Wynn Las Vegas — Saved from the Chopping Block
Tom Fazio says it’s shocking that a golf course even exists on the Las Vegas Strip, and he’s the one who built the unlikely oasis in the Wynn Las Vegas’s backyard. Built and rebuilt it, actually. After getting a chance to play the second-coming of the reinvented Wynn Golf Club, it’s tough to disagree. You’d […]
Bandon Dunes Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary
Twenty-one years ago, Bob “Shoe” Gaspar delivered a load of mulch to a construction site just south of North Bend on Oregon’s southern coast. Unsure of what was being built, he walked over a dune and saw a half-finished golf course. There was no clubhouse, the back nine was dirt, the front nine was being […]
Grandfather Golf & Country Club
“There’s something going on here at Grandfather that is truly special.” That’s a simple statement coming from a friend of mine at our annual meetings for a nonprofit foundation at Grandfather Golf & Country Club, and one that seems to be echoed around every corner of the mountainside club in Linville, N.C. A Scottish man […]
DLIII Redesigns Plantation Course at Sea Island
For the last 25 years—and largely under the radar—Davis Love III has been designing courses. With brother Mark, the Loves have done quite a bit of renovation work as well as creating some wonderful original layouts, among them Atlantic Dunes on Hilton Head Island, The Dunes Course at Diamante in Cabo San Lucas, and the […]
Great Courses of GB&I: Notts Golf Club
London is rightly lauded for the wealth of marvelous heathland courses— Sunningdale, St. George’s Hill, Swinley Forest, et al.—that lie a short distance to its south and west. But southern England doesn’t have a monopoly on the country’s outstanding “sand, heather, and gorse”-type layouts. Ganton and Woodhall Spa are two of Europe’s finest inland courses. […]
Classic Courses: California Golf Club of San Francisco
Coming up the entryway into California Golf Club of San Francisco—or, as it’s more commonly called, Cal Club—is a drive back in time. The road winds past the first fairway and up to a grand white clubhouse. There’s a main entrance, but the members know better and walk around to the side and through a […]
Modern Classics: Wade Hampton
On the ever-growing list of courses Tom Fazio has designed, there are only a select few that he calls home. Serving as the summer getaway from his primary residence in South Florida, Wade Hampton Golf Club is one of them. One of the game’s most exclusive enclaves, the club is nestled in the tiny mountain […]
A First Look at Hoiana Shores Golf Club
The newest course in the world’s fastest-growing golf market is open for limited preview play, and those lucky enough to get an early look at Vietnam’s Hoiana Shores Golf Club are in for a unique treat. For starters, the Robert Trent Jones Jr. design doesn’t have any flapping flags to help golfers deal with the […]
Dumbarnie Links
On a trip to Scotland last fall I had the opportunity to play a sneak-preview round at Dumbarnie Links. Clive Clark, a member of the 1973 Great Britain and Ireland Ryder Cup team, has taken a relatively undistinguished landscape and created 18 fun, testing, and memorable holes. About nine miles south of St. Andrews on […]
A Tour of Payne’s Valley
By Erik Matuszewski As our dusty camouflage utility vehicle squeezed past several excavators on one side of the gravel path behind Big Cedar Lodge’s Mountain Top clubhouse, a group of workers armed with compressed-air devices called air spades was on the other, painstakingly clearing dirt and rock from a wall of limestone outcroppings. Minutes […]