http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324564704578629802278401688.htmlDonald Trump's New Golf Course in Scotland Falls Short The Trump International Golf Links-Scotland: Impressive and Picturesque, but Imperfect
By JOHN PAUL NEWPORT 
Trump International Scotland
The 14th hole swoops spectacularly through the dunes but is awkwardly greener and softer than classic Scottish links.Balmedie, ScotlandDonald Trump's new golf course here, described by no less an authority than Trump himself as the greatest in the world, is indeed a very fine course. It flows like a river through a fantastically tall stretch of grassy dunes on the North Sea coast, 10 miles north of Aberdeen. With 110 separate tee boxes—a world record?—it plays at 7,428 yards from the tips, making it entirely suitable for a big-deal tournament. Trump suggests the British Open. The holes, which opened for play last fall, are well-designed and picturesque, with steep-faced Scottish pot bunkers pocking the fairways and open approaches to most of the greens, ideal for the low-running shots essential to links golf.
Why, then, did Trump International Golf Links-Scotland leave me a bit cold?
Part of it, possibly, was all I'd heard about how the sausage was made. Even more than most Trump projects, this one has been embroiled in controversy from the start. Trump obtained development rights for a small part of a contiguous nature preserve, which outraged environmentalists. He antagonized some of his neighbors by building berms, then planting trees, to block the views both of and from their houses. The British press, never fond of American hubris, hasn't been kind. During my visit two weeks ago, the BBC aired a "60 Minutes"-style investigation of the jobs and investments Trump promised, but is said to have yet to deliver, and his once-cozy, now estranged relationship with Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister. The Trump Organization refutes some of the facts in the BBC program.
But I write about golf, not politics, and even if this kerfuffle did somehow color my view of the project, my primary reservations were golf-ish. The fairways aren't yet mature, so they play as soft as many parkland or American courses. Balls don't bound like they are supposed to on links courses. They are also greener than normal for links, thanks to the rye grass mixed in with the traditional fescue strains. Other little touches also seemed out of place, like the lushly grassed walkways between holes and the ornate Trump coat of arms on every sign.
I also had a few quibbles with the design, the work of Martin Hawtree, a third-generation English golf architect. I didn't love having to tromp up the side of a dune to tee off on almost every hole, and then tromp back down again. The holes run through the dunes, but many could be anywhere—they aren't always of the dunes.
But mostly, if I'm honest—and this may just be me—my main issue is that Trump International isn't a quirky little ancient links. Sue me for saying so, but one of the main joys of playing golf in Scotland is to escape the American-style obsession with trying to make everything perfect as possible.
For example, the day after I played Trump, I teed off at Cruden Bay, 14 miles north. Golf has been played on the dunes and headlands there for more than two centuries. Old Tom Morris, the guiding spirit at St. Andrews until his death in 1908, first laid out the current course.
Although watered when necessary, the fairways and greens were both rock-hard and running. Holes climbed and twisted according to where the land led. There are holes through the dunes, holes along a high promontory with sweeping views of forever, and a blind par three that is also somehow a dogleg. Given the same property today, no developer would come up with Cruden Bay. He would insist on more land—the course only plays to 6,287 yards from the back tees, par 70—and bring in the bulldozers. But you would be hard pressed to find a more fun course to play than Cruden Bay.
Across Scotland, there are scores of other courses like that, such as Nairn, Royal Dornoch, Dunbar, Gullane and North Berwick, to name just ones I am familiar with. A huge part of their charm lies in the old villages that surround them, and knowing that, whatever the greens fees are for visitors ($100 or more), the locals join for $500 or $800 a year, because golf in Scotland isn't meant to be fancy. Typically you stay on your trip in small mom-and-pop hotels with breakfast included and spend the evenings after golf with your friends, both the ones you brought with you and ones you make there, throwing darts in a crowded pub. This isn't the American way of golf, where almost all the great courses are private.
This isn't to say that modern links courses in Scotland can't be terrific. Or that lots of earth-moving is necessarily a crime. Kingsbarns, not far from St. Andrews, opened in 2000 but looks like it has been there for centuries. Since the site was originally mostly flat farmland, it took a lot of work to create that effect. Crews bulldozed most of the distinctive dunes, knolls and dales into existence and trucked in worlds of sand as a base for the quick-draining fairways that now play as firm and fast as any.
Castle Stuart, where Phil Mickelson won the Scottish Open the week before claiming the British Open at Muirfield, is only four years old and was developed by the same American, Mark Parsinen, who built Kingsbarns. The private Renaissance Club, a natural-feeling Tom Doak design adjacent to Muirfield, is also a new American-backed project.
Trump's course, with time, could be the best of the new ones—and he is building a second that could open in 2016, pending approvals and good weather. The day after my round at the first course, John Bambury, the superintendent, took me out to see the dunes in their natural state where part of the second course will be routed.
In the low-lying parts, erosion-control fences put up last fall were already covered in sand. "The dunes here are mobile," Bambury said. "That's why before we built the first course, people said it would blow away." But it didn't because workers stabilized the dunes, once the design had been completed, by transplanting 11.5 million marram plants, one at a time, by hand, from nearby dunes. "There was a lot of turnover among those workers," he noted. Marram is a tall indigenous coastal grass.
That is the kind of effort, and money, it takes to make Trump International work, and it explains in part the $325 weekend green fees, discounted for locals to $265. I'll look forward to playing Trump again on a future visit, and the second course. But only if there is time after I've revisited Cruden Bay.