7 minute read
The Greens Agenda
Teeing off in New Zealand, Tom Mackin recces six of the world’s newest destination golf courses
HIGH HOPES Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore’s course at Point Hardy Golf Club will open for preview play later this year at the Cabot Saint Lucia development
BUNKER BEAUTY The 17th green at Coore & Crenshaw’s Te Arai South Course in New Zealand
If anything beats the anticipation of standing on the first tee with an unblemished scorecard, it may be doing just that on a brand-new course. With golf booming more than ever, it’s no coincidence that worthwhile layouts of various lengths continue to appear on the golf destination radar. On two islands some 8,600 miles (c13,840km) apart from each other, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw have crafted a pair of stunning new courses. At Te Arai Golf Links (tearai.com) a 90-minute drive north of Auckland on New
Zealand’s North Island, those design-company partners maximised a seafront location to create a dazzling routing on the South Course, with eight holes along the water and 16 overall with views of the Pacific Ocean. During its first year of operation, tee times will be available only to members and visitors who stay in one of 48 on-site suites. “At Te Arai Links we have been given a great gift, a uniquely special site for golf, comprised of sand dunes and landforms sculpted by the wind, adjacent to the sea,” Coore has said. The views are expected to rival – and perhaps surpass, in some instances – those found at Tara Iti, the nearby private club that’s home to a spectacular Tom Doakdesigned course. Both courses at Te Arai Links will be open for public play. That’s right, there will be two courses: in addition to the South Course opening this October, construction has begun on a Doak-designed North Course, which is scheduled to open in October 2023.
On the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, the artistry of the Coore/Crenshaw duo will be on display at Point Hardy Golf Club (cabotsaintlucia.com) with a routing that flows around a 375-acre (152-hectare) peninsula on the island’s northern edge. “The oceanside stretches to close each nine will likely be most discussed, and I think the closing stretch of 14-18 is as strong as any I have seen, but the other nine holes all have views of the water and some of those continue to be favourites among all who have toured, including Bill and Ben!” said Ben Cowan-Dewar, co-founder and CEO of The Cabot Collection, which includes the much acclaimed Cabot Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. Point Hardy
is a centrepiece of the Cabot Saint Lucia development, which will include luxury accommodations for members and guests, including hillside townhomes, single-family homes and customisable beachfront lots. The course opens for preview play in late 2022 before a grand opening in early 2023.
While a decidedly less exotic destination, Nebraska can still claim endless miles of superb potential golfcourse topography, as epitomised by the iconic Sand Hills Golf Club located in the heart of the state. Other notable layouts have followed since that famed private club debuted in 1994, the latest being Landmand Golf Club (landmandgc.com) a public facility located in rural Homer, Nebraska, just southwest of Sioux City, Iowa. Built and designed by Tad King and Rob Collins, creators of the highly regarded nine-hole Sweetens Cove Golf Club in Tennessee, the course moves its way up, down and over a sprawling 580 acres (235 hectares) of former farmland, with an estimated two million cubic yards (1.53 cubic metres) of dirt moved during construction. The massive scale is reflected in the design, with a handful of massive greens: at 30,340sq ft (2,819sq m), the multi-tiered 17th green falls squarely in the must-see-it-to-believe-it category. Anticipation is high that the course will immediately acquire coveted
PHOTO: BRIAN OAR RENOVATION PROJECT Left: the 16th at Entrada at Snow Canyon Country Club in St George, Utah
NEBRASKA MASSIVE Landmand Golf Club, designed by Tad King and Rob Collins, is huge in scale
worthy journey status. “Right now, I multiply the feeling I had early on in my gut about Sweetens by about 1,000x, and that’s how I feel about Landmand,” Collins wrote on his company’s website.
St George, Utah, is better known as a base to visit national parks such as Zion, Bryce Canyon and even the Grand Canyon in neighbouring Arizona, but it’s also becoming a golf destination. Two new reasons to stop by involve golf. The first is found at Entrada at Snow Canyon Country Club (golfentrada.com), which completed a thorough renovation by David McLay Kidd earlier this year. The work touched every aspect of the course, originally designed by Johnny Miller in the 1990s, all the way down to the tee markers. A number of template greens were created (such as the Biarritz on the par-3 12th and a Punchbowl on the par-5 16th), while a trio of holes set in a lava field on the back nine were made much more playable, a theme found throughout the course. Although part of a private club, guests staying at the on-site Inn at Entrada can also play the course. For Kidd, it was a chance to satisfy his ongoing curiosity about elevating one of the many courses that came online during a building boom throughout the US in the 1990s. “Can you take all that effort into those courses built then and change those into something better than they are? Is there untapped potential?” he said. “Entrada was a poster child for that. Beautiful landscape. The routing was OK, but not great. Behind the scenes some of my peers were asking why I was thinking about that. I wanted to find out what would happen. Why not? If the club let me take it on as a raw site, I could make it something much better.” Mission accomplished.
The second area attraction is a brand-new course at Black Desert Resort (blackdesertresort.com), a collaboration between Tom Weiskopf and Phil Smith. Every hole has a lava-rock feature adjacent to it, remnants left behind by volcanoes dating back more than a few millennia. That’s the prime reason for generous fairways, ranging from 45 to 60 yards wide in some landing areas (afternoon winds also played a factor in that design element). “The Black Desert lava fields are reminiscent of the most beautiful courses in Hawaii combined with distant views only rivalled by the red-rock region of Sedona, Arizona,” said Smith. “This canvas will set the scene for one of the most visually stunning golf courses I have ever been involved with. In my 33 years as a golf-course architect, I’ve yet to see a place as unique as this.” More than half the holes will be pure golf without any development, but the property will eventually feature a hotel, residences, spa and commercial space.
In the Scottish Highlands, Castle Stuart Golf Links is being rechristened as Cabot Highlands (cabothighlands. com/golf) after being acquired this past June by Cabot, a Canada-based developer of golf-resort communities led by Ben Cowan-Dewar. While a new Tom Doak-designed course is slated to debut on the property in 2024 (joining the highly regarded original course by late owner Mark Parsinen and Gil Hanse), a nine-hole short course is currently open for preview play with a grand opening planned for 2023. Co-designed by Parsinen and general manager Stuart McColm, the layout measures 765 yards in total without a single bunker. It’s currently open only to those playing the main course on the same day, making for a very memorable 27 holes. “The layout takes you in to Punchbowls and out to infinity-edge greens where shot-making imagination is required at all times,” said McColm. “Continuing the Mark Parsinen design ethos, this is fascinatingly fun, endlessly enjoyable, utterly unique in its concept and a great way to start or finish your Castle Stuart experience.”
DESERT ROSE Above: stunning Utah lava fields are home to Black Desert Resort
GREAT SCOT Left: the bunkerfree short course at Cabot Highlands
