BOWLING GREEN, Fla. — If golf has a superpower, it’s the ability to fill the cracks in your mind and feast on your anxieties. First-shirt nervousness. Thinking too much about a putt. New players anxiously try to understand where to position themselves, where to go, what to do. Experienced players, exasperated by every mistake, see the score they hoped to score slip away. All the worry about playing too slowly or waiting too long.
Then there’s the score. An arbitrary number decided by someone you’ve never met. You thought you played that hole well, but this little card says you made a bogey. The word originates from a Scottish term for devil. So now your terrible comedy is the embodiment of a fallen angel, expelled from heaven, abusing free will with the evil of him. Beelzebul is playing.
But now imagine receiving a scorecard with no criteria. Some tees at 50 and 56 yards. Others at 101 and 111. And 164. And 218. And even 293. A hole that can be played from 89 or 187. And on this card, a glaring omission. Do not stop. Just play. Play a game against a friend. Grab a couple of clubs, a few drinks and go. The winner of each hole decides where to tee off on the next hole. You can play a six-hole course that surrounds a lovely oak grove. Or play a 13-hole loop. Or play all 19. Who cares?
“You know,” Ben Crenshaw, the legendary golfer turned course architect, recently said, “this game can be played differently.”
So why don’t we do it more often?
The opening of a new course in Central Florida once again makes the issue difficult to ignore. The Chain, a “short course” created by Crenshaw and longtime design partner Bill Coore, will open this month at Streamsong Golf Resort. Guests can currently play 13 holes total for preview play. The hope is to open all 19 fields by December 1st, provided the terrain allows it.
The markers, which date back to when the property was a phosphate mine, provide golfers with guidance on where to tee off on each hole at The Chain. (Courtesy of Tacy Briggs/Troncoso)
Streamsong is already well known for its three eclectic traditional 18-hole courses built by the current holy triumvirate of design firms: the Red (also a Coore/Crenshaw), the Blue (Tom Doak) and the Black (Gil Hanse/ Jim Wagner). . The property, a converted phosphate mine, was considered at risk when construction of the first two fields began in 2012. Bowling Green, Florida, is an hour southeast of Tampa and nearly two hours southwest of Orlando. Even if it seems remote, it’s still a fire sale. Who, in a state with more than 1,200 golf courses, would drive all the way here to play golf? The project went forward, however, because the goal was broader than building a golf resort: it was to commercially develop reclaimed land that would otherwise have little other use. It worked because Streamsong’s three courses are so good and so diverse that it has secured a place among the new generation of golf destination resorts like Bandon Dunes in Oregon, The Prairie Club in Nebraska’s Sand Hills and Cabot Links in Nova Scotia .
Like The Cradle at Pinehurst and others, each of these resorts features a short, unique route. Now the same goes for Streamsong too. Function has become a prerequisite for resort life. For guests, playing (especially walking) 36 holes over consecutive days may be easier said than done. It’s much more fun to play 18, then take the short course for a round. For resorts, a short course is a draw, an extra bonus for the wallet, uses little land and, most importantly, encourages additional nights of stay-and-play.
The Chain is a portrait of why it works. Streamsong guests walk across a pedestrian bridge from the hotel, stop at a new 2-acre putting course (The Bucket), grab a bag to carry a few clubs, and play on a 3,000-yard walking course of holes that are — here’s the key: good enough to match the quality of the facility’s three main courses. Like any good short course, its character comes from its green complexes. Some wild and huge. Others are pared down and delicate. There is a certain personality in greenery, born of architectural freedom.
“You can take more liberties, or risks, so to speak, to do greens and surroundings that you might not be able to do on a regulation course, where you’re trying to adapt to people of such different degrees or both strength and ability.” Coore said.
Highlights include a bunker positioned in the center of the 6th green, which evokes the famous Riviera sixth, and the long 11th, a hole that can extend nearly 200 yards above a lake to a giant punchbowl green.
Ben Crenshaw, left, and Bill Coore stroll the property of The Chain and the adjacent putting course, The Bucket, during an on-site visit to Streamsong. (Courtesy of Tacy Briggs/Troncoso)
But the real highlight is what The Chain, like so many of these bizarre short courses, offers players. It’s different. In a sport so focused on individual pursuit, you and a few friends instead walk together, talk together, drink together. In a sport so obsessed with numbers, there is no real score. In a sport that takes so much time, you finish it in an hour. In a sport so dictated by strength and length, skill gaps are leveled.
It is, in many ways, a much more fun version of golf.
So why isn’t this version more widely available? Why are there no publicly accessible copies of these courses originating in metropolitan areas? Why can’t golf change?
Well, there’s a chance we’ll get there.
“I think it’s just a matter of time now,” said Andy Johnson, golf architecture writer and founder of The Fried Egg. “Resorts are innovators in golf because they are more incentivized to create. Municipalities and public facilities have more limitations and regulations, so there is less desire to adapt. But we often see a lot of golf course trends that emerge in private space and resort space eventually translate into public space. Public golf, and municipal golf, in particular, is a very leader-following industry. So I think the boom in short courses will also come to public golf.”
Short courses make incredibly sense in metropolitan areas bogged down by hyper-exclusive courses and limited public options. They just need to be built there. Chicago, Washington DC, Boston, Philadelphia: cities that require an hour’s drive to camp, a five-and-a-half-hour ride on a crowded route, and an hour’s drive home. One imagines that these players are hungry for that option. The most densely populated areas have the greatest number of potential golfers. There’s a reason Callaway paid $2.66 billion for Top Golf in 2021: Crowds of people go there because hitting golf balls is fun. Anyone who wants to go from driving range-style Top Golf to learning the game on the golf course must deal with the tension that comes with playing with 14 clubs on a crowded and daunting 18-hole course, dealing with all the worries. and embarrassment over golf’s excessive rules and customs. Instead, imagine new players being able to relax and understand how golf courses can be experienced.
Based on Johnson’s explanation of the top-down composition of golf course architecture, perhaps we will see the success of courses like The Chain finally push local municipalities and private developers to renovate pre-existing, anonymous public courses in alternative short routes.
This, in turn, could create an entirely new entry point into the game. Yes, par 3 courses already exist, but these short resort-style courses designed by top architects are nothing like what the average beginner has seen: short doesn’t have to mean simple. It’s a completely different experience. One that kids and newcomers would probably be much more inclined to want to revisit.
“You’re showing the funniest version of golf,” Johnson said. “Bold design features. Fresh vegetables. “People see the ball rolling and moving.”
This is implausible. Short design sources require only small plots of land and can be built anywhere: flat terrain, rolling terrain, rougher terrain. All you need is a tee space and a green space.
Golfers at the 11th hole at The Chain can play a shot across the water to a punchbowl green, with the Streamsong hotel in the shade. (Courtesy of Matt Hahn)
Some early examples are worth keeping an eye out for. The Loop at Chaska, located just outside Minneapolis and designed by Artisan Golf Design’s lead architect Benjamin Warren, will open in 2024 as a 1,200-yard, nine-hole course with eight par 3s, one par 4 and is the first of its kind expressly configured for adaptive golfers. The Park in West Palm Beach, Florida is a Hanse/Wagner-designed course that is the result of a public-private partnership between the City of West Palm Beach and the West Palm Golf Park Trust that resurrected a shuttered municipal course. In addition to an 18-hole course, there is a nine-hole par 3 that is lighted for evening play.
There are others.
There should be more.
But golf, as is often the case, moves slowly. The best chance for change is that the numbers eventually add up to create inevitable change. While renovating an entire public course can cost anywhere from $5 million to $15 million, renovating or building a high-end par-3 course can likely be done for less than a couple million dollars. What makes the most sense for that community?
“It’s a more palatable expense for a parks department or a municipality, and they would create something that will bring in revenue,” Johnson said. “These things make sense. There simply needs to be more momentum with them and more examples from them.”
Then we might see what so many hope for.
A different way to play.
(Illustration: Sean Reilly / Atletico; Photo: Courtesy of Streamsong Resort, Matt Hahn)