A lot of private golf courses are open to outside play, and the more you involve yourself with reciprocity the easier it is to guess what courses will let you out. As you get better at guessing, courses start to be divided into tiers, or at least into binaries, obtainable and unobtainable.
In the upper center of the country, where people are nice and proud of their clubs, most courses are obtainable. This region starts at the western border of Montana, carries down around Wyoming, skirts Colorado, then circles Nebraska, and covers Iowa and Minnesota.I have no idea about North Dakota, but if we include ND in our friendly folks + great golf region the area looks like a pistol with a short barrel.
The big, notable obtainability exception within this pistol is Mullen NE’s Sandhills. I am a member at Dismal River, a few miles west as the crow flies, but separated by galaxies in atmosphere. I have heard one favorable comparison of my club to Sandhills, the guy said, “When you get to Dismal, they say, enjoy your stay. When you get to Sandhills they say, here’s a coaster for your drink.”
What he means here, is at Dismal the members have an open invitation to do whatever the fuck they want. Sixteensome? Sure. Tee off at 6:00 AM? Look out for maintenance. 6:00 PM? You’ve got lights on your cart. The new ownership group tightened things up a little, but until this year there was a 10:00 PM dinner seating for the headlights on the golf cart crowd.
My journey to Sandhills started seven years ago. Part of living in Los Angeles is wishing that you lived somewhere else, so when I moved there from Colorado I spent a lot of time daydreaming about golf in the Nebraska Sand Hills. A graduate program in television production took me to LA, the plan was to stay there and continue doing film for all of eternity.
If not eternity, then until I had enough cache to move my production office to New York a la Aaron Sorkin (this might seem hyper specific, but it’s not, it is the dream of literally every person in an LA based production office).
During this time, my wife was finishing medical school and interviewing for residency. There are two options for psychiatry residency in LA, USC and UCLA. Here, in a shocking subversion of the of the desires of Aaron Sorkin, it is the apparent dream of every psychiatrist to treat the mentally infirm while they battle traffic in the unceasing glare of the California sunshine.
When it became clear that USC and UCLA were not options, we started, as one does when dreams are thwarted in the City of Angels, to look inland. There is a residency program in Colton, but we never got that desperate.
We were desperate enough for Rancho Cucamonga, though. During my wife’s interview, she gave cursory details of my career, film production in North Hollywood, and the residency director for the program in Rancho Cucamonga told her that we were going to get divorced.
This response was blunt, but with the benefit of nine years of hindsight, it was also merciful. Kelly and I are happily married. I’m writing this blog from a very comfortable couch in an open concept living area with stellar views of the Colorado Rockies (the mountain range, not the baseball team). We have two children, who are the light of my life. That light doesn’t glow so brightly as to blind me to the hypothetical challenge of raising them in the 400 square-foot apartment that Kelly and I shared in Koreatown.
In the moment, leaving LA felt like a defeat. Certainly less of a defeat than moving to the Inland Empire and letting my daily commute to a sound stage in North Hollywood end my marriage, but I was standing on the first tee at Rustic Canyon and pondering the move back to Denver when I got a call from Beth, Dismal River’s membership director.
Barring Dismal going bankrupt, which she did not minimize as a possibility, Beth offered to make me the deal of a lifetime. The club would go bankrupt (three times during our six years as members) AND Beth made us the deal of a lifetime. That deal still involved a lot of up front cash. Luckily, I had no idea how difficult it would be for me to find a job in Denver.
In the beg, borrow, steal, and PAY golf course architecture circles where I have spent A LOT of time and energy establishing a foothold, a rumor will sometimes surface that playing Sandhills is possible with a hand written letter to Dick Youngscap, the owner and developer of the club. I put that rumor to the test with my own letter in 2019.
I got an email response to this letter, the club’s general manager acknowledged receipt and encouraged me to try again next year. The move back to Denver had resulted in an inglorious return to the golf industry, and for a while, the GM and I kept in loose touch. In 2020, the club opened so late that tee times were competitive amongst the membership. 2021 members were allowed to bring guests, which resulted in so many guest requests that they discontinued unaccompanied play.
In 2022 I made friends with the director of golf at Dismal. This pro was a Mullen native. He started his career at Sandhills, spent time as the head pro at Ballyneal, then was poached by Dismal for a position as the Director of Golf.
He gave me all the information he had about the fraught relationship between Dismal and Sandhills. When Dismal first opened, the members were “abusing” the guest privileges of town members at Sandhills (there is a big overlap in town members when there are two clubs in a town of 400 people). Apparently it got so contentious that Mr. Youngscap threatened to revoke all town memberships.
The culmination of all this has been something like a golf course ranking death penalty for my beloved home club. Raters know that Dismal and Sandhills are the grape and grain of Mullen. The town is SO far out there, you’d have to be very rich AND hellbent on playing Dismal to make two trips for ranking purposes. When raters visit they just play Sandhills, or if they’re playing both courses Dismal isn’t getting reviewed. In 2025, Dis Red slipped out of the Golf Digest top 200 (currently 203).
In 2025, Sandhills ranked 8th. So what’s the difference between the 8th best course in the US and the 203rd? The first difference was the standard of service. I feel very lucky to be a member at Dismal, and more or less I sponsor anyone who asks for unaccompanied play (the less part is people with a bunch of Trump emojis in their Twitter name). There was an instance this year where the club contacted me and told me that my guests didn’t pay.
This is not typical in the tiny, INSULAR world where people meet online and pay handsomely to play each other’s golf courses. I called the folks I hosted and they confirmed that they didn’t pay, but they said there was no one at the club to pay. They went to the hospitality desk to check in – unstaffed. To the shop to check in – unstaffed.
These are people who had been to Dismal before, so not only did they know where to go to check in, they knew where to get a golf cart. They grabbed one, played until dark, and came in for dinner. At dinner the GM checked in with them and they said they had a great day at the club, but they couldn’t figure out how to pay.
In the tried and true manner of a boots on the ground executive, our GM told this group not to worry, they would be charged. In the end I guess they were charged, after Dismal’s frontline hospitality staff looped me in, which is NOT ideal from a member or guest perspective.
Professionally, I do enterprise level expansion sales, some of the biggest companies in the world are in my book of business. Most of these companies still roll out new locations one at a time, the cornerstone of my professional success is tenacity. So I never stopped following up with the GM at Sandhills, and seven short years after I sent the handwritten letter he sponsored me for unaccompanied play.
At the club I was greeted by a cart girl who directed me to a lone building in the parking lot, clearly the clubhouse. There, the club secretary greeted me by name, and talked me through using the charge account she had created for me. If I so wished, I could pay with a credit card at the proshop, which was staffed. I wandered into the downstairs restaurant which was closed, but staffed by an employee who told me that dinner was first come first serve, but that they get very busy, so earlier is better.
From there we followed a clearly delineated path to a driving range which was (gasp) unstaffed but stocked with Pro Vs. There was a grill near the first tee, a literal Weber, but on a very nice patio, the famous Ben’s Porch. Grill, staffed. Bar, staffed. All of this is to say that a MAJOR difference between 8 and 203 is the guest experience. At Sandhills, you know how to pay.
I didn’t get to go inside the cabins, but compared to the cabins at Dismal they seemed a little rustic. This tracks, Dismal was conceived and launched as a more amenity rich version of Sandhills.
This takes us to the golf course, where I don’t actually know if cabins that appeared to be rustic are a negative, because you wouldn’t want anything to pull focus from the course. Here, there is a counter argument, and it’s a pretty good one, there is absolutely no way that anything could pull focus from the golf course at Sandhills.
In May of this year I got to play Ballyneal for my second time ever, and my first time in over a decade. Bally is touted as a minimalist masterpiece, but it’s also a masterpiece of brutalism, where the sheer scale of the course and its contouring will pummel you. I am not questioning Doak’s commitment to minimalism or critiquing Ballyneal, I’m just saying that the land where he built Bally is big and bad and spooky and scary. Any other architect would have tried to soften.
Coore and Crenshaw trade in a less brutal minimalism, and I’m not sure if this is a chicken or egg situation, but the site they inherited for Sandhills is better situated for a golf course. It is exceptionally playable AND manages to highlight the extreme topographical variance of the chop hills without being overly penal. Within a rugged landscape it is beautiful and fair.
This leads us seamlessly into the White Course at Dismal, which I believe to be another exercise in minimalism. Does this seem wild for Nicklaus? Yes, but if he were molding the land of the White course there is no way that some of its holes would exist. If you’ve played the course you won’t need me to elaborate, so now, mercifully, onto the Red.
I have played a lot of golf, and the best courses flow cohesively from one hole to the next. They can be thought of a single organism, rather than as 18 disparate holes. Tom Doak achieved this on the Red course, the problem is that there is one bad hole. This problem compounds when the hole is 18, where the left side of the fairway is guarded by scrub oak, and the fairway cants SEVERELY from left to right.
This slope is so severe that luck comes into play on your tee shot. Too far left is scrub, and too far right, even marginally too far right, will have your ball bounding across the fairway into the lost ball territory on the right side of the hole.
After much reflection, I’ve concluded that the difference between 8th place and 203rd place in the Golf Digest Ranking boils down to small town politics, the grading of one fairway, and “different” service philosophies. This isn’t a knock on golf rating systems, there are a lot of great courses and I don’t envy the folks tasked with putting together these lists. (I actually do envy them. I am very VERY jealous.)
What gets harder to understand is the difference between 146 Wannamoisett, and 8 Sandhills. Wannamoisett, the course in inland, suburban Providence, is perfect. I lucked into a tee time this summer, please don’t hate me. The (famously) par 69 course laid out on 84 acres by Donald Ross is flawless. This is the argument for working on a small scale – you can get everything exactly right.
So perfect that on my first try the holes flowed together completely. I found myself gobsmacked, attempting to take pictures and later make notes, but ultimately giving into the euphoria of traversing a course that had stood the test of time and shouldered the burdens of its vaunted history.
Truly, the only thing you hear about this place is that it’s compact, 69 yards 84 acres, 69 yards 84 acres, again and again and again. It doesn’t do Wannamoisett justice, or even really make sense while you’re out there, because nothing feels cramped. The course is extremely fair – I might even say generous, from tee to green. This is Ross, and from what I can gather, mostly true to his original design, so you’re not going to get generous (or even fair) on the greens, but the complexes are right sized to the ample fairways.
This is hard to believe when massive courses keep getting put up on massive sites, but 84 yards is MORE than enough for a par 69. Check out the hole by hole, this course is no cupcake, 6900 yards and par 69 equals A LOT of long par fours.
The members at Wannamoisett are rightfully proud of their course, and the course is open to hosting golf societies – PLAY IT. It’s very fun, but I’m not telling you to play it because it’s fun, I’m telling you to play it because I think that Wannamoiset is the template for any architect needing to do something compact or even something coherent. (Which is HARD to do, I love Gil Hanse, but much earlier in his career he massacred West Denver’s Lakewood.)
In the GD rankings, two flawless courses are separated by 138 places in the rankings. From my experience, it felt like the only real difference was the scenery.
Which brings us back to the Red Course. You have to respect an attempt at coherence on a 2200 acre site in the Nebraska Sand Hills because it’s SO tempting to hunt out 18 exceptional holes without thinking of how those holes flow together. Eighteen disparate holes is less good, even when some of those holes are EXCEPTIONAL (ACHOO-4-White-ACHOO).
Like most other golf junkies, I work in tech and am no stranger to Seattle. This year I was very fortunate (I guess) to put my horrible slice to the test at Sahalee (GD’s #196). You’ve seen Sahalee on TV, where it looks brutal. Driving in, the neighborhood is almost comically peaceful. I’ve never used this word before, but I just Googled it, and it’s correct, bucolic.
The glimpses you get of the golf course are NOT peaceful, pastoral, or even remotely pleasant. It’s strange to have your heart pounding in abject terror while you’re peeping a golf course in a NICE neighborhood within a BEAUTIFUL old growth forest. The range is a little less scary, but when you get to the first tee (we went North>South) staring into the Sa-Hallway is like staring down the barrel of a gun.
Typically, I panic in these situations, but somehow I managed a good ball on my teeshot, a hard cut that soared over the tops of the humongous trees and worked its way back to the center of the fairway. My host chided me playfully, “You’re gonna have to tighten that up.” That helped me a lot, anytime my slice is challenged I LOCK IN, and I wound up playing a great front nine.
There was a delay at the turn, my host and I putzed around for a while, and he told me the south nine was the easier of the two. Apparently this is the worst thing to tell me, because my tee shot on 10 was wayward. Obviously the challenge of a tight course is the trees make it more difficult to recover when you miss a fairway. At Sahalee it was impossible for me to recover, and not just from my tee shot on 10, but for the whole rest of the round.
My host, god bless him, missed some fairways too. His first miss was LEFT on hole one. When I claimed that the ball was gone he told me that we wouldn’t lose a golf ball all day. True to his word, he dug up the ball, and would find many many more balls that day. (I actually don’t think either of us lost one.) At some point he told me the trick was to listen for the sound that your ball made when it hit the tree. Apparently there are different kinds of knocks – early knocks, late knocks, hard knocks, soft knocks, and knocks that come in multiples, etc.
What was even more impressive than my host’s clairvoyant ability to find our balls in the forest was his ability to chop those balls out. My new friend had full control of a hook that he could play with any stance from any lie.
These hooks were played between 120 and 140 yards. Sometimes onto the green. Sometimes pin high onto the green. My guy made MULTIPLE birdies from the deep dark depths of the forest.
I begged him to apprentice me, thinking perhaps he would request an ungodly sum of money, and we could negotiate down to my soul, or perhaps my first born son. His bashful answer, that he had just been at the club long enough (12 years) is a little disappointing but it makes sense.
Is this a course I’d want to play everyday? Absolutely not. Would playing there make me a better player? Honestly probably not, because I don’t have the swing path or the mental fortitude to recover from poor shots in such tightly confined space. But I could see how it made my host a strong player.
I love golf on TV, and I love to test my game at courses that host PGA events. Sometimes (often) the courses are too goddamn hard. Sahalee is a prime example. Waialae, where my father in law and I happened upon an ask and you shall receive scenario this winter, that is absolutely not the case. Beyond the beachfront, beyond the W palm trees, beyond the history and the pedigree this course is FUN.
Waialae was my first Raynor, and I have to say, I am coming around on some of this golden age stuff. Is there a way to improve on template holes in paradise? Yes, serve musubi at the halfway house. We were there in February, I played whatever day the shop told me to, and it was the least crowded place that we visited in all of Honolulu. Based on that, I would imagine that a large portion of their membership lives in Japan.
That is pure conjecture, but I do know for certain there is a block of tee times allocated for unaccompanied guest play every day from 10 to 11. Please, for the love of God, have your pro call. I am so fucking jazzed for the Hawiian Open this year.
As one does, I sought out another golden age masterpiece after I played Waialae, Cape Arundel. Here, my biggest take away is that Walter Travis was unwell. The slopes on this 5800 yard golf course were berserk. I mean berserk in the best way possible, I’ve forced myself to make a comp for this course, and it’s Kanye’s The Life of Pablo. This isn’t an attack on Travis’ character. I don’t know anything about the man, and I truly hope that he didn’t descend into insanity and deplorable racism after he completed Cape Arundel.
What I mean with the comp is that Cape Arundel is excellent, and that it is infinitely repeatable. Not only could I play it every day, I think I could play it every minute of every day. One endless loop where I subsist on protein bars and see the effect that every slope has on every golf shot. Please don’t tell W., or any of the other blue blood fucks that summer in Kennebunkport, but I couldn’t help doing some revisiting while I was out there – from what I could see every shot offered a myriad of options for playability, the total opposite of target golf.
Akin to Cape Arundel in the severity of its slopes and the sheer number of options that I had for playing each and every shot for the entire round was Cornerstone. I am not going to provide additional context for how I booked this round or even where the course is located because Cornerstone just might be golf’s last hidden gem.
However, I will tell you that I do not care for what Greg Norman has done to professional golf. So this is difficult for me to admit, but Cornerstone is an admirable piece of design work (an undersell, but truly all I have to offer). I have played exactly one of his other courses, Red Sky Norman, and I HATE it. Too penal.
At Cornerstone I was hosted by a member who talked me through shooting a low number. That probably sounds annoying, but it was totally necessary. The highest praise I can pay Cornerstone is that it made me want to revisit Red Sky.
Another instance where it was necessary to have someone bossing me around from the first tee to the hatless handshake was Chambers Bay, which is one of my favorite places on the whole planet. I had this round planned, before I booked Sahalee, because how can you not play Chambers when you’re in Seattle?
There’s been a lot of talk about golden age architecture in this blog, but we can’t forget about our old friend modern architecture. In my own rankings, Chambers is miles ahead of Sahalee, they are in totally different tiers. It’s such a special course, on such a special site, I truly, TRULY hope that they get another crack at a major.
On 18, I put everything that I had into a drive and PULLED it. This was a last effort to start a stalled boat type of pull. Really far and REALLY left. I went to re-tee, sure that I had lost the ball to the great yawning chasm at my nine o’clock. I stopped when I saw my caddy signaling frantically.
My ball was so far left I didn’t even register that he was signaling up, not safe, but I was on grass and right next to a plaque commemorating Jordan Spieth’s shot on the 18th hole of the 2015 US Open. I tagged a three wood, hollered HIT IT WIND, HIT IT into a dead calm April afternoon, (What else can you do in that situation?) bungled a greenfront up and down to make a par that gave me a 1 up loss to a 12 year old taking 17 pops from me.
None of this is important. The big thing I would like to pass on from my experience at Chambers is confirmation that Jordan Spieth is a goddamn maniac. This plaque is LEFT of left. I honestly think I may have been the only person to see the monument since it was installed, because only an insane person would take this line.
Maybe an inch left of the Spieth’s plaque is a line of sight bunker that is not really in play, but is a sure bogey if you can (mis)hit a ball solidly enough to reach it. Right of the small brass square is 10,000 acres of green grass. Maybe 100,000 acres. It could be 1,000,000 acres. I don’t know what the fuck Spieth was thinking.
A couple others from a banner year for golf:
Ravenna – Jay Morish gets a little targety (for my taste), but I was making putts this day, and I shot 76 in a tournament. The guest experience at CGA member play days is HORRIBLE. There were four groups on every hole along with a marshal yelling at us, the fourth group, to stay on pace. Looking at the course, and not the experience, If you want to have your (live in Colorado) cake and eat it (live in an Italian Villa) too, you’ve found your neighborhood. BAD walk.
Raindance National – Cool vibes, needs some time to grow in.
Bella Ridge – RULES. The boy Raindance told you not to worry about.
Colorado Golf Club – I had my head turned by the Castle Pines Golf Club renovation, but CGC is still the best course in the state. I guess Parker has to have something.
We have a baby coming in 2026. I’ll catch you on the other side…
Straight Gross 