The classic routing has the front nine turning clockwise through forest while the back nine circles counter-clockwise, and each touch repeatedly on the wetlands of namesake May River. It's an equally low-profile layout with a number of bump-and-run approach shots but with several Pine Valley-like waste areas and with larger, bolder greens. The theme song at Streamsong seems to be: “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.”īuilt some 35 years after nearby Harbour Town Golf Links, May River is an interesting contrast in Jack Nicklaus's portfolio (Nicklaus was co-designer of Harbour Town with Pete Dye). 178 Streamsong (Black) by Gil Hanse only adds to the spirited competition among designers. The Blue definitely has the bolder set of greens, some with massive shelves and dips. It has more water carries off the tee, and it’s also a bit more compact, since it sits in the center with the Red Course looping around its outside edges. 127, contains some holes originally envisioned by Doak.) The Blue starts a bit more dramatically, with the back tee on hole one atop a 75-foot sand dune. Coore then gave Doak first choice on which 18 he wanted to build, so Doak’s Blue Course includes a few holes routed by Coore. The Red has consistently comes out on top in this survey, but the Blue and Black are within just about a point.Īlthough congenial rivals, Tom Doak and Bill Coore actually collaborated on Streamsong’s original 36-hole routing, walking the site and mentally weaving holes around stunning mounds, lagoons, sand spits, savannahs and swamp, all elements left after a strip-mining operation. The turf is firm and bouncy, and while the routing is sprawling, it’s easily walkable. Some greens are perched like those at Pinehurst, others are massive with multi-levels like those at St. The course has a wonderful mix of bump-and-run links holes and target-like water holes. But there was only room for 31 holes, so Coore and Crenshaw had to take a section of less desirable, stripped-down land and create five holes that looked like the rest of the site, Red's holes one through five. The Red, like the Blue, was built from sand spoils created by a massive phosphate strip mine, with some piles forming dunes reaching 75 feet into the air. What's irreplacable are the views of Puget Sound from nearly every hole, multi-level fairways that entice bold driving to gain second-shot advantages and two holes running parallel to a railway that's invokes feelings of early Scottish and Irish links courses.Ĭoore and Crenshaw’s Red Course is part of a resort triple-header that gives golfers a rare opportunity to compare and contrast the differences in styles and philosophies of arguably the three of top design firms in America, including Streamsong Blue, a Tom Doak design, and Streamsong Black, from Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner. That’s now been remedied, as the fescue turf on the putting surfaces has been replaced with pure Poa Annua. Open, the firmness and surrounds were more manageable, but the greens were notoriously bumpy. In the Amateur, Chambers Bay proved to be hard, both in the firmness of its dry fescue turf (Jones called his fairways, “hardwood floors”) and its difficulties around and on the windswept greens. By the time Golf Digest named it as America’s Best New Public Course of 2008, the course had already been awarded the 2010 U.S. agreed to a radically different, vertical-links style when building Chambers Bay in an abandoned sand quarry near Tacoma. Prodded by his partner, Bruce Charlton, and their then-design associate Jay Blasi, veteran architect Robert Trent Jones Jr.
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