The "New" Bayonet GC - Fort Ord, CA

[Tom Huckaby]

Lou:

Price does have something to do with it, for sure.  But I didn't go there so many times, so long ago, for cheap golf.  I went there because it was the ultimate exposition of the flaws in one's game.  It was brutally unfairly penal; at the same time, it was quirky as all hell.  It was all I hated in golf courses and all I loved, strangely all at once.  Conditions were pretty damn good, btw.

A lot of that had been removed by the time you played it.  What you saw did indeed have little going for it.  Oh sure it was stilll tough... but 12 alone had been butchered so beyond recognition.. we're really not comparing to the same things.

So yes you shall just have to trust me, if you can.  Getting beaten up at this very weird, very cool, very soulful, totally unique golf course, was indeed fun.

And to me, it's all gone.  The course now is not special in any way shape or form.

And I'd say the same thing if they paid me to play it.

TH

[Mike Benham]

The bickering of what was, what is, you should have seen it then, what is now is really a bunch of chest thumping. 

Sure, some yearn for days gone by, when the pro shop addressed everyone as "Sir" or "Maam" because they never really knew who it was in the civies ...

The issue of price does matter but so does the knowledge of what was once there.  A wise man once said "Restorations are great but is the end result any better then what was there now".

A Bayonet, the new version is not the old, it is a creation of market research and years of customer opinion, from golfers used to walk in straight regimented lines.  Time will tell if golfers like the new course, either architecturally or playability.

Unfortunately, the answer will be driven by the economics, many golfers may play it once for $ 160 (weekend rate) but can achieve 40,000 rounds a year at the price?

So if in 12 months, they cut the price to $ 75 per round, is that a reflection on the quality of the course or the economics of the facility?

[Tom Huckaby]

Well, it's not chest thumping for me at all.... I was always a civilian and was never addressed as "sir.".   

But the rest is quite wise.

And I find it very sad.

RIP Bayonet.  Long live market-research created golf courses.

 

[Lou_Duran]

Quality of the course or economics?

Both likely, but with several peers in the area, a good researcher may be able to come up with a good answer.  Pebble Beach probably won't suffer as much because it is a marguee property.  Ditto for Spyglass though to a lesser extent.  But what about the economic impact on the next tier in the Monterey area?

There are three courses in Texas that had reputations of being brutally hard (Horseshoe Bay- Ram Rock, Cliffs at Possum Kingdom, and Waterwood before it was softened a bit).  They were all highly rated but not all that many people enjoyed playing them.  Most of us are not that good that we need to be brought to our knees to discover that fact.  Thomas does have eclectic tastes.     

[Tom Huckaby]

Lou:

Isn't there room in any golfer's heart for ONE COURSE that breaks all the rules?

I don't think I have eclectic tastes.  I tend to hate courses that kick my ass too hard.

This was just the exception, for reasons already stated.

As for the economics of it all, that's not my bag.  But it was an interesting indication that last weekend - the very opening weekend of the full 36 - with weather that was not at all bad - Blackhorse was a ghost town.. and my friend and I played Bayonet as a twosome at 8:00am... with no groups having started after us until we had played at least 4 holes....

TH

[Mike Benham]

Both likely, but with several peers in the area, a good researcher may be able to come up with a good answer. 

The researcher won't have to look very far, check out the green fees for Laguna Seca, Rancho Canada, Pacific Grove and Poppy Hills. 

You can try and make a comparison of green fees for those courses with their architectural merit to Pebble, Spyglass and Spanish Bay and you will see the challenge that they will have at Bayonet.

Out of town / resort play is not going to be the issue here, it is whether or not they will be able to define the correct price point for the locals (a relatively small golfing community with many many options and price conscious) and NorCal (price needs to be attractive when the largest customer base is 40 minutes away) golfers.

[Tom Huckaby]

Mike:

You're dead spot on (as I see it from the consumer side) as to how this all works.

However, does it change the equation when (if?) the hotel is built?

At that point they better damn well be hoping for resort/visitor play...

And that being the case, is the price now just an attempt to build buzz, compare to the courses inside the drive and other high-end upscales rather than the other publics, sell it in anticipation of what is to come?

I don't think it's gonna work and the ghost town I saw is gonna remain the norm unless price is reduced and/or one gets more bang for that high buck... I am just trying to figure out their thinking.

TH

[Lou_Duran]

Thomas,

I meant eclectic in a good sense.  I like people with diverse tastes and opinions.  And I take it at your word that the real "old" Bayonet was very enjoyable for you.

As to economics, maybe it is not as big a deal in your part of the state, but things are coming unglued down here.  The median home price in some areas has declined by over 40% year to year (I know there could be mix issues involved here) and the "experts" think the bottom is still six to eight months out.  Commercial RE owners are lining up for a bailout.  I haven't been to Pelican Hill or Trump-West, but I bet the tee sheet is wide open.

Mike,

Maybe Seaside or some other governmental entity will eventually get the property back at a reasonable price and will be able to price their rounds reasonably based on local and seasonal demand.  The only upside in this mess is that sometimes other people's misery is some people's gain.  

  

[Tom Huckaby]

Lou:  understood.  I just don't think eclectic tastes is why I loved this old course...

And things are pretty unglued here too - which of course makes it even stranger to overprice a golf course, doesn't it?

In any case we local golfers would love it if what you query Mike about comes true....

TH

[Tim Leahy]

As someone who has played the Bayonet/Blackhorse for the last 30 some years at least 3 times a year I will miss it.
I played the combo of Bay/Horse and actually thought that they improved the Blackhorse side greatley. I am hopefule the the Blackhorse will be a better course in the long run.
But at $160 I will have to wait for NCGA specials and twilight rates.
I think they are going for the Pelican Hill crowd and they will probably get it. I would take the two new Bay/Horse courses over what I played at Pelican Hills for the money.

[Tom Huckaby]

As someone who has played the Bayonet/Blackhorse for the last 30 some years at least 3 times a year I will miss it.
I played the combo of Bay/Horse and actually thought that they improved the Blackhorse side greatley. I am hopefule the the Blackhorse will be a better course in the long run.
But at $160 I will have to wait for NCGA specials and twilight rates.
I think they are going for the Pelican Hill crowd and they will probably get it. I would take the two new Bay/Horse courses over what I played at Pelican Hills for the money.

That is the crowd they are going for, for sure.  But then again, the carts do not have GPS, the refreshment and restaurant facilities are pretty spartan, and the views of the ocean are very far off (compared to Pelican).  I'm just not sure that this crowd will think they are getting anything close to what they are used to getting....

As for Blackhorse, well I did not play it, but I have seen a lot of the redo... and well... it was quirky and short and weird and strange before, as you know.

It's now LONG and a little less of all of those things.   One thing Blackhorse did need was improved conditions - it really was the bastard stepchild before.  Now, conditions are wonderful... and I say that simply from what I did see.  The frilly bunkers everywhere are interesting....

In the end whether it is improved or not depends on how much one valued it before.  I don't know anyone who had much love for the bastard stepchild version.

TH

[Pat Burke]

Blackhorse was the crazy relative you don't talk about.  There were a few holes worth something, but to be honest, I don't remember one hole, and I played 2 (3 round) tournaments there.
Bayonet was quirky, goofy, brutal, and different.  BUT, there was always the availability of different strategies, and the course could be played very conservatively. Prior to q school, I played a Golden State Tour event and hit driver on the majority of the holes.  I could drive it pretty well back then, and the Bayonet pummeled me 78-79.  This was less than 2 weeks before 1st stage!  I went home, bought an old MacGregor Eye O Matic 4 wood, and found an auto pilot 2 iron.  The 4 wood seemed to have a built in draw, which as legend has it seemed to fit the old Commanding Generals lefty slice well   And the 2 iron was money.
I hit driver 5 times (yes 5 times) in four rounds.  I worked for two weeks on my long irons, and played the most conservative golf of my life.  4 bogeys, 3 birdies and 65 pars later I finished t3 to  move to stage 2.  I've never been so tired in my life.  10 years later, I hit driver about 70% and advanced through stage 2.
The course just made you think about every shot, and punished you if you did not think out and execute the shot.  I'll miss the ol brute

[Tom Naccarato]

Blackhorse was the crazy relative you don't talk about.  There were a few holes worth something, but to be honest, I don't remember one hole, and I played 2 (3 round) tournaments there.

Please, I have to go right now and be with a bunch of those. Did you have to remind me!

[Bob_Huntley]

Lou:

Isn't there room in any golfer's heart for ONE COURSE that breaks all the rules?

Tom,

There must be one and I nominate the Stadium Course at PGA West.  May be it's once in a lifetime but the pelthora of players struggling around the course had the feeling of an S&M parade down Polk Street.

Bob

[Nick Church]

A playing review from a writer with the Monterey Herald.... I'm sure there'll be some rolling eyes about:

- "...Gene Bates still gave Blackhorse a visually intimidating look because he sprinkles bunkers so willingly. It's like he took a paint-ball gun and opened fire on each hole."

- "The best thing Blackhorse did during the renovation was eliminate blind shots."

Personally, playing the blind tee shots on Blackhorse's 9 & 10 are one of my strongest memories from my days as a junior golfer.

LINK:
http://www.montereyherald.com/kevinmerfeld/ci_11449918

[Tom Huckaby]

Interesting review.  I don't wholly disagree with anything he says about Bayonet. 

And from the holes I saw on Blackhorse he is right on about the sprinkling willy-nilly of bunkers... wait till you see some of these holes, Nick....

I kinda liked the blind shots at Blackhorse too though.  May they RIP...

TH

[Nick Church]

Well, I'm 35 years old... I guess it was about time I could properly use the phrase, "I remember when..."

[Adam Clayman]

After seeing these courses today, I was struck by how much was altered. My impressions are congruent with Huck's early posts on this thread. Every inch of character was removed from the uniqueness that was Fort Ord golf. Years of market research have obviously delivered a water downed finished product that can likely be found in almost every state. From the unneeded drainage collection areas to the bullshit contours in the greens. Bayonett was probably adversely affected the most. Black Horse might've actually improved. I played with a Military guy who paid $11 to play. He loved the Black Horse and was fascinated by my descriptions of what use to be there.

Major notes. Bayonet's 15th. The green that Jack Nicklaus 5 putted and walked immediately to the parking lot vowing never to return. It was sadly a simple two putt par today. (Even with the biggest swale in the way)
The next hole was one of the hardest test of driving, requiring a cut ball played all the way on the right side, just to be able to hold the fairway on the far left. The current emasculated version is barely sloped with another similar green to the 15 that preceded it.

The golf is not horrible golf. The masses will likely enjoy their time as long as value doesn't enter the equation. The conditioning and manicured grounds were a positive and showed a decent stewardship of the property, but, there were areas that had standing water in the middle of the fairway. Sad considering how well it drained before all that dirt was moved.

One last note. As I entered the fort from the Sand City entrance I was shocked to see a mile long line of cars trying to exit the fort. People from all the new homes built trying to get to work. How they could add all those homes and associated bodies and not change any of the entrances and exits is beyond inconsiderate.

[David_Elvins]

Who says that tour players don't know anything about golf clourse architecture?      This is one of the best things I have read in a long time.

*I found this on another forum.  Not able to confirm it is real, but no reason to believe otherwise.

*don't think it has already been posted, couldn't find it in the search function.

Dear Mr. Bates,

After enduring four rounds of golf at the Bayonet course at Fort Ord for PGA Tour qualifying this past week, it has spurred me to correspond with you over the changes made at your directive. Let me first offer a muted apology for the ensuing paragraphs as you are unfortunately bearing the brunt of my seemingly endless trips around “updated” golf courses, and this was just the latest example of sheer ineptitude. While arguably not the most egregious effort of poor redesign I have been forced to stomach, it is unquestionably the most precipitous decline in a world class golf course I have witnessed to date, and for that you have attained an ignominious feat in golf course architecture.

Where to start? How to start? Go painstakingly over every square inch from first to last? Even I find that tedious before I get started. Let’s begin with my favorite pet peeve of your ilk and that is with your obsession with building greens and bunkers that force approach shots in onto downslopes. My recollection has you featuring this a staggering twelve times. Obviously some are worse than others as some slopes are more severe and some shots are not coming from such long distances making some less abominable than others. Nevertheless, it stuns me how today’s architects consistently violate the simple premise that the green should “receive” the shot, not “repel” it. On par threes six and seventeen and par fours twelve and thirteen we were relegated to forward tees (the seventeenth two tee boxes forward) when the pins were placed behind greenside bunkers forcing approach shots onto the obligatory downslope. It’s not that a green should never tilt away from the approach shot. It’s that when it does, the player should be granted the opportunity to land short and run or bounce it in, not be forced to shoot the ball straight up in the air.

What this ultimately leads to is the same condition you have fashioned at Bayonet and that is the course is easier for the pros or low handicap amateur, and harder, if not downright unplayable, for the middle and high handicap player. Scoring indicates that you have made the golf course almost two shots per day easier for Tour caliber players than it once was. I obviously don’t have any data for the average hacker that further substantiates this parallel, but it doesn’t take a genius to know the average player does not possess the skill, lob wedge, and ability to spin the ball sufficiently well to play the course even somewhat successfully. If your intention was to make the course easier for pros and torture the average greens fee paying guest, congratulations, mission accomplished.

Would you agree that an understanding of slope and grading on greens would be a rudimentary requirement for anyone embarking on a career in golf course architecture? At the risk of leaving this a rhetorical question, I certainly do. If you had sufficient understanding in this area surely I and the other seventy-seven contestants this past week would have been spared your attempt at building the sixteenth green. I have seen some real abominations when it comes to unusable greens, but this takes the prize for largest green without any reasonable pin placements. The four pins used for the week would fit on a small coffee table. It must be real fun mowing that green in the morning wondering what the guy who built it was thinking. While that is unquestionably the worst on the course, the greens at two, twelve, fifteen, and eighteen are only somewhat less ridiculous. These greens were built seemingly with the idea that it is advisable to minimize usable surface area for pin placements rather than maximizing it.

The ninth hole is another triumph of head scratching inanity. Four hundred and eighty yards of uphill par four, at the coast (heavy air, the ball doesn’t travel well in coastal northern California), over deep, fronting bunkers guarding a shallow green with no tilt back to front. I’d ask you what you were thinking, but the final result is proof enough you weren’t. We had to move up thirty yards to make the hole marginally playable, and I stress marginally.

I would hate to be accused of piling on, but, hey, I’m on a roll. You move the fifteenth green fifty yards up, completely altering one of the best holes on the course, and put it right beside a huge shading tree that obscures the green from sunlight for most of the morning. And being one of the five or six greens struggling to grow grass, is it any wonder? Every green that has excessive “bowling in” instead of “bowling out”, like the fifteenth, is effectively dead. Do you think poor drainage could be a contributing factor? At the risk of another rhetorical question, yes, it probably does. And when it comes to bunkering, while yours if far from the worst I’ve seen, it is predictably contemporary in its overuse of turn-ins, walk-ins, cloverleaf features, whatever your favorite moniker for this mind numbingly clichéd shaping.

As I mentioned at the outset, this letter represents years of building frustration from dashed high hopes resulting from playing new or recently renovated golf courses, and yours just happens to be the latest. Some questions you might ponder going forward, if you insist. If people in the know resoundingly applaud old gems like Merion, Shinnecock Hills, Seminole, Pine Valley, Riviera, Pebble Beach, etc., then what are some of the common features these courses share? And once that is posed and answered with some accuracy, ask yourself do the courses that you, the Jones brothers, Arthur Hills, Pete Dye, etc. concoct resemble those courses in any meaningful way or possess any of the same characteristics? So as to leave no rhetorical stones unturned, no, they don’t. I confidently speak for all golfers that know better and assume the right to speak for all the golfers that don’t: Please stop, cease, desist, quit, resign, go no further. If these are the kind of courses we are to be the perpetual recipients of, we’d just as soon you leave well enough alone.


Sincerely,

Scott Dunlap

[Joel_Stewart]

Scott Dunlap is my new favorite player on the PGA tour.

I'm still shaking my head at how Gene Bates could get the job on 2 courses on the Monterey Peninsula over architects that have none, Doak, C&C, Hanse, Devries, and even Tom Fazio who was brought in to the Preserve after a terrible accident.

[Kris Shreiner]

Tom and Co.,

Some excellent posts, laments, gongs, etc. The internal contouring is almost beyond belief. VERY limited pinnable spots on quite a few holes, and tour quality shotmaking is required to hold them in many cases, even if the chops among us are playing from the correct tees. Conditioning is excellent, but that's moot when presented with the test that borders on "vaudeville" expectations, especially in windy, fiery conditions.

Huck, I luv ya man, but there ain't no way the new 11th green is better than the old! Come on, that old version was the most natural on the course(hell, both courses). It rippled right with the lay of the land along the lower portion of that west-facing slope, was subtle as all get out, and you could run it in to the back, so long as they hadn't overwatered or had recent Monterey Monsoons. True, the new green is better than most of the others, but I'll leave that one alone.

Huck is bang on with the Net being the all-time value king on the Peninsula in it's former glory and pricepoint. Laguna Seca is right there with it...astute call there. A gem that most overlook. The only problem are the greens, that due to super voodoo, run a stellar 4-6 on the slug meter quite often. That said, a great, sunny afternoon with some chums, some chilled chard and it doesn't get much better than that. They redid their range as well, for those that like the warm-up or ball-beating.

I looped at Pebble for 11+ wonderful years and used to love bringing my groups and players over to Ft.Ord. Sure it was "Combat Golf"....scruffy, penal, not easy to walk(carrying two bags, though we did cart it quite often), but what a track! The old tour school boys used to cry a river when they teed it up there for qualifying. In fact, usually, -6 to -8 under won it, and there were never more than 5-10 guys under par at the end of the week, and that was second stage!

I'll miss the old Madam Battleaxe...RIP Bayo...you were one tough play in your day, but I loved taking you on!

Cheers and a few tears,

Kris 

[Mike Benham]

Here are some photos from Blackhorse in May 09:

From behind #1 green:




#3 from the tee:




#4 from the tee (can't someone grow and maintain fairway height turf in front of and around the bunkers PLEASE!!)




#6 - Your basic uphill "driveable" but not driveable short 265 yard par 4 ...

[Mike Benham]

Looking back down the 6th hole:




A shortish par 4 that doglegs around the green of a downhill par 3 ...




Cool looking bunkers protected by rough




Scraggly:




Undulations, wide closely mown runoff chipping areas, stroke the chin:




Can't remember which one, they are all starting too look alike:




In the background, you can almost see The Preserve (hey, you gotta sell the views)




Another "Driveable but not really driveable" short par 4:

[James Bennett]

Did 'Scott Dunlap' go to the same journalism school as 'Julius' of Capital fame?

[Adam Clayman]

James. Could elaborate on what I'm sure is a witty post. Ignorance comes in all shapes and sizes. Mine just happens to be husky. I enjoyed Dunlap's perspective. His observations come from a place I will never reached but its interesting how our different perspectives end up with the same conclusion.