... under Architecture Timeline and Courses by Country.
Most clubs/courses scream for publicity. Not The Country Club.
Other than learning that Gil Hanse had become the club’s architect of record in 2007, I hadn’t read much as to what was going on. Have you?
Hence, one of the most bizarre things happened to me when I climbed onto the third tee at The Country Club two weeks ago: I became disoriented. My head exploded! Everything was the same yet everything was different. Over on the right was the seventh with its plateau green exposed - not framed by trees. Through the limbed-up specimen trees I could see the fifth hole to the left and below. The third hole looked ‘bigger’ for a lack of a better word. Having not been there since 2004, and having scrolled through its profile the prior night on GolfClubAtlas.com, it was overwhelmingly evident that much had changed. So ... I stopped playing for a few holes! There was too much to process.
Coincidentally, Ben Cowan-Dewar had played it a week earlier. We compared notes about its ample but not wide fairways and small canted greens and marveled that
not a single architect builds courses remotely like it today. 50 yard wide fairways, big bunkers, and wild interior green contours have people fixated at the moment. Yes, TCC is getting ready to host the 2013 U.S. Amateur next month, so it has its game face on, but those descriptives are never what TCC is about. Bending fairways, little bunkers that don’t always flash toward the green's center, and greens that average a scant 3,600 square feet on the Composite Championship course (the Main Course greens average 3,400 sq.feet) provide a distinctly old-fashioned challenge. Give me a hole like the penultimate one here: the inside of the dogleg left is well protected via bunkers/rough and the long, thin green tilts left. Its very simplicity makes 9X% of modern architecture look labored/contrived.
Along with seeing Merion prior to the U.S. Open, seeing this course marks the second time that I have ever felt pity for contestants. The stretch of holes on the Composite from 9 (this time being played as a par 4!) through 15 is the most brutal, searching stretch of holes that I have ever seen. Below is a picture of the embankment that you now must carry for your second shot at the newly configured 625 yard twelfth:
What a superb Sahara feature – 2013 U.S. Amateur contestants beware! The yellow flag is barely visible under the tree on the left.
Ben concluded with the following pithy observation:
‘TCC is like French food. Fusion or ethnic might be what is ‘in’ right now but as soon as you have French, you remember nothing beats it.’ Spot on!
Bottom line: It was a full notch better than I remembered. The club has done everything right and is nearing that rarified state of presenting their course at its peak state. IMO, less than ~30 courses/clubs can say the same around the world. Indeed, I now push TCC to a AA on the Morrissett scale (or a 9 on the Doak scale). Like Prestwick, the more the game changes, the more you appreciate TCC. To heck with all the new courses being built; play TCC and you might want to retreat into a shell and focus on but a dozen or two courses. You know’em and I know’em. If confined to such a limited number of courses to play the rest of my life, TCC would be one of them, it’s that different from the rest. Put another way: I couldn’t
not select it. There are too many neat features best found here.
There is primrose and then there is Primrose. There are country clubs and then there is The Country Club.
Leave the last word to my idol, Francis Ouimet, who said in 1932,
"To me, the ground here is hallowed. The grass grows greener, the trees bloom better, there is even warmth to the rocks. Somehow or other the sun seems to shine brighter on The Country Club than any other place that I have ever known."Cheers,