Island Adventures - By Jeff Blanchard
Photographs by George Peet

SANKATY HEAD GOLF CLUB
Polpis Road
Siasconset, Massachusetts 02564
Nantucket County
Phone: (508) 257-6655
www.sankatygolfclub.org
Club pro: Mark Heartfield
Gold tees: 6,655 yards, par 72, rating 73, slope 132
Blue: 6,346 yards, par 72, rating 71.6, slope 128
Red: 5,558 yards, par 72, rating 73, slope 126

Some of us love to golf, and some of us love to go golfing. The difference is that some of us aren't so good that we can rely on the play itself to deliver the psychic goods. A trip to Nantucket serves both masters at once.

The travel to the island becomes part of the event, somehow lessening the pressure to play well, or at least that was how I approached my first golf outing to our island neighbor to the south, our rich sister with the reputation for stiff winds, thick roughs and yacht clubby atmosphere.

Our goal was to get up early enough to tee off at Sankaty Head around 8:00 a.m., which meant rising at 5:30 to catch the 6:30 ferry, due on-island at 7:30, when we would hop in a rental car that was parked and waiting in the lot downtown Nantucket.

We met up at the Ocean Street terminus in Hyannis, which was humming with the sounds of feeding gulls, morning voices and idling motors. Uniformed attendants unburdened us of our gear, allowing us to take care of tickets and whatnot before climbing aboard empty-handed -- a nice way to begin the day's commute. Our bags would be stowed along with the tools and totes of the laborers who make this trip every day to cash in on the perpetual demand for work on Nantucket.

Our vessel of choice was the Grey Lady (which only sounds like the offspring of a New York newspaper). It's a high-speed boat owned by Hy-Line that makes the trip in one hour, dock to dock. No sooner does she make her way through the harbor channel than you completely forget that you're riding a ferry. Built to handle the waves and not get pounded by them, the ship is long and wide and glides through chop like a luxury liner. It could be your living room, it is that nice a ride. The snack bar is stocked, the bathrooms are clean and the padded chairs swivel comfortably on their bolted footings.

From the boat slip it was just steps to the waiting car provided by Nantucket Windmill Auto Rental, which makes it its business to get you between the ferry terminal and the rental office at the airport with minimal effort. On our return trip, for instance, we drove to the rental agency first and a driver hopped aboard to bring the car back from the ferry.

Diligence to our jobs and fidelity to our families demanded that we return on the 4:30, instead of having to wait until the next ferry at 7:30 (this was late April, and the schedules change with the season). That allowed for 18 holes at Sankaty and nine at Miacomet, instead of the desired 18, but our efficiency was rewarded with some time to kill before the return run, which meant that scores could be settled at the Atlantic Cafe, a classic saloon fronted by a cobblestone street that recalls the whaling days of the 19th century, when the island made its big splash on the global map.

"Experts declare the natural contour lines of this section and the surrounding country will make the Sankaty Head links the finest in the country." So reported the Inquirer and Mirror in 1921 as Sankaty was being built. Responsibility for the endeavor fell to a committee of supporters led by a group of exiles from Siasconset GC, most notably David Gray and H. Emerson Armstrong.

Gray was a Detroiter who had been summering on Nantucket for years, the beneficiary of his father's wise investment in the Ford Motor Company, according to Paul Judy, who wrote a history of the club's beginnings. David's Scottish-born father, John Gray, was a soft touch who had backed a nephew's so-far losing investment in the automaker with an infusion of $10,500. That was in 1903. By 1919, the paper was worth $35 million.

Emerson Armstrong had also been coming to the island for years, and was probably its best golfer, evidenced by his tying the course record 70 at Siasconset in capturing his second straight island championship in 1920. By then this New York bookkeeper had retired to Nantucket full-time, and he would soon get to building on the legacy of his father, the Irish-born golfer and course architect George Emerson Armstrong. The senior Armstrong designed Fox Hills and Richmond County on Staten Island, was an early member of St. Andrews, the birthplace of the American golf club, and played in the first national championships.

"The ability to envision a golf course in raw land - the location of tees, flow of fairways, positioning of bunkers and greens - seems to have been in George Armstrong's blood, and a trait his son Emerson inherited," Judy wrote.

Gray employed Armstrong to design and construct the course on a 276-acre parcel, centered by May Flower Hill and owned by 29 different interests in a deal that was being negotiated with the majority owner for a uniform $20 an acre.

"Owing to the different phases of the situation, it was necessary for me to acquaint myself with every inch of the land owned by the Flagg heirs, with the result that I trampled over it at least 50 times during the fall and winter of 1920 and 1921, thereby wearing out several pair of shoes, clothes, etc., forcing my way through scrub oak," Armstrong reported.

Skip Wogan, the renowned architect who apprenticed with Donald Ross early in his career on the North Shore, is sometimes listed as Sankaty's designer, in 1932, but there is no doubt Armstrong deserves the lion's share of credit for the course, while Wogan probably added its finishing touches. In fact, Armstrong and Gray had decided they didn't want to muck up the place with sand bunkers and such for at least the first two years, maybe to learn through regular play where the best bunker locations would be, and that's probably where Wogan came in. Gray had considered hiring Walter Travis for the job, but he was too expensive.

Armstrong was affordable, available and passionate in his affection for the task at hand. He wrote an article for a Cape Cod tourism magazine in which he said, "Every lover of the Royal and Ancient Game of Golf who has driven over the island of Nantucket is impressed with wonderful possibilities from a golfing standpoint. Its moors remind one of Scotland (in fact, it is the only place in the US where real Scottish heather grows)Öthe land is rolling, but the undulations are such as to prevent any ëblind' holes."

The closest to a blind shot is the tee shot on the fifth hole, named "Light Aport", a wonderful par 4, 423 yards long. This one handicap plays from the top of a hill near Sankaty lighthouse down into a hollow where the green sits. The tee shot needs to be on the right side, because the rough on the left side comes into play. This cannot be seen from the tee. The green is severely sloped from front to back, so three- and four-putts are common here, especially at tournament time.

As Willard DeLue described the setting in a story on Sankaty for The Boston Globe in 1923, "The whole vast moorland lay there under the eye, all splotched with masses of blending color - the warm browns of the fairway, where drought has done the painting, the great encroaching masses of dull green scrub oak, with mottlings of paler dwarfed huckleberry and wild roses; and then the brilliant emerald of the well-kept greens; the whole canvas rolling and tilting and dipping in harmony of contour down to the distant water. The sea in sight almost all around - the open sea, with no land off to eastward save the coast of Spain. Old Sankaty bids voyagers to Europe a last American goodbye."

Eighty-one years later and the course is still held in the same poetic regard by many, including one of the guys in our group today, Fred Walker, a member of Cummaquid Golf Club, who has played some of the world's most famous layouts.

Walker ranks Sankaty up there with the best of them, and above many of the top courses in Massachusetts. Not surprisingly, this two-handicap with a case full of championship trophies also happens to have the game for it. In a 20-25 mile-an-hour wind he played the course to his handicap, and he made it look easy.

Along with this magazine's publisher and the publisher's chiropractor/friend, we enjoyed a light-hearted affair with a three-way game within a game. Not four, because how could I work and wager at the same time? (Actually, they couldn't have given me enough strokes to make me count.)

Typical of the banter among the combatants was this comment made during the tense moment just before the boss got over a three-footer to halve the hole. It was the third hole, and the first two holes had not required much of the boss's putter.

Asked the chiropractor, "Should we give him this one, Fred?"

Fred: "I don't know, I've never seen him putt!"

The buzz among the guys was: 1) it's really windy here, and 2) you need a wood on your second shot, sometimes it's so long in this wind, and 3) this wind is even starting to blow the putts around.

None of them bowed to the tough conditions, however. The exception was the chiropractor, who started to drive the ball like Tiger this spring, instead of the old Mr. Long and Straight. The good news was that there isn't much of the long stuff in spring, so you really had to be missing wide.

A simple, naturally contoured golf course is what Gray wanted when he decided to back the project, which was somewhat controversial at the time because Sankaty would be built next door to the public Siasconset, of which they were all members. Today the island has four places to golf - when you add the public: Miacomet, on the other side of the airport from Sankaty; and the Nantucket Golf Club, which is very private and also within sight of Sankaty's clubhouse on the hill. Nantucket GC is the new kid on the block, though it looks like it's been there forever. That's where some of the CEO's from Sankaty play when they stray, and where the presidential candidate John Kerry has his golf locker.

Sankaty is a private club with an inviting wrinkle: the public is allowed to pay and play in the off-season, from October to May, when the course reverts to its members-only status, (meaning locals, both the well-heeled and those with plain good sense, and jet-setters from around the planet).

Its most famous member is perhaps its closest neighbor, Jack Welch, the retired but not retiring former CEO of GE who is also a big supporter of Sankaty's vaunted caddie camp, one of the last in the nation to survive the electric cart. (His home also survived my roof-shot. Sorry). Welch's summer residence sits on the fourth hole, a meandering uphill par 5 of modest proportions, named "Sesachacha", that plays directly at Sankaty Light. The green is relatively flat but small. Players have a good chance for birdie and that's good because the treacherous fifth hole lies in wait.

On about the sixth hole, a fantastic par three that plays 180 yards onto an undulating green surrounded by bunkers, one member of our group found a ball emblazoned with the distinctive GE logo, and he tossed it to me, no doubt thinking I needed good things brought to life. Could it have been the Corporate American Idol's own lost ball? Well, on the chance that it was, someone should tell him it's two holes past where he lost it, and thanks for the loaner.

Sankaty today has changed little since its beginnings. Sure, they have golf carts now, and there are more cars traveling the roads that intersect the course, but the basic idea is still the same - to provide a championship course that challenges golfers without dazzling them, and a course that plays like a Scottish links but doesn't intimidate with its difficulty.

If there were zero blind shots when Armstrong first took a look around in 1920, growth has added a few. That, or the wind.

Two old charms that continue to buoy the mood around Sankaty are the flag that's always whipping, and the red-and-white lighthouse that's always in view - whose likeness adorns all printed materials having to do with the course.

Another quaintness is the old practice of naming the holes, like "Outward Bound" (No. 1), the 397-yard, wide-mouthed dogleg left that sweeps down and away from your first tee box like a carpet unrolling, down to a flat for the pitch to the green over a banked bunker.

There's No 10, "Carry On", a beautiful but sadistic par 4 of 434 yards. The tee shot must hug the right side and avoid the strategic bunker at the corner where to hole turns right and up hill. The second shot plays into the prevailing wind to a plateau green that slopes right to left. Missing the green left is sheer death. This is a terrific hole- difficult and demanding.)

There's No. 14, "Wee One", 149 yards, and then there's No. 18, "Thar She Blows", 386 yards into a stiff –you know, and uphill to boot. In between, there is No 16, "Round The Horn", where water guards the right side to catch errant tee shots from the elevated tee. You must aim down the left side, as the wind wants to push your shot into the water. Your second shot is into a large and fairly flat green. The trouble here is going long, because the thick brush is very close to the back of the green. This, by the way, is the only water hole on the course.

The vitals on Sankaty Head Golf Club:

Polpis Road
Siasconset, Massachusetts 02564
Nantucket County
Phone: (508) 257-6655
Club pro: Mark Heartfield
Gold tees: 6,655 yards, par 72, rating 73, slope 132
Blue: 6,346 yards, par 72, rating 71.6, slope 128
Red: 5,558 yards, par 72, rating 73, slope 126

About five miles down the road is Miacomet, the island's only public year-round 18-hole course. Where the road to Sankaty was lined with conservation lands full of foliage stretching all the way to the ocean, Miacomet is surrounded by farms, homes and other grey shingled buildings; its center of commerce is a garden center that doubles as the neighborhood grocer.

"Located in the rolling hummocks southwest of the town of Nantucket, the course offers breathtaking views and challenging golf shots," the club boasts on its website, which is chock full of good stuff for the prospective golfer.

Miacomet was a nine-holer until a new nine, designed by Howard Maurer, came on line in October, and that's what brought our foursome to the island in the first place.

Today's Miacomet combines the old and new. You start out on the old No.'s 1 and 2 near the clubhouse, and then cross through the parking lot to No. 3, which begins a run of new holes, returning to the old on return to the clubhouse.

Among the noticeable differences are the green sizes. The old course averaged 3,000 square feet, and the new id about double that, with handsomely undulating tiers and nice chipping areas, should you need them.

Miacomet hadn't settled on its rate schedule quite yet, but the numbers being bandied about were $90 for a round, with a limited number of memberships available. At its best, Miacomet can make this seem like a bargain. How else would you get to enjoy the scenery from the seat of golf cart in summer?

In a way, you are also supporting a worthy cause, that is, the Nantucket Land Bank, which in 1983 became the first land acquisition program of its kind in the nation, according to the club, and is "designed to protect the island's unique and endangered landscapes."

"The program is funded by a two-percent transfer fee on the sale of real estate on the island, and an elected five-member commission uses the proceeds to acquire beaches, wetlands, aquifer recharge areas, moorlands, heathlands and other land significant to Nantucket's open rural character."

Current holdings of the Nantucket Land bank exceed 2,200 acres, including the Miacomet Golf Course.