Worth the Detour
★★★★★
It is the most fun I have had with a wedge in years, and The Dam is a hole I will be describing to strangers for the rest of my life.
Let us dispense with the number that will scare off the snobs: Strawgrass plays to a par of 63 over fewer than seven hundred yards from the back tees. Now let us dispense with the snobs. This is one of the most purely enjoyable golf courses I have walked in a decade, and I have walked a great many of the ones you have heard of.
The Goff & Goff layout does what the best architecture always does — it works with the land rather than bullying it. The front nine climbs and falls across a fenceline and a cliff edge; the back nine wraps a lake that is never quite out of play and frequently very much in it. There is a blind tee shot, a genuine dogleg, a forced carry, and greens firm enough and bold enough to make a sub-thirty-yard hole a real examination. Length is not the only way to ask a hard question, and whoever designed this course knows it.
The greens are the defence. They are quick, they are contoured, and on more than one occasion they returned my over-confident approach to my feet with interest. I three-putted twice from what I would have called gimme range on arrival. By the back nine I was leaving everything below the hole and feeling clever about it. That is good design: it teaches you how to play it as you go.
Every course wants a signature hole. Few deserve one. The fourteenth at Strawgrass — the stroke-index-one, the one they have wisely made the hardest on the card — is played from the very lip of the lake to a small green set upon the dam, water in your eyeline from address to tap-in. It is equal parts beautiful and merciless. I made a three, walked off grinning like a fool, and immediately wanted to play it again. I will be describing it to strangers for the rest of my life.
You walk Strawgrass, and you walk it in under two hours, which ought to be illegal it is so civilised. There are caddies if you want the angles read for you, a serious practice ground, and a teaching staff led by a professional who can plainly play. It is, in the truest sense, a walking man’s course — a loop you could play twice before lunch and twice more after.
Is it a championship test in the way the word is usually meant? No. It is something rarer and, I would argue, more valuable: a course that reminds you why you started playing this game. It is the most fun I have had with a wedge in years. Bring your short game and your sense of humour. You will need both, and you will leave with both intact.
