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Holland, MI. I’ve been fortunate enough to golf a number of courses that have been consistently ranked in “Top 100” lists, and recently I had an opportunity to play Crystal Downs, a course consistently ranked in the top 10 in the country. Crystal Downs is perched on an isthmus separating Lake Michigan from Crystal Lake, just southwest of Traverse City. As I spent a day on these magnificent grounds, I reflected back to my experience playing another “Top 100” course: the Stadium Course at the Player’s Club at Sawgrass. I think the differences between those two courses tell us a lot about what has changed in this country in the fifty years separating their openings.

Crystal Downs is a product of the golden age of golf architecture, designed by Alistair Mackenzie, who completed the course in between his more famous designs at Cypress Point and Augusta National. Mackenzie’s designs are noted for their fidelity to the landscape, and for his belief that the course must interact seamlessly with its natural surroundings. Mackenzie also believed that any golf course should be enjoyable to golfers of all skill levels, and Crystal Downs embodies both these principles.

For a course as highly ranked as Crystal Downs, its most notable feature is its modesty. So unassuming is the entry gate to the course that I drove right past it. I turned around and drove down the long forested path leading up to the pro shop. That structure is a simple stone and cedar edifice measuring about 30 paces from front to back and another 10 across. The interior of the shop is white pine, Michigan’s state tree. Sale items hang off pegs nailed into the crossbeams holding the ceiling. The grill offers simple fare served in styrofoam containers. The clubhouse, a smallish Victorian stone building, is a short walk up a hill, and standing in front of it allows you to see Crystal Lake off to your right and Sleeping Bear dunes on Lake Michigan to your left.
m 1st Hole at Crystal Downs
Mackenzie’s design strategy is evident on the first tee. Sitting atop a windswept bluff, the terrain is hilly with many dramatic undulations. Mackenzie used mule teams and sledges to move earth, but moved as little as possible. The first hole has a dramatic drop of over 100 feet to a wide fairway that is defined on one side by native fescues and on the other by a large bunker filled with Lake Michigan sand. It played straight into a howling wind, which is one of the course’s main defenses. I neatly lifted a high drive that got knocked down to the center of the fairway, but too far back for me to seriously consider going for the green. I laid up with a 6-iron and pitched on to the green, whereupon I discovered the course’s second defense. I hit what I thought was a perfectly placed shot, about 6 feet to the right of the pin, saw it settle in place, and turned around to put my club back in my bag. When I turned back I was shocked to see my ball off the front left of the green. I managed a bogey, but saw part of what makes Crystal Downs such a treasure.

The course is indeed accessible to all levels of skill. High handicappers will find the generous fairways relatively easy to hit, and any golfer will be seriously punished if they miss the fairway and hit into the nasty fescue which lines every hole. The greens are all fairly large, but your odds for par or better improve significantly depending on the angle from which you hit your approach. Players who struggle to control the ball can still play the course, but better players will spend a lot of time thinking through all their options off the tee, calculating how distance and angle will play out over the remainder of the hole. They are encouraged to play from the green back. The open front nine allows for golfers to come at greens from almost all sides.

On the fifth hole, a remarkable shorter par 4 which drops down to a fairway with a severe right to left slope, and then back up to a flat spot that, if you can hit with a driver, will leave you with a sand wedge to the green, I played the hole straightforward and easily wedged my second shot onto the green. One of my playing partners hit an ugly hook that ended up on the eighth fairway. From there, however, he simply lifted his next shot over a dune and into a patch of weeds just off the green. I was already scribbling a four onto my card, but my gingerly tapped putt easily traveled the 30 feet to the hole, and then beyond and off the right side of the green. I made a good up and down from there, but was nonetheless forced to take a five. The par five 8th is honored as one of the greatest in the world of golf, and rightly so. The fairway shows all the earmarks of a Mackenzie design: using the natural lay of the land so the golfer has to factor the contours in hitting his shots and planning his way up to the elevated green.

The back nine takes you on a different path, away from the dunes and into an old orchard. The fairway on number 12 leads to the left side of a magnificent beech tree. Here you see one of the wonderful subtleties of Mackenzie’s design. The fairway crests at the tree, and your sight lines tell you to hit your tee shot to the left of the tree. Directly at the crest, however, Mackenzie shifts the fairway to the right and then angles it even further to the right. If you hit your tee shot left, as your eye tells you to, you will end up with an impossible lie in deep fescue – if you can find your ball. Hit to the right, and you have a straightforward shot to the green, but you will also have to aim your tee shot over fescue. It’s one of the easier pars on the course, in part because the green is manageable.

On the 184-yard par-3 11th I hit what I thought was a perfect tee shot 15 feet behind the flag. The club member in our group shook his head and said “You’re dead.” How could that be? I was right above the hole, and as I stood above my putt it looked fast with a little right to left break, but nothing unplayable. I was advised to hit my putt almost straight to my right, which meant I was putting with my back to the hole. Assuming the wisdom of his superior experience I did as I was told and was left with a 12 foot putt. Still skeptical that a more direct approach wouldn’t have gotten me closer I dropped a practice ball for fun and hit the putt I would have ordinarily hit. It rolled past the hole and off the green. The four of us took turns trying that putt, and none of us were able to get it any closer than the 12 feet I had hit my original putt. Virtually every attempt ended up rolling well off the front of the green, leaving a very difficult pitch. For the most part, however, the greens were fair. They were remarkably subtle, often misleading you to think the ball would break one way rather than the other. Sometimes you would swear you were hitting an uphill putt that turned out to be downhill, a typical feature of the rolling countryside of northern Michigan golf.

m 17th hole at Crystal Downs
This masterpiece of design reaches its apogee in what is quite simply the finest golf hole I have ever seen: the breathtaking par-4 17th. Again, the hole has a dramatic drop down to the fairway, and then rises sharply uphill again toward the green. It played dead into the wind and created difficulty off the tee. If it were a calm day, or if you had the wind behind you, shooting for the green would be an option. The wind made that impossible. The uphill movement back up to the green meant you had very few places you could shoot that would leave you with a relatively flat lie from which to hit your approach. Off the tee you thus have a small margin of error. Hit your tee shot 180 yards and you have no play to the green. Hit it 210 yards and you will have a blind shot from an uphill lie.

I tried to punch a 3-iron, which I came down on too steeply and got it too high into the wind. I landed just short of the flat landing area, and was left with 110 yards from an uphill lie with a ball sitting up in the rough. I saw one of my playing partners land his approach on the front of the green, only to see it roll fifty yards back down the fairway. Now I had a dilemma: hit it to the front of the green and I risk having it pushed by the wind and roll all the way back down the hill, leaving a difficult pitch back up. Hit it long and I land in one of the back bunkers, from which 5 would be a good score. I normally hit my 8-iron 160 yards, but in this instance – an uphill lie and into a punishing wind – I figured it was the right club. Indeed it was, and I left a towering shot about 12 feet short of the flag. Standing on the green, which sits at about the highest point on the course, and looking out over Crystal Lake to the east and Lake Michigan to the west, made me feel as if I had reached the pinnacle of golfing perfection. Afterwards the four of us celebrated our round by sitting on the grass in front of the clubhouse, looking out over Lake Michigan and drinking a few cold ones.

The entrance to the TPC at Sawgrass would be impossible to miss. The large pillars announce the road which leads back to the 77,000 square foot Mediterranean style clubhouse, replete with fountains and a marble interior. The ostentation of the clubhouse is matched by the brutality of the course. The architect Pete Dye is often known as the Marquis de Sod – not only for the difficulty of his designs, but also because he never met a bulldozer or a backhoe he didn’t like. He’s cruel to the land. Dye’s design strategy might be said to have two elements as well: one is to be spectacularly different and innovative, and the other is to extract the best shots out of the best players. Dye is often referred to as the father of modern golf course design, the main idea of which is to shift land around in such a way as to provide small targets at which the players can take aim.[i] Target golf takes options out of their hands and forces them to play holes in a particular fashion, thereby replacing the freedom and creativity of the golfer with the freedom of the architect to alter the land to suit his vision. It also makes a course that is unplayable for the average golfer.
m Moguls at Sawgrass
I have seldom had a better day of ballstriking than I did at Sawgrass, but ended up shooting a score I’m too embarrassed to post. Even Jack Nicklaus believed the course was unsuited to his game, complaining that he “never was good at stopping a 5-iron on the hood of a car.” Part of Dye’s earthmoving, in addition to the little pot bunkers he strews around a course, involved the creation of artificial moguls which line the fairways and surround the greens. The average golfer facing a severe downhill lie in the gnarly Bermuda grass will find it nearly impossible to hit a clean shot onto the green, even from ten paces away. These ubiquitous moguls add nothing to the aesthetics of the course and seriously detract from its enjoyment.

m17th hole at Sawgrass
The most famous hole on the course, the par-3 17th, is a result of Dye’s penchant for moving large amounts of earth. He had dug such a large hole in the middle of the property that he had no room for his concluding par-3. Under his wife’s advice he decided to turn the hole into a lake and place the green as an island in the middle of it. Despite its notoriety, it really isn’t that interesting a golf hole. The green is fairly large and not that difficult to hit, as even average golfers will have a 9-iron in their hands. If you are on the wrong tier you will do well to 3-putt the green, but because of its artificial nature there is no connection between hole and the surrounding terrain. Indeed, it was built to intimidate players and to provide an arena for spectators. No less an authority than Tiger Woods dismissed the hole as “gimmicky.” Most of the holes on the course are visually forgettable; if you remember them, you do so mostly for the pain they inflicted on you. The only hole I would consider ranking in the top 100 I have played is the par-5 16th, a really well-designed risk/reward hole.. Unlike Crystal Downs, however, which embodies the land and virtues of Northern Michigan, there is nothing about Sawgrass that gives you any sense of where you might be. It is homogenized golf.

The design of a golf course begins with identifying a piece of land which lends itself to golf design – the first rule of which is drainage. Crystal Downs succeeds for the same reason Scottish links courses do well: given their soil conditions and elevation related to the surrounding land, it is nearly impossible for water to gather. Indeed, we were greeted on the second tee by a cloudburst, but the hard rain left no trace of its presence. Conversely, the TPC at Sawgrass, built on a low-lying swamp, had such legendary drainage problems, despite the complex system that was originally put in place, the powers-that-be completely ripped the turf off the course in 2006, added 27,000 tons of sand, and installed Sub-Air drainage systems under the greens which suck 42,000 gallons of water an hour out of the soil. It’s a classic example of how forcing the land to do something it is not suited for will necessitate further interventions and greater expenses.

Advances in technology have not made golf less expensive, more enjoyable, more egalitarian, more accessible, or more respectful of the freedom and decision-making of the golfer. “Progress” hasn’t made courses more memorable or more beautiful. Like Frank Gehry’s building designs, Pete Dye’s courses are more a tribute to the ego of the architect than an attempt to provide a fitting place for human beings to live, work, and play. In contrast, the golden age of golf architecture – figures such as Mackenzie, Donald Ross, A.W. Tillinghast, Harry S. Colt – is defined by the creation of courses on pieces of land hospitable to such development, courses remarkable for their natural beauty and playability.  Fortunately for people who love golf, we seem to be entering a renaissance of classic design. Michigan courses such as Arcadia Bluffs and Tullymore, and Ontario’s Cobble Beach reflect these old principles – courses made with nature and the golfer in mind first and foremost. Perhaps if such renewal is possible in the crusty world of golf we can experience it in other areas of our lives – areas now marked by planning, innovation, insensitivity to the soil of culture, and massive movement and dislocation. The restoration of par is sorely needed.


[i] One of the sad tragedies in contemporary golf is that, after Tiger Woods won the 1997 Masters by 12 strokes, the Men of the Masters in a fit of pride decided to transform Mackenzie’s masterpiece from a classic course to more of a target course. Worse than lengthening it, they eliminated a lot of the angles, and took options out of the player’s hands. In the process they made the course less interesting and robbed the tournament of much of its drama. The course doesn’t reward creativity, imagination, and risk-taking the way it once did.

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Jeffrey Polet
Jeffrey Polet grew up in an immigrant household in the immigrant town of Holland MI. After twenty years of academic wandering he returned to Holland and now teaches political science at Hope College, where he also grudgingly serves as chair of the department, having unsuccessfully evaded all requests. In the interim, he continues to nurture quirky beliefs: Division III basketball is both athletically and morally superior to Division I; the Hope/Calvin rivalry is the greatest in sports; the lecture is still the best form of classroom instruction; never buy a car with less than 100,000 miles on it; putts will still lip out in heaven; bears are the incarnation of evil; Athens actually has something to do with Jerusalem; and Tombstone is a cinematic classic. His academic work has mirrored his peripatetic career. Originally trained at the Catholic University of America in German philosophy and hermeneutical theory, he has since gravitated to American Political Thought. He still occasionally writes about European thinkers such as Michel Foucault or the great Max Weber, but mostly is interested in the relationship between theological reflection and political formation in the American context. In the process of working on a book on John Marshall for The Johns Hopkins University Press, he became more sensitive to the ways in which centralized decision-making undid local communities and autonomy. He has also written on figures such as William James and the unjustly neglected Swedish novelist Paer Lagerkvist. A knee injury and arthritis eliminated daily basketball playing, and he now spends his excess energy annoying his saintly wife and their three children, two of whom are off to college. Expressions of sympathy for the one who remains can be posted in the comments section. He doesn’t care too much for movies, but thinks opera is indeed the Gesamtkuntswerk, that the music of Gustav Mahler is as close as human beings get to expressing the ineffable, that God listens to Mozart in his spare time, and that Bach is history’s greatest genius.

12 COMMENTS

  1. Ben Crenshaw, I hear tell, once called Crystal Downs golf’s best-kept secret. The members are mainly to thank. They wake the course up late in the spring, and they tuck it into bed early in the fall–a function of the northern MI clime, no doubt.

    A buddy and I were turned away at the entrance once (must have been the beat up Chevy Cavalier). But a few years later, on my honeymoon, I made it all the way to the unassuming clubhouse (must have been my bride) and had a look at some of those world-class Mackenzie holes. The superintendent then was a guy with a master’s in English who thought better of life and got himself a turf degree too.

    One FPRer to another: how did you manage to get on the course? It’s on my list of things to do before I shuffle off the mortal coil.

  2. Mr. Polet, this is a great article and a welcome diversion on the Porch. I’ve grown to appreciate the game more in the last several years, mostly because I have tried it and found it to be incredibly difficult and rewarding. Though I also find few things more satisfying than the vistas provided by a very early tee time on a crisp Saturday morning in January when the fog is still lifting, even if I only shoot 80 (on the front 9).

    I did not golf when I was young, though Monroe County NY sported an incredibly high ratio of courses per resident, particularly for a northern town subject to cold late-Septembers and the random early May snow flurry. Living in Houston, golf seems to invade the pores on your body. You simply can’t fight it – like the humidity which I am also learning to accept…strangely enough. Half your friends in Houston have lived, are living, or will live in a planned community situated near a par 3. Most people have tried the game, like a strong shot, at least once, and there must be a couple of bags in every self-respecting garage…even if they are quite dusty.

    Anyway, I digress. Here in the swamp, we have a course called Tour 18, which has copied 18 of the most well known holes from these great courses you discuss. Having now “played” the 17th hole at Sawgrass several times, and come just inches shy of a hole in one, I can say it is the hole that keeps me coming back to play the game several times a year. The memory of near perfection…I just can’t shake it. And those views…

  3. What is it with golf? I just don’t get the allure. This is a serious question, any insight you gentlemen may have would be most welcome!

    pax et bonum-
    GP

  4. As a native of northern lower Michigan and avid golfer, it seems to me you’ve not done much until you golf a rough-hewn links instead of a polished course. To this end, I’d highly recommend a Michigan historical marker, Wawashkamo Golf club atop Mackinac Island. (I hear the caddy shack I inhabited the summer before college is more caddy than shack now.)

    Grace, walking is the practice of pilgrims and golf is the practice of Presbyterians. We also admire alliteration.

  5. I should also add (after Zrim) that there’s a Tom Doak designed course on 72 just east of TC & Acme called “High Point.” It should be called “High Price,” but it’s half links half alpine. Sweet sweet track. Doak also did Black Forest, which can eat you alive.

    Grace, only marriage is harder than golf. We flagellants love it. Plus there are only a few things in life prettier than a slight right-to-left ball flight off an elevated tee, and only few sounds more lovely than a golf ball finally hitting the bottom of the cup.

    Polet, thanks for making my exile in IL more miserable today.

  6. Ms. Potts,
    Having once enjoyed playing the environmental and botanical advisor to a golf course architect in the routing of some new holes through floodplain wetlands, I can tell you what the allure is. Walking through neck high Goldenrod on the other side of the river from the existing course, we kicked up …aside from many balls….a cleanly broken Driver and one 5 Iron bent in a perfect 90 degree angle that had obviously been bent over knee and flung farther than the ball had flown. 30 yards farther along, a half empty bag was dug out of the brush and the make of the remaining clubs was the same as the 5 Iron. It is no mean feat to hurl a full bag of clubs clean over a riverine hedgerow. This is the allure, nowhere else in such a fine setting can a marginally bored suburban/exurbanite enjoy such a gut-fulfilling level of pure beautiful anger and deep despair as in a golf course. Its an almost primeval angst and we cavemen need it. Then one hits a stunningly perfect shot and the ups and downs of life are met with triumph. Birds sing and even your buddy owes you a drink.

    Somebody should make little Petey Dye maintain one of his courses for a few weeks. There really is nothing like a vintage 20’s course. My favorite was shaggy ole El Monte at the mouth of Ogden Canyon where we kiddies with our 7:30 am tee times would have to wait between howling morning wind gusts funneling out of the canyon to smack off the first tee and hopefully avoid sending a ball back through the window of the stone clubhouse 50 yards behind us. And then there was the time we snuck pa’s clubs out and forgot to retrieve the crawdaddys stashed in the zippered ball pocket.

  7. Jason,

    I am told that High Point has closed down, a victim of the bad economy. I have not had a chance to play it, but lament the lost opportunity. On the other hand, I once played a Tom Doak design down in the Tampa area: Pine Barrens, at World Woods Golf. It’s part of a complex with Rolling Oaks, which I played on the afternoon of the same day. Pine Barrens is a BRUTAL course, but beautiful and well-designed. It’s nothing like a Dye course: it has a very natural feel embedded in Florida’s west coast, and works beautifully with its natural surroundings. It is one of my favorite courses I have played, but it is not for the faint of heart. Manifestly NOT a course for all skill levels. I should also recommend Arcadia Bluffs, but go before the end of the school year to take advantage of the spring rates. I don’t like the greens on that course – I find them ridiculous – but the vistas are astonishing. From tee to green, it’s a wonderful track.

    As to how I got on to Crystal Downs: at graduation this year I was meeting with one of our graduates who was introducing me to his parents. His dad mentioned that he had a friend who was a member at Crystal Downs, and would like to thank me for “all I had done” for his son, and would I be interested in golfing a round at the course. Um … ok. There was talk of making it an annual affair. Again: um … ok. I also found out that the man who has been the head pro there for the last 33 years went to Hope.

    Zrim: given your note, you ought to try Pilgrim’s Run, just north of Grand Rapids. One of the best tracks in the area, and each hole is named after something in Bunyan’s work. The 18th hole is a load of fun.

  8. D’oh! I’m getting ready for bed, and suddenly I remember Pine Barrens is a Tom Fazio design, not a Doak. Mea culpa.

  9. Good article. I’m simpler than most of you, and can answer Grace Potts in the same simple way. I like most of the people I meet on golf courses, I don’t much care about the nuances of golf course design, I’m old enough to appreciate the connection between man-made gardens and nature, and the game itself is an empirical proof of original sin.

  10. Crenshaw evidently plays CD at least once a year. So I was told. The 17th is reportedly his favorite hole.

    Why golf? I’m not the best in the world at anything, but every now and then I can play a hole as well as the best player in the world. There is no other sport, indeed no other endeavor, about which that is true. Golf is the human condition: being satisfied with intimations of perfection in the face of our pursuit thereof. Since part of that pursuit involves self-mastery, there is nothing I have ever attempted that exposes and challenges such mastery as does golf.

  11. One of the ways to gain an appreciation for golf is to walk courses like the Downs, which are magnificent pieces of landscape architecture. Tom Doak tells us that Mackenzie later gave up golf design to take up another hobby, the cultivation of roses.

    Another way is to hang out with golfers who play with hickory-shafted clubs. The Downs pro is, or has been, one of the top players on the little circuit that tours the country. They used to play at Kingsley every June, near the Downs, a design of another Mackenzie disciple Mike DeVries. Now I think they play a little further north at Belvedere (sp?) near Charlevoix. They’re into the freedom of limits and the appeal of hickory golf is ell defined in terms of a reaction against the gross commercialization and modernization of the game.

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