Sugarloaf Mountain - new C&C - Links Magazine article

[PThomas]

I liked it and look forward to seeing it again.

well-said

[Jason Connor]

I'm planning to do the member for a day thing (and the wife will check out the homesites).

If any GCAers are interested in playing, please shoot me a PM.

[Joe Hancock]

Chris,

A dissenting view is a good thing, IMO. I do think, however, it would be better accepted from a position of having played the course. I don't know how you can think anything, positive or negative, about the course other than the aesthetics. It's important for a course to look good, but the reason it exists is to play good.

Go play it, then if you don't like it, come back and state why. You'll have our ear(or eyes, as it were), I promise.

Thanks,

Joe

[Adam_Messix]

First of all, I really enjoyed playing Sugarloaf Mountain on my recent visit and look foward to returning.  The one thing I can say for sure is no two holes there are remotely similar and going through pictures of other C & C's that I've visited, the holes remind me of little I've played of there's with the exception of bunker styling.  

With this in mind, I can understand where Chris is coming from.  Not everyone is going to fall in love with Sugarloaf.  I guess this is true with any course, but for CERTAIN PEOPLE, there is not a lot of eye candy and wow features.  It's one excellent golf hole after another with an excellent set of intereting green surfaces and a great set of par threes and an interesting finisher where a lot of numbers come into play.  For me the wow factor is the topography for it's location, it's quite hilly.  

From experience, I think the pictures don't do the course justice.

[Chris_Clouser]

Adam and all,

I agree my dissent should be tempered because I have not yet experienced the course in person, but then opinions of a couple of others on this thread are also praising the course and they have not seen it from what I can gather. 

I am mostly curious about what it is that would draw me all the way down to Florida to see a course that looks like several others.  Like I said many of the holes from the photos look eerily similar to some holes from the Warren Course.  The opening hole looks almost identical to the first at Warren, the 11th is very much like the short 4th at Warren and the similarities exist on several other holes from a photographic perspective with the exception I noted above.  So what makes this course so good that it is now the new apple of our eye?  What is it that makes it so much better than what appears on the surface to be a similar golf course in Indiana that is perhaps a top 10 public course, but is suddenly one of the best courses in the state of Florida?

Why is it we bash magazines and ratings for hyperbole like this everyday, but we can have it about course XXX and we have to take it for the truth? 



Jeff,

Not to call you out, but there are people on here that think everything done by certain architects is gold or is trash due to the name only.  Just look at the words they type.  But I trust you are not like that based on our communications in the past.  But there are some on here...

[Jeff_Mingay]

Adam,

Though they're rugged, I find the bunkers at Sugarloaf to be different than a lot of Coore and Crenshaw's other work... I'm trying to "hit the nail on the head" in explaining the difference, but I can't. There's something in the detail I see that make many of the bunkers at Sugarloaf unique in the Coore and Crenshaw portfolio.

[John_Conley]

I'm planning to do the member for a day thing (and the wife will check out the homesites).

Jason, you still in town?  I'm happy to report that your view of the lots won't be obstructed by any housing.  Gimme a call if you feel like it as I am playing again this summer after a little while off, mainly for hockey season.