could be described as having a "clean" look -- many of the bunkers have their outside edges defined by rock and desert, but we do not intend to have much long grass anywhere as that would look weird in the desert (though, admittedly, so does green grass).  The client's main input was that we needed to make it extra-wide in order to keep it playable for their member profile -- 225 to 300 feet of grass in the landing area of most holes.  I cheated that down a bit, but that is the main reason why few courses in Palm Desert are named among the classics ... good players think they are too wide open.

PS  We have talked about throwing a little fescue seed around the edges of the course with the winter overseed, to break up the clean lines where the maintained turf bleeds into the desert.  Just my way of messing with the establishment.

A_Clay_Man

Re:The Eagle Has Landed......
« Reply #13 on: November 28, 2005, 12:18:54 AM »
Wow, Thanks for all of those quotes.

The quote that I was referring to was probably somewhere in 2001. Likely near the 18 months prior to the 2003 quote above.
 It was an unnamed reference, likely in an obscure post. Perhaps about the desert

Tommy_Naccarato

Re:The Eagle Has Landed...... Now with pictures
« Reply #14 on: November 28, 2005, 07:30:42 PM »
I added some images to this, especially a really cool aerial.

Ian Andrew

Re:The Eagle Has Landed...... Now with pictures
« Reply #15 on: November 28, 2005, 08:06:59 PM »
Pictures are really cool Tommy, especially the 11th.

Is it as downhill as it feels (remind me of skiing  ;D )

Do you have any more ?

Tommy_Naccarato

Re:The Eagle Has Landed...... Now with pictures
« Reply #16 on: November 29, 2005, 12:45:17 AM »
More coming later Ian.

Yes, it is downhill in places, but I think that's where the quirkiness comes in, and it works too.

Tags:
Tags:

An Error Has Occurred!

Call to undefined function theme_linktree()
Back