This is the final part of our year-end roundup of the best golf courses and golf communities we visited in 2012.  If you see any golf course or golf community that piques your interest, please contact us for more information.  Links to our original reviews of these golf courses are highlighted.

        Golf got old for me in September, literally.  It started at the circa 1929 Torrington Country Club, which is actually in Goshen, CT, not Torrington, at the beginning of the Labor Day Weekend.  Torrington was designed by one of those architects, Orrin Smith, who is largely forgotten by history but respected during his time.  I had wanted to play Torrington for 20 years and had high expectations that were met by the sometimes classic, sometimes quirky, but always challenging layout.  I won’t soon forget one almost drivable par 4; the back edge of its green disappeared into golfing oblivion and made even a 30-yard pitch shot a knee knocker.  A week later, I hosted a couple of contributors to this web site at Yale Golf Club, which opened in 1926 and crams just about every classic element of early golf into one sprawling layout.  Doglegs, blind approach shots, false fronts, double-tiered greens…Yale has it all.  There is no more truly intimidating golf hole than #9 at Yale, a par 3 total carry over water and a steep face to a green that is about 65 yards(!) front to back with a four-foot deep chasm across its middle.  If the pin is at front and your tee shot lands toward the back –- or vice versa -– be grateful for a bogey.

The pin at Yale on the day I played was up front -- and my tee shot came to rest beyond the four-foot deep crevace that runs across the green.  It took me three putts to find the hole, including one from the valley.  One of the toughest par 3s you will ever be lucky enough to play.

        Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in 1927, and Donald Ross hit a big one that same year when he built Oyster Harbors Golf Club on Cape Cod.  The annual golf outing that I attend there every September never gets old. Mother Nature contributes just enough in the way of terrain changes to make the great architect’s tricky green complexes and maddening putting surfaces seem as natural as a Venus flytrap.

        I am a bit sheepish about announcing that I played Winged Foot in October since there is no record of that adventure; I decided not to burden my playing partners or play the tacky tourist by carrying a camera.  We played the championship course and, suffice to say, the layout, the changing tree colors, the white caddy outfits against the bright green fairways –- it is hard to overstate the experience of such a course, and hard to overstate how proud I was to break 90.  I played another tournament golf course a week later, the Thornblade Club in Greer, SC, just outside Greenville and host to the final round of the annual BMW Championship on the Nationwide Tour.  Not only is Thornblade a fine example of an early Tom Fazio course, but it is also the breeding ground for such PGA Tour luminaries as Lucas Glover and Bill Haas (the Haas homestead almost hangs over the 5th green).  A couple of days later, I revisited Musgrove Mill in rural Clinton, SC, with the SC Golf Rating Panel, a farewell of sorts, we thought at the time, since the McConnell Golf Group had announced it was closing the challenging course for lack of members and play.  Thankfully, as the year comes to a close, there is word that some dedicated Musgrove members have found a way (and the funds) to forestall the hangman’s noose.

Greer, SC's Thornblade Club, a Nationwide Tournament venue, may be the most stable private golf club we visited this year, with an involved membership that spans all ages and such golf luminary members as the Haas Family and Lucas Glover.

        The next day, the Panel moved on to one of my favorite golf communities, The Reserve at Lake Keowee, whose sleek and pleasurable Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course is but one of the amenities that lure families from Atlanta and the Greenville area.  With one of the cleanest lakes in America at its doorstep, a huge community-gathering lawn that sweeps up from the lake to the large and rustic clubhouse (with an excellent Austrian chef at the helm of the restaurant) and the most inclusive club membership available (all direct members of a family have member privileges without fees or dues), there doesn’t seem much reason to leave the enclave. (Good thing since Greenville is an hour away and, frankly, Clemson, 25 minutes away on a winding road, is only mildly attracting.)

        I rested up in November for a big ending in December, which began with our first Home On The Course couples event at The Landings, just outside Savannah.  Four couples representing Ft. Wayne, IN, Goshen, NY, Atlanta and Boston joined us for a long weekend that was both active and relaxing.  Much of the activity was centered on two of The Landings’ golf courses, Oak Ridge and Palmetto, both in fine condition but offering two different playing challenges (the Arthur Hills Palmetto course the tougher of the two, with a few forced carries over marsh).  The Landings chefs also strutted their stuff with a special three-course lunch after golf and two sumptuous dinners.  Although it was optional, three of the couples opted for multiple visits to homes currently for sale at The Landings.  (Note: We hope to repeat the Discovery Weekend in 2012 at two or three golf communities. If any readers have suggestions about where to hold it, please contact us.)

Couples from Ft. Wayne, IN, Atlanta, Goshen, NY, and Boston participated in our first Discovery Weekend, held at The Landings near Savannah.  They played the Oak Ridge and Palmetto courses (Palmetto shown here), two of the community's six nicely conditioned and sporting layouts.

        I could hardly have asked for two better golf courses to end my year than Camden Country Club and Columbia Country Club.  Columbia, which is actually in Blythewood, SC, is a 27-hole complex by Ellis Maples, whose fairways are open and fair but whose charms are hidden in the large and subtly undulated greens, which were also in stunningly good condition for so late in the year.  Although the course is surrounded by a mature community, I do not recall a single home or out-of-bounds stake intruding on the round.  The only thing that intruded on our round at Camden was a freight train that barreled down the tracks that separate the 11^th green from the 12^th tee, tracks that once brought revelers to the luxury hotel that sat alongside the par 3 12^th.  Those days sadly ended during World War II but fortunately the Camden golf course is substantially as Walter Travis and Donald Ross intended it –- short and mean in ways that leave you smiling in frustration.  (Ross was hired in 1939 to remake the circa 1922 greens and to enhance other aspects of the layout.)  As befits a true Ross course, I might have had one or two putts all day that did not break at least a cup’s width –- maybe.  I cannot think of a better way to ring in the new year without saying goodbye to the old style of golf.

Donald Ross fairways may be wide, generally speaking, but a pushed tee shot at the par 4 7th at Camden Country Club creates a triple threat for the approach to the green; the fairway bunker, a tree at the fairway's right edge, and a greenside bunker that takes away the "safe" play to the front.

        As 2011 ends, there are signs that the housing market may be improving incrementally.  This may give some baby boomers the confidence to sell their primary homes and move to a warmer climate where they can indulge their urge to play golf year round and enjoy the benefits of a lower cost of living environment.  Still, some high-end and high-profile golf communities like Reynolds Plantation and the Cliffs Communities and their property owners and club members face an uncertain year.  Developers of both former high flying communities face financial uncertaintly, and even the recharged Tiger Woods may not complete his golf course deisgn for The Cliffs when the Cliffs' vaunted amenities and seven golf clubs are sold by financially strapped developer Jim Anthony, which seems more and more likely.  We will address the year ahead for golf communities in our January issue of Home On The Course, our free monthly newsletter.  You can subscribe at the top of this page.

         Thank you for your support and continued readership.  Happy New Year to all.

Ellis Maples made his large greens at Columbia Country Club tough to access.  Here's wishing all our readers a 2012 free of traps.

This is the second of a three-part wrap up of golf courses and communities visited in 2011.  Links to original reviews are provided.  If you would like to visit any of the golf communities mentioned, please contact the editor and we will be happy to arrange it.

        In June, I played golf near my home in Connecticut.  One highlight was a charity event played at Shuttle Meadow, a Willie Park Jr layout first opened in 1916, another of the courses from a bygone era whose distance (6,250 yards from the tips) belies the angles into greens that one must set up in order to score well.  Park, who designed courses worldwide, may be best known for the Gullane and Gailles golf courses in Scotland and Olympia Fields outside Chicago.

        A family vacation in Rehoboth beach in July put us within short driving distance of interesting but dissimilar public layouts inside golf communities.  In his review of the Jack Nicklaus designed Bayside Resort near Ocean City, MD, Tim Gavrich wrote that the golf course “is certainly not a place where a beginner will enjoy learning the game.”  At 7,500 yards from the tips, and with Nicklaus’ typical hard spots, Bayside is anything but a typical resort course. Baywood Greens wasn’t a walk in the park either, but it looked like a park –- one with a profusion of flowers. Indeed, the Bill Love design seems almost secondary to the 200,000 plants and flowers a zealous owner commanded.  Even on the gimmicky par 14^th, with two separate water-edged fairways, the flowers that engulf the cart bridge are almost enough to make you forget about the contrived layout.  Owners of the $200s+ homes adjoining the course can’t escape the floral views, and why would they want to?

Occasionally, the vistas at Jack Nicklaus' Bayside Resort layout in Maryland are interrupted by condos.

        August began with a meet up with my friend Bob for a round at Pinecrest Golf Club in Lumberton, NC, a golf course whose one nine dates to the early 20^th Century and whose greens were attributed to Donald Ross circa 1940 but whose history and layout imply it’s not pure Ross.  Dick Wilson was hired a couple of decades after Ross’ work and asked to harmonize the two nines, giving the course a somewhat patchwork feel.  A few holes were interesting but, for the most part, the layout was straightforward and the putting greens in the heat of the summer were too slow to appreciate. (Mr. Ross would not be happy.)  That night we stayed on site at the Country Club of South Carolina, in Florence and then played the course the following day.   On perhaps the hottest day of the summer, with the thermometer over 100, we had the course to ourselves.  In heat like that, every distant green seemed like an oasis, and the libation in the club’s modest bar and grill was like nectar of the gods.  The course wasn’t bad either, but the highlight of the stay was a huge three-bedroom condo we stayed in; one just like it down the block was listed for $225,000, which seemed like an extreme bargain (especially if the air conditioning worked).

Despite temperatures over 100 degrees, my playing partner and I could still appreciate the go and no-go options of a 316 yard par 4 at Country Club of South Carolina in Florence.  No-go will almost certainly yield a conservative par; go will yield something else.

        A few days later I made a revisit to Haig Point for a South Carolina Golf Rating Panel outing on 18 of Rees Jones’ 29 holes on Daufuskie Island, SC.  (No typo there: The club members commissioned two extra holes to take advantage of some scenic and challenging routings over marsh.)  I had played Haig years earlier, before an impressive renovation that now makes the course play more like a famous layout across the Calibogue Sound, Harbour Town.  You won’t find many more courses that put sprawling live oak trees to better advantage as backdrop and, occasionally, living hazards.  Invest the time to take the ferry over to Daufuskie, the only way you can get there short of a helicopter, and check out the environmentally pure and socially engaged community there.  (I would be happy to make arrangements for you to visit the private community and golf course.)

The marsh comes into play often at Rees Jones' Haig Point.

        The South Carolina Golf Rating Panel, which holds a handful of outings for its members each year, moved back to the mainland and Callawassie Country Club the following day.  Callawassie, though an island, does not require a ferry to reach it.  The golf community is near Okatie, about midway between Hilton Head and Beaufort, and it too had undergone a renovation of its Tom Fazio 27-hole layout.  The golf course may not have the drama of Haig Point, but its marshy spots provide plenty of challenges and visual delights.  And its community is tight knit and its residents involved with the life of the golf club.

This is the first of three parts to run over the next few days.  Links to original reviews of golf courses and golf communities visited are provided.

        Like the economy, my travel schedule slowed down and then picked up a little this past year.  I played a choice few outstanding golf courses, all east of the Mississippi, and started and ended the year with just about the same handicap index rating (9.2, for those who care, or want to give me a few strokes).  In other words, I have nothing to complain about.  Here’s hoping we all encounter a better economy and more rounds of golf in the coming year.

        My year started in the early days of January at the heralded and private Bull’s Bay Golf Club in Awendaw, SC, just off highway 17 and a few miles north of Charleston.  Bull’s Bay is one of those clubs that has mostly skated by the recession because its deep-pocketed owner considers it more important to collect friends and fellow golfers than to obsess about

Awendaw, SC's Bulls Bay Golf Club winds its way through coastal marshland, aided and abetted by the late architect Mike Strantz, who addes sweeping waste areas, huge fairways and well-protected greens into the mix.  It is one of the most playable (i.e. fun and challenging) courses on the east coast.

        Weather dogged me the rest of January as I made my way upstate in South Carolina, where a few patches of snow that lingered after a freak storm kept me from playing the golf courses at Savannah Lakes in McCormick and Timberlake on Lake Murray, 30 minutes from the state capital of Columbia.  My trip up north from the Myrtle Beach area, however, was not for naught as I made a slight detour to stop Holly Hill, SC, and Sweatman’s, a plain but legendary barbecue palace that is only open Fridays and Saturdays.  This is one legend that lives up to its billing, the pork unadulterated by anything but smoke, slow cooking and natural moisture.  I have eaten barbecue all over the south, and I have not had it any better than at Sweatmans.

        I did get in nine later that January week at the recently renovated Orangeburg Country Club in the South Carolina town of the same name; state golfers put Orangeburg near the top of their lists, its flat and classic Ellis Maples layout a great walk and a lot trickier than it looks.  At just $119 per month in dues for those who live 30 miles or greater from the club, it is worth the trek a few days each month.

        The Golf Industry Show in Orlando in February was an eye opener for me, my first trade show.  I listened to a lot of complaints by golf club owners about how certain online tee-time consolidators were ruining their businesses by driving prices down.  Having visited scores of public golf courses in the last few years and noted that their own first instincts in the recession were to cut their green fee prices, the wounds seemed self-inflicted.  The rest of the show was rather light on excitement and vendors.

National Golf Club's Jack Nicklaus greens are currently undergoing renovation, the result of which will be to soften the severe sloping but to pull the surrounding bunkers closer to the putting surface.  The Southern Pines golf community should have its golf course back by March.

        One of our dedicated readers invited me to visit The National Golf Club in Southern Pines, and I was eager to take him up on it since, like Myrtle Beach, which I know very well, Pinehurst is synonymous with both buddy golf vacations and golf retirement homes.  I’m glad I went; the National Club golf course, by Jack Nicklaus, displayed some of the largest, most multi-level greens I have played, and the spanking new cottage I stayed in was a study in well-furnished comfort.  As the year ended, National began a renovation to restore the 20-year old greens to their original glory and to soften some of the slopes.  We look forward to the results next spring.  For those looking to embed themselves in the classiest golfing mecca east of the Mississippi, the National community will fill the bill.

        My month of March ended with a round of golf at one of the premiere courses in the southeast, the Secession Golf Club near Beaufort.  A Connecticut friend, Larry –- love that name -– is a national member at Secession and invited me to join him and a few of his buddies for a round.  Former PGA star Bruce Devlin designed the course for walkers only, and Secession boasts one of the rare caddy programs in the Carolinas.  The golf course is pure delight, not a clunker hole among the 18 and a few that are memorable (including a par 3 with a waste area just below the four-foot high bulk head that keeps the green from falling into the marsh; I stubbornly tried to play a lob wedge out of the waste, and wasted a shot).

The green at the 2nd hole at Philadelphia Cricket Club is surrounded by bunkers and a clubhouse, which comes into play.

        I was mostly a golf spectator in April, following my son around two entirely different golf courses during the final leg of his college golf career.  The Philadelphia Cricket Club was a stark reminder of the way golf used to be played, on courses not brutally long but certainly brutal at times. At the par 4 2^nd hole, for example, the stream that bisects the fairway at midpoint is the least of the challenges.  The pin on the day of the college tournament was a mere 30 feet from the edge of the clubhouse; I cannot say that, in 50 years of golf, the clubhouse has ever come into play.  Later in April, my son’s career-ending tournament was held at Bay Creek Golf Resort on the Delmarva Peninsula, home to two smashing golf courses, one by Jack Nicklaus and one by Arnold Palmer, the first golf community in which the two legends each contributed a design.  Bay Creek, which is about 45 minutes from Norfolk over the impressive Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, is something of a bargain for those seeking a high-quality weeklong golf vacation as well as those looking for a lifelong golf vacation (i.e. retirement home).  You can leave New York City, for example, at 6 a.m. and get in 18 before the sun goes down on a summer day at Bay Creek.  Prices for condos start in the $200s but a nice array of single-family homes are also reasonably priced, and within mere strides of the Chesapeake Bay.

A few of the holes on the Jack Nicklaus course at Bay Creek bump up against the Chesapeake Bay, including the par 3 4th.

        After my son’s graduation from college in Virginia, our peripatetic family (San Francisco, Oakland, London) celebrated at the Wintergreen Resort in the Blue Ridge Mountains, just 45 minutes from Charlottesville.  Wintergreen’s two golf courses, one by Rees Jones (27 holes) and one by Ellis Maples, could not be more different. Maples’ Devil’s Knob runs along the very top of the 3,850-foot mountain, a couple of hundred yards from where the chair lifts deposit skiers for their long runs downhill in winter.  Balls fly farther up there, which is to say that stray shots can more easily stray off the edge of the mountain.  Jones’ Stoney Creek layout plays out along the valley floor but, nevertheless, features enough changes in elevation, and plenty of water and sand, to make it the slightly more challenging of Wintergreen’s designs.  Like Bay Creek, condos and single-family homes at Wintergreen are reasonably priced and suitable as either vacation or permanent residence.  Come to think of it, for those seeking one coastal and one mountain home within 4 ½ hours driving distance of each other, Bay Creek and Wintergreen would make for an ideal combination -– from a golf and cost perspective.