"Nothing, however compares with the drama of the eighteenth. Nicklaus and Doak planned to build a long demanding par 4 here, but Pascucci wanted a finishing hole on which the average golfer stood a chance of making par. So the architects pushed the tee back and sketched out a 560-yard par five that someday be known as one of the great holes in golf"

It already is.

Pebble's 18th can take a hike.

So you pay Doak and Nicklaus millions to design a course and it takes the owners meddling to design one of the great holes of all time.  

Crump did the same with a bit of success....

Thanks for the article. Something that has struck me about Sebonack is the cost of the land. $46 million for 300 acres. That works out to be about $150,000 an acre. I can't believe he got this property for this cheap. The only history I know it was purchased from a union retirement plan.

Was the property not zoned for any residential? It would seem to me, given the spectacular location, that this property could have sold for 3 to 4 times the price.

We've got developers in Atlanta paying that price per acre for the most awful property 45 miles outside of Atlanta.  As I recall, this is close to the price that developers are buying Lanier Country Club for (on a per acre basis...)

pictures look great!

Any chance for Ran to profile Sebonack?

If you measure "hard" as being difficult to keep the ball in play, then I don't think Sebonack is that. But having played it twice, it is certainly one of the toughest courses to score on that I've seen. If your usual means of putting together a good round is flying iron shots close to the pin, then you're going to have a long, hard day out there. As of a few weeks ago the course record was still level par, and quite a few local pros had been around it by then.

"If you measure "hard" as being difficult to keep the ball in play, then I don't think Sebonack is that. But having played it twice, it is certainly one of the toughest courses to score on that I've seen. If your usual means of putting together a good round is flying iron shots close to the pin, then you're going to have a long, hard day out there. As of a few weeks ago the course record was still level par, and quite a few local pros had been around it by then."

Eamon:

I'd say precisely.

I've never played Sebonack, and I probably never will, but my gut feeling about what might constitute "hard" on that golf course just could be perhaps ultimately the neatest thing of all about some really good, challenging and interesting architecture. By that I mean that golf couse just may have a huge wide spectrum of "variability" depending on the degree of firm and fast they put on the course at any time,
particularly "through the green".

Some might say that should be true of most any golf course but I do not believe that at all.

I would say if they have 40-50 yards of roll-out on the course off some tee shots, maybe 20-30 yards of roll-out on some of the approaches (if one wanted to try that option on the holes that architecturally allow it) and green surfaces where you couldn't just "stick" aerial approaches that golf course just might be one of the most interesting to play one could find. I don't know whether that's true on all the holes but it looked to me to be true on maybe up to half of them.

I could see even a tour pro hitting some technically well executed shots on that course but not thinking well by not "reading" the course well and getting pretty well screwed score-wise while another good player who could read the course's complexities might make out just fine.

I hope you know what I mean by that.

I have no idea if stuff like that is basically Doak or Nicklaus or a combination of the two (or some of their crews). I don't know Nicklaus architecture that well but I do know some of Doak's and that particular aspect is on some of the holes of Stonewall (the original one).

Even a really good player the first time out there (if the course is firm and fast) may look at that course and just completely miss the best and most effective way to play some of those holes, even with hitting what are technically well struck shots.

I've always been amused by that woo-woo-woo remark of "Be the Ball" but Sebonack (if firm and fast) looks to me to be a golf course where it might help a lot to sort of feel in your gut what it's like to "Be the Ball"----eg otherwise you just might hit a technically well executed shot and find yourself in a world of hurt.

If my sense about that---about Sebonack that way, is correct---that to me is what really good architecture is basically all about.

The flip side of that coin, though, is some, at first, might think that kind of thing is unfair or boarderng on it----at least until they figure out how to "read" the course's complexities.

I can't wait for the next couple of years to see if my sense about this is true of Sebonack, and to the extent I think it may be.

Eamon:

As I mentioned I've never played Sebonack (a few of us walked around it with Tom Doak last fall) but that second green did strike me. I can't remember how long that hole is (pretty long as I recall) but that green looked just a bit too shallow and perhaps too high and left to right tilting for the length of that hole.

A green that struck me as very brilliant was #12. The diagonal of the left side (back left side) will be something very tricky to contend with I think.

Tom Doak,

I'd say that the golf course can be set up to be fairly benign, or very, very difficult.

One only has to look at a far back right hole location on # 17 to get a feel of how different that hole plays, versus a front left hole location.

# 15, which to some, might be a fairly benign hole, becomes very difficult with a rear hole location.

I don't have to tell you this as you're intimately familiar with the golf course, but, depending on set up, it can be a pleasure to play, or an intense, overwhelming challenge, especially if the WIND is up, which it almost always is.