The name "Falcon's Fire" conjures up a somewhat threatening mental connotation, but the day I played there it was so wet and bright green the name couldn't have been more incongruous with the playing conditions or the presented challenge. From talking to a number of regulars, I understand that the lush presentation is standard operating procedure, unfortunately.
Let’s start with the aesthetics and get that out of the way.
There are 120+ bunkers at Falcon’s Fire, 74 on the front nine alone, most of the roundish, “pot-within-a-mound type variety. What’s more, at the edge of every single fairway, both sides are single file rows of mounds…one after another after another.
While I can say truthfully that the bunkers do not look nearly as egregiously offensive from the ground as they do from oft-photographed aerial views, which would be almost impossible, they are at best a visual distraction and at worst a cubist eyesore.
That’s sad, because once you get past the aesthetic distractions and histrionic stylistics, Falcon’s Fire is a pretty good golf course, and certainly one that is much more mercifully playable than the vast majority of the “7400 yards, 140+ slope from the tips” resort “championship” courses that have been built in recent years.
In fact, one of the ironies of Falcon’s Fire is that it might just be “too” playable for the modern golfing mindset. At only 6900 yards from the tips, the course features ample fairway widths, NOT ONE forced carry (a minor miracle in the swampland of Florida), reasonably playable rough, greens that are more clever than diabolical, and holes that present the golfer with a fair number of strategic choices, one of the knocks that I’ve heard from others is that Falcon’s Fire is too “easy”.
It’s interesting to consider the following dynamic and what this says about the average golfing perception; when FF opened in 1993, and for the first decade of operation, the course rating and slope from the 6901 yard tips were 72.5 and 125. Now, in 2007, without adding a single yard of length, a single bunker or hazard, without growing the rough any longer, or planting a single tree, the course rating and slope is now miraculously 73.8 and 138!!
This means that somehow, suddenly, Falcon’s Fire is not 10% harder for higher handicap players than it was when it opened, or even 50%. No, it’s 100% harder. This, of course, is preposterous, and obviously part of a modern effort to somehow equate difficulty with greatness.
The front nine at FF starts out slow, and frankly a bit dull. While the short par four second hole offers some strategic decision-making, it’s really not til the 5th when one encounters a hole with some unique character. At 453 yards and the number one handicap hole, it even features a largely blind tee-shot that needs to challenge bunkers on the left side for an optimum approach (that could be played running if they’d ever turn the sprinklers off, which I understand is never the case). That’s followed by the clever little 6th hole, which only suffers from the unfortunate fact that the cart path was routed 30 yards in front of the green. Eight is a very long, strong par three, followed by another cutesy, the mid-lenth 9th, where once again challenging bunkers from the tee provides the optimum approach angle.
The back nine starts less promising. Holes 10 and 11 are two dead-dull holes, and it isn’t til the 12th green is reached that one notes the course coming back to life. The oft-photographed 13th, with the 15 bunker “Bunker Hill” feature, is actually a pretty damn good left-to-right cape hole of 394 yards, often played across a prevailing wind coming from the right. It’s a hole that narrows the noose the more aggressively one attempts to play from the tee. Even better is the following par five 14th with a green tucked just so in a corner on a hill behind a swampy depression. That’s followed by a terrific little par three of 163 yards with a pucker-inducing green. The front-pin on this hole is simply wonderful.
The next two are reasonably decent holes, if much less inspired, but then finishes with a boring “Trent Jonesian “hard par-easy bogey”, long slog of a par four.
All in all, Falcon’s Fire is not nearly as bad as the awful artistic sensibility of the shaping and might lead one to believe, and frankly, it’s wonderfully playable by every level of golfer. For a modern course, the routing is almost intimate, with no long green to tee treks, and flows rather naturally. It also has stretches of rousing golf, interspersed with quite mundane fare. At its best, it’s even good fun. I just found myself wishing that more of those 120 or so bunkers were more creatively interspersed into the playing areas and not simply set well to the side to present visual window-dressing.