NORTH CAROLINA
Tobacco Road a Carolina gem among golf courses
A golfer stumbles upon the superlative golf course. One swing, and he's in love.
If not golf? Zorbing, disc golf, unicycling, parkour, buzkashi
Tobacco Road Golf Club, North Carolina
Durham, N.C.
Amid superlative Carolina courses, a golfer stumbles upon Tobacco Road. One swing, and he's in love.
You don't always find genius where you expect it.
The highway to Tobacco Road Golf Club, the masterpiece of maverick golf course architect Mike Strantz, passes used RV lots, the Lady Luck Tattoo parlor and the standard American jumble of fast-food restaurants and gas stations. This dazzling course occupies an abandoned quarry between scraggly cotton fields and an asphalt-manufacturing plant.
When I moved to the Carolinas from California more than a decade ago, I had never heard of Strantz. I hadn't played golf in years. But, as I soon discovered, the Carolinas are one of the world's great golf meccas. This is the land of the sausage biscuit, bass fishing, NASCAR, a church on every block and --
So I took up the game again, and I began making occasional expeditions to new courses recommended on the Internet or, the old-fashioned way, by friends. One trip took me to Pinehurst, the fabled resort in North Carolina's piney sand hills with eight top tracks. It was a treat to play the storied No. 2 course in the footsteps of
Then, in a quasi-mystical tone, someone mentioned Tobacco Road.
"Forget Pinehurst," he said. Tobacco Road is the "course you have to play."
I drove there a few weekends later and was instantly mesmerized by the way the course zigzagged through the broken red-clay bluffs. Many courses have one especially dramatic signature hole, but at Tobacco Road, it seemed that every hole was spectacular, with blind carries, improbable angles and unexpected hazards.
Golfers will always have a favorite course. I've played at St. Andrews in Scotland, the home of golf, and at such modern American classics as Whistling Straits on Lake Michigan and Pacific Dunes in Oregon, and I put Tobacco Road near the top of my list, and not just because it's only an hour from my new hometown of Durham.
Discovering Tobacco Row felt like having stumbled across the proverbial lost Whistler or Sargent in the attic.
PITY NOT NECESSARY
My California friends pitied me when I left for the Carolinas, as if I'd been banished to Siberia. They warned me that it was a region of in-bred country hicks, Klansmen and wacky, hair-sprayed televangelists, but the reality proved different. Although grits remain on the menu, I also found new arrivals from Latin America and Asia, a strong African American professional class, high-tech industrial parks, top universities and a thriving arts-and-music scene.
I also fell for the charms of the cypress swamps in Congaree National Park and the beach at Ocracoke Island, the mythical lair of the pirate
Then there were the golf courses.
I credit Strantz for understanding the dynamic character of the region and not trying to turn it into something else. He was an Ohio native who studied art in college while majoring in turf-grass management. He learned to operate heavy machinery and, even after making his name, loved getting dirty with his work crews.
His method was always the same. After days walking the land, Strantz would make a detailed sketch for each hole. These were the cartoons, as the Italian Renaissance masters termed their miniature plans, for the fresco that the course would soon become.
In his late 30s when he first made his mark, Strantz was fast becoming a legend among golf cognoscenti when he died two years ago at age 50. In contrast to the button-down corporate mold of other top golf designers, Strantz had a rock star's shaggy mane and preferred cowboy boots. He took just one project at a time. Five of his nine courses are in the Carolinas; four are open to the public. Serious golfers from as far away as New Zealand, Sweden and South Korea have come to play these Strantz creations.
A student of the so-called golden age of early 20th century course architecture, Strantz admired Alister MacKenzie, the creator of Augusta National and Cypress Point. This Englishman believed that every good hole should look harder than it is. A golf course may be a faux battlefield with a cold one as close as your cart's mini-cooler, but the player still wants a sense of accomplishment, the pride of conquest -- or at least survival.
Strantz understood this. He makes you feel as if you've entered the breach yet allows you the possibility of coming back to the clubhouse with a decent score to your credit.
Strantz's most obvious skill was his mastery of illusion. Take the first hole at Tobacco Road. Your ball must carry between two big, jagged hills to a patch of fairway that looks a mile away. Golfers always secretly fear the public humiliation of shanking, topping or even whiffing the ball on the first tee. Most architects start with a vanilla opening hole just to steady the nerves. To instead demand so intimidating a tee shot as at Tobacco Road seems a mean joke.
But here's the trick: It's really not so hard. Just get your ball by those mounds, and the fairway opens into a generously accommodating bowl-shaped expanse. It's that way all around Tobacco Road. Once beyond scary appearances, the course is short, just 6,554 yards from the back tees, and not impossibly tough. You can go low if you keep your wits about you.
"The average golfer can't handle a Pinehurst No. 2 or an Oakland Hills. They're so long, and the greens are too severe," says Joe Gay, head pro at Tobacco Road and a former college all-American. "Everyone has a chance here."
SPRAWLING COUNTRY
"I let the character of the property dictate the design," Strantz once said, and the more you get out on his Carolina courses, the better you come to understand the character of this country.
Playing Tobacco Road over time, I slowly gained a feel for the sprawling hill country between the Atlantic coast and the Appalachians, the piedmont, as geologists label it. This heartland of the Carolinas juxtaposes the old-time cotton and tobacco farming (hence the course's name) with muddy reservoirs, Ft. Bragg and the gleaming ultramodern downtown of Charlotte.
Another Strantz gem I've played is Tot Hill Farm, which offers a more Appalachian flavor. This course lies an hour west of Tobacco Road and is closer to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Here, Strantz worked with a palette of deep green forest, gray stone cliffs and glinting brooks, reminiscent of scenes described in the Civil War novel "Cold Mountain."
He drew attention to the woods -- with their black snakes and deer -- by setting many of the greens back against the forest, and rather than dynamiting away the fractured stone outcroppings, he used them as his leitmotif at Tot Hill Farm. Rock extrudes everywhere, sometimes even on tee boxes or close upon the greens.
On first playing Tot Hill Farm, I was a little surprised to discover that the first hole nose-dives down a mountain. Strantz loved making grand opening statements and had his work crew scoop away many tons of dirt, so that a gentle slope became a dramatic plunge. It's pure amplification, the oxymoron of people moving earth to bring out nature's essence, allowing golfers to open their rounds with a madcap moon shot off the summit in the bargain.
Similarly, it took me time to understand the meaning behind the stone fences at Tot Hill. They crisscross several holes on the back nine and would not have been there if Strantz hadn't had them built.
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