Is Sand Hills the greatest course in the US?

[THuckaby2]

Mike:  you are hitting on exactly what I meant by calling my own comments "elitist" way up above.  Oh yes, we do NOT want to be exclusionary, and your comments are exactly right on and convey my whole unease talking much about Sand Hills.  However, I look at the photo of #1 and I feel like I have to EXPLAIN to people that the green is VERY VERY VERY raised from the fairway, and the left fairway bunker is NOT clearable, not very easily anyway, not from the back tee and certainly not into the wind... it's no fault of the photographer, but that picture absolutely does not convey close to the majesty of that hole.  Not even close.  Seeing it in person one gets it.  I read the course profile many times in the months leading up to our trip, and never did I find #1 to be that big of a deal... in person I sure as hell did!  That's what I'm trying to get at.  Sand Hills, unfortunately, is very difficult to describe or photograph.  Thus the quandary.

Matt Ward:  you and I have always been at opposite sides of what I call the great dividing line (or at least I think so from what I read from you on here):  ie which does one like better, Shinnecock or NGLA?  For the NGLA lover (me), obviously Sand Hills wins over Shinny also.  To me, a course being tested at the highest level is cool, but certainly not essential.  They've never held any major at Cypress or NGLA or Dornoch or countless others - does that somehow diminish them?  What do I care how the pros do at a course?  But I do understand how others would value this and it is a "plus".  IU just wouldn't count as a "minus" any course that hasn't been "tested at the highest levels."  More meaningful to me is your comment (from Doak) that Shinnecock also "can still speak to the average player."  Man, I didn't find that AT ALL.  The only speaking it did to me is "Huckaby, get your pansyass back to California, you can't handle this bitch of a golf course."  I'm not kidding.  I'm a decent player and all Shinny did was bitchslap me.  Of course, I played the wayback USOpen tees in some pretty serious wind... Others have told me it is fun from the members tees.  Love to try that some day.  For now, Shinny was summed up best in what our host said that day:  "it just requires perfect golf shots."  Unfortunately, I don't have many of those!

Thus Shinny is way up there for me - damn I loved a lot of holes there - but it's not at the TOP, for this reason. It's plain and simple too much golf course, more of an examination than I want in my personal "best course in the world."

But that comes back to the great dividing line, doesn't it?

Sand Hills is a cousin of Shinnecock though, in this sense.  From the wayback Diamond tees, it can test any player - it's a big course from those.  From the up tees, it is darn fun.  I called it Shinnecock from the Diamonds, NGLA from the Squares... Fair assessment?

Now David Kelly - your story is depressing but doesn't surprise me. That Assistant Pro is REALLY gonna regret things once he gets enlightened!

TH

[THuckaby2]

Gib, my Armenian Mentor and Teacher to Me of So Many Things:

Please realize that it was PAINFUL for me to place Sand Hills over NGLA and Cypress (which really have been a dead heat in my mind ever since that magical day for me last October in Southampton).  I mean, I swear to you this is agonizing.

But yes, Sand Hills is "better."

Why?

You speak eloquently of isolation and magic.  I felt this at Pacific Dunes, and though I didn't get the full "treatment" at NGLA, I sure as hell felt the ghosts there - you and I have ruminated on this before.

But I NEVER felt it like I did at Sand Hills.  There are ghosts there all right - they're just young ones.  It is, plain and simple, the most spiritual golf experience I have ever felt.  How can I explain this?  How can I convey it?  I can't.  Words fail me and I am not the writer you are.  I really wish I could... Best I can do is this:  I sure as hell felt the presence of glaring old CBMac and his "boy" Seth at NGLA.  But I felt the exposure of my OWN soul, feeling everything I personally love about the game of golf, at Sand Hills.  It opened my mind, my soul, and to quote a fine man, made my heart sing like no other place.  Oh how it pains me to place it over Cypress and NGLA in this respect, as each place also stirred me in a very spiritual way also... But Sand Hills just had a tiny bit more.

Sorry, as I say, best I can do.

My fondest hope is that you experience this in the same manner.  Might happen, might not.  From what I know of you, I think after seeing it, you're gonna look back on this thread and absolutely laugh.  It's gonna be so apparent that this will indeed be comical.

As are the comparisons to Pacific Dunes.  God help me I do love that course, love the resort, love the Bandon course, love everything about the place.

But comparisons to Sand Hills are pretty silly.  It's not even in the same ballpark.  Take away all the aesthetics (which Sand Hills wins hands down, btw) and just comparing the golf holes, it truly isn't close.  Par 5's blow away those at PD, par 3's blow away those at PD, par 4's blow away those at PD, routing blows away PD's, need I continue?

But that's just me, and my apologies to those who think PD is comparable or better.  PD is a wonderful golf course indeed, and deserves all its high rankings most definitely.

To me, it's just silly to compare it to the best course on the planet.

TH

ps: our "no longer posting on GCA" friend notwithstanding, this is much more fun than email, wouldn't you say?

[Mike_Cirba]

Gib,

Please excuse my political correctness, but I simply felt that it wasn't necessary to diminish other great courses while elevating Sand Hills.

We all know that history is something we all have respect for and even worship to some extent in this game.  The fact that Sand Hills comes in at #7 on Golf Magazine's list as the only course built after 1940 in the Top 20 says a tremendous amount about this wonderful course with no historical cache or tournament lineage.  

The questions I asked in my original post on this thread were meant to get people thinking and asking the same questions I've been asking myself since I've returned...

After mulling it over for a week, I concluded that if Sand Hills had been built in 1920 or so, it would be rated number one today.  It is THAT good, and I'm really happy to hear you're heading there.  I'd love to hear your assessement when you return.  

[THuckaby2]

Many thanks Mr. Cirba, who who conveys things so much better than I do.  Concur 100% with that.

I would add that as times goes on and more people see the place, the #1 ranking may well be achieved.

TH

[GeoffreyC]

Mike

This venue should always be one where individuals feel free to comment on photos or essays without being intimidated or harassed for their honest opinions.  We are all here to learn and enjoy a common passion.

However, I do feel that first hand experience will trump a photo or essay every time ****provided that the individual with the first hand experience shares your basic views on the subject****  We do get to know each others tastes here from posting and I think its up to the individual to interpret first hand experience on site as they wish.

Mike- Do you recall being blown away by the scale and architecture at Riviera?  We've seen numerous photos and hours on TV but that hill on 18 or the bunkering or the angles of play on the ground couldn't be fully appreciated until we played (or walked) the course.

[Mike_Cirba]

Geoffrey,

No question about Riviera, and we both agreed that both photographs and television could not properly convey either the scale of the features or the movement of the property.  I suspect that Augusta National is similar in this respect, as is Sand Hills, admittedly.

However, that does not strike those original, former photographic impressions we each formed before playing as incorrectly invalid, totally deceiving, or utterly meaningless in the least.  It's simply that we only got 75-80% of the picture, so to speak.  

I still think that's good enough for discussion purposes in most cases, particularly when we are mostly talking about form and aesthetic factors, and not golfing playability.  

[GeoffreyC]

Mike- we agree    

[Gib_Papazian]

I have no doubt that Sand Hills may one day rise to the pinnacle of golf architecture in my mind.

You can even make a plausible argument that Nicole Kidman is a more beautiful woman than Katherine Hepburn was.

But I gotta see it. And if I agree, I am not going to artificially prop up NGLA atop the list because it would be "blasphemy" to do otherwise.

And Tommy should not either. (see post #2 referring to TOC)

You know Huckster, the Armenian has a pretty vivid imagination and I am having a difficult time envisioning a golf course that "blows away" Pacific Dunes.

But anything is possible.

Your analysis is all the more credible because you are a now "Doyen" and I am still only Fred Flintstone.

  

[John Foley]

I tried to prepare myself for what I would find in Nebraska when I arrived. No matter what you read, or hear or try to imagine, when you arrive, you are plain and simply blown away as you stand on Ben's Porch and see the vastness of scale in front of you.

What we need is someone who is eloquent (not that those who posted here already are not, by anymeans!!) who shares this passion (along the gift of verse) to have the words pour out. Wether that be Tom MacWood, Tommy Nacaratto, Gib or Rich or any of the others whose words seem to inspire. Tom put it well,

"It is, plain and simple, the most spiritual golf experience I have ever felt.  How can I explain this?  How can I convey it?  I can't.  Words fail me and I am not the writer you are.."

Are we being eliteist or exclusionary by our enthusiasm? I don't think those are sins anyone on this site could ever be guilty of. The reason this site exists is beacuse of the passion that golf & architecture brings out in it's participants. If that passion didn't exist, what would we have never found?

Sand Hills brings out that passion in many of us.

[THuckaby2]

Gib:

Please realize also how much I WANTED to artificially prop up Cypress or NGLA, both of which have extreme sentimental/spritual value to me, at the expense of Sand Hills.  As I've said, that late night over some damn fine single malt, I couldn't bring myself to place Sand Hills #1, and it hur to even put it #2 as I did.

Upon reflection, it did rise to #1 for me.

OF COURSE you can't take any of our words for this, you do indeed need to see for yourself.  I didn't believe any of the hyperbole either before I saw it, though I sure as heck was open to it... the pictures and descriptions just didn't connect for me.

And heck, I believe I understand the "connection" you have with NGLA, so even after seeing it, it might not rise above for you.  That would be understandable most definitely.

I just look forward to the conversations after you see it.

As for me being a "doyen", jeez that's just based on quantity.  Imagine if they ranked us for words said during golf rounds....

Scary.

As for blowing away Pacific Dunes, well, you know me and exaggerating.  Perhaps that overstates things.  It is in a different "league" in any case, by my take.  Imagine if you will how that happens... that might be the best way to try and get a sense of Sand Hills!

TH

ps - JF - perfectly stated above, we are simpatico on all this, mi amigo.

[Brian Phillips]

Pictures cannot convey how BIG Sand Hills is.  The bunkers are huge.  I arrived on the Friday afternoon and played nine holes after our drive from Denver.

I stood on the first tee and tried to drive the first bunker on the left as to me it looked pretty small!!  my ball landed in the middle of it and I trudged on down to hit out...

The thing is huge...I mean huge!!  All I could do was wedge out.
I then hit 5 wood down the fairway and landed in the fairway...

You then have to try to hit the green with a wedge and the green is about 6-10 metres above your feet!!

And that is how it goes the whole way around...there is not one hole that is in the slightest bit boring or strategically wrong!  The place is amazing.  I was so amazed that I got up at 0500 the next morning just to get sunrise photos and again I was not dissappointed!!

I think I took about 300 photos at Sandhills and all of them are beautiful!!

I even love the range..this is the simplest range in the world.  Throw a bit of seed down irrigate it a bit and hey presto you have a range.  No signs, nothing!!  The only way you know it could be a range are the divots from previous days.

I was so impressed with Sand Hills that when I met someone in the bar in NJ in my hotel who said he played golf I rushed up to my room (at midnight) to get my laptop to show him pictures.  He had not heard about it and wasn't even that impressed by the pictures.  I even got the usual question ...you travelled that far just to study the course and meet up with some architects...why?

Because there is no greater feeling (apart from the birth of your own children or your wedding day...just in case the wife reads this) than waking up on a beautiful day knowing you are about to play a masterpiece with some of your colleagues who also appreciate the course to it's fullest...to me it's like Christmas.

Sand Hills is the best designed course I have ever ever played, not only that it is stunning.

Pictures and words cannot describe it.  Not only that, it was designed by two of the nicest gentlemen I have ever met in the business Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw.


Brian.

[Mike_Cirba]

Brian,

I had the (mis)fortune of playing my second shot into the left greenside bunker on #4.  

I was faced with a shot roughly equivalent to trying to land the ball softly over a three-story house!!!  

The vast HUGEness of Sand Hills makes one feel positively Lilliputian!  

[THuckaby2]

Brian/Mike:

My own contribution to Lilupudliness was hitting into the greenside bunker to the left of #18.  It hit way at the top, then rolled all the way to the bottom, easily 30 yards backwards.  I faced a shot that had to be akin to Mike's on #4 - I felt like I was hitting out of the bottom of Lake Tahoe.

The cool thing is this does indeed happen all over....

For bunker lovers, Sand Hills has got to be the absolute archetype.  Sit on the Porch, look out at #1, that's IT.  That's how bunkers should be.

TH

[Doug Wright]

Tom H,

You say, "As for blowing away Pacific Dunes, well, you know me and exaggerating.  Perhaps that overstates things.  It is in a different "league" in any case, by my take.  Imagine if you will how that happens... that might be the best way to try and get a sense of Sand Hills!"

As far as I'm concerned, you're asking me to believe the unbelievable. HOW is SH in a different "league" than PD?
Now I might understand that SH is laid down on an otherwordly canvas and has the dimensions to match, but this "other league" thing just sounds blasphemous to me! Is the architecture THAT much better, or is this the "total golfing experience" thing? In the latter case, we'll get back into the "Where does the architecture begin/if you moved the course next to the city dump would it still be a great course, etc." discussion.

Regardless, I'm gonna stick out my thumb on I-76 and hitch a ride to Huskerland real soon...

All The Best,

[THuckaby2]

Doug:

Check out my quote from Dick Daley at the bottom.  I have never tried to quantify, and likely will never try to quantify, architecture in a vacuum.  I'm not qualified to do so, and to me it's a silly conversation.  The fact is that the surroundings and everything that makes up the "total golf experience" EXISTS, so why deny it?

But in any case, in answer to your query, yes I am talking total golf experience.  I never do otherwise.

And that's where Sand Hills is in this "different league" from Pacific Dunes.

PLEASE remember this is NOTHING against PD, though!  It just illustrates how otherworldly great Sand Hills is.

TH

[Rick Shefchik]

Tom H. has finally used the word that reminds me why my weekend at Sand Hills was my most memorable golf experience.

It is spiritual.

In its truest usage, that word implies ghosts, which answers Gib's question about whether Sand Hills is old enough to have ghosts.

Oh, yes it does.

I am not one to get overly maudlin about the experience of Native Americans, but if you can't feel their presence as well as their absence during your stay at the Dismal River, you aren't looking around with your heart.

You are set up for this on your drive in, whether it be after flying into North Platte, or driving down from the north as Dan Kelly and I did from the Twin Cities. First, turning south off I-90 in South Dakota, we made a rather abrupt transition from what looks like basic midwestern grassland to significantly rolling hills, upon which stood the first buffaloes I'd ever seen outside a zoo. Then we drove through a little Indian town named Valentine just south of the Dakota/Nebraska border, where trailers, junked cars and roaming dogs surounded the only business I remembered seeing -- a ratty, windowless, 1-story casino the size of a post office.

Beyond that, all the way into Mullen, are the sand hills. This land has been compared to an ocean many times, I'm sure, but that's what it is -- and ocean of semi-arid grass and spiny desert plants, rising and falling around you like billowing waves. You hardly ever see another person or another car. This beautifully rugged land is essentially deserted, though you know that a couple of hundred years ago the ancestors of the buffaloes and the Indians you saw earlier in the day once lived here.

I don't think you ever really get those images out of your mind, though once you reach Sand Hills you're certainly riveted by the magnificently natural golf course that bobs in and out of sight among the hills, like something floating on the water.

There's just nothing else there. Even the golf course itself, totally unobscured by trees, tends to appear and disappear like an apparition as you traverse those hills. You can't ever really forget that there is nothing, and nobody, around you -- and yet the very absence of all of life's usual distractions somehow makes your inner self grasp the truth: that this magnificent land once sustained another kind of life-and-death reality that makes golf there seem both small and impossibly grand by association.

Even in the most idylic golf enclaves of man's making, where the trees and walls and shrubbery combine to create the illusion of isolation, those very trees, walls and shrubs serve to remind you that -- regardless of what once was there -- something familiar and mundane is on the other side. There is no other side at Sand Hills, except the kind that we can't see anymore. But it's there, as palpably as the memories you carry with you to Sand Hills, and the memories you carry away.

I'm not a particularly spiritual person, but I know when I'm in the presence of something otherworldly. Perhaps that's not quite the right word; when you settle in on Ben's Porch to watch a shooting star cross the western gloaming, and listen to a coyote cry as the light fades and the course disappears for the night, you're more in touch with the world -- all of it, especially the parts you can't see -- than you ever imagined you could be.

The ghosts are everywhere at Sand Hills. It's a deep privilege to share their land with them.







  

[JakaB]

I don't know if you have ever dry-docked a crap after a great meal...a delight not to be shared or described to even those who love you the most...but a thrill on the level of Sand Hills...and I am a spiritual person.

[RJ_Daley]

Well I said somewhere a 100 posts or so ago on page 2 that I either had to start drinking earlier or get out of this thread before I start blubbering... well now I had my first drink

sniff... I just wonder if Dick and Bill and Ben and all the boys know all this stuff you guys are saying... sniff...  I'm sure it would make them cry too... sniff

But, you know what it was for me guys?  It was before and after dinner after getting really steamed up out on the golf course and after taking a nice cool shower, I just sat in one of those perfect big oak rocking chairs out on the cabin's back porch, in the darkness all alone, and heard nothing but the gurgle of the Dismal and saw the silent flight of an owl disappear into a snag along the other side of the river... felt the coolness of the pine glen that forms the bottom of the river canyon... and thought, is this a great life, or what...?  

[Greg P]

You guys are starting to lay it on a little thick now.

[guest]

guest

Yes, this thread become about as interesting as a vacation slide show.

[Chevey Chase]

Do I get to play Tom H in the movie?

[THuckaby2]

Unfortunately if they are going for physical accuracy, the more appropriate former SNL type to play me would be Chris Farley.  Among the living and if we are stretching outside comedians, perhaps Ian Woosnam.

And for those guests who are offended or bored by this thread, well... I can understand it.  Didn't we say Sand Hills is impossible to describe, impossible to understand unless you see it... But many here have said GREAT words that give the feeling, I think.

Rick - that captured it perfectly.  That's a "saver" for me definitely and I'm gonna use that - along with many other parts of this thread - as I try to explain Sand Hills to the locals here.

Dick - funny - I did the same thing - solo rocking in the dark... does that mean we are both off our rockers?

I suppose so.  But that was really cool for me also...

TH

[Mike_Cirba]

While I've argued that it's impossible to divorce golf course architecture from its aesthetic components (which is why the "look" of things like bunkers and other golf features is so very fundamentally important), I do draw the personal line at factoring in things like "service and experience" while analyzing a golf course.  

Perhaps that distinction is fuzzy, but for me what is included in the first part are all of the things that are seen, sensed, and viscerally felt while "on the golf course" that make up the actual functional and aesthetic play of a round of golf.  Generally, I find great beauty in subtlety and simplicity and find it wears well.

And yes, those things included views to the horizon, adjoining oceans and forests, etc., because a talented architect finds adjoining natural beauty and maximizes it for the viewing pleasure of the golfer.
  
Purposefully, I try to divorce myself and my impressions from factors like friendliness, impressiveness of out-buildings and clubhouses(even Ben's porch), camaraderie, my own scoring, showerheads, wine-list, and a whole host of other non-golf related accoutrements.

To get this discussion back to architecture, I find it amazing at how little was done at Sand Hills beyond "finding" the golf holes.  Yes, the land was superb for the purpose, but even so, we speculated whether other modern architects, particularly those who seem so enamored with the power of earth-moving and massive shaping, would have had the vision and restraint to have realized a Sand Hills in its current, "perfect" form.

Said another way, I'd be very surprised if an architect like Tom Fazio would have taken the same approach if he was given the commission for the Sand Hills property.  Not to cite him specifically, what do others think would have been the result with the same land, but instead a commission to Nicklaus, or Rees Jones, or Weiskopf/Moorish, Hurdzan/Fry, Arthur Hills, Pete Dye, or even our own Jeff Brauer, Tom Doak, Jim Engh, or Kelly Moran?  It's very interesting to imagine how each might have approached the job, and what the results might have been.
    
In a way, it's almost the ultimate architectural "acid test" of philosophy and methodology.  

[Just Wondering]

Two questions about the natural-ness of Sand Hills,

How natural are the

-The two tiered second green?

-The ridge running though the 5th green?

They seem TOO subtle to have beed "found" there.

[Mike_Cirba]

Just Wondering,

It's clear that the 4th green was created by flattening the top of a dune into a mini-mesa, as well, but overall....5,000 Cubic yards of movement is next to nada, wouldn't you agree?

Also, I'm not sure why you find the second green as man-made necessarily.  Are there not enough mini-contours on the property of that type that you are sure it's manufactured?