For my first ever gca.com-related travel, I drove out from Toronto to see Joe Hancock in Grand Rapids, at his Grand Island Golf Course. I’d been interested to learn about his maintenance program/practice there (I think calling it minimal is not getting it too wrong), and it was a pleasure to see the results first hand. The course is healthy and fresh, in a natural, easy way; and despite lots of rain recently the greens were firm, and still rolling true and fast. I think the work that Joe’s done at Grand Island is important, as it seems to me that maintenance/agronomy issues and practices are going to become ever-more central topics of conversation in the golf world in years to come, on at least a couple of fronts.
I also played The Mines, the course Joe worked on with architect Mike DeVries. I haven’t read any of the threads about it, but here are some of my general/overview thoughts. I think it’s an absolutely wonderful golf course. I can’t remember when I enjoyed a round more (and it rained steadily that day). The course struck me as all of one piece, if you know what I mean, i.e. nothing was there that didn’t seem to fit in with everything else that was there, or with the whole. The golf course (and the work that Mike and Joe did) seemed to me lacking in any self-consciousness, e.g. the bunkers didn’t seem consciously natural or artistic, they just seemed right; the complete lack of bunkers on two of the first three holes didn’t seem forced or artsy, it just seemed fitting (and to my eyes attractive and effective); and the greens didn't seem of any prescribed type: they were sometimes undulating and sometimes sloped/tilted, and were larger/smaller sometimes when you expected them to be and sometimes not, but always seemed to me to be what the land called for.
I don’t want to say something like “they made the most of a very challenging/undulating site”, because that kind of statement always sounds to me like a back-handed compliment. Instead, I think they used just about all the dramatic landforms on the site, and (to my untrained eye at least) used them in the only/best way those landforms could be used. To me, the course also felt spacious and relaxed, even the shared fairways and a section of valley with 3 Par 3s all played in/around it. (And I’m guessing that if I had a bird’s-eye view, the entire property would be smaller than I imagined it to be while on the course.)
I think it’s a golf course where the tee placements were very smartly done. I played the white tees, from where I played the course pretty decently (for an average golfer who’s only played about 5 times in the last two years): some of the holes looked scarier than they proved to be, but others, like a couple of tough Par 4s and a tricky short Par 4 with a nice bit of visual deception (it fooled me) proved harder than they looked. But I also had the time to look at certain holes from the back tees, and from there those holes looked hard, not just for an average player but for a good one as well. The way the landforms come into play from back there (and the shots needed to play them best) was different than from the whites. Finally, to my eyes the course looked very mature, like it (and the trees and the landforms) had all been there for a long time; to me it looked like what I imagine a classic course looking like. That it was so affordable was just a very nice bonus.
Anyway, as you can probably tell, I think The Mines is an exceptionally good golf course, and one that will be thought of highly (and maybe even more highly) for years to come.
A couple of last little things. When I first got to The Mines, I hadn’t been on the course 5 minutes when the thought struck me “This is a Stanley Thompson course”. Let me explain that, because I don’t want any charges of hyperbole fired my way, and I’m certainly no expert of Stanley Thompson (or of Mike DeVries for that matter). I’ve only played one Thompson course, the 9 hole “The Sands” on Lake Muskoka, and that was about 7 years ago. It too is a treed and undulating course, but I don’t want to make too much of the comparison; I mention it just because it struck me as interesting how immediately and strongly my thoughts were brought back to that Thompson course when I got to the Mines. Also, I only learned as I was leaving the golf course that Golf Digest had picked it the best new affordable in 2006; and I have to admit that I was pleased to learn that the opinion of people who see and play a lot more golf courses that I do jibed with mine.
Peter