Philadelphia’s Main Line is home to such museum pieces as
Hugh Wilson’s Merion East, and the William Flynn-Howard Toomey collaborations at
Manufacturers and Philadelphia Country Club’s Spring Mill course. Any new course
along this real estate certainly draws comparisons to these classics. But at
Inniscrone Golf Club, Gil Hanse and his associates, Jim Wagner and Bill
Kittleman, built a 6,657-yard, strategically original and a
love-of-things-ancient course that artfully connects it to Philadelphia
masterworks of long ago.
Your first round here will never be your most enjoyable one
because the holes contain such a lacework of psychological innuendo. There isn’t
time to react to all the false and true danger signals Hanse’s hazards send out.
The way in which 18 holes are routed and shaped gives rise,
you might concede, to a four-hour conversation between the architect and the
player. That notion would apply to any superior course, but somehow it was at
Inniscrone that the metaphor first struck me. The opening hole, a 400-yard
downhill par 4 with a grassy ridge rising left and a treeline pushed far back to
the right, impersonates a Friday-night poker dealer explaining the stakes and
calling for antes.
Play this or any other Hanse course and you’ll soon realize
his commitment to the idea that the story of a golf shot should not always—or
even usually—be over when the ball lands. “In Britain and Ireland, the game
begins when the ball gets on the ground,” he points out. “You don’t see your
ball land then look away, you keep watching.”
Inniscrone hosts the annual Excelon Invitational, in which
Jim Furyk and three other tour pros team with a small field of amateurs. This
event gives the builders a chance to watch consummate shotmakers interpreting
the challenge laid before them. “It was gratifying to see players like Furyk
standing at 130 yards and taking out 7-iron to play a touch shot,” says Hanse.
“Play that’s creative and unorthodox for American parkland golf—chipping to a
slope instead of to the hole, bumping the ball and letting it run—that’s what we
live for.”
At the long par-4 12th, three 170-yard approaches from wide
fairway can represent varied experiences. Far left, in a hollow, the shot is
somewhat blind and uphill. Dead center, the approach is unhindered and calls for
attack. Along the right third of this fairway, the flag is visible but the
putting surface that is blocked and made to seem dauntingly remote by an
otherwise out-of-play bunker at about 340 yards from the tee.
