LAKE COUNTY — I spent the past week in the Great Midwest, visiting family as well as attending a college reunion. My journeys took me back and forth from Chicago to Milwaukee to Grand Rapids and back again. From the car driving perspective, this is as good a time as any to visit that section of the country. Gasoline prices are in the $2.59 range even though there”s not a refinery in sight. They probably get their gas from Martinez, just like the rest of us.
The other unique issue that I experienced during my Midwest sojourn was the fairly recent phenomenon of longtime established private golf courses opening their doors to public golfers like myself. In fact, it is now such a buyers market for linksters that I was able to pick and choose to the point that I played a pair of Donald Ross designed courses, one outside Chicago and the other in Grand Rapids, with green fees no higher than $40.
Ross, along with C.B. MacDonald, Alister Mackenzie, Seth Raynor, and A.W. Tillinghast would have to be considered amongst a short list of the godfathers of American golf architecture. Ross is best known for his design of Pinehurst in North Carolina, a past and future United States Open site. He is the architect of record for more than 400 courses (the Donald Ross Society includes 407 member clubs) including U.S. Open sites Oakland Hills and Oak Hill, as well as Aronimink, Beverly and Seminole, all past USGA sites.
Ross spent most of his time in the Midwest and South and his only California course is Peninsula Golf and Country Club in San Mateo.
Ravisloe Country Club in Homewood, Ill., some 20 miles south of downtown Chicago, is a most unique story. It first opened in 1901 as a relatively non-descript course. The members hired Ross to completely renovate the course in 1917, and when it reopened in 1919, it was heralded as a classic gem due to its shot making values.
What makes Ravisloe interesting is that for more than 100 years it was a private country club with a decidedly Jewish membership. In the early years of the 20th century, many big city country clubs had exclusively rules that prevented Jews from belonging to their club along with other minority groups. As a result, many urban areas had clubs that were heavily Jewish. In the case of Chicago it was Ravisloe, just like in the case of San Francisco it was Lake Merced Country Club.
In 2002, Ravisloe was restored by architect David Esler, reintroducing many of Ross” design features such as hidden fairway bunkers surrounded by moguls and mounding, cross bunkers, deceptive distances and fall away slopes around the greens that constitute collection areas.
Membership at Ravisloe fell off severely around 2006, the result of an aging membership as well as a financially struggling contingent of the club that was victimized by the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme scandal. The end result was that Ravisloe started to open its doors to people like me who would willingly pay to play at a well known course that exuded charm and history.
Everything about the layout at Ravisloe smacked of 1920s golf. Although a relatively short 6,500 yards from the tips, there were clever dog legs, fairway landing areas pinched by tile mounds and moguls, and putting greens with subtle difficulty. Ravisloe had some design quirks that were commonplace some 100 years ago such as back-to-back par fives and back-to-back par threes on the front nine. The 10th tee wasn”t near the clubhouse.
The distance from green to the next tee was extremely short, oftentimes no more than 10 yards away.
As a golf course collector, I go to a lot of neat courses and then cross them off my list.
In the case of Ravisloe, I will return. It was that great a golfing experience although I have to add that being the first golfer off that day at 6 a.m. and playing the front nine in relative seclusion added to the experience. Having no three putts, hitting 11 of 12 fairways, and carding a 76 made it all very memorable.
The Highlands Golf Club on the southeast side of Grand Rapids is another former Ross course, first opened in 1908. The Highlands too was a private course for close to 100 years and during the 1990s served as the tournament site for the PGA Senior Tour. Now owned by the Elks Club, Highlands is a totally public venue with charity scramble tournaments, business leagues and local amateur tourneys.
Over time, some of the Ross features at The Highlands have disappeared. While playing the course, you could tell by the mounding where a cross bunker or a greenside sand trap used to be. Some of those have gone by the wayside because of the difficulty of maintaining them or because the new management wanted to make the course easier for the golf playing public, resulting in smoother play and faster rounds.
The Highlands wasn”t the total golf experience that Ravisloe was, but it is a visually impressive course with well designed and unique holes. I played Highlands with my brother and nephew, both triple digit golfers, and they were able to enjoy the course without losing a slew of golf balls.
My Midwest golf experience of the last eight days at former private country clubs correlates to what is going on throughout the country including Northern California.
Auburn Country Club in Sacramento is now open to the public. Another Sacramento area course, Granite Bay, is open to the public on Mondays. While I don”t foresee public golfers being able to go to the Olympic Club to pay and play, I think more second level clubs such as Santa Rosa, Yolo Fliers, Tracy and others will go that route to increase revenues during financially troubling times for golf establishments. In the end, its win-win as golf clubs can keep their doors open and linksters like myself get to tee it up on old-style Donald Ross gems.
