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Golf on Cape Cod Course ReviewPinehills Golf Club
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Photography by George Peet
How could a course that bills itself as New England’s premier daily fee golf facility live up to the hype? By employing two of the world’s best course design firms to build two courses with minimal real-world intrusion, and by imbuing a staff of people with a sense of purpose that makes even the most pedestrian golfer feel as if he’s been invited to the Masters. "I’ll be right with you," the man behind the counter says as soon as we enter the pro shop, even though he is serving another customer.
Here they have thought of everything. The sand in the bunkers is soft but not too fluffy. The cart paths have little speed bumps which provide yardages to the hole. Every round includes a bucket of balls for the range, and well-placed old-fashioned signs make it a cinch to find one’s way around the course.
To avoid going overboard _ and risking our credibility in the tricky art of golf course review – we’ll say right upfront that Pinehills has its flaws: the hot dogs are no better than Fenway’s, and when there’s dew on the grass it can get your club handles wet when you put them down. Aside from that, it’s a pretty perfect place.
Rees Jones, the USGA’s chief architect, who redesigned Torrey Pines, the Country Club of Brookline and dozens of other American landmarks, who designed the Nantucket Golf Club and some of the finest courses of Long Island and North Carolina, who comes from the best stock imaginable (as in Robert Trent Jones, Jr.) and who insists upon building public courses for every player (not just the really good players), got it right here. As right as Donald Ross would have, as Seth Raynor, Charles Banks, C. B. MacDonald or A. W. Tillinghast would have.
But mostly like Ross, for the similarities between these two designers are plain to see: manageable-looking holes that prove dastardly in their playing. You say to yourself, "I can see the pin from here, so I’ll just hit it over there, then take out a 7-iron and land it up there." When you get there, however, you see that you’re still short of the green and have a lob wedge left. You can’t hit a lob wedge, so you pitch it on and watch it roll off into a waste area from which you hope, like a fool, to get up and down for bogey. You can’t putt, so you settle for six and swear that the hole was an easy par.
For some of us, there is no such thing as a bad golf course – just some that are better than others. We view them as we do, say, children or puppies, recognizing the potential in even the homeliest track _ the ones where the holes were laid out in conformance to a condominium-builder’s housing dream, where the fairway ends too abruptly or the water gathers in puddles too easily. "Hey," we say, "at least it isn’t a strip mall."
One can only wonder how hard it must be to make your mark as a golf course architect these days, with the increased pressure to protect the environment, to preserve water, to find the necessary acreage, and to attract the fortune needed to do it all right, and not only right, but with distinction?
How hard must it be to follow in the footsteps of giants and still stamp a singular vision of greatness on an otherwise unremarkable plot of land amid the pits and hills of a pine forest with few natural-born vistas? However hard it was, Jones made it look easy. His end of Pinehills flows like links. It takes you up and down without getting whiplash and side to side without losing a single ball. It blends in with the scant housing that exists alongside the course, and it provides raison d’etre to the surrounding thicket of pine.
Of course the tract is manicured nicely. It’s also mapped out with a gem-cutter’s eye for detail, with all the bunkers in just the right places to keep things interesting, and with all the target areas hittable without being lethal. The greens are spacious and true, surrounded by short-grass gutters that hacks will have to scramble back from all too often.
On the par-3 7th, beware of hitting your ball long, as we did. We almost gave up on finding our ball until a ranger found it tucked in a blanket of needles. Did we mention the helpful staff? Considering that the Golden Bear’s construction team accounted for four of the best new courses in America in 2001 (as judged by Golf Digest), the new Nicklaus course is expected to rank among the best new layouts in America in 2002. This end of Pinehills is reputed to be just as stylish and devilish, challenging and pleasurable as the Jones. The greens are smaller but more undulating, with lots of false fronts and collection areas, and the fairways have more doglegs, both left to right and right to left, than Westminster. The Nicklaus is hillier, wider and a little longer than the Jones, and features a couple of quintessential Nicklaus-isms, including a bunker smack dab in the middle of 17 that dares the golfer to try to bomb one over and a finishing hole that should swing a few scores – a par 4 that’s 476 yards into a prevailing wind. (We combined a sneak peak with a debriefing by the staff for this intelligence report.)
Probably unnecessary to mention are all the amenities of Pinehills _ the banquet facilities, three levels of PGA instruction, its website, a big, beautiful clubhouse with locker rooms and a restaurant. But phooey on that. Here it’s the people and the pleasures of great course-design that make you feel privileged, regardless of your right to.
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