When did you say, “Ah, so this is what a golf course can be!”

[Tommy Williamsen]

I had heard about Crystal Downs when I visited my parents in Michigan. In the early 70s, you could call Fred Mueller, tell him you were a visiting golfer, and he would let you play. I called every year for a decade. After a while, he remembered me and always gave me a warm welcome. Standing on the first tee and seeing the sprawling course before me, I thought, “This will be fun.” After four holes, I thought, “This is really good.” Then I got to number five. What in the world do I do now? Where do I aim? I tried to hit my tee ball over the three sisters. I luckily pulled my tee shot because I wouldn’t have made the carry. When I got to the turn, I thought, “Ah, so this is what a golf course can be!”
When I walked off 18 after many three putts, I thought the greens were the most fun I’d ever played. Playing my course at home was a letdown. That experience set me on a quest to play as many great courses as possible.

[Ian Mackenzie]

1978 - Forsgate CC in NJ.
The steam-shoveled bunkers just blew my mind at the time.


Charles Banks opened my eyes.

[Joe_Tucholski]

Rustic Canyon.  It was generally my home courses for the 4 years of dental school.


Affordable, well designed public course that presents options and not just the requirement to hit it straight and long (although those two things never hurt).


It led me to this site, also took me off the path of seeking rounds on the top 100 publics. 

[Steve_ Shaffer]

Merion East
Years ago, when I was a muni guy in the Philadelphia/South NJ area until a friend invited me. From the first shot next to the club house patio to the 18th green, my eyes were wide open. I parred the first hole and thought I was good.  What a day!!!

[jeffwarne]

Despie growing up at Augusta CC, frequently playing(and loving) Palmetto, working in college at Athens CC, and securing my first golf job at Long Cove(#1 in SC at the time), my eyes truly opened to the possibilities(views, architecture, northern turfgrass) when I played my first course in New York, Sleepy Hollow, where I was fortunate enough to work in the early 90's.

[Craig Sweet]

When I was nine...sunk some soup cans in the ground around my house. Hit plastic golf balls on "holes" laid out in the front and back yards.  Lots of fun playing shots of the roof angles, and around lilac bushes.

[mike_malone]

After I moved to Vermont I had the chance to play in the annual corporate outing at


   MYOPIA HUNT CLUB


 While I grew up in Delaware at DuPont and enjoyed the architecture of the Nemours and Louviers courses I realized that Myopia was on a completely different level and one I wanted to experience as much as possible.

[Thomas Dai]

When I was nine...sunk some soup cans in the ground around my house. Hit plastic golf balls on "holes" laid out in the front and back yards.  Lots of fun playing shots of the roof angles, and around lilac bushes.

Splendid.
Golfs essentially a simple ball, stick, hole game.
It's all the trappings and malarkey around it that make the game more complex and expensive than it really needs to be.
atb

[Scott Weersing]

I would say Pacific Dunes in 2004. Sure I played Bandon Dunes in 2000 but i was overwhelmed on the first play.


Pacific has that great reveal where you finish one hole and then emerge to see the next one. And I also learned to look from the green to tee to see another perspective.

[Jason Topp]

When I moved to Des Moines from more rural areas of Iowa at age 12 I went to the golf course closest to my house and on the first tee remember being captivated by the huge hills, tall trees and a pond that one needed to carry on the opening tee shot.

My experience of golf prior to that time consisted of cornfield golf courses, typically 9 holes, with a single line of spindly trees deliniating the corridors of play.  Seeing a mature course for the first time was magical.

The course was Waveland and when I now visit every five years or so, I notice all of the aspects of the design that are flawed, but I still have a tinge of that magic feeling when I visit or even think of the place.

[Jim_Coleman]

   When I was a freshman in college, the son of a friend of my parents (a Princeton prof) called and asked if I would like to play Merion. The sum total of my golf architecture knowledge was Dan Jenkins’ Sports Illustrated piece on the best 18 in America, and Merion was the only course with 2 holes listed - #’s 1 and 11.
    I was crushed when he called me the day before to tell me Merion had fallen through.  Unfortunately, we would be playing Pine Valley.  Well, we played 36 that day, and I was hooked.

[Ira Fishman]

Youth experience: we went on a family vacation to Bedford Springs when I was 15 or 16. Adult experience: the architecture bug did not really take so I rediscovered it 40 years later in Ireland, particularly at Lahinch. My life has been so much more enjoyable in the decade since that trip. The real time experience of playing interesting courses, the memories that are created, and the stories to swap. All the better that nearly 100% of those experiences were shared playing golf with my wife.


Ira

[Mike_Trenham]

Played Lahinch in an absolute downpour, yet the balls were running out and the greens were draining, plus the in your face blindness of the holes that were so much fun to attack.

[Matt Schoolfield]

I think for me the first time I was struck by this was when I'd moved to Edinburgh and took my clubs on the bus to Silverknowes GC on the firth. Learning to play in central Texas, our "links style" courses looked the part, but I didn't like the way they played. I know Silverknowes bills itself as parkland (it is technically), but when I stepped up to the second tee (a downhill par 3 that you could probably use a putter on), there must have been a 20mph sustained NW headwind, I knew this was the golf I'd been waiting for all my life. On the third tee, I knew I could smash my (25hcp at the time) drive as hard as I could without fear of OB along the left side because the wind would push anything to the right. I probably played that hole from next fairway a dozen times.

To this day my views on golf keep a strong prevailing wind at the center of the design I prefer. I think I'd usually rather play a straightforward, 240 yard, par 4 with an awkward crosswind than a 340 yard tactical position-play hole on a calm day. Thankfully, I can typically play both on a really good course.

[Brad Tufts]

I was lucky to grow up on, and still play, a great golden age course with history at Tedesco.  It also afforded me to experience several classics through interclubs...imagine a rota of Salem CC, Essex, and Myopia, with an RTJ thrown in at Ipswich CC!


Essex CC has always been my favorite.  I played it once a year for a while, at one point shooting 116, then 89, then 76, and ten years after that I made the round of 16 in the Mass Amateur there.


I relish getting to play there in the Sherrill Cup each year, one day 36 holes, afternoon alt shot, four man teams, 25ish clubs...it's a blast and the course gets better each year.  We've come in second, maybe one of these years we'll win the damn thing!

[Tim Leahy]

When I was nine...sunk some soup cans in the ground around my house. Hit plastic golf balls on "holes" laid out in the front and back yards.  Lots of fun playing shots of the roof angles, and around lilac bushes.

Did the same thing when I was 16 and first discovered the game of golf but without the soup cans. I used fence posts and drains in the yard as holes for wiffle balls.
My first exposure to REAL golf came when I played the closest country club, Rancho Murieta, a Burt Stamps course just outside Sacramento in the foothills. Juniors could play for $5 walking and I remember hitting spin off a real fairway on the first hole for the first time. Also there were no parallel fairways  as the course was laid out in a figure 8 with elevation changes on every hole lined by old Oaks with the fastest greens I had ever played. 

[Anders Rytter]

Ballyneal. Such an eye-opener

[Buck Wolter]

In a 3 week period I played St Louis CC, Royal County Down and Crystal Downs in about 2000. Life was never the same.

[Marty Bonnar]

Obviously, growing up in Scotland, we were exposed to links, heath and parks in roughly equal measure. As a kid/teenager, nothing was unexpected or surprising.
It wasn’t until a trip to the Monterey Peninsula, what, fifteen years ago, that I was TRULY surprised by a golf course. No, not that one and, no, not that one, either.
MPCC Shore was an absolute game-changer for me. Golf course design as true Art. Remember, this is coming from someone who’s been involved in landscape design for most of his career. For me to see the work of someone who had taken on board not only the principles of landscape design, but to also have the cojones to apply them, in a very highly stylised way, to the laying out of a golf course was revolutionary.
True genius. I shudder to think where else he might have gone. Maybe only some of Muirhead’s more ‘out-there’ work is as ‘interesting’.
F.

[Jordan Beasley]

In the summer of 2007 I took an internship working for my then-girlfriend's father in Queensbury, New York. The family belonged to Glens Falls Country Club, and would take me out to play with them every weekend.  I couldn't break 100 and I had never before heard the name "Donald Ross," but I was blown away that golf could be that fun.  The girlfriend and I did not make it through the year, and I have never been back to Glens Falls, but my love for golf and GCA has only grown over the last 16 years.


As a side-note, I have never seen another course with as cool a pair of "first shot and last shot" as Glens Falls. 


For the first tee shot (dog-leg right par-5) you walk out on a bridge to a tee box anchored in the inlet of a small lake, then try to get your tee shot across the water and up to the top of a large hill on the other side, to flat ground and a clear view of a distant green.


For the 18th tee shot (short drop-shot par-3) you find yourself back on top of the hill you traversed with the first tee shot, and only steps from the back patio to the club dining room. With a small gallery clinking glasses and the lake/first tee box looming to the left, your task is to finesse a wedge for one last chance at a birdie.


God willing I'll make it back some day!