![]() ![]() Those courses include Pacific Dunes (2001) and Bandon Dunes (1999) as well as Whistling Straits (1998), near Kohler, Wis., another walking-only course, which runs along two blustery miles of Lake Michigan shoreline and will be the site of the PGA Championship in 2004. The top four courses on Golfweek magazine's annual list of best modern courses (opened after 1960) are all natural-style, and all were built within the last eight years. Or, as the current trend seems to indicate, survival of the most wild, scenic and natural. It's going to be survival of the fittest.'' ''That's not going to happen again, even if the economy comes around. ![]() ''We were opening a golf course a day,'' he said. Developers ''saturated the market'' with too many new courses in the 1990's, Mr. While 398 new courses opened in 2000 - a 15-year peak - just 220 sprouted in 2002, according to the National Golf Foundation. The number of rounds of golf played annually has fallen every year since 1999, dropping 3 percent in 2002. ![]() ''It's unlikely you're going to have a golf course that looks like it sits on the Oregon sea coast running through a residential development,'' he said. The boom in residential golf communities in the 1990's also played a part, Mr. Klein said, ''but it also created a very unnatural, very contrived look.'' ''That produced a lot of courses on land you couldn't otherwise have used,'' Mr. But as technology and budgets increased, course architecture turned to moving major mounds of earth and building moats, lakes and hills. Architects had to work with the land's natural features out of necessity. Most courses were created using existing grades and hand tools. Until the 1960's, ''golf course architecture was embedded in nature,'' said Brad Klein, architecture editor for Golfweek magazine. Just eight of the top 50 courses on Golf Digest's 2003 list of ''America's 100 Greatest Golf Courses'' were built after 1936. Many of the new courses represent a return to ''links'' golf as it originated in Scotland, golf played on an open, windswept and sandy course, with an emphasis on a strong ground game.įor many years, the highest-ranked courses in the United States have also been the oldest. Love, who has worked on more than 100 courses over the last 20 years. It is also environmental concerns about course development and maintenance, along with a desire to get back to a more traditional style of golf - ''good, solid, honest shot-making,'' said Mr. It is not appearance alone that is driving the trend. ''We're certainly leaving more untouched areas,'' he said. Jay Morrish, president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, agreed. That can include using native grasses that may sometimes be dormant and brown, outlawing the use of carts and avoiding asphalt in favor of weathered wood for paths. ''There's a definite movement back toward courses that appear to fit seamlessly into the landscape,'' said Bill Love, the golf course architect who designed Hunting Hawk. In a departure from the carefully manicured courses that blanket most resort communities, the best new courses are etched into canyons (Rustic Canyon in Moorpark, Calif.), rolled into sand dunes (Pacific Dunes and Bandon Dunes) or slipped into woods and wetlands (Hunting Hawk Golf Club in Glen Allen, Va.). ''My definition of a great golf course is one that a nongolfer will have as much fun walking as a golfer,'' said Mike Keiser, 58, the self-described ''thoroughly mediocre golfer'' who owns Pacific Dunes and its sister course, Bandon Dunes. Even bad golf is enhanced at Pacific Dunes, a walking-only course that seems to sprout from the sand, gorse, beach grass and shore pines that characterize this stretch of coast in remote southern Oregon. While Mark Twain famously called golf ''a good walk spoiled,'' a new breed of golf course is turning that maxim on its head. Dozens of different shades of green and gold blanket the hills, from the bright yellow Scotch broom to the deep green pines to the golden brown grass along the fairways.įairways? Yes this particular three-mile stretch of wilderness along the Oregon coast is also a world-class golf course, Pacific Dunes. But there's a wild beauty to all the drama, with thick clouds scudding above the waves and the beach grasses and blooming thickets of gorse swirling in the wind. The wind can blow so hard here that the rain comes in great horizontal gusts across the dunes. ON a grassy bluff 100 feet above the Pacific Ocean, you can see for at least 14 miles in each direction, from the windswept dunes and rolling hills along the shore, straight out across the sea toward Japan. ![]()
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