Patrick:
There is no photo of the Biarritz green, because the greens mix was halfway on it while we were walking around, and the tee was still being cut to final grade. Maybe next month.
Many here on the web site probably know already that the Biarritz is my least favorite of Macdonald's "template" par-3's and it pained me a bit to have to include it in the mix at Old Macdonald. To make matters worse, in our first routings we hadn't found a good natural location for the hole -- I commented to Jim Urbina in January that I felt like we were trying to pound a square peg into a round hole.
But, the very next day, I was out with Mr. Keiser and we were discussing the possibility of relocating the seventh green so it would have an ocean view. We agreed that we should do that, but the tee for the former eighth hole (the Cape) was well away from the new green site, and we both thought it would be better to have the tee on the dune as well -- so we both looked out and saw an attractive site for a green. And when I got down there to look at it, I realized that we had been looking at the front half of a Biarritz! So now that is the par-3 eighth hole, and we'll have three par-3 holes on the front nine as a result of inserting it into the routing.
I won't describe this Biarritz green in every detail, but it will be among the wildest I've ever seen. The tee shot is a bit downhill (not as much as when we started, because we had to lower the seventh green and eighth tee), and the front of the green and the sides are guarded not by the parallel bunkers (the feature I detest) but by natural ridges and valleys which will make for their own difficult recovery shots.
I am confident that it will be one of the most talked-about holes on the golf course, and it's one of the best examples so far of our approach to the golf course -- using the same concepts as Macdonald for inspiration but not being afraid to deviate widely from the "plasticine models" that some seem to expect us to build.
And that's all I will say for now. Go back to discussing somebody else's work. The green should be grassed in late April and playable by the fall of this year, although we are hoping they keep people off (with certain exceptions
) until the spring of 2009.