A Day At Mountain Ridge Country Club

You've likely noticed that I don't blog much on Wednesdays, as a result of a regular game that features Bob Dembner, d/b/a as Bobby D in these pages, as well as two Elmwood Country Club refugees, Jeff Goldstein and Bryan Kornreich.  We had grandiose plans to take the game on the road this year, in my fertile imagination I saw us hitting all the iconic venues in Westchester County and surrounding areas, which I would of course share through this wee blog.

But I'm finding that 2020 hasn't exactly lived up to its expectation, though perhaps your experience has been better.  With the golf season fading fast, we were able to arrange one away game for yesterday, at New Jersey's Mountain Ridge Country Club, where Donald Ross and Clifford Wendehack combined to create an iconic Golden Age experience, but one that remains equally compelling in the 21st century.

As is often the case with notable golf clubs, their initial golf courses quickly become antiquated.  From the club's website:

Mountain Ridge Country Club, located in West Caldwell, New Jersey, was officially formed on April 17, 1912, when 25 charter members filed a Document of Incorporation with the State of New Jersey. In 2012 the club celebrated its 100th anniversary.

The original Mountain Ridge golf course was located in West Orange, on a 176-acre plot. Because so few of the original members knew how to play golf when the club was created, the official opening was celebrated with a softball game. The initial nine-hole course was laid out by David Hunter, golf professional at the nearby Essex County Country Club, and opened for play in 1913. Thereafter, A.W. Tillinghast created a new course on the site during the winter of 1916-17. Tillinghast’s work at Mountain Ridge caught the eye of the leaders at Essex County, and his efforts there resulted in him obtaining commissions to design Baltusrol, Winged Foot, Baltimore (Five Farms), and other classic courses.

Despite the Tillinghast pedigree, the golf course was troubled. The site was extremely hilly, and did not lend itself to good design. In 1926, Mountain Ridge retained Seth Raynor and George Banks to advise the club on modifications to the layout. Raynor and Banks reported that no amount of money could build a satisfactory course at that location. For a second opinion, the club turned to Walter Travis, a three-time U.S. Amateur champion and the first US citizen to win the British Amateur, paying him $250 to visit and provide his views. Travis confirmed what Raynor and Banks had said, and soon thereafter Mountain Ridge began looking to sell its course in the hopes of reestablishing itself at a different location.

There aren't too many clubs that would abandon a Tillie, though that decision seems to have been unanimous.  Perhaps the most interesting aspect here is that, having already engaged with Tillinghast, Raynor, Banks and Travis (Herbert Strong as well), they sought out Donald Ross to design their home.  No slight to the man from Dornoch, but what exactly was lacking in those other bold print names will remain one of life's enduring mystery.

I'll highly recommend this feature from the club's website called Two Architects, which offers an abundance of details and background on the creation of the golf course and clubhouse.  I'd love to offer my usually impeccably curated excerpts, but it's formatted such to frustrate my copy-and-paste instincts.  The course was completed in November 1929 for what must have been the staggering cost of $186,000, though no mention is made of that inauspicious timing. 

Donald Ross is familiar ground for most of us, but the more interesting aspect of the Two Architects is the discussion of Clifford Wendehack and his Tudor Revival clubhouse.  You've heard Wendehack's name recently, in these pages and elsewhere, as his most famous work is the Winged Foot Clubhouse.  He also built similar clubhouses for Ridgewood Country Club, Hackensack Country Club, Forsgate, Bethpage and North Jersey Country Club among others, and literally wrote the book on this subject, with the unwieldy title of  Golf & country clubs;: A survey of the requirement of planning construction and equipment of the modern club house, now sadly out of print.  Many of his insights are included in the linked Two Architects feature, down to the granular level of locating the pro shop on the way from the locker room to first tee to boost spur-of-the-moment purchase.

While frustrated that I can't excerpt the piece, I am able to grab their vintage photos:

The approach to the clubhouse in the 1950's.

These next photos had no caption:

This last one of the entrance hall will, I imagine, will feel dark and foreboding to those with more modern sensibilities:

I'm a bit of connoisseur of locker rooms, this one being of the delightfully retro, steel-cage variety:

As noted above, the construction of the course was completed in late 1929.  The club hired architect Ron Pritchard to develop a master plan and he supervised an extensive restoration in 2007, which has been received favorably.  This review is also of the non-excerptable ilk, but here I can use a tried and true workaround:

That last bit intrigued me, with visions of Tillie's square Winged Foot at top of mind.  But these Ross greens don't lend themselves to any know geometric form.  Free form is the phrase that come to mind, featuring the widest array of humps, hillocks and hollows, offering a seemingly unlimited array of hole locations.  A couple of times I had the presence of mind to ask our caddie where the most difficult pin might be on a green, but it's more than any one mind can absorb from one loop.

Green contours are notoriously hard to capture on camera, but this of the 7th green isn't half bad:

Each little section of the green offers its own unique challenge, basically requiring the player to miss in the correct spot.  I had a chip from a downslope behind and to the right of the camera angle, and the ball took about four different breaks as it traversed the width of the green.  

The greens themselves weren't quite as elevated as I expected, this of the short Par-4 third an example of how, in dryer conditions, one could run a ball up on many of them:

Notwithstanding the seeming receptivity to the ground game, the greens were firm and fast, and no shortage of balls made only the briefest stop on the green before running off the back.  At Pinehurst those are referred to as pitch-marks in regulation...

I've started with greens because, duh!, Donald Ross.  But it's quite the test of golf tee-to-green as well.  The Pritchard restoration widened the fairways, which I'm thinking is a very good thing for their membership.  We played in rather wet conditions, with morning fog and heavy air all day, rendering the rough extremely juicy.  The card features no shortage of stout Par-4's and the most difficult collection of three-shotters I've played recently.  One reason can be seen below from the 5th hole:

Centerline hazards are all the rage among the cool architects these days, but of course the old timers got there first.  Most players will lay up short of it, but the issue really presents when one has the misfortune to miss the fairway.  Ross's design include many bunkers positioned deceptively short of the green, one in particular that ensnared your humble blogger.  But before we go there, let's share some snapshots from our day.

I have a love-hate relationship with my camera, one exacerbated by the fact that I simply haven't touched it since last August.  It's key feature is the burst mode, perfect for capturing a golf swing.  One recurring screw-up feature in my travel blogging is the mode dial moving unintentionally off its automatic setting, and rendering all photos in 1920's sepia tone.  For instance, this image of Bob approaching a green:

But also this of a red-tailed hawk that alit on one of the carts:

And also, unfortunately, this of our Wednesday game:

On the 14th tee, Bob, Bryan, Jeff and My Ownself (l-r) violating multiple Covid protocols.

Of course, with the days growing shorter and the sun lower, those sepia tones will soon suit our wisrful memories of the Wednesday game.

Noted above is the fact that the nines have been reversed from Ross' original routing.  I note this because the current configuration features such a strong finish that it seems passing strange that it wouldn't have served in that capacity from the start.  The 16th is its shortest Par-3, though it should come with a Surgeon General's warning that this is your last birdie opportunity.  Here's Bryan striking his tee shot:

A good one indeed, as it ended narrowly inside my own,  earning him provisional greenie status.  But therein lies the rub, as Bob and Bryan had forged a two-up lead earlier on the back nine.  We had cut the lead to one (and by "we" I mean, of course, Jeff), and Bryan's three-putt here was the pivotal moment of the match, which ended appropriately halved ( the bad guys did pocket $2 for junk, but Jeff and I were quite satisfied to get off so lightly).

No. 17 is a long Par-5 that starts the climb back towards the clubhouse.  My scorecard indicates the hole measures some 517-yeards from the white tees we played, though it felt a good 100 yards longer.  This from the club's website hints at the challenge:

It takes two well-struck shots to properly position oneself, but even that might not be sufficient to the task given the severity of the green.  The approach will be an severely uphill shot to a green with a punitive falls front (you won't be playing this shot on the ground), then the green falls away to towards the back.  We played to a pin that might seem generously past that false front, but it only seems generous until your approach fails to hold the green and you chip back towards it.

But it's the finishing hole that is, simply put, a beast.  You can see it the background above, but here's a better overhead:

The hole plays far more uphill than it seems from the two-dimensional photo, but let me focus your eye on that bunker some 65-70 yards short of the green that just into the fairway from the right.  Because of the severe dogleg, that bunker functions almost a s a centerline hazard for anyone playing to the green on their second shot.  I can tell you from personal experience that I felt its gravitational pull playing off a good drive in the center of the fairway.  And when a hole is a beast off a good drive...well, you can imagine the rest.

Also hard to imagine from this photo is the slope up to the green from that evil bunker, it took perhaps my best shot of the day to even find the green, barely clearing that false front.  But to this observer the hole is design brilliance, because of multiplicity of lay-up options it affords the player.  But it's the kind of hole where one plays for bogey, and perhaps a few of those par putts might drop.

A few random thoughts and I'll wrap things up.  I noted above that we played in wettish conditions, but it's hard for me to see how their conditioning and presentation of the golf course could be improved upon.  Despite it being wet, my golf ball simply never picked up any mud, and I rarely felt the need to clean it.  To me that's always been a telling detail.

Additionally, the club's exhaustive website includes many pleasures, not least being Ross's original field sketch of each hole, such as this of No. 18:

We have a few more Wednesdays still ahead of us, though this was a great coda for a season's worth of camaraderie, trash talk and spirited competition with good friends.  Hopefully next season will feature many such posts of our road trips to similarly engaging venues.  But in the annus horribilis that is 2020, I find myself grateful to have had the one.

Back to our regularly-scheduled programming tomorrow.