One of the things I love about Cypress Point is the way you go in and out of the different environments of dunes, forest and ocean front. This in and out weaves a great dynamic, with the climax along the ocean for the first time in the round.
Friars Head gives you the same feeling, which in my opinion makes it a great piece of golf architecture and exceptional routing skills. Coore and Crenshaw were given a bunch of relatively flat land, the former potato field, and some great dunes land with valleys and dunes. How they painstakingly found a routing that takes you back and forth and creates that dynamic routing is the tale of Friars Head. This is what makes it one of the top golf courses built in the past 20 years.
The course starts out up in the dunes and plays over a valley up onto a dune. Then a par 5 takes you from an elevated tee and down into the potato field. The fact that I have no idea what was shaped and what is natural of holes 2-7 is part of the genius of the place. Those are terrific holes. The first part of #2 plays down off the dunes, the green of #7 is set up against the slope of that dune.
#8 - 10 are up in the dunes and have a different feeling, the feeling of being in the dunes.
#11 tee is, like #2, on top of the dune, and down you go to start the next stretch of holes in the potato field. #13 takes you back to the base of the dunes, and #14 is another par 5 that takes you up back up into the dunesland, where the green is benched into a giant dune.
#15 - 18 finish your round in the dunes, all very good holes with that dunesland feeling.
It's a routing of genius, I think. The real genius of the routing is what I call "the escalators," the par 5s that take you down from the dunes and back up again. Each is a very solid hole, with the uphill greens being diabolical with their slopes.
I think Friars Head will stand the test of time and will continue to be one of the top courses on Long Island. As I mentioned in a recent thread on Austin Golf Club, I think the C&C strength is in design of greens, but in this case it's the full package - routing, location of great natural holes, natural looking shaping, and super green sites and bunkering.
Just wondering. Did Tommy ever finish the yardage book?