In the process of updating the Wairakei and Paraparaumu Beach profiles, I saw where I wrote in 1999 that New Zealand was the biggest golf disappointment in the world considering all that it has going for it: miles and miles of coastline, sandy soil, a former British colony where people know and appreciate what represents good golf, weather for growing grasses that are conducive to good golf, etc. Since writing that ten years ago, New Zealand got what it needed and that was from one man: Julian Robertson, whose creation of Kauri Cliffs followed by Cape Kidnappers gave New Zealand the world class golf that it deserves.
All us golfers wish we were in the southern hemisphere this time of year but Kauri Cliffs isn't like Humewood or Durban where you have roads (and power/telephone lines) separating you from the water. The connection with nature is undiluted and this resort with only eleven cottages was never intended to be a golf factory or a real-estate play. Rather, it was simply a way for Julian and his wife Josie to share this special country with friends and likeminded people who enjoy the outdoors.
Their love affair together with New Zealand started in the early 1970s when they spent a year here and Mr. Robertson is quick to credit his friend Stan Druckenmiller for prompting him to pursue land in New Zealand in the 1990s. His first of two five thousand plus (!) acre purchases was here in the Bay of Islands and this is the kind of view
that you must endure as you play along the cliff line:
Look out your window now (I'm looking my insane Goldendoodle barking at frozen pine cones) and look back at this photo. Hmmm...not a tough call as to where you would rather be and I bet my dog wouldn't bark if she were there.
A few years later, Mr. Robertson followed up Kauri Cliffs with Cape Kidnappers, which cracks my world top ten list (it pushes Pebble Beach out, in part because Cape Kidnappers is perfectly presented and Pebble still labors along with with its two badly managed par three greens on the back nine).
GolfClubAtlas doesn't do Green Keeper of the year awards but if we did, Steve Marsden would win one. The phrase 'fast and firm' has rapidly become the most over/miss-used phrase in golf but it accurately applies here. On not one not two but three occasions, Ben tried to throw me off my game by hitting drives in excess of 380 (!!) yards. Some of that was wind-aided and some was the power generated when his driver head sauntered
into the ball at a club head speed approaching 80mph (yes, it almost compressed the ball). Give Doak's routing and Steve Marsden the rest of the credit for allowing such fun, one-of-a-kind shots to unfold. It is shots like that and having a wedge into one hole followed by a three wood into the same hole the next day that should energize you to head down to New Zealand.
While the fairways had a perfect sheen to them, everything else about Cape Kidnappers was ideal as well to the point that if I were Tom Doak, I would give my own work a '10' on the Doak scale. As it is, I am too tall
to be Tom but Cape Kidnappers receives a AAA in the other most feared ranking system (the Morrissett AAA, AA, A, BBB, sliding scale developed in 1988 under tightly guarded laboratory conditions by my then eighteen year old younger brother and me).
Yes, personally speaking, Cape Kidnappers constitutes the finest cliffside course in the world but that's like saying Invictus is the best rugby movie this year - it is just full stop great, a AAA, and warrants hole for hole comparison with any course you so wish to. Have a look at its profile and see if you don't agree and/or if you can find some weaknesses that I don't. The whole range of shots are asked for, that's for sure, but when and where you'll hit them changes with the wind.
The Robertson family have given people from around the world two more reasons to come to this wonderful country where the vocabulary is different: gannets, kiwis, flat whites, Steinlager, and All Blacks are central to conversations on either property and that's before you start mispronouncing Mauri words like Tane Mahuta and Puketi Kauri.
The flight down is easy (you get on board at night and wake up there in the morning (no one is asking you to fly the plane, for goodness sakes!)) but it is just long enough to where some people don't go. That's a shame. Not unlike MacKenzie and Royal Melbourne, if you really want to know just how good Doak is as an architect, you have to see Cape Kidnappers. Also, you'll miss out on appreciating people giving back in a spectacular manner to a place that means so much to them, which is exactly what the Robertson family is doing on several different levels in New Zealand.
This Tar Heel made it all possible: Julian Robertson, bounding up and down the hills at Cape Kidnappers where he closely followed the action both days at his 2009 Kiwi Challenge.