The term restoration has become pretty elastic, perhaps too much so. Properly used, it means to restore something. Shocking, I know! Well, I have no qualms in applying it to what has occurred at Hollywood Golf Club. Literally from a map in the Men’s Locker Room, Brian Schneider painstakingly expanded all eighteen greens and reworked the vast majority of the bunkers as seen on the locker wall. What a job he did too. While some courses enjoy natural advantages over Hollywood, how many have better bunkers and/or greens? Well! That list gets very short, very quick IMO. To convey its strengths, I turned to photographer Benjamin Herms for series of 2022 photographs to update its profile.
Here is the result:
Hollywood Golf Club – Golf Club AtlasWalter Travis had very strong notions on what constituted good golf and he conveyed them eloquently over the years in The American Golfer. To me, what Brian did (with help from Blake Conant and Matt Hunter) is to infuse Walter Travis’s inimitable style back into this rectangular parcel of land. I don’t know what to admire more - the hazards (like the volcano bunker left of 16) or the greens (the 6
th is a master class). Luckily, I don’t have to choose. There is a main ridge that bisects the property and Travis did a masterful job of utilizing it in varied ways at holes 14, 16, 17, 4, and 5. Otherwise, the property has modest movement, which allowed Travis to go to town building such fabulous features. The course is a breeze to walk too, an increasingly important personal consideration with each passing year.
There are thousands of 200-acre parcels across the country of comparable quality to Hollywood’s raw land. Also, I consider the quality of today’s new course construction to be at a similar (high!) level to that of the Golden Age. And yet, here is the rub: if you gave your favorite modern architect a comparable site to Hollywood, I reckon the odds are low that anyone would build a finer course. That’s the magic of Walter Travis and Hollywood - and Brian. Even in the golf-rich Garden State, Hollywood stands out.
Best,