another welcome addition. Along the way, it also brings those adjoining woods back into play, and makes angles of play more of an element than ever.
Assessment There’s now so much more room to
play golf. Fairways have been pushed into tree lines, and holes have been swung to reduce the extremity of doglegs. Along the way, literate and itinerant golfers will have good reason to con- jure up the names of other famous golf courses that the character of particular holes seem to reveal. At the risk of indulgence, I will share
my own list of where and what I thought. As I walked over to the tee of the long par-5 fourth hole, I looked out to the expanse of sand and pine and thought it looked like a layout from Pinehurst. As I played a shot onto the green at the par-4 eighth hole and utilized a periph- eral slope on the slope to work the ball in, I flashed immediately to Chambers Bay, where it’s often possible to work the ball from the outside. In the fairway of the par-5 10th hole, with the new green swung to the right and readily visible from the driving zone—including an ominous swath of fairway leading directly from the green down to the pond’s edge
20 yards away—I thought of the 15th hole at Augusta National. And as I stood on the tee of the par-3 17th hole trying very hard to keep my approach shot from descending into the deep pit front right of the green, I flashed to the famed devil- ish bunker protecting that same position into the green at the 10th hole at Pine Valley. Indeed, throughout Poppy Hills now, those broken areas of waste in front of the tees and alongside landing areas evoke a Pine Valley aesthetic. There are still a few drawbacks. No
one had ever been able to build a com- fortable reverse camber par-4, and the third hole at Poppy Hills confirms that
12th Hole
liability. The transition from the ninth green to the 10th tee is also circuitous and distracting. And the transition off the 16th green over (or under) the road is clumsy. The tree clearing on tee shots is far more generous to those who fade the ball, where as those (of us!) who draw the ball (or hit it right-to-left) have a lot less room off the tee, given the intrusion of looming tree canopies on that side of the chute—especially on Nos. 3, 13 and 18. It would also help to provide more understory ground cover (wood chips, anything) along the right side of the second and third shots of the 18th hole, where the ground downslopes quickly
Best of all, the course now feels like it’s on the Monterey Peninsula.
18th Hole SUMMER 2014 /
NCGA.ORG / 49
PHOTO: TERRY VANDERHEIDEN, 2014 –
WWW.IMAGELIGHT.COM
PHOTO: TERRY VANDERHEIDEN, 2014 –
WWW.IMAGELIGHT.COM
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