Knowing Where You Are
It’s early morning in a rock garden outside Tucson, Arizona. The sun is just making its way over the Santa Catalina Mountains to the east. From Mount Lemmon on the north side down to Pusch Ridge at the other end, the entire range rises out of the Sonoran Desert and provides a kind of theatrical backdrop to the town of Oro Valley and to Stone Canyon Golf Club.
Having arrived here the night before and stayed in a nearby casita, I couldn’t wait to come over early enough to watch Stone Canyon wake up. I’m making my way by foot down the eighteenth fairway and up the path to the back tees so I can see what it’s like for this rock-strewn desert garden to come to life.
The teeing grounds are small. Good thing, I realize, otherwise they’d look out of place. They’ve been fitted snugly and modestly into the rocky hillsides on a scale that makes them seem like natural viewing platforms—which, in effect, they are. And as the light breaks over the Catalina Range and reaches across the floor of the desert foothills and the underbrush, I’m privy to a theatrical production of plant life, rock forms, and animals.
Life is beginning to stir in what looks at first to be an inert environment. It’s happening in a matter of minutes, maybe as much as a half hour, though I have not bothered to keep time and so can only guess. What is happening before me is a kind of condensed journey through a time tunnel of evolution and erosion. Shapes assume coherence and color as they emerge from the shadows and penumbral light. I’m watching the world emerge from a blurry, black-and-white prehistory to a sharply honed, up-to-date Technicolor of recognizable golf forms. Millions of years have seemingly materialized before my eyes. Without fully knowing it, I’m watching a world that might have been inhabited by dinosaurs. And then as the light brightens, they simply disappear.
Now I’m looking down the length of the eighteenth hole. The distance marker at my feet denotes 463 yards. But as I gaze out toward the distant Catalina Range and scan the rocky hill that forms a natural box canyon for the fairway below, what captures my imagination is not the golf playing surface but everything that frames it from behind. Like the colorful chuparosa, or hummingbird bush, with its bright orangey red flower that seems to spark to life in the desert everywhere. Or the hopseed bush, with its taller, dark-green arms and soft willow little puff of misty flower inside that blooms white in spring. And then there are stately giant saguaros, their main trunks in stark vertical contrast to the desert floor, with some of them sporting arms all twisted akimbo, as if signaling different letters of the Sonoran alphabet. In fact, what these amazing trees convey is how persistent and resourceful nature can be. Few plants are better designed to fend off natural predators and hoard their own water.
As I look intently onto the desert floor, more cactus plants take shape: barrel cactus, which resembles a stodgy keg; ocotillo, with its thin but wildly arrayed branches, like Albert Einstein’s hair; and prickly pear, an aggressive grower that is amusingly cartoonish in its dog-eared shape.
Animal life is evident too. I spot a bird’s nest in a hackberry tree. And on a path toward one of the back tees, I discover some “night soil”—droppings from a bobcat or coyote. Both are commonplace here, as are mountain lions, though with less frequency. Rabbits and quail are hopping everywhere, and with good luck I might spot a desert tortoise. With bad luck I might find myself near a rattlesnake.
I walk on, behind the eighteenth tee, down the path toward the ninth hole. Another mountain range is starting to light up to the north—the Tortolitas. As I watch the light make its way down the hillsides toward the green swaths of fairway, I’m suddenly aware of activity around me. The maintenance crew is scurrying around. There’s the whirl of small utility vehicles, the buzzing of mowers, trimmers, and chainsaws. The gardeners have arrived to do their work. I realize that I’m hungry and in need of a third cup of coffee.
And so I head east down the length of the eighteenth hole toward the Catalina Range, now suffused in light. Far behind the green the clubhouse is waking up, with employees attending to their tasks. And as I look to the right, toward the practice range, I see a worker bend over and pour what turns out to be a perfect pyramid of lily-white golf balls—8 square at the base, 204 in all. There are enough Titleist NXTs there to exhaust the most avid practicer. Who, I think, would really want to take the time out to practice when that beautiful golf course is sitting there ready to be played?
A lovely walk in the desert garden awaits. Just another morning at Stone Canyon.
Somewhere along the way during thirty years of golf travel and writing, I discovered a sense of place. Or more precisely, I found that when I am somewhere that looks and feels like it’s in one place and could not be anywhere else, I know that I am in someplace that’s special.
In golf, too, the experience of place is crucial to what makes a course special. So, while many others see the golf course as a succession of discrete holes constituting pars of 3, 4, and 5, I see—or at least look for—some kind of compositional unity. The layout that registers an impact and that stands out as alluring manages to weave the course elements together from the ground and the native terrain, and it relates them to the larger culture and landscape outside the immediate boundaries of the property. Golf operators who see the facility in terms of tee times, budgets, operational efficiency, and customers (whether satisfied or not) overlook this dimension of their trade. Yet if they paid more attention to what makes a golf course a unique recreational space, they’d actually improve their bottom lines because they’d be more attentive to what draws people back. This isn’t a matter of clever marketing; it’s a matter of a drawing upon the natural shapes and character of the land and of giving people a chance to engage them while having fun in a distinct setting.
Modern geographers worry about a phenomenon called “placelessness.” It’s a syndrome, or sense, of being both nowhere and everywhere. It’s what happens when you grow up amid suburban sprawl, work in a corporate park, sit in front of a computer screen for hours a day, and shop in a climate-controlled mall near a highway cloverleaf. Old cities and towns all have a distinct downtown look—a skyline, a layout or town plan, a design style or material unity. Suburbia, by contrast, has what writer James Howard Kunstler bemoans in his aptly titled book The Geography of Nowhere.
Too many golfers today don’t spend time observing where they are and looking around them as they play. Perhaps it’s because they are touring around the course in golf carts rather than walking. Or perhaps because, like many these days, they have become so accustomed to having a roof over their heads and looking at a screen for work and play that they mistake indoor views and virtual worlds for the real ones that are outside.
For me golf courses are the most interesting landscapes in all of sports. They’re certainly the most diverse—related to each other only by a single regulation in the rulebook dictating that the little hole to which one plays measures four and a quarter inches in diameter. That’s it for standardization. Everything else varies: length, width, slope, soil, turf cover, shape, and character of features along the way from tee to green.
Most of all, locations vary. Golf courses are not only the most varied of all sports fields; they’re also found in remarkably diverse niches. They’re found in mountainous terrain, in deserts, along coastal links land, on parkland, across rolling meadows, along rivers, as part of suburban residential development and business parks, atop urban landfills, and in wide open prairie settings. And because these golf courses were all designed by someone, an architect with a particular vision or expertise or approach to the game, these layouts also betray a measure of the designer’s personality.
Knowing about the people who designed these courses has kept me busy for a very long time—since the fall of 1966, when (as a twelve-year-old) I read a two-part essay in Golf Digest by Herbert Warren Wind and instantly became enamored with golf course architecture and architects. And for all the courses I’ve seen and for all the travel involved over the ensuing four decades, I still get excited when I stumble upon a place that’s special. It’s like reliving in the present that first moment you fell in love.
In December 1997, for example, I was in West Palm Beach, Florida, having just spent the morning with a Golfweek colleague chasing down Greg Norman for an interview: office, golf course, back to office, then finally helicopter pad, where after alighting he spent twenty minutes with us, and we considered ourselves lucky. Now we had the afternoon free, with only an appointment to be back in Orlando that night for the kickoff to a Golfweek editorial meeting. It was Jason McCoy, Norman’s lead design fellow, who made the unexpected suggestion. “You ought to stop off along the way in Lake Wales and see Mountain Lake,” he said. “It’s a Raynor design. Real quiet place. No one knows about it.”
I knew about Seth Raynor. Knew about his working relationship with Charles Blair Macdonald. Knew Florida golf as well, though not as thoroughly as I thought I knew architecture. So, when McCoy suggested we see this Raynor design, I thought he had to be wrong about something. Like maybe it didn’t really exist. “Mountain Lake? Never heard of it,” I said. “You sure it exists? That it’s a Raynor?”
We pulled out road maps, and he pointed out the town of Lake Wales. As far as I could tell, it was just about dead center in the middle of nowhere. This suspicion was confirmed when he told me the directions. “Florida Turnpike to Yeehaw Junction, then west on 60.”
Two hours later I knew I had made a mistake. Route 60 scared the hell out of me. I have never seen so many trucks driving so recklessly on such a small road. I felt like the proverbial little old lady from Pasadena as I clung to my tiny share of road, adhering to a version of the speed limit, as one rickety, overloaded truck after another tailgated me until they found a suitably dangerous place to speed by on the passing side. “This Mountain Lake better be good,” I thought to myself.
Upon making the right turn from Route 60 through “downtown” Lake Wales, I began looking for the telltale signs of advanced civilization that I normally associate with classic American golf—Starbucks, boutique hotel, tobacco shop, men’s haberdashery. No such luck here. This was clearly a working town that had seen better days.
Not being a big fan of gate-crashing, I had phoned ahead to the superintendent and secured permission to tour the grounds. There wasn’t going to be enough time to play, and I hadn’t wanted to commit to golf before at least checking out what Mountain Lake looked like.
The moment I turned in from Alternate 27 and got to the off-white stucco guard gate, I knew I was in another world. There are certain transportive moments in life, when you suddenly feel yourself occupying a whole new time and space. The guard, who was very polite, waved me through, and as I surveyed the pond on the right and the drapey live oaks lining the road and saw the elegant Spanish Colonial homes set back far from the road, I felt that I had passed through a time tunnel and wound up on a set piece of The Great Gatsby. I paused and listened for the “yellow cocktail music” that F. Scott Fitzgerald made famous.
On that first visit I just walked around the first and second holes, back along the entry road to the pro shop, then around Colony House and halfway down the eighteenth fairway. It all looked and felt very special—a place that had been there for a very long time, that was confident in its identity, that didn’t need to try real hard to make an impression. It was not what our daughter would have called “puffy” or “showy.” I could not wait to get back to play.
A month later I did. It was the Saturday of the annual PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando. It’s an overwhelming trade exhibition, with thirty acres of golf equipment, gadgetry, and clothing displayed under one roof, accompanied by blaring noise and endless hype. The first two hours you’re amazed and excited. By the end of that first afternoon your feet are sore, and you have a headache from seeing (and hearing) way too much. So, the chance to get away early that Saturday was tempting. Luckily, I had called ahead to Mountain Lake’s general manager, who kindly put me in touch with two midwestern gentlemen who had been longtime members. That was all I needed to flee the PGA show.
The directions I had this time around—Route 4, west out of Orlando to 27 South, then look for the sign for “Chalet Suzanne”—were not quite as ominous as the ones I had the last time I headed to Lake Wales. And this time I knew what to expect as I turned in to the Mountain Lake gates.
I’ve always appreciated modest little clubhouses and changing rooms. There’s something so endearing about a clubhouse with no pretensions. That’s why I was really pleased to see how “back-to-basics” Mountain Lake’s was. I’m sure some high rollers and power brokers dismiss it as hopelessly antiquated. For me the benches and the racks of shoes were the ideal setup for a place that clings to a traditional golf identity.
The golf course conveyed a similar feel. This was before a big restoration brought back so much of Raynor’s trademark linear styling, yet even then it was obvious that the land plan, the routing, and the quality of the shots into the greens all combined to create a course that embodied very classy golf values.
I went back to the PGA show in Orlando that afternoon and told my colleagues at Golfweek about this magical course I had just played. Some of them had been Orlando residents for a decade or more, and even they had never heard of the place. Over the next few years a few of them were invited to play, and without exception they all fell in love with Mountain Lake. In recent years, whenever I make one of my rare appearances in the Golfweek office, the veteran writers who have been there greet me with “Hey, when we going to go to Mountain Lake again?”
My fellow course evaluators on the “Golfweek’s Best” national course rating team I run have thought highly enough of Mountain Lake that they regularly vote it among the top one hundred classic courses (pre-1960) in the United States—the first and only rating team to accord this quiet little club such recognition.
There are lots of fine golf courses in the United States. There are a few intriguing historic places where the game’s spirit creaks on. But what continues to amaze and thrill me each time—and it’s never more than twice a year—that I pass through the gates of Mountain Lake is the clear sense of it being a historic treasure where golf is thoughtfully woven into the fabric of a gracious but modest community. For a golf curmudgeon like me, it is truly precious ground.