On The Road Again

This week has been a great one for golf, as I've had the chance to play two new-to-me venues each of notable distinction.  Monday was the Metropolitan Golf Writers Association August meeting at Tamarack Country Club in Greenwich, CT.

Tamarack is a 1929 design of Charles Banks, the protegee and associate of Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor.  Banks came to prominence after the untimely death of Raynor in 1926, he finished ten courses in progress and later completed some thirty original designs of his own.  But he continued the practice of utilizing the Macdonald template holes, and a cursory review of the Tamarack scorecard reads like a walk down a familiar country lane, with the expected Eden, Redan, Long, Short, Cape and even a Biarritz.

Banks was nicknamed Steam Shovel Charlie, for his practice of bringing in the eponymous equipment to move earth.  You'll see that in photos of Tamarack, though I've always assumed that practice was a reflection of the greater availability of such equipment after Raynor's death.

One great aspect of the MGWA events is that they're about more than just the actual golf, but always include

Brian Silva

informative presentations from the host club and others.  In this case golf course architect Brian Silva, who is overseeing the course restoration for Tamarack, made an informal presentation on the work completed and under consideration.  I had played Silva's Cape Cod National a few years ago, and enjoyed it greatly.  I can assure you that not a soul nodded off during his presentation, which was little more than an impassioned stemwinder on the greatness of Macdonald, Raynor and Banks.  As far as your humble blogger is concerned, he was preaching to the converted...

The course did not disappoint in the slightest, as you'd be hard pressed to identify a substandard hole.  Tamarack provided a wonderful CD of images of the golf course, but the files are unfortunately too large to utilize here.  So you'll be forced to look at my own photos. 

The 12th green - Biarritz.

A proper Biarritz plays with a long iron or hybrid, such that the player can hit a low running shot through the half-pipe in the middle of the green. Greens keepers tend not to like them for many obvious reasons, including the difficulty of mowing, but also because the pin needs to be placed on the back tier.

The 11th hole green complex - Punchbowl.

A fine example of the genre, where some earth was obviously moved to create the effect.  As at Sleepy Hollow, the approach shot is mostly blind, so the player is denied the pleasure of watching his ball on the ground.  

Missing from my photos is one that adequately shows the shear depth of these bunkers.  After all, there's a reason he was dubbed Steam Shovel Charlie... These two photos of partner Bill Baum show the third green, the Eden Hole, and you can get just a flavor of the depth of the bunkers.  Trust me, this is close to as deep as they get and the camera flattens out the perspective.

There's an amusing reason I'm including two seemingly identical pictures, see if you can spot it

 

As those two exposures were being taken in burst mode, the ball actually fell off the tee.  Amazingly enough, Bill still managed to make pretty good contact, though the ball not surprisingly went left.  

I was hoping to visit with Brian Silva after golf, as I struggled to recognize the design principal in many of the template holes, especially the Road Hole.  The holes are never intended to be replicas, as I'm well aware, but I would have loved Brian's thoughts on what he thought Banks saw in the hole.  Another time, perhaps...

Next up was The Stanwich Club for an Eastern Seniors event.  Stanwich is a younger club, dating back only to the 1960's, designed by William Gordon.  While Gordon's name is not especially well known, he had spent the early part of his career working for Donald Ross, Devereux Emmett and Willie Park, Jr.   But Gordon probably came to the club founders' attention for his more recent work with the firm of Toomey & Flynn (that being William Flynn of Shinnecock, Merion and Pine Valley fame).  Gordon had supervised recent renovations at Shinnecock and The Country Club, as well as at Burning Tree also in Greenwich.

It's a beautifully rolling property with a number of lakes and winding streams, just perfect for it's intended use.  The club is of course first rate, and if you've been with us for my reporting on prior outings there's always a detail that conveys to me the quality of the club.  For Round Hill it was the luxuriously plush towels on the ball washers, softer than anything in my hole, whereas at Baltusrol it was the Fuji apples in coolers on the golf course.  Stanwich has something I've never seen before, pictures something in size midway between a rake and a squeegee used to brush the sand from the bunkers off their perfect greens.

Calling these greens perfect is somehow an insult, as at the start of the day a blemish couldn't be found.  They tend to be severely canted from back to front, the imperative of staying under the pin being quickly apparent to the player.  As has been my experience under such circumstances, sometimes it's the putts across the green that are the most difficult to control, as a certain level of hit is needed to get them started on line.

The postcard-beautiful Par-3 thirteenth.

The approach to the Par-5 seventeenth, candy to the eye of a drawer of the ball.

Two venues with sterling reputations that didn't disappoint in the slightest...and with perfect weather both days.  I call that a fine week.