While most people go to Marquette Golf Club to play the spectacular Greywalls course, it isn’t the only course there. In fact, people have been playing golf here since 1926 when architects William Langford and Theodore Moreau laid out an 18 hole course. Only 9 of these holes were built and eventually, part of the land for the second 9 on the east side of the property was used to build houses. But by the 1960s, the club decided to go ahead with a second nine and commissioned David Gill to design it. The current Heritage Course is a mix of Langford and Gill holes, with most of the Langford holes coming in the middle of the front nine and most of the Gill holes at the end of the back nine.

But thanks to the club and our host, superintendent Craig Moore, our group was able to play the Langford 9 in its original order. While the rest of our golf course architecture snob outing stopped there, Bob and I continued on and played the Gill 9. This was my second trip around the Heritage Course (the first came in its everyday configuration in 2011) and cemented my fondness for the course. It’s clear that despite their somewhat degraded state, the Langford 9 holes are the stars here. But there are several good holes on the Gill 9 as well and I think that with a little tree clearing (and lack of restoration of the Langford 9), they wouldn’t be too far apart in quality.

It’s certainly worth playing all eighteen holes if you’re going to play the Heritage Course and it’s also worth playing the Heritage Course if you come to play Greywalls. While it doesn’t have the drama of Greywalls, it’s on a very good piece of property and makes for an excellent second 18 or evening nine.


The first hole on the Langford 9 is the tenth on the Heritage Course. It’s a slight dogleg left with a wall of trees protecting this hole from the driving range on the right (with moderate success). As you approach the green, you can see the old Langford bunkers on the left side that are now grass. And if you look around the green, you’ll see the margins of the old Langford green pad, which in many cases are ~50% larger than the greens in their current state.

Two (Heritage 11) doglegs right around some spruce trees that attempt, probably most of the time in vain, to protect the eleventh (2nd) hole from slicers. The second plays up the hill again again, you can see the old Langford bunkers adding zig and zag to the fairway. The green complex looks like it lays simply on the land but if you look over the back, you can see that it’s been built up a good 8 feet.

Three (7) is a great 140 yard drop shot to a severely back-to-front pitched green on the edge of a valley. Again, the front of the green is built up several feet from its surroundings. One thing that I noticed here, like at Langford and Moreau’s most famous course, the Links at Lawsonia, is that all of the greens involved substantial earth moving but if you’re playing into them from the correct place, it’s hard to tell that they did any earth moving at all. The shaping is always very well-blended into its surroundings.

The par 4 fourth (8) is something of a Langford and Moreau template. As at the second at Lawsonia, this drive is blind over a hill and the architects placed two bunkers on opposite sides of the fairway that form a V-shape facing the tee about 130 yards out that golfers need to carry. They repeated this feature several times at Lawsonia, including on the second shot of the par 5 ninth and the drive on the par 4 seventeenth. While most will be able to carry these bunkers, they would have probably caught many mis-hit shots in the 1920s.

The second shot plays downhill to a shrunken green in a great green complex. There are crossing trench bunkers about 30-50 yards short on the left and the green side bunkers are no match for their Langford ancestors. But the entire green pad is being mowed as short grass which suggests that the green might be restored to its original size in the near future.

The par 5 fifth (4) is a beauty. The drive is uphill and if you want to go for the green in two, you’ll have to skirt the wooden ravine on the right edge of the fairway. The approach is downhill to what appears to be an almost completely restored Langford surface (again, the bunkers not so much). Take a look over the back right of this green to see just how much above its surroundings it was built.

The par 3 sixth (5) and short par 4 seventh (6) have seen better days. On the former, the green has shrunk and bunkers were built on the actual green pad (!). The seventh was originally a 240 par 3 but has become about a 280 yard par 4. This green was absolutely enormous but is currently at best half its original size.

The long par 4 eighth (12) was a beast back into the wind, although there’s ample fairway here to bomb away. There was originally a crossing bunker cutting in from the left ~50-60 yards short of the green. While the bunkers could use some work, the green has been restored to the full original pad. You can tell that it had shrunk because there are sprinklers about 15 feet into the green in several places.

The short par 4 ninth (13) was originally a much longer par 4 where you teed off from across Grove St. There was a solitary fairway bunker up the left side near the start of the fairway. Now there are two bunkers and a maple tree on the right edge of the fairway, near where you want to hit your drive. While not at all what Langford intended, I think that the current hole is actually very good, with a drive placed near the bunkers giving you a better view and angle into the green. If they do ever restore the rest of the Langford nine, I’d suggest sticking with a version of this hole closer to what exists now. I doubt that they’d restore the original tee across the road and this version works better at this length.

The Gill 9 starts with the par 4 first on the Heritage Course and while it may not have the steep and deep earthworks of the Langford and Moreau 9, we can see from the first tee that it won’t be a pushover. It’s a fairly short par 4 so the only sensible play is to lay up short of the first fairway bunker, but that doesn’t stop people (including some of the golf course architecture and strategy buffs that I played with) from trying to hit the narrow neck to its right—with mixed results.

The dogleg right par 4 second is actually one of my favorite holes on either nine. There’s a diagonal water hazard up the right which good players should be able to carry—but if you push it, you’ll end up in a grove of arborvitae trees. The second is uphill to a very well defended green with a general back-left-to-front-right tilt, except in the back right, where it slopes away.

The third is right next to the fourth hole on the Langford nine and shares some of its features—the blind tee shot, the slight dogleg left on the approach. But it also illustrates the relative weakness of the architecture—there’s no interesting V-shaped carry bunker or crossing hazards on the approach (there is a blind pond on the right, which isn’t a plus). But there are several bunkers around the green and it’s still a demanding approach.

We cross Grove St. for the fourth hole, which is the ninth on the Heritage Course. It’s a slight dogleg right around a solitary bunker then gradually uphill to a green with flanking front left and right bunkers. It sums up the Gill 9 well—solid, but nothing special.

The next few holes have some special features, although not so much for the better. I like the short par 3 fifth (14) out of a chute of trees to a green with two bunkers right and one left. Like the rest of the course, it’d be a bit more interesting if there were more shape to the bunkers.

I have some pretty serious problems with the next three holes and one of them is obvious from standing on the sixth (15) tee. This hole has just become completely overgrown in the roughly 50 years since this nine opened. With tree clearing around the tee and the removal of a few white pines left of the fairway, this hole would be a nice drop shot par 4 where the primary challenge would be to keep your drive out of the right hand fairway bunker and keep your approach below the hole on the steep back-to-front sloped green.

I’m afraid that there isn’t much that can be done for the par 5 sixteenth, which might just be a classic bad hole. The drive is into a big right-to-left side slope and the approach is blind over granite outcroppings that were covered with dirt. You can try to go for the green, but it’s a small target and blocked by more dirt and grass covered granite outcroppings. An even more practical reason not to go for the green is that a push stands a good chance of taking out a windshield in the parking lot next to the clubhouse. The smart second is a lay up with about a 9-iron, which leaves a pretty interesting-looking approach over the aforementioned mounds. I guess that you could think of it as a risk-reward hole, where some of the risk is borne by the other golfers who parked their cars in the wrong place in the parking lot (or maybe you parked there too and you put out your own windshield…).

Another weakness of this part of the course is that the routing is awkward. We drove around the seventeenth green to get to the sixteenth, now we play back between them before driving uphill around the sixteenth to get to the eighteenth. As it plays parallel, seventeen is similar to fifteen but while it’s just as overgrown around the tee, there’s a bit more room out in the fairway.

Along with the second, the eighteenth is the best hole on the Gill 9. I think that strategically, this one would be a contribution to the Langford nine: there’s a ridge that cuts into the fairway diagonally from the left side and angles down the fairway to the right. If you follow the ridge out to the right, you’ll have an awkward approach across bunkers to the green. But if you carry the ridge, you shorten the approach and can play down the angle of the green, angles from front left to back right.

When I last played here in 2011, I really liked the Heritage Course. It’s obviously no match for Greywalls but I think that it complements it well. Other than the last few holes, it’s very walkable and doesn’t have so many opportunity to lose balls (or a golf cart…). It’s a good course for an evening nine or a league. It reminds me a bit of one of my favorite public courses in metro Detroit, Rackham, a Donald Ross course where several holes had to be redone to accommodate I-696. Now the architect of those new holes did a better job of trying to capture Ross’s style than David Gill did here and I think that the original Ross holes there are closer to their original state than the Langford holes here. But are courses by (at least in part) a great Golden Age architect where the general public can see some of what has made these guys so revered.

It seems like the club is trying to restore the Langford holes gradually and they are certainly to be commended for that. The restored eighth green is magnificent and it looks like they’re close to restoring the fourth to its original state as well. But I think that the bunkers might be an even bigger issue—the current bunkers are totally out of place and it seems like it would be pretty easy to restore the Langford bunkers. All of the earthworks are still there, so I think that it’s just a matter of putting sand in them. They don’t necessarily need to put sand in all of the original bunkers—many of the bunkers at Lawsonia have been kept as grass bunkers and I think that that works just fine.

But both for their own sake and because most people who play this course neither know nor care about Langford and Moreau, probably the easiest way to improve the Heritage Course is to clear out some of the trees on the fifteenth through seventeenth holes. There’s nothing wrong with the design of these holes (well, the routing isn’t great…), but they’re just absolutely choked out by trees at the moment, which makes playing them frustrating. They should do this while continuing their gradual restoration of the Langford holes. And in the really long run if they’ve restored the Langford holes and the budget allows, they might consider redoing the bunkers on the Gill 9 in the Langford style. This might be difficult to do because with the deep Langford bunkers come the huge, built-up Langford greens, but I think that the point of such an effort should be a more superficial aesthetic consistency rather than turning Gill holes into Langford ones.

Erin Hills has an eventful past. What was once a farm was supposed to be a golf course designed by Tom Doak in the late 1990s. But that never happened and the property was acquired by Bob Lang, who wasn’t a golfer but became obsessed with hosting a US Open. He jettisoned Doak and hired Ron Whitten, Michael Hurdzan, and Dana Fry to design the golf course. While the original course was minimalist, with the architects moving little earth even to build greens, Lang became convinced that the course needed to be more difficult and needed more ‘stuff.’ He eventually built bunkers everywhere, ran out of money, and was bought out by some hedge fund guys from Milwaukee. This story is the subject of probably the best piece of golf journalism that I’ve ever read: the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s 7-part tale of the course’s troubled journey to the US Open. 

But by the time the last acquisition happened, the course was already slated to host the 2017 US Open, so there was little chance that they were going to return the course to something closer to the original vision. And that’s a shame because what exists today is a golf course that sits on one of the most beautiful pieces of property that you’ll ever see, but one that’s just trying way too hard. It’s too long, the holes are too far apart, and there are too many bunkers that make it impossible to play anything but aerial shots most of the time. It’s a course that looks to have been built solely to challenge low handicap golfer but the ultimate irony there is that the pros beat this course up more than any other recent US Open site. They made the excuse that it had been wet and the course couldn’t get as firm as they wanted but it’s June in the midwest and the course is on farmland: it rains a lot on the ground is good at retaining water. That’s why they used it for farming in the first place.

If it’s not already clear, I had a lot of problems with Erin Hills. On about the eleventh hole, Bob asked me what I thought of the course and I went on one of my rants, which I summed up by saying ‘this course is a lot of what’s wrong with golf today.’ We played with a guy who insisted on playing the championship tees and while he was a long hitter and a good golfer, we spent almost every hole looking for his drives in the fescue. On most of those holes, it’s at least 250 just to reach the fairway so any little bit off line and your in the fescue. Still, we couldn’t have played any faster than the five hours that we took because the group in front of us was also always looking for their balls in the fescue.


Despite my comments, I think that Erin Hills gets off to a very good start. The first hole features the course’s only marshland up its left side, but hugging this will make the lay up much easier. If you hit a weak drive out to the right (as I did), you’ll have to contend with the bunker in the middle of the fairway on your lay up. Once you get past this, the approach to the slightly domed green is wide open. It's a tough opening hole, but a very good par 5.

The second hole is one of the best on the property. If you drive it toward the bunkers on the right, you’ll have an awkward angle to the green and likely a blind shot. But if you can carry part of the hill with your drive, you’ll have a clear look down the deepest aspect of another dome-shaped (and small) green. I thought that the green was a little bit gimmicky, like a Pinehurst no.2 green, but with more severe run-offs. But apparently, it was placed on a natural knole and used to be an even smaller and steeper dome. Sometimes the hand of man is an improvement, at least for the sake of golf.

The third starts my complaints about the course as we’ll see 7 or 8 holes like this: a long par 4 with a huge fairway to a green that’s wider than it is deep with a big bunker right in the front middle, preventing you from being able to run the ball on. I’m not sure why anyone thought that this would be the right way to challenge the longest hitters. It plays right to their strengths: bomb it 350 inaccurately and wedge it onto the green. Meanwhile the guy who hits it 250 (me) is stuck with a long iron that they have to try to fit around the bunkers.

Four is the same thing except this time if you go over the green, you run down a hill. Even though I only had a wedge to the green, I couldn’t stop it up there. Five is the same thing as well, except we’ve reverse directions and are now playing into the wind, so what was a wedge is now a 4-iron.

The sixth is the first of what’s actually a pretty good set of par 3s. It plays over a valley to a ridge top green with a big false front. Although you can’t tell from the tee, the green is quite deep and pretty flat. So it’s better to miss long than short and if it’s playing into the wind like it was for us, take plenty of extra club.

We reverse direction again for the par 5 seventh, which was playing quite short—even I was able to reach the green in two with a hybrid from 550. Same deal again, bunkers blocking access to the front of the green. I decided to hedge a bit right and that was the right call; short and right of the green is a fairly easy pitch.

Nothing about the long par 4 eighth is easy. While there are no bunkers off the tee, unless you carry it a long way (into the wind), you’re going to hit into the upslope and have a long, blind approach. Of all the holes at Erin Hills, this one might bother me the most. It falls beautifully across the land and has a good green site but what do they do? Block the entire entrance to the green with bunkers. I don’t get it. Why on a 440 yard par 4 where you drive into an upslope would you put bunkers across the entire front of the green? I swear, they designed this course with about 15 people in mind and one of those, Brooks Koepka tore it a new one in the US Open. This approach to design doesn’t even work for the people it’s designed for so really, it works for no one.

Nine is a short, downhill par 3 that I was a bit worried about. It has another dome-shaped green and is surrounded by bunkers, so I was worried that it was going to create a Kingsley-Club-2nd-hole situation where if you hit it in one, you go back-and-forth across the green until you eventually pick up. But this hole actually works because the green is large enough, the slopes aren’t that steep, and the bunkers aren’t that deep. The ball will hold on most edges of this green. Maybe I’m underestimating the possibility of disaster because everyone in my group hit a decent tee shot, but even that’s some evidence that it’s playable—because it was windy.

I had a hell of a time with the tenth—I couldn’t even reach the fairway. But unlike all of the long par 4s on the front, this green is open in front and fairly receptive. Eleven is also restrained for this course—only about 350 yards from the normal back tees (7,150 yards) and without fairway bunkers. A drive up the left side gives you a better angle at right pins but if you drive it up the right, you’ll be playing into the slope of the green. This hole is as easy as it gets at Erin Hills.

And twelve is as good as it gets—a beautiful natural hole winding through several of the hills in the links-like middle of the property. The drive is onto a ridge and if you hit a good one, you’ll go over the other side and have a wedge to the green (and also maybe drive into the group in front of you like the one behind us did). The approach is over another ridge to a green that angles front-right to back-left. This isn’t a very interesting hole from a strategic perspective because there’s no way to open up the angle of the green, but it’s a hole that was routed over interesting land in an interesting way and doesn’t try to outcompete it with a bunch of bunkers. For me, that’s enough to make it an excellent hole.

The thirteenth isn’t a very interesting par 3 but I appreciate its visual simplicity—something that does not characterize the par 5 fourteenth. We’re back to the bunker overload here with blindness, alternate fairways, and confusing turns in the fairway to boot. Like many of the holes at Erin Hills, the key thing to do is…play the correct set of tees. I was playing off the middle green tees (still 6,750 yards) and was able carry the fairway bunkers on the left off a good drive. If you can go for the green in two, play over the middle of the rough-covered mound as everything near the green feeds right. The alternate fairway short and right of the green doesn’t serve much purpose.

Fifteen is one of three shorter par 4s (with two and eleven) and this is the one that they made drivable for the US Open. It’s not well-suited for that. The green is perched up on the side of a big hill and there are bunkers everywhere. The only sensible play here is to lay up, preferably just short of the left centerline bunker. You’re pretty much dead if you miss this green (as I learned from both of my playing partners) so wherever you drive it, go for the center of the green. You may three-putt if the pin is near an edge (as I learned from myself) but you won’t make a 7, which is otherwise quite possible.

The sixteenth is a lovely medium-length par 3. While the green is surrounded by bunkers, there’s enough room up there that you should be able to hit it with a decent shot. Seventeen is something that I wish more holes were: bunkerless. The hole doglegs slightly left around the hole and the fairway slopes gently to the right, making it a tough drive. But you want to drive it up the right side here because a ridge blocks the green from the left side of the fairway and the ground short of the green slopes gently to the right.

The final hole sums up Erin Hills nicely: there’s just too much shit going on. There are bunkers on both sides of the fairway seemingly for the entire hole then when you get to the lay up area, there’s a bunker in the middle of the fairway too. It looked like a nightmare on my GPS. And it’s very frustrating even if you hit a good drive because the second is blind and there are bunkers everywhere. I hit what I thought was a decent second only for my ball to roll into bunkers on the left side of the fairway. I played conservatively from there and was able to save a six, but it was an annoying way to finish.

Despite all of my griping, I actually played really well at Erin Hills. In fact, one of my proudest moments ever in golf was at the end of the round when the caddy for my championship-tee-playing playing partner said that it was the first time he had seen anyone play the championship tees and then asked me what I shot. 74, I was very proud to say. Because I had played the appropriate set of tees, I was able to take advantage of some of the easier holes and hit some good shots into the harder ones. I also got a few lucky bounces.

But I played one of my better rounds ever and had good luck—I’m not a very long hitter (usually ~250 off the tee) and I don’t hit the ball that high. And if I played 10 more rounds here, that’d probably be the best score that I’d shoot by a few. This course demands a very modern, aerial game. It’s the type of design that you could do on any type of land, which is why it bothers me so much here—the land is so good and it really deserved a design that used the undulating character of the property to generate most of the strategy. But this design doesn’t generate strategy so much as it generates difficulty and it does that almost entirely through the use of bunkers. It would have been possible to build a great course on this land with no bunkers.

I’m not surprised that the pros beat this course up in the US Open. The fairways aren’t that narrow, so it just becomes a matter of bombing it off the tee and landing high, soft iron shots into greens. Go figure that the guy who benches 350 lbs. won the tournament. The next time that they play a big men’s tournament here, either Bryson DeChambeau or one of his disciples will shoot 20-under and win. In the meantime, thousands of golfers will play the course from too far back (’tip it out’ as my playing partner douche-ily put it), spend half their day in the rough, shoot 120, and cause the pace of play to be even slower than that on the PGA Tour.

I’ve been excited to play Sand Valley ever since I heard that Mike Keiser would be developing a golf resort in the sand hills of central Wisconsin and that Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw would be designing it, probably seven or eight years ago. As I discussed at the beginning of my Mammoth Dunes review, I was intrigued by this region as great land for golf when I came hiking here back in 2008. When I heard that Mike Keiser thought the same thing and hired Coore and Crenshaw to build the first of several courses here, I knew that I wouldn’t be disappointed.

And I wasn’t. Once they decided to strip away the red pines on what was an old lumber plantation and expose the sand barrens and their native vegetation, it was going to take a special effort to build a bad golf course. I suppose that they could have built one with several blind shots and overly complicated holes, a bit like Tobacco Road. But when you look down from the first/tenth tee, you’ll see that the property is just too pure to do anything fussy like that.

Unlike its younger sister Mammoth Dunes, Sand Valley lets the land dictate the play. Whereas David McLay Kidd did a tremendous amount of shaping to create a variety of mounds and banks that you could use to run the ball onto greens or near tucked hole locations, Sand Valley sits on the land in a simpler way. That means that sometimes the land will help you get the ball closer to the hole. But often it will not. Sand Valley is a tougher course—often a little narrower and a little bit less forgiving around the edges. But there are also several holes with big, concave greens like those on Mammoth Dunes. So there’s a lot of variety in this course, arguably more than on Mammoth Dunes. But easy or hard, it’s still a lot of fun and rewards well-played golf, if not so much creativity.


The first hole is a pretty atypical start: a short, but not drivable par 4 (~330 yards). This type of hole seems to have fallen out of favor recently as we’ve come to equate short and drivable par 4s. But even the juicer would be wise to lay back here as the green is at a sharp front right to back left angle to the tee and any miss left of the fairway will give you an approach that you definitely didn’t practice at the range. So take it easy on yourself—lay-up to the right and pitch on.

The second is a medium-length par 4 that has one of my favorite types of greens: one where the front is completely open and where a miss short right or left leaves an easy pitch, but one that gets narrower at the back and where the run-offs become steeper and longer the further you go. For some reason, I didn’t get pictures of the sides but safe to say whatever your yardage, play to the front of the green.

After a lovely long par 3 over a big sandy waste area, we come to a long, wide open, uphill par 5. As long and as wide open as it seems, it plays even longer, but not quite as wide. Holes four and five work their way to the highest point on the course so while there’s plenty of room to miss, you’re probably gonna need some of that. You have to hit two good shots to get with a decent distance of the green and the third shot played about two clubs uphill. I was the only one in my four ball still standing by the time that we got to the green…and just barely at that.

The fifth is a drop shot par 3 and a very good one. The green is about twice as wide as it is deep, but it should be plenty deep enough. A miss short right will feed off down a slope, so it’s best to hedge a little left.

Six is a long par 4 where the fairway bunker cutting in on the left should be your cue that it’s best to play your drive up the left side. There’s plenty of room to run your ball up onto the green from the left but this is one hole where, like Mammoth Dunes, you really need to know where the pin is placed. The green is enormous and heavily contoured. But unlike Mammoth Dunes, there are no shoulders on its edge to keep your ball on the green. Like most of the other greens on Sand Valley, the edges are convex so you have to be a bit more careful if you’re playing the ball on the ground.

Seven is another par 5 and, I think, one of the best holes on the course. The drive is up hill and plays diagonally left to right along a large bunker up the right. There’s room to play out to the left but if you go too far, there’s another bunker to catch your drive. This left bunker runs down the hole for another 140 yards and splits the lay-up zone into a blind left side, which gives you a shorter approach and better angle, and an open right one. If you can carry your second to within 110 yards of the green, you can carry this bunker.

The eighth is a great example of one of my favorite type of holes, the uphill par 3. If there were heather around the bunkers, this hole would be at home on one of Colt’s excellent London-area heathland courses.

Nine is a drivable par 4 that features in a lot of the course’s promotional material. It’s a bit simpler than a lot of the drivable par 4s today—the fairway is wide open for a lay-up but the green is surrounded by bunkers, so you either have to run it up the narrow front or carry it to the green. It’s definitely a sucker play because the green is quite receptive and the three of four people in my four ball who laid up were able to get their seconds close to the hole (to be fair, so did the guy who tried to drive the green).

Ten is another excellent par 5—in fact, it’d probably be my pick for the best hole on the course. There’s a b bunker in the middle of the fairway and you’d correctly suspect that if you want to go for the green in two, you should either carry it or play to the narrower fairway left. The second shot is one of my favorite shots on a par 5. About 100 yards short of the green, bunkers left and right pinch the fairway, which plays into the green from a slight left-to-right angle. So if you’ve kept it near the centerline bunker off the tee, it’s a straight shot. If you’ve hit your drive out to the right, the angle into this section of the fairway is awkward. It’s a bit like the second shot on the ninth hole at Lawsonia, but laying up short of the bunkers here only leaves you 120 yards rather than a 170 blind shot. Unfortunately I didn’t get good pictures of the approach to the green.

Eleven is a good example of one of the strengths of Sand Valley: its variety. After a few complex par 5s, this hole is fairly simple. The fairway is wide open but the approach is much easier if you hug the left fairway bunker. That’s because the green has a Pinehurst run-off on its right side—if you miss here, the ball will run down a 4 ft. slope about 20 feet away from the green. If you’re in the right side of the fairway, you’ll have to carry this slope to go at middle or back pins.

Twelve is another very complicated par 5, I think a bit unnecessarily so. The bunker on the right is about 220 short of the green and if you can reach it, you’ll either have to lay-up or play over the edge of the trees on the left. I’m not a long hitter and I managed the latter just fine, so it’s doable. And actually there’s one more option although no one in my group was aware of it—the fairway that you see left of the trees is an alternate fairway. It’s wide open, but I’m not sure anyone hits it over there because it looks like it’s on another hole (although that hasn’t always stopped me before…). The approach from there is blind and has to carry a lot of junk. The approach from the right is straight-forward and if you’ve carried the trees, it’s easy to reach in two (I did it both times with a mid-iron). I’d suggest losing the left fairway and make the driving decision about laying up short of the bunker or carrying/skirting the trees.

Thirteen is medium-long par 4 that is wide open but plays very tough because like the long par 5 fourth, it’s uphill and was straight into the wind. I suspect that this is the prevailing wind because the green is wide open in front, giving you ample opportunity to run it on. Fourteen is a lovely par 3 framed by sand and scrubby pines. The green is receptive in the back for those who go directly at back hole locations.

Fifteen is a medium-long par 4 where you want to hug the let side of the fairway to shorten the approach. While there’s a lot of room to run the ball onto the green, the approach becomes very long if you let your drive leak to the right.

Sixteen is one of the toughest par 4s that I’ve ever played. It ruined my second round and let’s just say, it didn’t make a positive contribution to the first either. There’s a bunker in the middle of the fairway about 190 yards short of the green, right where I wanted to drive my ball. The green is up a hill to the left, protected by a bunker on its right and if you drive right of the centerline fairway bunker, it’s an extremely hard approach. You can run it in up the left, but there are two bunkers cut into the hill short and left of the green, so you have to be very careful with this shot.

The last two holes feel like they belong next door on Mammoth Dunes, but that just contributes to the variety in the course. The seventeenth is a long par 3 to what must be a >10,000 sq. ft. green in a massive punchbowl. For most pin placements, you’ll at best be able to see the top of the flag. It’s pretty easy to hit this green, but difficult to get close to the pin unless you know where it is and which slopes feed toward it.

The eighteenth is a very busy uphill par 5. The best play is just to go right over the middle of the first bunker although long hitters will be able to reach the next one. If you hit a good drive, you should be able to reach the green, but you’ll have to carry the bunker that runs along the right. The more direct a line you take, the more of the bunker that you’ll have to carry. But the green is receptive to a shot that runs in from the left. If you lay up, you’ll need to be sure where the pin is because the green is 60 yards deep from the lay up area.

I found Sand Valley to be several shots harder than Mammoth Dunes. It’s easier to get away with a few loose shots over there. The closing stretch killed me both times that I played this course although with the exception of number sixteen, that’s probably due more to my bad shooting than the difficulty of the holes. And there are also fewer opportunities to three-putt here so if that’s the weakness in your game, you may find Sand Valley to be a bit easier.

Overall, I find Sand Valley and Mammoth Dunes to be two of the tougher courses to rate than I’ve played. The architects put a lot into their designs and they took full advantage of the opportunity for spectacle that the landscape provides. And I guess that if I had one general criticism of both courses, it’d be on this latter point: they’re both a bit too spectacular. It’s hard to criticize something for being too beautiful, but that isn’t really what I mean. I mean more that they’re too spectacular in the sense that they’re visually and often strategically overwhelming. There are probably too many waste bunkers, too many centerline bunkers, and on Mammoth Dunes, the slopes on and around the greens are a bit much. It’s arguably both visual and mental overload and having written these reviews just after I wrote a review of Lawsonia, I think that I’m starting to prefer that course’s approach to design features: the hazards are stark, but limited in number and while there are a few wild greens, many are simpler. There’s a lot of strategy, but it’s neither strategically nor visually overbearing.

It’s also interesting to compare these courses to the Loop in Michigan, with which the property shares some key similarities. While the land here is hillier, both are on all sand and the trees are scrubby Jack Pines and Oaks. The native vegetation seems a bit different here—I didn’t see any prickly pear cactus or beach heather at the Loop. But the main difference is that they left the margins between the holes undisturbed at the Loop while here, everything’s been dug up to expose the underlying sand. It’s certainly more visually spectacular this way and one of my main criticisms of the Loop is that it’s both a bit visually and, off the tee at least, strategically dull at times.

But I think that these course and the Loop would each be a bit better if they borrowed from the other’s approach. The Loop could use a little more visual/strategic interest off the tee while these courses could use less. These courses could also use a bit more short grass and less sand around the greens. I really like the Loop’s greens, which are much smaller in scale and rely more on 2-4 ft. high ridges and mounds. A few simpler greens like those over here would add to the variety. But a few big, wild greens would add to the variety on the Loop. Sand Valley is somewhere in between the extremes of Mammoth Dunes and the Loop, but it’s a lot closer to Mammoth Dunes than the Loop.

Maybe the answer to all of this will be Doak’s third course here, which is currently under construction. While the resort describes itself (accurately enough) as ‘This is heathland golf,’ Doak’s course will take inspiration of another feature common to many of the best courses over there: that the par will be <70. But I hope that Doak’s course takes inspiration from another aspect of those courses: their greater sense of intimacy, with greater simplicity from tee to green and greater use of the native vegetation as rough rather than sand blowouts. It’d be especially nice if they could encourage the growth of the native beach heather, which is very similar to the European heathers common to those courses. That would bring some nice variety to Sand Valley and give golfers probably the closest thing we’d have to heathland golf in the United States.

Back in the summer of 2008, I went with one of my good friends from college who was living in Chicago up to the middle of Wisconsin for a few days of hiking. After spending a day in the Wisconsin Dells learning that there’s no reason to go there unless you have kids under the age of about 9, we headed north into the middle of the state to a few different state parks (I don’t remember which ones). While much of the hiking was on fairly modest land, some of it went up and down big, sandy, oak-covered hills. Being the golf course nut that I am, I said to my friend ‘this would make fantastic land for a golf course (I used to say that a lot).

Well apparently I wasn’t the only person who had that thought hiking around in the sandy hills of middle Wisconsin and one of the others had much better track record of turning his golf fantasies into reality: Mike Keiser, of Bandon Dunes fame. But he saw something about which I certainly wasn’t aware: that if you stripped this scrubby land of its trees, you could expose sand barrens and types of vegetation that are native to this area, but had become dormant in the soil as we suppressed the periodic fires that were such an important part of the region’s ecology. So the land he had was perfect for an inland-Bandon Dunes and in creating it, he could make a major ecological contribution by recreating a type of landscape and plant life (beach heather, prickly pear cactus) that was indigenous to the area. Plus, it would draw wealthy golf tourists to the area, especially because it’s only a few hours (rather than a few flights) from several major metropolitan areas. So it’s a win-win-win.

Now visiting Bandon Dunes is the most overdue item on my realistic golf to-do-list. But after Keiser opened Sand Valley in 2017 and Mammoth Dunes in 2018, I knew that this wouldn’t be a trip that I would put off for 15 years. So when in late April 2020 in the middle of covid cabin fever, I asked my traveling golf buddy Bob if he’d be interested in going and, having taken the lockdown worse than many, he immediately said yes. Plus it gave me the opportunity to tack on another long overdue visit (Lawsonia). Eventually the plans came to include Blackwolf Run (completely worth it) and Erin Hills (well, I checked the box) as well.

There are a lot of words that you could use to describe Mammoth Dunes. ’Mammoth’ and ‘Dunes’ are two good ones. Another is ‘spectacular.’ But from the golfer’s perspective, probably the most important are ‘interesting’ and especially, ‘fun.’ This is one of the most enjoyable golf courses that I have played, especially if you’re someone who likes banking shots off of slopes and big, crazy greens. Architect David McLay Kidd speaks of the importance of the ‘bounce,’ of using firm ground and architectural features to feed the ball into the proper spots of fairways and toward pin placements. While this element has become more important on a lot of recent designs by architects like Gil Hanse and Tom Doak, I haven’t seen a course which is so fundamentally based on it.

Some people might think that it gets a bit over the top with all the big slopes around the greens and that it rewards too many loose shots. True, you may get away with a loose shot or two. But three or four of them will catch a slope and go the wrong way, leaving you in a ditch or with a 75 foot putt. Almost any feature on this course that can help you can also hurt you if you don’t play it correctly. This results in one of the most strategically interesting courses that I’ve played as well as one that gives you among the most tactical options to play shots. Yes, you can shoot a good score here even if you hit a few poor shots, but what’s wrong with that? It’s certainly more fun to shoot well than poorly.

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Now the first hole embodies all of the above-mentioned adjectives with its hundred yard wide fairway and sandy expanses but there’s also another important one: confusing. I hit my drive down the middle of the fairway and played my second at the middle of the green that we see in the second picture. Oops. Turns out that the green is about 60 yards wide and that’s the left third of it.

So I decided to look at the yardage book a little more carefully on the second hole. There’s a bunker in the middle of the fairway about 250 from the tees that I was playing (there are 6 or 7 choices of tee markers at Sand Valley; I played the second from the back, ~6,600 yards.) and you can see what looks like the green over the waste bunker just past it on the left. The green is actually more left than you think. The best angle visually is from the far right side of the fairway, but this leaves a longer second. But the green is also huge and while the flag was hidden in the back left when we played it, the hole is much easier if it’s on the right.

The third is an excellent zig-zagging par 5 where you want to cut off as much of the left bunker as you can to shorten the second. If you’re laying up, it’s important to keep it up the left side, near the bunker, because the angle is very awkward and the shot is blind from the right side.

The uphill par 3 fourth is good example of the importance of using bounce. The bunker in front is in front of the middle of the green and everything right of it slopes right down a false front. But it’s important to try to use context clues when you’re a golfer and there’s an important one here: the solitary white pine behind the green. If you hit it here, the ball will feed into the middle of the green—right next to the hole in my case.

The next two holes feature some huge slopes around the green which you can really use if you get out of position. The best drive on five is up the left, but if you’re coming in from the right, there’s a huge backstop. The sixth green horseshoes around a huge front bunker and features in some of the course’s promotional material. There’s a big ridge in the middle that you can use to feed your ball toward a right pin—or 80 feet from it if you’re a bit off.

The drive on the par 5 seventh is a bit intimidating, uphill over a massive waste bunker. Now there’s about three fairways worth of room to bail out left but there’s also a penalty for doing so—this lengthens the second shot and makes it unlikely that you’ll be able to carry the cross bunker in the lay up area. Unless you’ve hit a good drive, this is one of the tougher lay-ups that I’ve seen on a par 5.

The next two holes are a par 3 to an island green in a sea of sand and a long par 4 that has a that I think is even wider fairway than anything we’ve seen so far—although there’s no reason you should ever be in the left half of it. These aren’t two of the better holes on the course, but they’re still beautiful and fun to play.

The short par 4 tenth, however, is. You can tell a lot about how you should play this hole by looking up to the green on the left. You can see that from this angle, over the left side of the fairway, the green is entirely protected by what looks to be a very deep bunker. So maybe you should play your drive toward the right fairway bunker. This is correct. After all my brilliant planning, I put my drive right where I told myself not to hit it, leaving an awkward angle and then a 60 foot downhill putt.

There’s plenty of room over the right fairway bunker on the par 5 eleventh, but you’ll want to put your drive near the one on the left on this dogleg left par 5. The second shot is uphill and the green opens up from the left, so try not to fan your approach right.

Twelve gives you another centerline bunker to avoid. You either want to thread it between this and the waste bunker that runs up the left side or keep it just short. The green is built into a hill and slopes off short and right. There's also a big mound in the front-center that deflects weak approaches. If you keep your drive up the left, you can run it on and use the slope to feed the ball to back right pin locations.

Thirteen is a signature hole among signature holes; a wedge over a massive sand pit. This is one shot where you have to be fairly precise, although it’s a short one. There’s a backstop for right pins.

Fourteen is interesting for at least two reasons: (1) it’s an excellent drivable par 4; (2) it was the subject of a Golf Digest contest where they published a topographical map of the land in the magazine, invited submissions, and gave $100k to the winner. I had read about this some years ago but didn’t remember any of the details. My playing partners told me that some engineer won it and there’s a precision in the bounces here that would require an engineer to figure out. You drive into a steep right-to-left slope but you can see that if you can carry it 230 or 240, the ball will carry a ridge. From there, the land slopes forward to the green and if you suspect that just carrying the ridge will result in a putt for your second shot, you’ll probably be correct. I laid up in my first round, which left a pretty easy second. I went for it the second time around, hit a good drive, and ended up in the middle of the green. Then I three-putted.

Fifteen is a complicated par 5 that I found quite difficult. There are two choices of fairway here, straight-ahead or blind up the hill to the right. You may not even realize that the latter is there. But it leaves a much more open second. The real difficulty is in approaching the green—there’s a huge trough to the left that can easily suck your ball off the green. If you’ve laid up, it’s best not to attack left hole locations.

Sixteen is a downhill par 3 to a receptive green. If the pin is in the middle, it shouldn’t be to difficult. But if the pin is on the edge of the green, you’d better be somewhere in the middle of the green because now a lot of those slopes that help you feed the ball toward the middle work against you.

The par 4 seventeenth has another huge fairway and you’ll be tempted to just play up the right side, directly at the green. If you’re a long hitter or the flag is on the left, that works just fine. But if the flag is on the right and you’re a shorter hitter, you’ll want to play up the center-left because the green opens from the left side allowing you to run the ball into back right hole locations.

It’s pretty tough to miss the par 5 eighteenth fairway, so swing away. If you hit a really good one, you’ll have a good chance to reach the green in two. There’s a choice of lay-up fairway here—to the left over the waste bunker that gets you near the green or short of it and out to the right. The green is pretty receptive from over here and even though I could have maybe reached the green my first time around, I laid up to the right, had an easy wedge, and made a birdie. And sometimes your plans work.

I really liked Mammoth Dunes. It’s a big, beautiful, fun golf course. The fescue fairways and conducive to all kinds of bank shots and bump-and-runs, giving you an opportunity to play a lot of shots that you probably don’t play on your normal course. A few low handicap golfers may find it to be a bit of a funhouse and one of them might make the cliched windmill comment. But I found it to be a lot less gimmicky and certainly less penal than a place like Tobacco Road. And a windmill might be a useful thing here because you can certainly get a lot of wind—another reason for the width and all of the ground options. And if your low handicap friends are offended by the fact that you can get away with a few loose drives and iron shots, they can insist that you play your next round next door, where the slopes are less often in your favor.

While my June 2020 golf trip to Wisconsin with my golf travel buddy Bob was mainly about going to Sand Valley for me, it was at least as much about seeing the Links Course at Lawsonia. The Links Course is apparently the best preserved example of the architecture of Langford and Moreau, which is similar to the MacDonald—Raynor style of design with its deep trench bunkers and mountainous pushed-up greens. I have a lot to say about this course as you’ll see but to put it simply, I wasn’t disappointed. As great as Michigan’s top public courses are and as much as we promote them, if Lawsonia’s Links Course were in Michigan, it’d easily be the best public course in the state.


I think that the first is an almost perfect opening hole. It’s semi-blind and wide open but if you know one simple thing—that the hole beds right—you’ll suspect that maybe it’s best to play your drive up this side…which is also where the only visible trouble (some long grass) is. And if you make the inference from the minimal information that you’re given that you should hit your drive up the right side, you’ll have the optimal angle to the green. Now if on your second you intend to play to the front or just short of the green, the angle isn’t so important here. But if you intend to go at the pin, the green is built at least 15 feet above its surroundings on the left side and slopes sharply left to right. So the approach from the right side of the fairway is fairly easy, but one from the left is not.

I don’t know why, but I’m a huge fan of uphill, blind drives. When these holes are well designed, the architect will give you some simple visual cues off the tee and that’ll give you all the information that you need. That’s the case on the long par 4 second. There are two bunkers that face the tee in a V-shape about 120 yards off the second tee. Unless the architect is messing with you (always possible--it'll happen later), you might infer from this that the point of the V makes a good aiming point. And you’d be correct. That line points you at the middle of the second fairway. The approach is downhill to the right over two trench bunkers. These are about 50 yards short of the green and if you can carry them, you can run your shot onto the green.

The third is interesting because unlike the first two holes, the visual cues are a bit deceptive. But that’s ok because you can see the entire landing area here. The hole doglegs right around a bunker on the corner. Now as you might suspect, you will have the easiest approach if you carry this bunker. But if you can’t carry it, you actually want to play to the outside of the dogleg on the left because the green is small, elevated, and angled from front left to back right.

The long uphill par 3 is excellent, but tough. The approach to the green is all carry but there’s fairway short and right if you’re not confident in your ability to carry the trench bunker that covers most of the front of the green. The forward tees are appropriately place up the hill to the right, giving you an open angle and a clear view to the green.

The short par 5 fifth is a great hole and probably my favorite hole at Lawsonia. Again, the drive is semi-blind over a ridge. There’s more tree trouble here than on any other hole. But I think it’s appropriate here; the left trees make a good aiming point for a fad and it’d be a really bad drive that went in them. And if you hit a good drive, you should either get past the large oak on the right side of the fairway or at least be able to keep it just left and play underneath its limbs on your second. There's a ridge that bisects the fairway about 270 from the back tee and if you carry it, you'll get another 30 yards on your drive.

Once you’re over the ridge in the fairway, you have what I find to be one of the more beautiful views on any golf course—a slightly downhill approach over a trench grass bunker on the left with a sand trench bunker short and right of the green. You can tell from the general left-to-right slope of the land that a shot up the left side that carries the left trench will feed onto the green. I tried, but failed to get pictures that capture the contour of the green. It’s two-tiered, but the first tier is a triangle with its base at the front of the green and point at the back, with the outsides of the triangle being two lower tiers back left (smaller) and back right (large). This green reminds me of several at Woking Golf Club in Surrey outside of London, which also has several greens with oddly-shaped tiers.

It’s hard to follow a hole like the fifth, but the sixth does so nicely. Several people consider this to be the best hole on the course and it’s not hard to argue that. The drive is downhill over a huge front left to back right angled grass bunker. Old aerials of the course show that these grass bunkers all had sand in them originally, but I think that they work just fine as grass bunkers—you can’t carry their lip and reach the green anyway so it doesn’t really matter what’s in the bottom. If you bail out left and hit it too far, you can run into bunkers through the fairway.

The approach is very difficult—uphill to a shallow green with more bold and creative contours. Like the fifth, this one is two-tiered, but this time the ridge runs from near the front left of the green diagonally to the back middle, making the right ~70% of the green the high tier and the back left 30% the low tier. Our flag was on the 30% side and unless they get their ball on that tier (not easy), about 90% of golfers will fail to get up and down.

The seventh is another Lawsonia wonder—a short par 3 to a green built into a step left-to-right sloping hill on an enormous pile. I read somewhere that there’s boxcar buried underneath this green. That must be mistaken—they must have buried the whole train under there. I don’t believe that I’ve ever seen a green built up so high from its surroundings—it must be 15-18 feet above the natural grade on the right.

The short par 4 eighth might be the least interesting hole so far, but that just shows how great the front nine at Lawsonia is. It’s another drive where you can’t see the landing area, but you can see the green to the right. So just play it toward the green. Simple, right? Too simple…and wrong—the best angle into the green is from the left side because there are deep bunkers across the front of the green if you’re up the right side. But if you go up the left side, you have an open approach up the throat of the green. You still have to get your distance control right, but a miss short on this line leaves an easier recovery.

The ninth hole is a long par 5 that plays down hill and doglegs to the right. In addition to being the most attractive hole on the front nine, it’s really brilliant, but I didn’t realize why until my second playing. On my first playing, I hit a terrible drive and had to lay well back on my approach. But on my second playing, I hit a good drive. That’s when I realized how important the bunkers are that pinch the fairway about 125 yards short of the green. If you get past them, the fairway is wide open to the green. But the shot is uphill and the steep faces of the bunkers make them difficult to carry from long range. Unless you’ve hit a long drive, you have to play a very accurate shot between them or lay back. Admittedly, they’re not relevant for long hitters (which doesn’t include me), but will be relevant for probably 90% of the people who play this hole. We’ll see this feature again on the back nine.

After one of the best nine holes of golf that I’ve ever played, we come to the back nine, which as of the last few years has been rendered almost completely treeless. While I don’t think that the golf quite rises to the level of some of the holes on the front nine, it’s still excellent and the landscape is stunning—you can see the whole back nine from almost any point on it.

While the front nine started with a subtle but very interesting par 3, the back nine begins with just a damn hard par 3—about 240 yards from the back tee. But it’s a very well designed hole for this length. There’s a big bunker that looks like it covers the front of the green, but it’s really about 60 yards short. The best play is to carry this and try to run it on the green. It’s ok if you don’t make it because a miss short is much better than a miss anywhere else.

n.b. With all the trees on the back nine that they removed, I can’t believe that the only ones that they left are some non-native Austrian Pines left of this green. They should be removed immediately.

Eleven is one of three par 5s on the back nine and from the new back tee, it takes about a 260 yard drive to clear the rise in the fairway. If you can’t make this carry, you have to contend with a large grass bunker on the right. Unless you’ve hit a good drive, keep your second short of the bunkers on the left 70 yards short of the green. If you’re going for it, you’ll have to skirt the bunker that cuts into the fairway on the right about 30 yards short.

After the mid-length par 3 twelfth, with its high front-right, low-back left tiered green, we come to a very long and tough par 5. There’s a series of fairway bunkers up the left that only the longest hitter will be able to carry entirely. The rest of us will try to skirt them. Unless you hit a very long drive and can get your second within 50 yards of the green, you’ll be laying up to the base of a hill that will leave a completely blind approach. It’s important to hit it far enough to get to the base of the hill; otherwise, you’ll have a downhill lie…and you’ll still have a blind shot. It’s a very good hole for long hitters but a bit awkward for everyone else. But it’s not gimmicky and the blindness just adds to the variety of the course.

Fourteen is, to me, a less interesting version of the boxcar par 3 seventh. It’s a good hole where you play at back and right pins and your own risk. It was a mixture of aggravation and entertainment my second time around as I had to wait for a guy in front of me to hit bunker shots back-and-forth across the green. I didn’t enjoy the wait, but it is kind of funny to watch a guy score higher than his three playing partners together.

Fifteen is a medium-length uphill par 4 that bends right around a fairway bunker. If there’s a weakness of Lawsonia, it’s that the ratio of holes favoring a fade off the tee relative to those favoring a draw is a bit high…although that’s good for my game. This isn’t a standout hole, but make sure you take enough club on the approach so that you don’t come back down the false front.

I really like the long par 4 sixteenth, which has a bit of an intimidating drive over a grass bunker. But this is only about a 180 yard carry. This is another hole where you want to drive it as far as you can (and a draw does help) because there are bunkers about 40 yards short of the green that will be tough to carry if you’ve hit a mediocre drive. These bunker run to the green on the right side so if you’ve missed the fairway right, you’ll have to carry your approach all the way to the green.

Seventeen is another run the gauntlet hole, with another v-shaped set of bunkers in the driving zone. It’s only about 200 yards to carry them from the back tees and the fairway open up past them, so it’s an easy driving hole for good golfer. But they create a lot of trouble for probably 2/3 of the golfers who play this course (as I saw first hand). And that percentage would have been even higher in the early days of steel shafts after this course opened. Few golfers would have been able to carry them and, with no fairway irrigation, this drive would have been a fantastic test of keeping your drive straight. The fairways may not be as firm now, but the hole still works for many who play this course and it’s a great example of a hole that most good players won’t identify as interesting, but that’s because they lack the proper perspective. Golf holes shouldn’t be designed for just one type of player; not everything needs to be protein shake-proofed.

Eighteen is a short par 5 where even a modest-length hitter like myself can reach the green in two. But there are many hazards along the way. You have to fit your drive between a sand bunker right and a grass bunker left. While a drive up the left shortens the hole, one up the right leaves a more open approach to the green. The approach up this side is protected by a fairway bunker but if you can carry it (about 110 yards short of the green), you can run it all the way to the green.

So that’s Lawsonia’s Links Course—a course that was very high on my list of courses that I wanted to see and which if anything, exceeded my expectations. It’s hard to come up with anything negative to say about the course: it’s on a great piece of land, the holes are very strategic, the greens are great, and the shaping is bold but very efficient—everything that is shaped is shaped with a purpose (no pointless mounds here) and I think that the style fits the land very well. The bunker ridges usually accentuate the natural grade of the land and while most of the greens are built up quite high, if you’re playing into them from the correct angle, it’s hard to tell.

The Links Course is even more important because there are very few, if any well-preserved examples of this type of architecture open to the public. The new South Course at Arcadia Bluffs goes for something similar and it’s interesting to compare the two. Relative to the Links, the new Arcadia course feels over-designed, with too many bunkers and too many convex edges around greens. I think that the Links creates the perfect balance—the bunkers are challenging and there are a lot of the, but at no point does it seem like the bunkers are everywhere and that you’re just playing the same type of shot that you’ve already played several times. The fact that the Links is on a better piece of land probably helps contribute to this feeling of greater variety but if you look at it on Google Earth, you can see that there really aren’t that many bunkers and that their placement varies throughout.

In short, Lawsonia’s Links Course is one of the most important public courses in the country. You could even argue that it’s one of the most important courses overall because there are very few well-preserved examples of Langford’s architecture. It has to be one of the top 20 or 30 public courses in the country and I’d bet that it’s one of the top 100 overall. Again, for me, it’d easily be the best public course in Michigan—and that’s a state that’s justly known for its public courses.

While I didn’t play it (I opted for a second round on the Links, I walked around the Woodlands Course after dinner and a bit to my surprise, I really liked what I saw. It’s completely different from the Links and appropriately named: every hole is through mature oak and pine forest. There are some beautiful holes, like the drop shot par 3 third and the par 5 seventh. This course was built in the 80s and was clearly designed to be difficult, with numerous fairway bunkers and ponds. Unfortunately, it looks like they’re dumbing it down by filling in a lot of the bunkers. I know that it’s expensive to maintain bunkers and they’re probably focusing their dollars on the Links Course (apparently it used to be the opposite—the Woodlands was the premier course). I know that this 80s architecture has fallen out of favor recently, but there looks to be plenty of interest in this course and I think that it’s also worth preserving the architects’ intent, even if their names were Roquemore and Lee rather than Langford and Moreau.

The reason that I went to Blackwolf Run in June 2020 is that my traveling golf buddy Bob needed to check the Meadow Valleys course off his list and he suggested that we add it. He didn’t insist (because I was the one making the plans), but I thought about it for awhile and realized that I wouldn’t mind also seeing the River Course. And if you read my review of that course, you’ll see that I’m glad that I went along with his suggestion.

But we were there to play the Meadow Valleys course. And while I didn’t like it as much as the River, it’s a very good course. It probably never had a chance to be as good as the River Course. While the original 18 holes at Blackwolf Run (the front nine of the River and the back nine of Meadow Valleys) follow the river, all of the new holes that make up the River Course are along the river while none of the new holes on the Meadow Valleys are. The new holes here put the Meadow in Meadow Valleys. They’re in what looks to be an old farm field but Pete Dye did plenty of shaping to try and make them interesting and for the most part, he succeeded.

Some people prefer the original 18 at Blackwolf Run to either of the current courses. They suggest that the back nine on the Meadow Valleys are the strongest holes at Blackwolf Run. I disagree. While there are a few holes (fourteen and eighteen) that take great advantage of the river, the others aren’t as interesting as most of the holes on the River Course, especially its newer nine holes, nos. 5-13. But it’s all still very interesting and like the River Course, there are several quirks…several of which involve trees.


But that won’t be an issue for awhile as the front nine are entirely out in the meadow. The first is a bit of an intimidating drive with a pond right, but plenty of room left. The second is a very wide fairway and you’ll want to hit a long one as the green is elevated over two tiered bunkers and requires at least one club extra.

The medium-long par 3 third is a very Pete Dye-looking hole with its diagonal front left to back right green built up about 10 feet from the bunker on the right. The fourth is an interesting split fairway par 5, where a drive up the right leaves you a shorter, but blind approach. Unless you hit a very long drive, you’re probably best playing out to the left of the green as the green is shallow from the right and a miss short on its line will leave you in rough on the side of a hill.

The medium-long par 4 fifth is an interesting hole. While the fairway is wide, the green is narrow and unless you’re online with it, you’ll have an awkward angle. If you miss far right or left, the trees that frame the green will come into play. Unfortunately, with the exception of the tree closest to the green, they’re all ash trees and will be lost to the emerald ash borer if they’re not treated every few years (although with the green fees that they charge here, they should be able to afford that…).

The sixth is a tough, but very good long par 4. The main task here is to hit it as far as you can, but keep it near the bunkers on the left because the green is more open from the left side. I didn’t get a picture of the approach to the green, but I found the shaping around the green to be very appealing.

The next three holes play around a large pond and feel like typical Pete Dye holes. They’re interesting and challenging holes, but I think that you could find three similar holes on several Pete Dye courses in Myrtle Beach or in Florida.

The back nine starts with a very odd dogleg right short par 4 cut through a mature forest. This hole feels like it belongs on a good (but not very good) course in northern Michigan but there’s one interesting thing to note about it: the green is/was also the green for the first hole of the original course. The drive for that hole plays south over the Sheboygan River from near the third tee on the River Course to a fairway which sits in the river’s floodplain. The second shot from there is dramatically up hill. I suspect that that’s a better way of reaching this green than the tenth hole on the Meadow Valleys course.

From the par 5 eleventh to the eighteenth green, we’re playing the front nine of the original (and current championship) Blackwolf Run course. The view from the tee has changed a bit over time as they’re now adding a par 3 course on the right between this fairway and that of the second (got to keep with the times). It’s a bit of a Dye standard, with the big waste-like bunker on the left, where the bold drive that carries or skirts it has the shortest approach to the green and with the best angle. It’s a good hole, but I could do without some of the shaping around the green.

After the medium-long par 4 twelfth, we come to an awkward but interesting short par 4 at the thirteenth. The hole doglegs uphill to the left and there are two bunkers on the corner. It’s important to challenge the corner here because the green is so small and elevated that you’ll want to have a short approach. If there’s a decent wind, the green really isn’t large enough for any yardage to be safe.

Fourteen is a signature hole on the Meadow Valleys course because the approach features in much promotional material for the course. The drive is fairly open, but you can run out of room on the left. The approach is the attraction here, downhill to a bend in a tributary to the Sheboygan River. It’s interesting to think about how much shaping must have gone into this green site—the right side of the green is built up on bulkheads probably 10 feet about the tributary. The green site appears to be completely built up and everything else around the tributary appears completely shaped. The result creates for dramatic and interesting golf but when I look at parts of the river bank that weren’t shaped for a hole hole, I think that Dye could have done something less intrusive and still produced great golf.

As others have noticed, the par 3 fifteenth is excellent. The green is built up on a ridge overlooking the tributary and it’s difficult to see from the tee how deep it is. It looks like there’s no room to play left of center, but this is deceptive. The green is both quite deep and contains some of the most interesting contours on the course.

I really like the par 5 sixteenth. The concept is similar to number 11, but the drive is uphill and blind. I love a good uphill, blind shot and this is one because the movement gives you a cue about what’s going on—the further right you go, the further you have to go to carry over the hill. Oh, and this being a Dye course, there’s a big bunker there. The lay up is simple, but you should play it to the left because the small green angles from front left to back right along a quasi-waste bunker.

The par 3 seventeenth isn’t very good. A bit like the thirteenth on the River Course, a tree blocks the shot to the green but unlike that hole, you don’t have the interesting shot over the bend of the river. This hole is essentially the same as number fifteen, but there’s a big sugar maple tree blocking your shot. And if you assume that the tree grew in a symmetrical way, the right side has been completely deformed by golf balls over the last 30 years. I understand why they kept it because without it, it’d be the same hole as number fifteen. But for the sake of the dignity of both the golfers and the tree, they should remove it and maybe rethink the green.

On the other hand, the eighteenth is a great, heroic hole. We can see that the Sheboygan River comes into play on the right the further you hit it. It’s critical to hit a long drive and get it as close to the river as you can here because the approach is a long carry over the river to the green. Apparently the carry is too long for many because they’ve built an alternative green on this side of the river. But you should at least give one shot at the right green no matter your skill level—it’s one of the most proper, heroic shots that I’ve seen on a golf course, a bit like the second on the great par 5 eleventh on the River Course. It’d be a great finishing hole for almost any course.

The Meadow Valleys is a very good course, but it just can’t match the greatness of the riverside holes in the middle of the River Course. I think that even the back nine here, which are the front nine of the original course, fall quite a bit short of those holes. And some of these holes, like number thirteen and number seventeen are awkward and without sufficient redeeming features. The first nine is very good, but wouldn’t go further than that in my praise—several holes are no better that what you’d find on any other Dye course that isn’t held in such high regard. There are a few flashes of brilliance on the Meadow Valleys course, but I feel that the River Course definitely got most of the better holes. And while I didn’t play it, I also strongly doubt that I’d prefer the original course to the River Course.

Although I now live in Washington D.C., I usually spend a few weeks in the summer with my family in southeastern Michigan and go on a golf trip somewhere in the state. But I’ve been meaning for a few years now to go on a trip to Wisconsin to play Sand Valley and Lawsonia. Now back at the end of April/beginning of May, in the depths of the coronavirus lockdown, not as many people as usual were planning summer golf trips—they were lucky if the courses were open at all. I was fortunate; while the Maryland courses wouldn’t open until the beginning of May, Virginia allowed courses to remain open throughout. And when I got a call from my traveling golf buddy Bob asking when I was going to be back in Michigan and if I had any interest in taking a trip to Wisconsin. I did and told him that I would immediately beginning the planning to go to Lawsonia and Sand Valley, neither of which he had played.

But Bob is a box checker and while he had played a few of the Wisconsin courses, namely those at Whistling Straits, he hadn’t played either Erin Hills or the Meadow Valleys course at Blackwolf Run. And while these weren’t nearly as high on my places of interest, I’ve learned that it’s good to play good courses when your in the area because you don’t know if you’ll get to see them again. So I added Erin Hills and Blackwolf Run to our early June itinerary.

And I was pretty happy with my decision because while I haven’t thought about it in recent years, I was always very intrigued by Blackwolf Run’s River Course. I remember watching the US Women’s Open there in 1998 and thinking that that course, which is the original course and takes 9 holes from each of the current courses, looked very interesting. It’s not often that you have a proper river winding through a golf course and there appeared to be several interesting—and pretty wild—holes wrapping around it.
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Even though Blackwolf Run is incredibly expensive, the River Course proved to be every bit as good as I might have hoped. This is an excellent golf course. If it were in Michigan, it’d probably be the best public course in the state. The Sheboygan River winds through the course and Pete Dye used it better than any other water feature that I’ve ever seen in golf. There are at least half-a-dozen holes that play along or over the river and several of these are just excellent.

While there are a lot of trees in play—some of them very questionably so—there are a few shots here which make you appreciate just how irreplaceable trees as a hazard can be. There’s nothing that makes you shape the ball the way that a tree does. There’s nothing that makes you control the trajectory of a shot the way that a tree does. And there are several times on the River Course that you’ll have to do one or the other. Again, some of these shots are questionable, but all of them are interesting and make you think. Throw in one of the best sets of greens that I’ve seen on a course and you get something that to me, was completely satisfying and exceeded my expectations.


​The opening hole is a par 5 along the edge of the river, which shouldn’t come into play (although did for me…). It’s fairly flat and zig-zags a bit around Dye’s big, flat waste bunkers, but there isn’t too much trouble if you hit the ball relatively straight. But the green is outstanding and made me pretty optimistic about the rest of the course.

After the second, a short par 4 with another very interesting green we come to the dogleg right third, which is the number 1 handicap hole. There are trees in the right rough and you’ll want to skirt the edge of them to shorten the approach to the green, which is at the end of a long bunker that runs down the right. This is another interesting green and when the pin is in the back left corner (as it was on this day), the hole makes a good argument for its handicap ranking.

The fourth hole is a standard Dye water par 3, with a pond running down the right side. To me, this and the short par 4 fourteenth running up the other side of the pond are the most visually incongruous holes on the course. There’s a lot of water on the course, but most of the rest of it comes in the form of the Sheboygan River, which has a much more natural look. Four is not a bad par 3, but it doesn’t fit the look of the rest of the course.

However the drive downhill out of a chute of forest on five may be the course’s signature. This is one of the holes that features in the resort’s promotional material and atypically for such signature holes, it’s an excellent one. This is the beginning of a dramatic nine hole stretch, 5-13, that were grafted into the middle of the back nine of the original course. These holes are mostly in a floodplain of the Sheboygan River, so they all play either along or very near it.

​On the fifth tee, don’t get distracted by the river and the big bunker on the right—you want to go at the left fairway bunkers to set up an open angle to a very elevated green. Some might say that the extreme shaping of the green complex looks unnatural, but it makes for very interesting golf—and reminds me of the Langford and Moreau earthworks that I would see a few days later at Lawsonia.

The sixth is a medium length par 4 that continuously bends right to a green which angles from front left to back right. While there’s a temptation to cut it short up the right side, the angle is crucial—you want to approach this narrow green from the outside of the dogleg on the left side. Especially if the pin is cut in the back right, as it was on this day. Another excellent hole.

There’s a common strategy on a lot of Pete Dye holes—a drive along the major driving hazard will set up a better angle to the green. While the opposite was true on six, seven fits the standard approach. Skirt or carry the big left bunker for a shorter shot to another green that angles from front left to back right. You can also use the slope short-left to run the ball onto the green.

In reading others’ reviews of the River Course, the par 5 eighth usually stands out as a favorite. It’s not hard to see why. You drive downhill from a tee elevated about 100 feet above the river through a chute to a fairway that turns right. You can try to carry the trees on the right, but the right rough is very thick and very steep. The second is to a split fairway which is one of the best examples I’ve seen of the type. A shot to the lower left side is simple, but leaves an uphill shot to a green whose surface slopes away from you and is semi-blind. The shot to the high right lay-up fairway is semi-blind and a push can put you in the woods, but an approach from here is clear and simple. Another great hole.

Now the ninth is always considered one of the most notable holes on the River Course. Many have said that it’s one of Dye’s best holes. It must be one of his most visually complicated. It’s a short par 4 where you can go directly at the green over the edge of the river to the right. This fairway is narrow and guarded by a young cottonwood tree. I don’t really understand why the tree is here because it’s a difficult shot anyway, but if it really creates trouble for you, you shouldn’t be choosing this route anyway. I think that this shot is a total sucker play because unless you can drive the green, it doesn’t leave an easier approach than just going far out to the left, which is much less risky.

​The other route is left of the grove of trees over the levee of the irrigation bond to a semi-blind fairway. Although you can’t tell from the tee, the fairway is ample. I laid up with a hybrid my first time around. This put me in good shape near the fairway bunkers but I realized that the best tee shot is just (for me) a full drive because the further you go, the more the angle of the green opens. It’s a very busy hole but at the end of the day, it’s a good one.

After a very difficult long par 3 over a pond we come to the par 5 eleventh, which is on the short list of best par 5s that I’ve played. It’s a lovely drive with some bushy linden trees along the river on the right. I wasn’t sure where to hit it, so I went at the bunker through the left of the fairway in the distance. I pushed my drive to the right-center of the fairway…which turns out to be a much better spot because the hole then bends right for one of my favorite shots that I’ve ever played on a golf course—a diagonal shot over the river where the closer that you try to hit it to the green, the more river you have to carry. And this shot also features one of the best uses of trees on a golf course: the two cottonwoods near the bend of the fairway create trouble if want to hit a fade on chicken out and go to the left. There aren’t many par 5s better than this one.

The complex golf doesn’t let up at the long par 4 twelfth. Here we have another choice of fairways—long over the whole pond to the left or shorter over part of it to the right. As you might guess from the difficulty of the shots, you’ll have an easier approach to the green if you go right. And the right fairway is really only there for short hitters and high handicap golfers as the carry to the left isn’t that far (I was able to make it easily…) and it’s easy to run out of fairway. As we approach the green, the Sheboygan River appears again and comes right up to its edge, so don’t miss right.

Now we come to the most controversial hole on the course, the par 3 thirteenth. This is the infamous par 3 over the bend of the river and trees. I always thought that this shot looked impossible on TV (and that was 20 years ago—the trees would have only gotten bigger) so I was wondering how it actually played. My recommendation is: if you’re playing from the back tee block (all but the forward tees), ignore the actual placement of the tee markers and tee it up somewhere that gives you a clear line between the trees right and left of the river. But here’s another thing—while the shot is intimidating as hell, my mis-hit 5-iron cleared the trees on the left without too much difficulty. And if you’re a decent ball striker, you should be able to as well.

If you can’t clear the trees, you should move up to the next tee box…where you’ll have to play under the same trees to get to the front of the green. I actually think that the shot from here is worse than the one from the back tees because the green is fronted by rough and bunkers, so there’s no way to run it on.

Once you get to the green, you’ll see that it’s fantastic. But it’s hard to say what to do about the hole. I’d suggest removing the entire multi-trunked tree closest to the green but keeping the rest of them. The shot is will still be hard enough with the river from the back tees, but it will be more playable from the front. It’s hard to call it a good hole as is, but it’s certainly one-of-kind and the trees do contribute to the setting, so I wouldn’t want to remove all of them.

The fourteenth is as good an example as I can think of of a hole that’s good for strategic reasons but bad for aesthetic ones. This is the hole along the other side of the pond from #4. It’s a short par 4 where hugging the pond or laying well back leaves you a clear shot to the green. Bailout left and your approach will be blind over a bunch of ugly, but effective mounds.

I find the fifteenth hole very endearing and I’m not sure why (maybe because I birdied it in my second round…) I think that it’s because you can tell a lot about how the second shot will play from the tee. The fairway is wide but if you go to the right, you can see that there’s a ridge of mounds between that landing area and the green, which will probably leave a blind shot (it does). A shot the hugs the bunker on the left will leave an open shot…but only if you hit a fairly long drive. It’s an excellent driving hole because it’s playable from wherever, but it really rewards a long, accurate drive. The green is large and fairly receptive, so it’s all about getting a good look from the drive.

The sixteenth is another excellent and original par 5. You drive over another large bunker and if you hit it long enough down the left, you can catch the downslope and run out a long way. Then it gets interesting. There’s a huge linden tree (hence the hole’s name, Unter der Linden (under the linden), from a German poem) on the edge of the river in line with the green, about 60 yards short of it. You can either (1) go for the green by going over the river or über den Linden, (2) lay up (well) to the right of the linden or, if you’ve hit a weak drive (3) lay up short of the linden. As I learned in my second round, if you’re laying up short of the linden, it needs to be at least 50 yards short. I learned in my first that if you lay up to the right, it needs to be well right… 

And whatever you do, don't hit it unter der Linden.

The seventeenth is another tough pond par 3, but I like this one more than four because the pond left fits the surroundings—it looks like it’s part of the river, but it isn’t. The eighteenth is a very good, but very tough long par 4. You’ll want to keep it up the left side to shorten the approach, which you can run onto the green.

I clearly wasn’t too enthusiastic about going to Blackwolf Run because I didn’t even think about including it in my Lawsonia—Sand Valley trip. That would have been a huge mistake. The River Course should not be missed by anyone planning to go to Sand Valley, provided that they have the time and budget to visit both. It’s one of the most strategic courses that I’ve ever seen and has some of the most original holes in the most unique settings probably anywhere. With the exception of maybe Pebble Beach, there probably isn’t a course that has so many holes along a natural water feature. While the Sheboygan River can’t quite match the Pacific Ocean for drama, its winding banks are perfect for routing golf holes (although maybe not for maintaining them—I can’t image that this course is playable after heavy rains).

And I can’t imagine anyone doing a much better job than Pete Dye did here. Some architecture aficionados might be turned off by the heavy shaping and 80s mounding along several of the fairways. But while it’s not my favorite style, everything else about the course is so good that I just didn’t care.

The 10 hole Short Course at Forest Dunes opened in August 2020 and is part of the trend of new destination golf resorts opening short courses with lots of short grass and wild greens. Those who have come to Forest Dunes in the past will be familiar with the site of the short course—the pretty, pine tree-covered hill just up past the driving range. I’ve previously profiled the 9-hole Threetops par 3 course at Treetops and have the 17-hole Sandbox at Sand Valley (plus the big courses) on deck.

The Short Course at Forest Dunes falls somewhere between Threetops and the Sandbox in style. Threetops is essentially a collection of full-length par 3s that could be on any normal course. The Sandbox has full length holes, but also a few 40-50 yard holes where you can do a bump-and-run or a putt. There are none of the former on the Short Course at Forest Dunes--its shortest hole is about 70 yards. Like the Sandbox, the Short is also a good drunk-and-barefoot course--not like Threetops, where drunkenness can result in putting your cart into the deep woods down a hundred foot hill, never to be seen again.

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The first is just out behind the patio and plays across the tenth. As we can see, it was 107 when I played it and could probably play up to around 125. I actually think that this hole would make a great 200 yard par 3 because you could use the bank short and right of the green to run the ball on.

The second is one of several 90-yard flicks to a very large and undulating green. This green exemplifies a common theme, which is large greens with collecting and rejecting sections. When the pin is in a collecting section, like on the left here, there will be holes in one. When it’s on a rejecting section, like this one, there will be three puts.

We can see that the pin on three is in a collecting area at the base of the ridge in the middle of the green here. But if you go long, the only thing collecting your ball is a hidden bunker. This hole really shows off the beautiful shaping that the architects Keith Rhebb and Riley Jones did on what was a gently sloping hill.

Four is a half wedge shot to a ridge-top green framed by half of a white pine tree. The other half was lost in the July 2020 storm that also took out most of the leaning white pine in the parking lot and the left half of the forked red pine on the thirteenth hole of the Weiskopf course.

Five is another big, wavy green with a collecting area left and a bunker through the back, like on two. The green on six is a bit different than those so far—long and skinny, with less interior contour and no bunkers. You can use the slope on the left to feed your ball onto the green and the slope over the back of the green to feed your ball into the eighth fairway. I like this hole a lot.

Seven plays uphill to another bunkerless green, but this one is much larger and with more interior contour than six. I find these bunkerless greens to be very visually appealing because they show off the interesting contours of the ground.

We pick up the bunkers again on eight and nine. Because it has a fairly flat an open approach on the left, nine might be the only hole that would work well with a putter. Unless you grew up at St. Andrews, putting, while possible, isn’t the best approach around this course because all the holes are at least 75 yards.

The tenth is probably the most standard par 3 here, playing about 125 to a large green with the open sand of the Weiskopf course as a beautiful backdrop.

I like having these short courses at golf resorts because they give you something else to do while drinking in the evening. This course is easy to walk and easy enough to hit the ball around, if if your vision and judgment are somewhat impaired. And if you’re not drunk or are a functioning alcoholic, there are a lot of opportunities on the Short Course to be creative and to use slopes to feed your ball to pin placements. So it’s a great addition to Forest Dunes—not that you needed another reason to go there.

The Gailes made a big splash when it opened, being named Golf Digest’s Best New Resort Course and finding for many years thereafter a high place on its top 100 public courses and top 25 overall in the state of Michigan. This is probably because when it opened back in the mid-90s, it must have been one of the most original new courses in the country—a pseudo-links course that actually looked like a real one, with wide, rippling fairways and hidden sod-faced bunkers. Many courses built in the 80s and 90s labelled themselves ‘links-like,’ but this usually just meant lines of mounds down the sides of the fairways and otherwise-standard shaping. The Gailes was one of the only courses that really made an effort to practice what it preached and was rewarded with many years of high rankings by all the golf magazines.

As with many courses built in the 90s that made a big splash on the lists, the Gailes has really fallen off in the last decade or so. It no longer makes any top 100 public lists and didn’t even make Golfweek’s recent (2020) list of the top 20 public courses in Michigan. I was very surprised to see this and it inspired me to revisit the Gailes.
I had only played the Gailes once before, in either 2004 or 2005. Back then, it was still on all the lists so I had very high expectations. I remember being a bit disappointed but also not being quite sure what to make of the course. Although I noted above that unlike the other 90s faux-links courses, the shaping extends into the fairways, I thought at the time that there was still too much mounding along the fairways relative to what was on them. And I thought that they overdid it with the pot bunkers, which were scattered seemingly everywhere. I also didn’t like their construction—they were very shallow and looked kind of cheap rather than authentic because the areas around them weren’t shaped to make the look like natural depression, which is what bunkers on links courses are. But I also thought that the greens were excellent and there were some very good holes, so I needed another look—which also gave me the opportunity to take pictures so that I could write this review.

Although I hadn’t remembered the details of some of the holes, my feelings about the course were very similar to what I had remembered having the first time. It’s a very good course, but I think that they could have done a better job with what they were trying to do. I felt that it was probably a bit overrated then but now that it has fallen off all of the lists, I feel like it’s underrated. I thought before that it was one of the top 20 public courses in the state, but closer to number 20 than number 1. I still feel the same way. And another thing that I’m now more aware of is that with its bent grass fairways, it doesn’t play like a links. We now have an example of true links fairways with the all fescue fairways at the Loop and the Gailes would benefit greatly if it had them. But I still appreciate that the course was original for its time, which should still count in its favor.


​The first hole is a good start with a solitary bunker in the right side of the fairway that will catch a weak drive. Otherwise it’s a straight-forward hole with a nice, open green which gives a clearer view to those on the left side of the fairway. The second hole is a medium length par 3 that plays to the undulating right half of a double green.

The next few holes are very tough. I remember not liking the medium-long par 4 third…and I was right. There are blind fairway bunkers everywhere and a creek cuts off the fairway in the driving zone and again in front of the green. I think there’s enough room if you carry the fairway bunkers up the right side, but it’s an unnerving drive, especially because the hole plays straight into the wind.

After a nice long par 3 to a large undulating green with bunkers along the right to catch weak shots, we come to an even harder par 4, number five. Bunkers pinch the fairway left and right and again, a creek cuts off the driving zone. But I found this hole more playable than I remember because a solid drive will easily carry the fairway bunkers and only the longest hitters can reach the creek. The green is also very receptive to a long approach.

The creek continues up the right side of the sixth fairway, but there is tons of room to miss left. I hit a terrible pull off the tee and was still in the light rough just off the edge of the fairway. And the angle of approach to the green isn’t that important because it’s completely open in front.

I like the tee box on the par 5 seventh, which is just a simple extension of the sixth green. We see this all the time now, but it was little features like this that made the course original for its time and gave it a reasonable claim to being a links course. This is a nice-looking hole, but there isn’t a lot of interest between the tee and the green.

The same is true for the very long par 5 eighth, which has little invisible bunkers scattered everywhere down the right side, but is is pretty straight-forward if you keep it down the left. To be honest, it isn’t even worth thinking about most of these fairway bunkers because they’re so small that they’re almost impossible to hit—like hitting a small puddle in the middle of the fairway. A good general rule on this course is to ignore individual fairway bunkers on any shot, but plan around bunker clusters. The green on eight is very good—small, elevated, and undulating.

The green on the very short par 4 ninth is also small and elevated with a false front in the front right. The fairway is enormous, but you’ll want to keep it up the right side to have an open shot up the slope.

The tenth is probably my favorite hole on the course for a simple reason—it’s the one hole where the mounds around the fairway are continuous into the hole, rather than just on the edges. This hole really feels like you’re on an actual links course rather than a solid imitation of a links course. The left side of the fairway is obscured by mounds on the left side and there are two blind bunkers here—it’s best to play over the right edge of the mounds that encroach from the left side, at the left edge of the part of the fairway that you can see. The second shot is over mounds that obscure a view of the punchbowl green from anywhere but left-center. If there were seven or eight holes with shaping like this one, the course would be quite impressive.

The par 5 eleventh returns to the standard mounding down the side, but it’s a very interesting hole. If you drive it down the shorter left side, your view of the lay-up area and green will be blocked by long grass-covered mounds in the left side of the fairway. You’ll either have to carry these to go at the green or lay-up to the right, being careful not to run through the fairway. Visually, it’s much simpler to play down the center-right.

The twelfth is the Gailes’s take on the postage stamp—140 yards to a small plateau green with a mound on the left and pot bunkers right and long. It’s a tough hole, but recoveries are doable if you don’t miss by too much—there isn’t a real danger of going back-and-forth here.

The thirteenth was probably the first 500 yard par 4 in Michigan and is just brutal. A creek cuts off the fairway about 175 yards short of the green, which is nestled into hillocks and has pot bunkers front left and front right. It’s pretty hard to run the ball onto the green given the soft fairways and narrow opening in front, so it’s probably best just to play for the front center of the green. The pitch from here is simple.

While not as long as the thirteenth, the par 4 fourteenth may be just as hard. While the fairway is wide, anything up the right side will be blocked by mounds that pinch the fairway about 250 yards off the tee and run up its right side. This is one of the hardest greens on the course to hit. It’s the right half of a plateau double green with number eleven and anything short, right, or long will run off. A run-up up the left side is blocked by a proper cavernous pot bunker behind the eleventh green and a small one front left of the fourteenth. It's a good hole, but very tough.

The fifteenth is par 5 with several blind bunkers in the left side of the driving zone. While it’s true that links courses have blind pot bunkers, in my experience (which is links courses in England and Wales), they’re more often visible than blind. The opposite is the case at the Gales—most of the bunkers are blind. This is another issue that I think would have been helped by more shaping in the fairways. More shaping in the fairways would have allowed them to create visible mounds and depressions and the latter would have been natural places for bunkers. Even if the bunkers themselves weren’t visible, the mounds would clue you in that there might be something there. As is, it’s very hard to play the Gailes without some kind of how schematic because on many of the holes, there’s often no indication where the trouble is.

To be honest, the final few holes are pretty uninteresting. The sixteenth is a bland par 3 with a large green. The seventeenth is a bit better; the fairway is pinched by clusters of pot bunkers left and right at about 250 and the approach—to the right side of a double green with number two—opens up from the right.

The eighteenth is flat and wide open as long as you don’t hit a long drive up the left, where many bunkers await. Keeping with architect Kevin Aldridge’s fetish for building an enormous green on the eighteenth hole of every course he designs (a nod to the eighteenth green on the Old Course at Indianwood, which his family owns), this green is about the size of five or six normal greens put together. There’s some contour, but not enough for such a large green and this is a pretty dull way to finish an otherwise interesting, if flawed, golf course.

I was a bit disappointed by the Gailes fifteen years ago but came to think in the meantime that it was probably a better course than I thought. Playing it again, my first sense was correct and now it’s more clear to me why. It is a more authentic take on a links than anything from around that time, but there are several little problems and missed opportunities with the design. The amount of shaping between the holes relative to in the fairways is the biggest problem. And more shaping in the fairway would have helped with a second big problem, which is the blindness of such a high percentage of the fairway bunkers. A few of the holes are a bit too severe and running the ball onto the greens is difficult due mostly to the fairway grass, but also because there are too many bunkers in front (on thirteen, for example).

These complaints aside, the shaping of the greens is excellent, the course has pretty good flow, and there are several very good holes. The greens have great variation in both their size and interior contour. It’s certainly one of the better sets of green complexes on any public course in the state. The course’s flow is also good; some holes are very difficult, but there are stretches of easier holes to offset them. And there are several very good holes, especially in the middle of the course. I think that one of the architects currently in vogue (like Gil Hanse or Tom Doak) could have done a better job with the concept; for example, although it’s been awhile, I thought that Doak’s course at the Legends in Myrtle Beach, also from the early 90s, was a better faux links. But this is a very good course and it was novel for its time, so I think that we should still give it a lot of credit. And it should still be on lists of Michigan’s best public courses.

Probably the most prolific non-Michigan-based golf course architect in Michigan for the last four decades has been Arthur Hills. In the 90s and early 00s, he designed several of the highest profile new public courses (Bay Harbor, Shepherd’s Hollow, Boyne Highlands) plus many country-club-for-a-days of more local reputation. Although he hasn’t designed any of the recent big name courses (he might be retired?), his courses still occupy several places on best-of lists in Michigan.

I think that these late 90s/early 00s courses are an improvement over some of the earlier ones that he did (i.e. Pheasant Run in Canton or Fieldstone in Auburn Hills). His shaping has become more subdued with less mounding around the fairways and greens. And his bunker placement and green design have created more strategic interest than on his older courses (see especially the first few holes at Boyne Highlands). But I’ve never played an Arthur Hills course that didn’t have some major issue with its routing and/or a few bad holes. Bay Harbor, Shepherd’s Hollow, and Boyne Highlands are all good and each has some excellent holes, but each kicks a few own goals and because of that, none of them makes it into my highest ranks of Michigan public courses. They’re lining up in the bottom 5 of my top 20 public courses in the state but none of them quite cracks the top 15.

That is, until I played Red Hawk, just north of Tawas, for the first time recently. I’d heard from several people that it was an excellent course and it spent several years on Golf Digest’s top 25 courses in the state and its top 100 public courses in the country. Although it has fallen off recently, I was interested to get there to see if I thought that it was the best Hills course in the state and, more importantly, if it could avoid the self-inflicted wounds from which all of the others suffer.

And with the exception of one weak point in the routing—the long drive between seven and eight—I think it does. Except for the river valley that splits the front nine, the property is excellent, with good natural contour and some outstanding trees. There are several good holes (2, 4-6, 11) and no poor ones. While I think there are a few instances of shaping around the greens that the contour of the ground made completely unnecessary (around the eighth and twelfth greens), the shaping is never intrusive and generally well-done. The property is excellent and I think that another architect could have done better, but I think that Red Hawk is Hills’ best public course in the state and it cracks my top 15.

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The course gets off to a subdued, but still interesting start at the first. It’s a fairly long par 4 that gradually doglegs left around an oak tree. The angle of the green opens up from the outside of the dogleg and the approaching fairway is split into two tier—a higher (by maybe three feet) right tier that feeds onto the green and a lower left tier where the further you go, the narrower the angle onto the green and the more that you have to deal with the left green side bunker. It’s a tough but good first hole.

The second is a drivable par 4 and one of the best examples that I’ve seen in the state. The green is narrow and elevated over bunkers left and right and actually slopes front-to-back—which is a rarity on an Arthur Hills course. If you go for the green and miss wide, you have an almost-impossible up-and-down. But you still need to be careful with the lay-up. More than most drivable par 4s that I’ve seen, it’s important to leave yourself a good yardage here because the green isn’t receptive and you’ll need some check. And especially if the flag is in the front, the angle is important (left-center is best) because the green is very narrow. An excellent hole—the best short par 4 that I’ve played by Hills.

After the third, which is the obligatory northern Michigan drop shot par 3 that of course features in most of the course’s promotional material, we come to an excellent medium-length par 4. This one is a bit awkward as the hole bends gently to the left and the fairway slopes to the right. It’s wide enough not to be gimmicky, but you’ll want to play up the left because the front of the green from here is open while from the right, its partially obscured by rough.

Five is an excellent par 5, which I’ve come to realize are usually the strength of his design. He places a lot of emphasis on dramatic and interesting par 5s (7 at Bay Harbor, 13 at Boyne Highlands, most of them at Shepherd’s Hollow). To a fault because he sometimes eats up the best land with par 5s at the expense of a workable routing (the third nine at Shepherd’s Hollow is incredibly guilt of this). But this hole is over modest ground and is one of the best examples of bunker usage that I’ve seen on a Hills course—two staggered on the drive, a big one that forces a decision or a clever workaround on the lay-up, and just one in the front at the excellent green site. It’s not as flashy as the aforementioned par 5s, but it’s every bit as good.

Six is a medium length par 3 with one of the most interesting greens that I’ve seen on a Hills course—sort-of half-bowl-shaped with a low middle left and a few ridges coming in from the right. While my game was going terribly, the opening six holes are not only the best stretch that I’ve seen on a Hills course in Michigan, they’re one of the better stretches on any public course in Michigan.

My enthusiasm starts to become tempered at seven, however. This is a very long par 5 and while very nice for about the first 450 yards, the choice of green site on the side of a steep hill is poor. While the shaping of the green is fine given the site that they chose, there were much better choice short and right. This also would have made the routing a little less awkward as you wouldn’t have had to drive all the way around the fourth hole to get to the eighth.

After probably a 400 yard drive around the fourth green and over the river valley, which could have been the site of a nice uphill par 3 to complement the drop shot 3rd, we come to the long, dogleg left par 4 eighth. This is a very nice hole, with a wide fairway where there’s a premium on being up the left side to open up the angle of the green. The only complaint that I have is about the small mounds around the green, which are completely pointless. They could have moved the green a few yards back and right and done no shaping at all.

Nine, a medium-short par 4 is probably my least favorite hole. Unless you hit it right in the middle of the fairway, you have to go over or kick a field goal between two large oak trees. Ten is a long par four along a right-to-left slope with a pond on the left for the last 70 yards. There’s plenty of room to run the ball onto the green from the right and the fairway contours help with this.

Eleven is another excellent par 5, doglegging first left than right. Again, there’s plenty of fairway to the right, but this makes the approach much longer. Like at the first, the fairway splits into two tiers on the approach, with a lower right side that leaves a semi-blind approach to the green and a high-left that leaves an open one. You can run a ball up to the green on the left side if you’ve hit a long drive but there’s still a strong premium on laying-up to the left.

The next two holes, a par 3 over a marsh and a medium length par 4 over flat ground are modest, although the shaping around the latter’s green is simple and well-done. The fourteenth is a very difficult medium-long par 3 with a green similar to the second—narrow and sloping front-to-back. A miss wide here leaves a very difficult recovery shot. Best to play to the back of the green, which is its widest area.

Fifteen is a very nice medium-length par 4 where carrying the fairway bunker on the right leaves you the best view of the green. An approach from the left side is deceptive because there is a rise 50 yards short of the green that makes it seem closer than it is—and there’s a hidden bunker on the far side of the mound.

My other least favorite hole is the par 5 sixteenth—so it’s not surprising that it’s the other hole that features in the course’s promotional material! The drive slopes right with bunkers on the left and unless you’ve hit a decent one, it’ll be hard to carry the marsh that crosses the fairway ~180-150 out from the green. The green is carved into a big hill and while it’s an attractive setting (the white pines here are among the best I’ve seen), I prefer something more modest. It's not really a bad hole, but it's tough and a bit awkward.

The par 3 seventeenth is a good short iron shot to a small green. The eighteenth is a very tough long par 4. Swing away because unless you hit it 300 yards, you’ll stay short of the fairway bunker on the left. The approach is a good one. It looks like the green is completely fronted by bunkers but except for the one on the right, they’re at least 50 yards short and you can run the ball in from the left side of the fairway.

I think that hole-by-hole, Red Hawk is pretty clearly the best Arthur Hills public course that I’ve played in the state. It’s a strategic golf course with several excellent holes and no really bad ones. The bunker placement is good and the shaping of the bunkers and greens is mostly well-done. For my liking, it’s also only of the most beautiful pieces of land for a course in the state with nice contour and beautiful trees—that appropriately function mostly as a backdrop.

But it still has the Arthur Hills problem of not quite bringing everything together. In this case, it’s the awkward routing of the front nine. I’m almost certain that the long cart ride between the seventh and eighth could have been avoided. If they had reversed the routing of 4-7, the seventh green could have been next to the edge of the valley and the eighth could have been a par 3 back across—which we can be pretty sure would work because they already did it at the third. The probably would have had to eliminate the par 3 sixth and maybe lost one of the par 5s, but that would have been worth it. And because the rest of the course has fairly short green to tee walks, it would have made the course completely walkable.

Of course no one goes on vacation to northern Michigan to walk a golf course so the routing decision was poor strictly from an architectural standpoint rather than a practical one. Still, it’s probably enough to keep Red Hawk just outside of my top 10 public courses in the state.