The Reviews are In:
FROM GOLF CHANNEL’S MATT GINELLA: I can’t tell you how excited I am that this is back. It brought Poppy Hills back to relevance. Having played it now and seeing how much better it is…this is defi nitely a part of anybody’s itinerary going to the Monterey Peninsula.
FROM
GOLFCHANNEL.COM’S MIKE BAILEY: . . .all-in-all, this course was pretty close to perfect.
FROM
GOLF.COM’S JOSH SENS: Poppy’s eye-popping. The meta- morphosis of the 12th marks one of the more striking changes to a course that’s been so dramatically transformed, it now appears as a diff erent creature altogether.
FROM
EXAMINER.COM’S GARY MCCORMICK: The new Poppy Hills is a dramatic re-imagining and reconfi guring of the NCGA’s fl agship course, elevating the layout to an equal footing with its world-renowned neighbors in “Golf’s Greatest Zip Code.”
FROM LINKS MAGAZINE’S TOM CUNNEFF: 93953 might not look too good on a scorecard, unless it happens to be part of the address of the course on the back fl ap. That means it would be located in Pebble Beach, Calif.—“the best zip code in golf,” as the saying goes. Well, with the reopening of Poppy Hills. . . the neighborhood is about to get even better.
FROM
AMATEURGOLF.COM’S PETE WLODKOWSKI: Like Bandon Dunes? You’ll love Poppy.
FROM GOLF GETAWAYS’ VIC WILLIAMS: At certain prints it feels like Pinehurst, other times Augusta, with dashes of Pine Valley.
40 /
NCGA.ORG / SPRING 2014
What’s it Like to Play the Course You Built?
F
or more than six years, Bruce Charlton dreamed about the Grand Open- ing at Poppy Hills.
“There’s nothing more fun as a golf architect than to see the fi nal product,” said Charlton, the chief design offi cer for Robert Trent Jones II. “It’s a day that you live for.” Charlton saw the reno-
vation through its infancy, staying up odd hours with his team of architects to solve the many riddles that this project presented. RTJ II unkinked routing
quirks, discovered new holes, increased and varied playability with wider fairways and softer doglegs, and returned a course that felt like it was sitting on an earthquake-ravaged second story back to the forest fl oor. Nobody knows what was
done to Poppy Hills better than Charlton. So what’s it like to play
a course you understand so intimately? “That’s kind of fun and
frustrating at the same time,” Charlton said. But how? Charlton has the
answer key, right? He knows every inch of this place. “But then you’ve got to
swing the club and try to ex- ecute it—and you just can’t do it sometimes,” said Charlton, hitting on one of the mysteries of golf. “You go, ‘Dang it! I want to hit another ball. I know I can hit that shot.’ But that’s the way golf is. You just don’t execute every shot all the time. But when you go out to a golf course that you’ve worked on, that you’ve poured your heart and soul into, where you know exactly where you should hit the ball, it’s a frustrating mental game.”
But it was incredibly
rewarding for Charlton to see the reaction of the guests at the Grand Opening, talking through each hole over a post- round beer. “The sampling we had
during the Grand Opening was a good one,” Charlton said. “We probably had some very tough critics there with the media. I think every single person—especially if they played here before—was extremely pleased with the playability. They didn’t say it was easy, but they felt like they could play the course.” While playability has
improved, Charlton can’t wait to see how Poppy Hills chal- lenges Northern California’s top amateur players. “My fi rst impression as I
played, I really think that the golf course will yield a 65 or 66 in the fi rst couple months,” said Charlton about Poppy
RTJ chief design offi cer Bruce Charlton (left) and project architect Mike Gorman
Hills, which will also host the Champions Tour in September. “But if you want to make
this golf course tough, just move the tee up on either No. 9 or 10 and have one play as a par 4. Play Poppy Hills as a par 70. “And I’d still like to see
some really good players from the forward tees (291 yards) on No. 14.”
But most of all, Charlton
believes Poppy Hills is a course that will reward local knowl- edge over everything else. “Playing here again and
again, you’re going to have a distinct advantage,” Charlton said. “There’s probably more variety in how to play the golf course than ever before. And I think that will bring people back. I’m really proud that we’ve developed a course with a huge amount of flexibility.”
–K.M.
TheNEW
HILLS POPPY
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