![]() ![]() It became one of his great early designs. The Red has consistently comes out on top in this survey, but the Blue and Black are within just about a point.Īsked if a course could be built in a Birmingham forest, Jack Nicklaus scouted the site from lumber haul roads and said of the mountainous terrain, “Well, there are a lot of par 3s out there, that’s for sure.” But then he discovered a gentle valley in which to put par 4s and 5s, so he took the job. The turf is firm and bouncy, and while the routing is sprawling, it’s easily walkable. Some greens are perched like those at Pinehurst, others are massive with multi-levels like those at St. The course has a wonderful mix of bump-and-run links holes and target-like water holes. But there was only room for 31 holes, so Coore and Crenshaw had to take a section of less desirable, stripped-down land and create five holes that looked like the rest of the site, Red's holes one through five. The Red, like the Blue, was built from sand spoils created by a massive phosphate strip mine, with some piles forming dunes reaching 75 feet into the air. What's irreplacable are the views of Puget Sound from nearly every hole, multi-level fairways that entice bold driving to gain second-shot advantages and two holes running parallel to a railway that's invokes feelings of early Scottish and Irish links courses.Ĭoore and Crenshaw’s Red Course is part of a resort triple-header that gives golfers a rare opportunity to compare and contrast the differences in styles and philosophies of arguably the three of top design firms in America, including Streamsong Blue, a Tom Doak design, and Streamsong Black, from Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner. That’s now been remedied, as the fescue turf on the putting surfaces has been replaced with pure Poa Annua. Open, the firmness and surrounds were more manageable, but the greens were notoriously bumpy. In the Amateur, Chambers Bay proved to be hard, both in the firmness of its dry fescue turf (Jones called his fairways, “hardwood floors”) and its difficulties around and on the windswept greens. By the time Golf Digest named it as America’s Best New Public Course of 2008, the course had already been awarded the 2010 U.S. agreed to a radically different, vertical-links style when building Chambers Bay in an abandoned sand quarry near Tacoma. Prodded by his partner, Bruce Charlton, and their then-design associate Jay Blasi, veteran architect Robert Trent Jones Jr. In 2019, the course hosted the USGA Mid-Amateur. The massive par-5 fiirst is one of the most exciting first holes in a time zone known for exciting opening holes, and it's followed by a short cross-ravine par 3 benched into a hillside like its inspiration, the second at No. ![]() is a second-shot course where seemingly generous landing areas can result in awkward hanging lies for approach shots to greens that run left or right or even away from the direction of play. They positioned greens on buttes and the far sides of barrancas. They ran fairways across sagebrush hills that are dotted with pines. These designers made this stretch of Front Range southeast of Denver extraordinary. Yet it sets the tone for what may well be Coore and Crenshaw’s finest example of how to massage a great golf course from topography that many would have considered ordinary. The par-4 10th at Colorado Golf Club, playing downhill off the tee to a green hanging on a slope, with the Colorado Rockies in the far distance, has not a single bunker. ![]()
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