Among
the American courses I’ve played in 50-plus years, those approaching perfection
fit on a short list led by Cypress Point, where my stepfather was a member and
where I first got pathologically serious about golf. Alongside it is the
National Golf Links of America, my home course since college days.
Pine
Valley and Augusta National
(as it was in the days of Cliff Roberts) have filled out the roster. Now with
assurance I lengthen that list to include Friar’s Head, freshly minted some 70
miles out from New York City on eastern
Long Island, in the hamlet of Baiting
Hollow.
The
course is designed and built by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw and their inspired
atelier of design associates and shapers, all in collaboration with 1997 U.S.
Mid-Amateur champion Ken Bakst. The atmosphere, the human factor, comes courtesy
of Bakst.
Start
with the site: 350 acres of windswept terrain, half of it tree-fringed duneland
tracking along 200-foot bluffs that overlook Long Island Sound, the other half a
grassy and undulating meadow. The name Friar’s Head bespeaks what 19th-century
merchant sailors saw from their ships—a bald dune top with a ring of vegetation
further down, resembling a tonsured monk looming above the shoreline.
Bakst’s
work with the Coore and Crenshaw group has produced a flat-out triumph, a golf
course and a golf experience that will reunite you with the game’s essence. The
understanding at Friar’s Head is that you will walk the golf course and complete
play in under four hours, morning or afternoon, weekend or weekday. You will
bring along a well-trained caddie whose yardages you can trust. You will play
from unraked bunkers and you’ll accept the good and bad breaks with
equanimity.
Friar’s
Head’s resemblance to Cypress Point, physically and
atmospherically, is uncanny.
A set of black-and-white Friar’s
Head
photos I looked at recently could be
slipped in among
1930s images of
the Cypress Point Club and fool many an
expert.
Others
compare Friar’s Head to Pine Valley, and I can see their
point, but for
me, the Coore-Crenshaw collaboration with Bakst
could be
called “Cypress Point
East," not that it’s in the
slightest degree
imitative. The nearby presence of
big
water—Long Island Sound is just
the other side of the bluffs that frame
the
northerly margins of
Friar’s Head—is perhaps what sets
this course, along with
Cypress Point
and the National, apart
from so many other beloved golf
sites.
Long
Island’s
great Golden Age courses were built, after
all, before the advent of modern
earth-moving machinery, which
in this
golfer’s opinion has had a more dire
effect upon the
game than any ball
or club technology. What you can’t do—or
choose not to—often matters as
much as what you can. A golf
architect worth his
salt would rather lean
on Mother Nature as
a design partner than Caterpillar or
Komatsu. Coore
and
Crenshaw take all possible paths toward the natural, nuanced
look
and away from machine-made homogeneity. Toward this end, they encourage
their on-site artisans—working this project were Dave Axland, Jeff
Bradley, Jim
Craig, Rod Whitman and Jimbo Wright—to express
their
personal artistic visions
in every curve and angle of
the golf
course.
A
lot of golf courses have been built in this country in recent
years, and quite a
few out on eastern Long Island. Until
Friar’s
Head, however, none could be said to seriously challenge the
triple
godhead of
Shinnecock Hills, Maidstone and the
National.
To
see the old trinity joined by a new and worthy
peer in this century is an
inspiration, especially knowing what a force
of character and will is
required
to do so. With its original
driving force, Bakst, keeping
watch, the club and
course will
surely age well. And when the
Coore-Crenshaw design record is
written in full, this will doubtless be
viewed as one of its
crowning
achievements, a symphony of golf holes
for the
ages.
Par: 71
Yardage: 6,774
Year founded: 2003
Architects: Bill Coore and Ben
