Inclusivity and Green Grass

My biggest hobby, if you can call it that, is leveraging my golf memberships and my connections to explore coveted and celebrated golf course architecture. If you have the stomach for this type of networking, the private club experience, as it extends to accompanied and unaccompanied guests, is phenomenal.

Of course, there are amazing public bucket list golf courses here in America. I’m willing to pay to play them, but I am NOT willing to pay to slog through a six-hour round. As top-tier US publics try (and fail) to find the monetary-fuck-off-threshold of the American golfing populous, they become less willing to marshal pace. At American bucket list resort courses, I’ve found a direct correlation between how much money I’ve paid and how many groups I’ve found stacked up on hole 14.

I love Pete Dye, and I love televised golf, so I’m only half joking when I say that the RBC is MY SUPERBOWL. You watch that tournament enough times, and damn if it doesn’t leave you itching to try out the course for yourself. My father-in-law, Randy, is 70; he’s seen the tournament even more times than I have. The two of us were in Hilton Head in late July.

Harbour Town uses a reverse season, so late July got us a 50% discount on their prime rate, our greens fees were $365. There is a mandatory forecaddie, with a tip suggestion of $40 per head. Our caddie was a welcome guest, and sending a caddie with every group did WONDERS for pace. As dictated by etiquette, we doubled the caddie base rate as a tip, for an all-in, per-person golf cost of $445.

Randy has not structured his golfing life around reciprocity or architectural excellence. His social membership at an A-tier country club allows him eight rounds a year, but he doesn’t use them. This is a function of living ten minutes away from his long-time home club, The United States Airforce Academy

USAFA has two courses, Ike Blue is a top ten in-state course that is exceptionally fair from tee to green and as close as I’ve seen to impossible once you reach the putting surface. Ike Silver is a course where Frank Hummel manufactured a whole mess of doglegs.

Randy prefers the Silver. He’s a retired colonel, so he can play either Ike course for $50. My civilian rate is closer to $70. On the Blue course, those rates represent the best deal on the planet, inside or outside of golf. On the Silver…let’s just say they do not.

All of this is to say that while I will never understand Randy’s preference for Ike Silver (“a thinking man’s golf course”), I do understand why he isn’t juiced to pay Flying Horse’s $125 guest fee. With a gun to my head, Flying Horse Main is a better course than Ike Blue, but with the price difference, Eisenhower’s walkability, and the AWESOME robot caddies (Club Car Tempo Walk), it’s VERY close to a tossup.

Despite our difference in golfing ethos, neither of us batted an eye at the price tag for Harbour Town.

Harbour Town Golf Links is very much built around the PGA event. The club has a beautiful locker room, the lockers are adorned year-round with the names of that year’s tournament participants. There is an attendant, but I got the feeling that he was there as more of a bartender, the Mich Ultra he has on tap for $3 a glass is the cheapest thing on the island.

Outside of the locker room was a MASSIVE heckle deck. No one was out there heckling. Sea Pines has a membership, those members have access to a fourth “Club” course, and advance booking/discounted rates at the other three courses.

If you haven’t been to Sea Pines, you might not think that it’s possible for home developers to manufacture low country tranquility, but Sea Pines is gorgeous, and somehow, they have. I would imagine the $9 toll keeps unexpected visitors at bay, probably a bonus in an island paradise. Escapist fantasies are hard to avoid when you’re on vacation, but even in hindsight, I honestly think that I would move to Sea Pines.

Harbour Town’s Bermuda Grass range stocks PRO V1’s, and has a tall net at the back to stop the PGA players from hitting drivers onto the course. The net is WAY back there. Harbour Town caught me on a good ball-striking day (I covered the bunker on 16), but I couldn’t carry it to the net.

The meat of this blog is challenging me as a writer, because all of you know Pete Dye, and the magic of immersing yourself in a strategic golf course. Most of you also know Harbour Town from its status as a high-tier PGA mainstay, and many of you have played Harbour Town, so you’ve experienced the magic of immersing yourself in this particular strategic golf course firsthand.

This knowledge base is good. If you didn’t know (or like) Dye, or if you hadn’t seen Harbour Town on the TV before teeing off, this course would TERRORIZE you. The angles are severe, the Bermuda Grass greens are slick, tiny, and ruthlessly contoured, and the driving corridors are narrow. If you’re trying to score, you’ll need to ask your caddie a lot of questions because, no bullshit here, on most holes, it’s better to come in from 200 yards than it is to leave yourself short-sided, even if you’re pin high.

This is especially true on the shorter holes and the par 5s, where green contouring shifts from ruthless to diabolical. To simplify, if (god forbid) you miss off the tee, your recovery shot is not whatever gets you closest to the pin, it’s whatever gets you a full-yardage shot from a distance where you are comfortable executing a soft landing or ripping the cover off her. (If you’re pulling the string, be warned that grain affects backspin.)

All of this is to say use your caddy. Use your caddy, use your caddy, use your caddy.

Still painting in broad strokes here, Harbour Town starts out hard, then gets harder. Bell to bell, you’ll need to fully commit to, then execute shots. These shots are often difficult to visualize with dense pine forest squeezing the angular golf holes like a vise. If we think of ourselves as frogs plopped into a saucepan of room temperature water, and Pete Dye as a chef, the boiling point is hole 13, where nothing but 190 yards on the right half of the fairway will do.

In the heavy, low-country air, 190 was a 3-wood, started left, and played for 70 yards of cut. My distance was perfect but the ball didn’t spin enough, 40 yards of cut left me center fairway. Our caddie had already turned to jog down the hole, but he was visibly shaking his head. I can’t confirm this, but I’d bet you he was rolling his eyes too.

The emphatic reaction made sense when I got to my ball. From the heart of the hole, I had a full gap wedge into a tough pin placement on the craziest looking green that I have ever seen (google it), but not enough distance between me and the tree to take a 52-DEGREE WEDGE over the top (13 has a tree planted in the center of the fairway). Our caddie suggested a bump-and-run with a hybrid, under the tree and into a bunker fronting the green.

On the range, my gap wedge draws reliably.  I set up right of the tree, focused on my tempo, and overswung for a horrendous double cross to a clean lie on 14 tee. Our caddie immediately had me put another ball in play, (bump and run into the bunker, up and down for an easy, but not totally in line with the rules of golf) bogey.

When I went to pick up my first ball, I could see how a mulligan (and literally any penalty, including disqualification) was preferable to playing into 13 green from 14 tee. I stood over the shot, and even from the cleanest of clean lies, there was nothing, absolutely nothing there.

If holes 1-13 are akin to a frog being boiled in a pot of water, holes 14-18 are something like the sweet relief of death. Again you’ve seen these holes, and you may have played these holes, but quick refresher, 14 is a full wedge with plenty of room to bailout left. Fifteen is a par five with a VERY wide fairway.

I split this fairway, then hit my three wood LEFT. From there, our caddie told me to punch out to the right side of the fairway and hit a 7 to the center of the green. The flag, on the front and as far right as she could be pinned, was a dyed-in-the-wool sucker pin.

(Like an idiot), I hit a perfect 6-iron that settled pin high and maybe four feet right, off the green, in the primary cut of rough. I ALMOST potted the chip, which was my one option to not make double, then 3 putted from 30 feet for…seven. I doubled all three of the par fives. All of this is to say holes 14-18 are easier, but you still have to pay attention.

The double on 15 could have been a blessing in disguise because I needed all the hate I could muster for the tee shot on 16. Two-thirty, all carry, my ball limped over the bunker that runs up the left side of the hole and in front of the tree (16 has another tree planted in the center of the fairway) that occupies what would otherwise be a perfect landing area. Again our caddie was down range, and again he didn’t bother to turn around when my ball came to rest, but this time he didn’t shake his head. He made a muscle.

Sand wedge, birdie, a view of the ocean.

And let’s talk about “the ocean.” I’m sure you’ve read a (crybaby) review Harbour Town to the tune of, “I payed $700 to play away from the ocean for 16 holes.”  Moving forward, please join me in inviting these weenies to shut the fuck up. The course plays inland.

At this point, there might not be a single golfer in the entire world who hasn’t seen the INCREDIBLE inland holes on TV. YOU KNEW THE COURSE PLAYED INLAND WHEN YOU TEED off. Hand to God, I would give back 17’s ocean view for one more taste, just the teensiest, tiniest morsel of angle and strategy.

Eighteen is a different story. Long, straightaway, and framed by the Harbour Town Lighthouse. I’m not sure if my experience as a spectator is unique, but anytime someone hits a drive on this hole, I turn to my long-suffering wife and say, “that’s lost left.”

Maybe subliminally I was trying to replicate this experience in my own round – my drive was cranked and WELL left of my intended target. I was going back for a provisional when our caddie told me I had found the fairway. I think even for a course review, I’ve talked a lot about my own round in this blog, but bear with me for one last helpful thing…

On 18, a ball that I thought was dead to rights OB had room left. I lied before, but I promise that this is the LAST helpful thing, there is a mowed and relatively flat runout behind 18 green. Unless the pin is all the way back, you can miss long.

When I write these blogs, I go to great lengths to spend as little time as possible rehashing my own round. Hearing people describe shots and scores is boring, but the magic of Harbour Town is testing yourself against the game’s best on a course that most of us have intimate knowledge of, even on our first time playing.

It’s a month after my trip and I’m still re-hashing shots in my head. At Harbour Town, there are places you can miss and places that you can’t miss. Every shot requires total concentration and full commitment. Is this target golf? Yes. Is it bad? No.

It’s not bad target golf because if you can keep your ball between the water and the forest, you’ll find plenty of fairway. Unless a shot is severely misjudged or misplayed, there will be options for recovery. Those options are often penal and they require creative thinking to figure them out.

This is completely different from target golf of (off the top of my head) the Troon North variety, where you lose your ball when you get off your intended line. Based on what I have seen on TV, I was very surprised at how few opportunities there were to lose my ball at Harbour Town.

I touched on how different my father-in-law and I are in our golfing lives. If we simplify, I expend an insane amount of time, money, and social capital to ensure that public golf is a place of last resort. Randy eschews his golf allotment at an A-tier private club to immerse himself in the unwashed masses at an architecturally irrelevant track on a military base down the road from his house. At Harbour Town, both of us had the time of our lives.

Outside of the college football season, he and I sometimes run out of things to talk about. On this trip, we spent many joyful hours discussing shots, holes, routing, and what we would do differently if we got another crack at the course.

It’s hard to classify a course where peak season rates are inching towards $800 + caddie fees as a must-play, but I’m telling you that this course is worth the money. Until you’ve played Harbour Town, don’t even think about any other course on Hilton Head.