The entrance road to the golf course is 55 miles long. One member
called the journey the longest hour in golf—except that the land is stunningly
beautiful, and along the way you cross west into the Mountain Time Zone and so
arrive the same hour you left. Out here in the middle of central Nebraska’s Sand
Hills, the grass-covered dunes unfold forever.
There aren’t many golf courses here, about midway between Omaha
and Denver, some 300 miles from each city. Welcome to the Sand Hills, 18,000
square miles—an area the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined—comprising
the largest grass covered dunesland in the world.
Cattle ranchers have been squeezing a living out of this dry turf
for years. Understandably, they were suspicious when Dick Youngscap rode into
town with dreams of creating a golf club. The idea of an utterly simple,
links-inspired course at Sand Hills routed over native sand dunes appealed to
Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. The logistics were problematic—just getting to the
Sand Hills and back was a major undertaking. But after seeing the land, Coore
and Crenshaw knew they were onto something special.
Finding holes was the easy part. Over a two-square-mile area,
Coore and Crenshaw routed some 150 holes. There was no limit to the
possibilities on this barren, crumpled land. With its native washes and
blow-outs of sand, the dunes offered all manner of perfectly natural settings
for tees, fairways, bunkers and greens. The hard part was narrowing down the
choices and then puzzling through the connections in the chain.
Most of the holes were built the old-fashioned way: They were
found, with little more than some hand labor needed to get them into shape, plus
a few nudges from a light bulldozer here, a few days of digging with a shovel
there.
As Crenshaw likes to say, there are three basic elements to links
golf: sand, firm turf and wind. All of them are found in abundance in the center
of Nebraska. Surveying the course from the ground, you see ribbons of fairways,
a flag or two fluttering in the wind, and a few flashes of sand that approximate
the look of bunkers. Walk a few yards and change your angle of vision and the
course appears to metamorphose into an alien landscape. There are no standard
reference points out here; this is golf as basic as it gets.
There are some interesting oddities about the routing, dictated by
the flow of the land. The back nine is 700 yards longer than the front because
the incoming side sits on a broader, more open parcel. The front, by contrast,
weaves its way across somewhat more sharply etched terrain, including
back-to-back short par 4s. The 7th, only 283 yards, is driveable for the brave
of heart, but there’s a risk at having a go at a green that settles into the
cross-slope of a large, sandy mound.
The course offers all manner of changing surfaces: The second
green is a wildly contoured convex, while the putting green at the par-4 10th is
a sprawling, low-lying saucer. The drive at the 469-yard 15th must carry—or fade
around—a massive bunker. At the next tee, a 612-yard par 5, players stand on
what feels like a precipice and have to draw the ball over a raw wound of scrub.
Sand Hills feels more like a frontier outpost than a country club.
Daily life starts and ends at a modest clubhouse that sports a fine restaurant,
a comfortable bar and a tiny changing room where you park your street shoes. No
one even worries about tee times, since there’s not a clock to be found on the
grounds.
