Serendipity! Our friends at Golf Vacation Insider published a short review of Tobacco Road today while I was playing Caledonia Golf & Fish Club in Pawleys Island, SC. The two layouts were designed by the late Mike Strantz who completed just nine courses before succumbing to cancer at the age of 50 a couple of years ago.
That these two layouts could be the product of one person's imagination says something about creative possibilities in the human mind. Tobacco Road, about 40 minutes from Pinehurst in the Sandhills of North Carolina, is a roller coaster ride of a golf course, definitely not for the faint of heart, or the uninitiated, as it throws one blind shot after another at you. No course begs for an investment in a yardage book like Tobacco Road does, with its severe mounding, highly elevated greens, and landscape out of Star Trek. Playing it two or three times in succession will shave a few strokes for sure. First timers with a 10 handicap would do well to break 90 on a track whose slope ratings - 150 and 142 for the better players - defy its modest yardages, 6,500 and 6,300 yards respectively. Bring a forecaddie and an extra dozen golf balls when you play Tobacco Road. You can afford them; golf fees are modest in the extreme, never tipping the $100 mark and, during summer, a downright bargain at $59 on weekdays.
Caledonia, on the other hand, is beautiful, sleek, and not at all rough around the edges. It shares only one thing with Tobacco Road, beside its designer pedigree -- no houses encroach on the design (although we heard the sound of pounding nails on one new home behind the 17th hole). Caledonia is also expensive, approaching the $200 mark for greens fees in the high seasons of fall and spring. It is worth every penny, and I will have more to say in this space, with a few photos, later tomorrow.
The marsh on Low Country golf courses looks peaceful enough, but danger lurks.
The Charleston National golf course, just east of its namesake city in South Carolina, is a solid Rees Jones layout whose hazards are mostly visible from tee to green. They include a large number of fairway and greenside traps, some of them positioned to snare your wayward shot and make you pay, but others almost a saving grace. That is because they often separate your errant ball from the worse fate of the adjacent marshland. Charleston National has plenty of marshland, and once your ball enters the muck and mire of that terrain, it is lost forever.
Should you enter the muck and mire yourself, you might be lost forever as well. Although the Low Country marsh is home to many docile and exotic birds, such as the majestic Great Blue Heron and elegant snowy egret, it also hosts more territorial animals who don't appreciate home invasions, alligators and poisonous snakes chief among them. When playing golf in the Low Country, it is wise to heed all warning signs. Gators especially do not usually venture near fairways and greens, but snakes can be slightly more adventurous. Playing golf at a place like Charleston National gives added meaning to the term "keep your head down."
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