Importing links
Pete Dye has spent nearly half a century importing the gambits he
saw on Scottish links—from pot bunkers to blind greens to “sleepers,”
the wooden
planks that shore up the famed island green of the
17th hole
at TPC Sawgrass.
Today’s minimalist
architects, by
creating holes
emerging from the terrain rather
than stamping
them upon it, also pay
homage to the
original links.
Indeed, some of America’s most highly regarded courses incorporate
features derived straight from the links, beginning
with
Augusta
National and
Pinehurst No. 2. Sadly, the
U.S. is also
home to many less
successful
imitations.
More than 300
American courses have names that
incorporate the
word
links,
and only a handful of them play remotely
like links.
On the other hand, it is possible to duplicate—or nearly
duplicate—links conditions in the U.S. and elsewhere, even in
areas
nowhere near
the sea. Prairie Dunes and Sand
Hills are
in American’s
heartland, yet could be
in
Fife or Ayrshire.
Courses such as these
compel us to wrestle
once again with
the
definition. If it looks like a
links and plays like a links, maybe it
should
be a
links, regardless of
when, where and how it came
into
being.
After all, can anyone say Newport Country Club, site of last
year’s Women’s U.S. Open, with its seaside setting and fast-running,
unwatered
fairways, is less a links than England’s Formby,
where most
of the holes are
bordered by trees? What
about the
great triumvirate on
eastern Long Island:
Shinnecock Hills,
National Golf Links and
Maidstone?
All look, feel and play
like links, right down to the
buffeting coastal winds. Then
there are
Australia’s
great sand-based
courses: Royal
Melbourne, Kingston Heath and
Royal
Adelaide. Who can
deny
that they provide a true
links experience?
Among the most revered modern courses is Kingsbarns—20 minutes
from St. Andrews and overlooking the North Sea. But a few of its holes
are
set on clay-based farmland. Is it a true links? How about
the new
Castle Course
at St. Andrews—with almost no
sand under
its fairways?
These are all worthwhile questions, and LINKS is excited to be the
first to announce a group that will have some
answers: the
newly formed
Links
Association, a
non-profit group dedicated
to the promotion,
preservation and
protection of links golf.
Links Association
Founded by Brian Keating, developer of Scotland’s new Machrihanish
Dunes, and Malcolm Campbell, former editor of Golf
Monthly
(U.K.), the
association will be made up of the owners
of the world’s
links. Its
first task
will be to reach
a definitive, 21st
century definition of a
links; its second
will be to apply
that standard to identify the
precise number of links courses
in the world. (The
current estimate is
around 270—of the
approximately 30,000
courses in the world.)
Already, the association has enlisted onto its board the
aforementioned Thomson. One of the most important missions for
the
group, which
will launch later this summer, will
be to
help protect
links courses—from both
nature and
man. Because
of their location,
links are vulnerable to the
vagaries
of
weather, tidal movement and
climate
change. Crail, Dornoch, Nairn,
Troon and
Turnberry already are
battling the elements.
The Links Association also will keep links courses abreast of best
practices in agronomy, coastal reinforcement and turf
management, and
through an
annual awards program,
will
recognize the clubs and courses
where the playing
qualities of
a true links are best maintained.
It’s an ambitious project, but one well worth undertaking—for the
good of the world’s most magical courses and for the sake of
defining—once and
for all—what we mean by the word
links.
