Sounds like Whitten had a similarl impression of Wild Horse:
Course Critic Wild Horse Golf Club, Gothenburg, Neb.
By Ron Whitten
GolfDigest.com exclusive
For the past three years, I've boasted that Wild Horse Golf Club in Gothenburg, Nebraska was the best $25 golf course in America. I can no longer make that claim. As I found when I played there last week, they've raised their prices.
Wild Horse Golf Club is now the best $33 golf course in America. I admit I'm showing a bit of provincialism here. I was born and raised in Nebraska and I'm partial to her natural treasures, of which Wild Horse is certainly one. There are many other fine public courses across the country that are even less expensive to play than this one, but none, I will argue, allows you quite as genuine a links experience as Wild Horse.
That's due to the talents of the unassuming design team of Dan Proctor and Dave Axland (Dan & Dave, as they are known in the trade), who not only route a course to pose every imaginable scheme, but hop on bulldozers and shape it themselves. Taking a novel section of rolling sand dunes on a bluff overlooking the town of Gothenburg and the broad Platte River Valley, Dan & Dave have produced a low-budget, low-maintenance, high-concept course that's been quietly drawing golf fans since it opened in 1999.
This is not quite a minimalist masterpiece. They had to accommodate 50 proposed housing lots around the perimeter of the course. Whether by design or coincidence, they routed all four par 3s and three of the four par 5s in different directions, always an architectural objective in order to pose varying wind situations. So it's a masterpiece that's a few steps up from raw minimalism.
On the scorecard, the course measures 6,805 yards, par 72, from the back tees, 6,315 from the regular markers. But distances here are meaningless. When the north wind howls, as it did last week, the 328-yard opening hole is a driver and 5-iron. Conversely, the southward 451-yard eighth (433 from my tees) was a 3-wood and an 8-iron. The prevailing summer wind, as it is throughout the Great Plains, is from the south, so those two holes will normally play just the opposite. But Wild Horse is cleverly designed to accommodate every type of wind direction.
The fairways are enormously wide, 80 yards at one point on the dogleg-left 524-yard 14th, and over 100 yards wide across the shared fairway of the second and third. The turf is fescue, kept firm and fast, so straight drives seem to roll forever but wayward ones can scurry across those wide fairways and into the rough. The rough is all native grasses irrigated only by Mother Nature, so most times it's dry enough that you can usually spot a ball from 50 yards away in what looks like ankle-deep grass and extract it with a single swing.
Most of the greens are generous targets too, and all are surrounded by wide swaths of fairway wrapped to one side or the other or completely around. You can bump-and-run to some spot on every green, but if you miss one left or right, even badly, you'll likely still have the option of pitching or putting.
Forgiveness is a major virtue of Wild Horse. Which is why I think the stronger the wind, the better the game on this course. Personally, I found it invigorating, punching a 7-iron along the ground into the flag from a distance where I'd normally hit a high sand wedge shot.
What really makes the course fun to play are its 68 bunkers, cunningly placed to require challenge or avoidance. The bunkers are deep, have gnarly edges and powdery sand. If you hit one, quite often you'll simply aim towards the nearest point of escape. The Wild Horse bunkers are akin to those at Sand Hills Golf Club (Nebraska's premier layout, in the center of the vast sand hills), although smaller in scale and more manmade, but nonetheless appearing more like eroded pits than formal bunkers. It's a style several designers are adopting these days, no doubt inspired by these new Nebraska courses. So call them sand hill bunkers. If there is a flaw in Wild Horse, it is the proclivity of artificial mounds that Dan and Dave shaped at spots in fairways just before greens, and on some greens themselves. These are lookalike mounds, each shaped like a giant domed hubcap. They're obviously meant to add an additional element of uncertainty (Will it deflect my shot? Will it propel it toward the hole?), but I saw far too many artificial knobs on an otherwise wonderfully natural-looking golf course.
This course offers an interesting twist on the usual local-versus-traveling golfer fee structure. Usually a course gives locals a break and soaks it to visiting players. It's a little different at Wild Horse. Nobody pays through the nose, but if you live in Gothenburg or in an adjacent zip code, you're allowed just two rounds a year at the posted green fee. To play more, you must join the club. Of course, an annual membership is ridiculously cheap: $425 for a family membership, $375 for an individual, $200 for a student. Which means a local playing 40 rounds during the year ends up paying less than $10 a round. In that case, Wild Horse Golf Club is unquestionably the best $9.37 golf course in America.
The VerdictWild horses couldn't keep me away. On Golf Digest's 10 point scale (1 being Unacceptable, 5 being Good, 10 being Absolutely Perfect), I rate Nebraska's Wild Horse Golf Club at 9.0.