Eric,
Thanks for the encomium. As we also played together at Tobacco Road you got to see the Good, the Bad, and the (really)Ugly of my game.
I'm just happy that I saved my best for the last. The match against you was about as well as I can play with the hickories. I can only recall one true mishit all day and that was the tee shot on 8 where you were getting a shot anyhow. As I remarked to you at least twice during the round, "It may not be pretty but it's really competitive. If this were on TV we'd be giving Johnny Miller a lot to talk about."
Describing my experience as a sand problems is kind and accurate, but from my perspective, after you hit your approach on 18, I felt like I should be wearing a burnoose and I swear I could hear the theme from Lawrence of Arabia as soon as your killer shot stopped stony dead. A good match, a good time, and i was surprised at how much faster the pace of play seemed on Sunday than on Saturday. Eric and I didn't have to wait much at all despite being a twosome and the tail end Charlies.
The courses: the work done at Mid-Pines has improved the look and the vistas, but I seem to remember some of the greens as being a little more extreme before the renovation. Could be my imagination as it has been nearly ten years since i had seen it.
Pine Needles always seemed to overwhelm me before and so I always regarded it as a big brother to Mid Pines. I still regard it as a big brother but strangely it seemed more manageable with my hickories, but I'm sure the relative shortness had a lot to do with that. Still, I felt more comfortable on the course and was able to enjoy the architecture. Lots of good holes there.
Tobacco Road. This course still causes visceral reactions. Some people (I'm talking about you Ward) really dislike it. I've only played it twice, Dixie Cup 2005 and then again this year, but I still like it even though I blew up ("blowed up real good" for you SCTV fans) and only finished three or four holes on the back. The first time I played it I made three birdies and still feel that with experience I could navigate my way around to a reasonable score. Greens were bad, but that can be fixed. The visual stimulation of the course did inspire me to ask the musical question "If you dropped LSD before teeing off, would the course appear dead level."
Dormie Club. My third Coore and Crenshaw and by far the course with the biggest shoulders after Chechessee and Streamsong. Truly minimalist, no ball washers, no hole markers indicating the hole number and the yardage from the respective tees. The absence of a yardage book makes it difficult for me to recall all of the holes. 8 is a great hole with the speed slot on the right side of the fairway. The monster first par five on the back is a gorgeous hole. Curiously Eric and I played that hole and on each of our first three shots our balls got closer and closer together until after our thirds we were about two yard apart 100 yards short of the green.
I particularly liked 15, 17 and 18. From the tee the fairway on 15 looks impossible but it has three tiers that can provide a level lie for the approach. On my first play I was on the upper tier and thus had a completely blind shot to the green. My fault. Great green. The kind where you would like to take a bucket of balls and just chip and pitch and putt for hours.
The 17th is a breathtakingly beautiful hole that swings from right to left and climbs and climbs. When I stepped onto the tee the first time I said "I'm in love, but then I've always been a sucker for a pretty face." Being a short hitter I had to strike three damned near perfect woods to get just below the green. I'm wondering how close some of the real golfers could get in two.
The 18th is a sweet proposition as well with a huge waste area down the right side, and the same sand runs as diagonal hazard from right to left. I think it's a great finishing hole even if it's not as great as the preceding one. Craig Disher told me there was some discussion about whether to use the current 17th as the finishing hole with the clubhouse just beyond it. It was decided that it was too dramatic. The way it was built you now have the thrill of the seventeenth but are left with the eighteenth as the denouement. Or think of the seventeenth as the gathering of the suspects in the smoking room and the eighteenth as the explanation of how the murder was committed. It certainly worked that way with Eric and me. I thought I had gotten away it, but i was brought to justice by the waste area.
A lot of blind shots, but of a different type of blindness than that presented by Tobacco Road. Shaida and I discussed the different types of blindness one evening, but I'm not certain if it was before or after the first round at Dormie. I do remember red wine and beer were involved.
He assigned different letters to the categories of blindness. X, Y, and J. Well, that's how I remember it and did I mention red wine and beer. X was a hole at Rye England, the 13th I believe, where no amount of study would give you a clue to what is on the other side. Only experience would solve the riddle. There's a lot of that Tobacco Road.
Dormie has a lot of tee shots that could conceivably finish out of sight, but there is never the feeling you are hitting into a void or forced to act as a matter of faith that there's a safe haven for your ball out there. It would be interesting for someone who is familiar with the course to count the number of holes where you can't see the green from the tee. This was category Y--an acceptable and even valued form of blind shot.
Category J is the blind shot that not only goes out of sight but has a capricious fate ahead--either a downhill hogback or hardpan running to perdition be it woods, water, or OB. This is not a good thing and I for one don't recall any of Category J this weekend.
Of course, I want to echo everyone's thanks to Craig, and Cory for their organizational efforts, and to Ran who once again opened his house to us. I thanked him by pointing out to him in front of the group that this site has enabled me to spend thousands of dollars that would otherwise be in my IRAs. Ran anticipated my next gambit by intervening with an assertion that there would be no opportunity for reimbursement.
Captain Fleisher, I have one question. Had I won would I have been allowed to make my own sartorial choices or been required to provide them for the entire North team for the next Dixie Cup. I'm hoping to debut some barber pole striped beauties at the next GCA outing. I don't want to know what my penance would have been had I lost--lederhosen complete with the alpine hat.
Great times, great courses, great matches, great guys. For those of you who haven't made your way to a GCA outing you should really make the effort. I've done so many I'm not sure when I've been present and when it's just an after image.