Hawaii was already covered in Volume 2 of The Confidential Guide, albeit not very thoroughly ... I think the four of us had only played a dozen courses in the islands altogether. But I happened to have a free day in Hawaii today before heading back to the snow at home, and after a morning on the North Shore watching surfers get pounded in the Banzai Pipeline, I stopped through Ko'olau Golf Club, formerly known as the Hardest Golf Course in the World.
On a Sunday afternoon, the giant parking lot was full, but not because of golfers. It turns out that after the course's original owners went bankrupt, the best use of their giant clubhouse was to convert it into the new home of the First Presbyterian Church of Honolulu, and the keys to the golf course went with it. Having briefly attended Presbyterian Sunday school as a small boy, I will honor that affiliation by not swearing in my review of the course.
Ko'olau struggled financially from the get-go for three reasons:
1. It reportedly cost $82 million to build;
2. Its slope rating was off the charts, due to jungle surrounding the course and a lot of forced carries; and
3. It's cut out of a tropical rain forest, and the 80 to 100 inches of annual rainfall limits the conditioning and the attractiveness to golfers.
Genius business plan, am I right? With the $82 million written off the books, the new managers only have to worry about the last two reasons above.
A friend of mine was in charge of the construction of the course, and now that I've seen it, I'm amazed he ever got it finished under the circumstances.
I would guess that they did not originally set out to build the hardest course in the world, but realized once they got into the project that it was going to be extremely difficult, and just figured they should go for the title of "most difficult," since "playable" was not in the cards. At that point, they went a bit mad adding bunkers left and right, ostensibly to save balls from being lost in the jungle, but adding a lot of difficulty and time to the recovery play. The new management has grassed over more than 50 bunkers from the original design.
Even with that, it's still a very difficult course, and it didn't appear to me to be the kind of difficult that would be fun. I suppose you could play it with the "bombs away" mentality as long as you bring a bucket of balls -- they suggest you'll likely lose one ball for every stroke of your handicap! But since I do not enjoy losing ten balls, it looked to me that I would have to play it extremely conservatively, hitting 4-wood on the tee shots to keep it in play, and possibly laying up on some of the forced-carry second shots if I hadn't hit a perfect drive, to avoid penalty strokes. There are forced carries from the fairway at the 6th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 16th [which sports two of them], and the 18th, many of them longer than 100 yards, in addition to numerous carries from the tees. In addition, with the rain forest growing back as rain forests do, many of the big carries must be made through narrow gaps in the jungle, as the maintenance crew has been severely short-handed.
So, for now there is no Doak Scale rating for Ko'olau, and I am grateful to God's mercy that I don't have to give it one. I just don't have enough game to enjoy it. And, from the looks of it, neither do 99.5% of other golfers.