Fishers Island Club - "Sneaking On Story"

My favorite "sneaking on" story has to do with the now famous Fishers Island Club. I was 15 and just learning to golf at Shennecossett, a Donald Ross Course located a block from where I grew up in Groton, Connecticut. My best friends older brother was a scratch golfer and his buddies were all good sticks. The course at Fishers Island loomed across the sound and was a mysterious and mystical place for me at the time. I knew little about it, only having glimpses of the holes you could see from biking or boating around the island. Fishers was a lot more laid back in those days, and mostly undiscovered. The conditions were only average at best, but I had heard stories about how awesome the course was. Anyway, these "golf obsessed" upper aged teenagers used to fill a cooler with beer (the drinking age was younger back then) and get 4 guys into a Boston Whaler, and head out from the shore of Eastern Point around 5pm. After they crossed Fishers Island Sound, they would motor slowly up to the island and anchor the boat just offshore. After filling their golf bags with beer, they would then carry their clubs high on their backs to the shore - having carefully timed the trip for low tide. Then they'd put their golf shoes on, sneak onto the course, and play as many holes as they could until dark. They would then head back in the boat through the dark. Quite an adventure. I wish I could say I had the chance to experience that, but it wasn't until years later that I got to play Fishers legitimately for the first time. I hope some day I can design a course that would be so desirable it would prompt a similar effort by "golf obsessed" youngsters to try to sneak on. But it is highly unlikely I will ever produce anything that can compare to Fishers. Having grown up in its shadow, it's still a mystical place to me.

The Aftermath

Two things strike me after watching the open this past week with a critical eye. One has to do with bunker grasses and the other with drainage. I know, it's easy to be a critic........

First, for the most part I thought the set up of the golf course was excellent. The one place I think they got it wrong was with some of the long grasses on the faces and noses of the bunkers. For instance, on the 18th green complex. Sure, it’s a “cool look”, and I have no problem with the fescues growing into the sides and noses of the bunkers when larger fescue rough areas tie into the bunker. In other words when they are adjacent to the hazard. However, they become randomly penal when they are in the middle of normal rough, the fairway, or a green complex. I don’t think you should ever be penalized more for carrying a hazard than in it. Some might argue that the long grasses are “part of the hazard”. The problem is, surrounding the green these grasses can be extremely thick due to irrigation. And at one point in the Open, a player had to hack it from the face of the bunker next to the green, and into the bunker in order to play a shot. Under normal circumstances, (without the aid of ball spotters and fans), the ball would likely have been lost. It doesn’t make sense when the player is “on-line” and just a couple of yards off of the green. My thinking is if the USGA is going to transition the rough from fairway to longer grasses, why wouldn’t they consistently carry out that philosophy throughout the course?



“There’s so much water on the 18th fairway that Michael Phelps couldn’t par it.”
Golf Writer Dan Jenkins

I know they had an awful amount of rain. However, if you have ever seen the 18th hole – it’s easy to identify where the drainage is going to be an issue. Whenever the land has a dramatic drop and then flattens out, you can expect water to collect and sit. Now I know there are many purists out there who think you should never have a catch basin in a fairway. And maybe they refuse to work on sites with clay soils. But when you are planning a course for the US Open Championship and you are given millions of dollars to prepare the course, you would think one would address the landing area of the finishing hole. You do anything you can to get the water off of the prime landing zone. Collect the run-off in the rough and penalize a poor shot. Or, as a last resort, put a catch basin in the fairway if you have to. There is plenty of room at Bethpage to get the water off of landing areas.

The Black

I am going to be blogging on a regular basis starting in mid-September. I will kick-off the blog with an explanation of what I hope to accomplish, write about, etc.. But I thought I would post some photos I took of Bethpage Black a little more than a year ago. It was late October 2007 and I was at Bethpage to give a presentation on green design. The USGA was making preparations for the Open, so the course was shut down for the day. It is very unusual to get to tour the course when it is empty. It is a much better way to see a golf course if you are interested in studying features. (I did the same thing at St. Andrews by going on a Sunday and I will post those on my blog in the future). I toured the course on this beautiful fall afternoon with Scott Ramsay CGCS, the Golf Course Superintendent at Yale - a fantastic Seth Raynor design. We got to see the course from all angles, and we were completely overwhelmed by both the scale of the property and golf features. The bunkers are just enormous! You just can't grasp the scale of these things from the TV. The bunker that Scott is standing in front of contains as much sand as some entire courses have. Probably not fun to hand rake yesterday after 2" of rain!

We both noted that the green surfaces themselves are not overly impressive. Coming from Yale's dramatic and bold greens, Scott was commenting on their simplicity. Simple, but if they are stimping at 14, it's a good thing. I noted that many of the greens are elevated and you can't see the surface, so I thought it made good design-sense that they are straightforward. Anyway, it's beer-thirty on US Open Friday, so it's time for me to push out of my studio and watch some golf. These are some of my better photos. Enjoy.

Getting Started

"A designer must study and understand the idiosyncrasies of a given project, for that is where initial inspirations and indications come from. Design is not about preconceived ideas, and it does not spring from the air – it is a studied reaction to a set of given conditions. Then intuition kicks in and brings fluidity and magic to the scheme."

Dan Kiley