[Robert Mercer Deruntz]

This is a very challenging course that has hosted a couple of Met Opens.  About half of the course is carved out of an oak forrest and the other half is a treed in former horse meadow.  There are some really good holes and a couple of bad holes.  Overall, I find this to be a top notch Met area layout, but not quite worthy of top 50 greatness.  Gil Hanse redid all 9 greens on the Woods and all the bunkering which used to be very generic 60's flash style.













This next nine is the Woods which Gil redid the greens and added bunkers,ect. but was trapped by the routing which leads to some not so great holes.  Still, a big improvement over the previous incarnation.







This is a 90degree dogleg because there is no room for anything else.  My playing partner held up the final round of the Met Open by about 15 minutes because he caught an inside tree and ended up on the 5th tee and had to hit across the 2nd and 4th greens to reach the 6th green.

[TEPaul]

Robert:

This is originally a William Mitchell design, right?

Pretty interesting guy who did a lot up and down the East coast. I like some of the holes of his Cedarbrook in Philadelphia but an architect like Mitchell seemed to be sort of one of those class B guys of the middle era in American architecture who did courses that are fairly identifiable in their type and style---eg basically fairly solid but kind of boring in their general sameness with nothing really wrong and nothing all that cool either.

By the way, my mother once mentioned that Devereaux Emmet's Old Westbury course (NLE) in its entirety was one of the most beautiful golf courses she ever saw and she pretty much saw them all at one time or another in her life.

I might be mistaken but I believe the successor course to Emmet's Old Westbury course (and polo club) and membership was Dick Wilson's Meadowbrook GC. done in the 1950s. In my opinion, what William Mitchell did with the next Old Westbury course and what Dick Wilson did with Meadowbrook (for the old Emmet course's membership) is like night and day architecturally, and it shows why one was a class A architecture and the other one wasn't.

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