Guys, I was underwhelmed by the links course at wild dunes. What's everybody think?
I wrote it up on my website. Here's the skinny:
In the book The Greatest Golf Courses in America, Wild Dunes is listed beside Augusta National, Pinehurst, Oakmont, Baltusrol, Pebble Beach and Oakland Hills.
I respectfully dissent.
As most of you know, I swear by every course Mike Strantz has done, and Strantz worked on this project, but as usual, Fazio diluted most character out of the property and succeeded in marketing it nonetheless.
Located on the Isle of Palms, the course sits on the sandy soil that is the holy grail of all the great designers, yet underwhelms through flat greens, mundane hole design and too much “Florida-style” palm trees, ponds and a collection of holes that look and play the same. By the time the player gets to the “money shot” – the last two holes which play along the sound, the ordinariness of the other sixteen fail to turn the tide of opinion. Two great holes do not make a golf course, not even on the seaside.
Fazio once again proves a slave to the doctrine of symmetry, the doctrine of framing, too much water, way too much out of bounds and flat featureless greens.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some inspired moments. The excellent par-5 fifth features a Strantzian blind shot over enormous bunkered dunes to a green set high in a tree-sheltered dell. This terrific hole washed away the bad taste of the preceding three, all overly narrow holes guarded by dense marshy scrub. But while the penal nature of the start fades as the course progresses, the rest of the front nine is lackluster. The short par-4 ninth is a puzzling folly, featuring a blind pond guarding the left side of the fairway. (A blind pond?! Why?)
Few greens and fairways have any undulation, despite being built on excellent terrain for golf. One exception is the really short par-4 10th, which despite being quirky looking actually works from architecture standpoint with several landing areas amid heaving swales in the fairway. 12 and 13 are also good holes, playing among natural looking sand dunes.
Guarded on all sides by out of bounds and houses and looking particularly unnatural, the course looks and plays nothing like its contemporary sister Fazio work at World Woods. It’s hard to believe those two courses were built by the same designer at roughly the same time.