John,
My wife and I had the true pleasure of having dinner on Friday night and playing The Honors on Saturday morning with David Stone. Mr. Stone has spent the past 45 years as Superintendent at Holston Hills and then at The Honors. Fascinating stories of his early experiments with zoysia and fescue, bent vs bermuda in the deep South, and his 30 year relationship with the Dye family.
I had acquired a copy of the Honor's club history a few years back. It contains an illustrated hole by hole guide, so I was somewhat familiar with the course. And I'd read John Sabino's blog post from when he played it a decade ago. David pointed out the major changes from what I'd read as we played. They included a rerouting of the 10th fairway to accommodate a larger driving range about a decade ago, and a more recently redesigned 13th? green. They've also recently lost a large tree which really effected strategy on the short p4 12th.
Overall I guess the obvious comparison would be to The Golf Club in Columbus, Ohio. It's similar in that its a true parkland routing with lots of subtle Dye touches, like small round pot bunkers, but not too much of the over the top Sawgrass-like features. No bulkhead bunkers on this one. And the hole that was probably most photographed in it's early years, the par 3 14th, has had it's 140 yard long tee to green bunker replaced with nasty native grasses quite a while ago. Only hole I hated was the 16th, a fairly formulaic 185yd par3 with 100% carry over water. Overall, it is a very, very tough golf course. Greens were running 12 on Saturday, and there are dramatic slopes on many of the holes. But I'd say Dye did a pretty good job of balancing the fun with the challenging. My wife, a 36 handicap beginner, made 5 pars including a missed 2 footer for birdie on 18. The feature I was most interested in seeing based on my research was the fairway on the 7th hole that sits well below the level of the bordering lake. It turned out quite clever, if not quite as revolutionary as I expected.
My main takeaway was jealousy - Honors is miles ahead of anyone else in the Deep South for how firm and fast the course was playing even after recent rain. Mr Stone plays mostly a ground game these days, and did so quite effectively on the majority of holes. I guess it's fair to say I'm becoming more and more of a believer in the combination of zoysia fairways and bermuda greens for this part of the country. Obviously that assumes you've got someone like David to keep an eye on them. If you are a greenskeeper, architect or greens committee member contemplating agronomic changes in this part of the U.S., I now feel strongly that The Honors should be a mandatory scouting trip.
I posted a few pictures on my twitter @Bamabearcat if you are interested. I think they give at least an overall "feel"
MW