A stairway to Heaven? No, that’s a stairway into Hell — “The Devil’s Asshole” – the aptly named pot bunker at the par-3 10th hole of Pine Valley Golf Club in southern New Jersey. Pine Valley is ranked No. 1 among the 200 courses that make up Golf Digest’s 2017-18 America’s Best Courses.
(Editor’s note: The 2017-18 Golf Digest listing of America’s Best Courses is in the February, 2017 issue, with Dustin Johnson on the cover, that is currently on newsstands.)
By JOHN FINERAN
@genefin
Years ago when I was trying out this profession for a living, I came upon a favorite football coach of mine at a favorite place of mine.
The late Glenn Edward Schembechler Jr. – known better as “Bo” – was playing in a summer golf alumni outing for his employer, the University of Michigan, at one of the state’s better known playgrounds, Point O’Woods Golf & Country Club – known better as “The Point.”
My boss at the time at the South Bend Tribune, Bill Moor, who at the time thought golf was a waste of a good walk, dispatched me, as his spring- and summer-time fairways reporter, to cover the competition – Bo vs. The Point.
The Point – a Robert Trent Jones design of over 6,800 yards to be played at par 71 – won handily, much to the usually competitive Bo’s delight.
Yes, delight. “You’re happy shooting 101?” I asked him.
“Yes,” Our Man Bo replied. “If I broke 100, my alumni would think I’m spending too much time on the golf course and not enough time getting ready for the University of Notre Dame.”
There aren’t many 18th holes prettier than the one found during the autumn at Point O’Woods Golf & Country Club near Benton Harbor, Mich. The Point is ranked No. 185.
Priorities – successful folks all have them. Schembechler adored former coach Ara Parseghian, who had Bo on his staff at Northwestern before departing for Notre Dame where he won national championships and played scratch golf at South Bend Country Club. The Michigan-Notre Dame series renewed itself because Bo and Ara wanted to compete against each other in a sport where they truly were equals. Sadly, Parseghian retired to the golf course at age 51 and never matched coaching wits with Bo, who retired in 1989 at age 60.
Shortly after he stopped roaming the sidelines in 1989 at age 60, Our Man Bo took up the game of golf. He got good enough at it during his winter visits to Boca Grande, Fla., that he joined nearby Coral Creek Golf Club, one of the well-kept secrets of golf-course architect Tom Fazio, whose name is on 35 of the 200 courses listed in Golf Digest’s 2017-18 listing of America’s Best.
At Coral Creek, Schembechler was not just another Bo – indeed a member there had a black Labrador similarly named that had the run of the little pro shop and course. Coral Creek had its share of predators – eagles and alligators among them – who feared both creatures named Bo.
Occasionally, they got mixed up. Once, when the dog was getting into some mischief, the Coral Creek pro admonished him – “Bo, get out of there” – only to look up and see the real Bo stopped dead in his tracks outside the men’s locker room.
“Coach, I didn’t mean you – I meant the dog,” the pro pleaded for forgiveness.
“Ah, that’s all right,” Our Man Bo replied. “I’ve been compared to animals before.”
Ah, the stories you gain through the years visiting golf courses around the country and sometimes playing them. I never could have imagined that when an old neighbor, Mike Mihalick, put a wooden-shafted mashie in my hands as a 12-year-old to calm the demons within me that I would spend my adult lifetime covering the game played by true sportspersons of whom honesty and integrity were demanded.
One of them, Ben Crenshaw, and I share the same birthday – Jan. 11, 1952 – and I informed Crenshaw, who along with design partner Bill Coore have seven courses in the Top 200 (Sand Hills Golf Club in Mullen, Neb., is No. 9), of that when the pair were fashioning Warren Golf Course at Notre Dame, which will host the U.S. Senior Open in 2019.
“Obviously, Ben, you got the putting stroke and I got the writing stroke,” I joked, knowing full well that many believe Ben, a noted historian, got the writing stroke, too.
I’ve had few successes playing the game. My one and only hole-in-one came while I played a solo round at Fineran Country Club, a 3-hole course I laid out and kept manicured on our homestead where Clover Lane and Carteret Road intersect in Livingston, N.J. I eventually graduated to Valley View Golf Course in East Hanover, where I walked a Fourth of July round and got sunstroke.
Yes, the author got a chance every so often to test his game on America’s top golf courses. Here he is the day after the 1985 Masters play the par-3, 155-yard 12th hole at Augusta National Golf Club. His tee shot ended up in Rae’s Creek.
Sadly, Fineran Country Club, which had a zoysias grass putting surface, and Valley View are no longer. Valley View is now the world headquarters of Mondelēz International (formerly Kraft and Nabisco). I think of it whenever I eat a couple of Oreos or pass it on the way to my parents’ eternal resting place across the street from Valley View’s sad corporate remains.
Of the 200 courses in the latest Golf Digest listing, I’ve visited 21, often in the company of my father, whose unique golf grip featured his index fingers running parallel down opposite sides of the shaft. Dad loved walking the U.S. Open fairways at Shinnecock Hills (No. 4), Oakmont (No. 5), Winged Foot West (No. 10) and Baltusrol Lower (No. 39) following the world’s best golfers while his son chronicled their strokes and words.
In the late August of 1985, father and son drove 200 miles round trip each of two days to Pine Valley Golf Club in southern New Jersey to see the Walker Cup Match featuring a team of United States amateurs that included Scott Verplank and Davis Love III against a Great Britain and Ireland team that was led by Colin Montgomerie.
Dad was duly impressed – not by the golf played (the U.S. won 13-11) but by the course itself. He loved seeing “Hell’s Half Acre” – a fairway-wide hazard of 100 yards in length ending at the 380-yard mark on the par-5, 580-yard seventh hole. And he found the nickname for the deep-faced, small bunker that requires wooden steps to get to your errant shot short and right of the par-3, 161-yard 10th hole very appropriate. The bunker at the 10th is called “The Devil’s asshole.”
“Who designed that course, a mountain goat?” laughed Dad after finally catching his breath from walking the course.
I explained to Dad that Pine Valley was the one and only design of George Arthur Crump, a Philadelphia hotelier and amateur golfer who bought the original 184 acres on which were sand dunes, marshland and thousands of pine trees. Crump then brought in some of the notable golf architects of the time – H.S. Colt, A.W. Tillinghast, George Thomas Jr., Walter Travis, Hugh Wilson, Alan Wilson, William Flynn, Alister MacKenzie, Donald Ross, Perry Maxwell and Charles Blair Macdonald – to advise him how to shape and construct the holes and how to route them.
The task of building Pine Valley, which had become known as “Crump’s Folly,” was so arduous that it may have contributed to Crump’s suicide in early 1918 with four holes still to be finished.
A low handicap is required to play Pine Valley, and my handicap never was low enough. But the respect I have for it remains in the 32 years since I walked the course, and those who determine Golf Digest’s rankings share that respect. Pine Valley and Augusta National Golf Club, designed by Alister MacKenzie and Bobby Jones in 1933 and home of the Masters since 1934, have alternated the No. 1 ranking through the years.
My first Masters assignment came earlier in 1985 and I got a chance on the day after Bernhard Langer’s first victory there to play Augusta National. My handicap didn’t matter to club officials as long as I completed the round in four holes, which my playing partners and I did while walking the course with our provided club caddies.
If I recall I shot a 109 and an “X” on 10 because I hit my approach at No. 10 in a bed of azaleas to the right of the green and didn’t want to go searching for the ball and slashing it out. At the par-3, 155-yard 12th hole in Amen Corner, I hit my tee shot so far right and into Rae’s Creek that it was easier to get to the green via the Nelson Bridge in front of the 13th tee than to walk over the Hogan Bridge just off the 11th green.
I’ve also played Baltusrol’s Lower Course (No. 39) that is about seven miles from Livingston in the fall of 1992, a year before the club hosted its last U.S. Open and a good month after my last round. The opening hole, listed at 478 yards, plays as a par 5 for the members. I split the fairway with a drive and told my caddy that might be my best shot of the day and that he’d be well paid for all the walking he would do that day. I then proceeded to hit a 225-yard approach onto the green with a 5-wood 15 feet from the hole and just missed my eagle attempt.
As you walk up the 18th fairway at Castle Pines Golf Club (No. 42) in Colorado, one of the best milk shakes in the world awaits you in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains.
By round’s end, after gasping my way up the closing par 5s – the 647-yard 17th and 553-yard 18th – I managed to shoot my body temperature – 98.
At Castle Pines (No. 42) in the foothills of the Rockies, I aimed my tee shot on the downhill 644-yard, par-5 hole at Pike’s Peak.
At Butler National (No. 45) outside Chicago, I managed to avoid getting hit by lightning, something Lee Trevino and Jerry Heard couldn’t do during the 1975 Western Open.
When I finished my Media Day round at Medinah No. 3 (No. 48) for the 1990 U.S. Open, there wasn’t a crowd waiting for me to high-five as there was for champion Hale Irwin later that summer.
Crooked Stick (No. 94) in Carmel, Ind., Long Cove (No. 148) on Hilton Head Island, S.C., and Wolf Run (No. 180) in Zionsville, Ind., all have felt the wrath of my clubs and brought joy to my heart.
NBA great Michael Jordan once competed in the Western Amateur at Point O’Woods Golf & Country Club in southwestern Michigan. His partner for the first two rounds, Phil Mickelson, won the title.
But the memories of Point O’Woods (No. 185), where I once interviewed Our Man Bo and where I scored my first real eagle – driver, 5-wood and 25-foot putt on the par-5, 493-yard 15th hole – remains No. 1 in my heart even if it has fallen out of favor of those doing the rankings for Golf Digest. For many years when it was hosting the Western Amateur 38 straight years from 1971 through 2008, the Robert Trent Jones design was ranked comfortably among the top 60. For a variety of reasons, The Point’s ranking tumbled and it was eventually out of the 2015-16 rankings.
From 1975 through 2000, I covered most of the Western Amateurs at The Point and saw a Who’s Who of golf win the title – Andy Bean, Bobby Clampett, Hal Sutton, Scott Verplank, Chris DiMarco, Phil Mickelson, Justin Leonard and Tiger Woods.
Sometimes you didn’t know who was going to show. Like in 1991, when Mickelson was at the top of his amateur game. Lefty played his first two rounds at The Point with some guy who played professional basketball – Michael Jordan. Jordan missed the cut; Mickelson won the tournament.
Verplank won in 1985 in July and later that summer would become the first amateur to win on the PGA Tour in 30 years by winning the Western Open at Butler National. He then completed his memorable summer by helping the U.S. team in the Walker Cup Match at Pine Valley.
The 1985 Western Amateur is when I became well acquainted with one participant’s famous father who was on the “Eat To Win” diet but had struggled that summer in the majors – missing the cut at the U.S. Open and The Open Championship.
Who knew that Jack Nicklaus liked butter pecan ice cream? Nicklaus enjoyed the butter pecan ice cream cones he ate at Point O’Woods Golf & Country Club near Benton Harbor, Mich., in 1985. Now he sells his own brand of it.
Jack Nicklaus saw me eating some butter pecan ice cream out of a waffle cone and asked where I got it so he could get one.
“There’s a guy who makes homemade ice cream and brings it every day to sell at a stand by the first tee,” I told Jack who was weighing less than 180 pounds at the time. “Surely, you can’t have ice cream on your diet.”
The Golden Bear roared, “The great thing about this diet is you can have as much of one thing as you want as long as you are careful watching the other foods you eat. I’m love butter pecan and I’m going to get some.”
I told him I’d get him an ice cream cone so he could continue watch Jackie compete in the second round. So there we were at the 11th hole, sharing butter pecan cones (I broke down for another for myself) and sharing my memories of him winning the U.S. Open at Baltusrol in 1980 in the first major I ever covered.
“Everyone was writing you off that year and you won at Baltusrol and later that summer won the PGA at Oak Hill,” I reminded him between licks.
Nicklaus knew where I was going, what I was hinting at, as he took a lick on his cone.
“You know, I’m not done yet,” he told me on July day in 1985 before taking another lick.
The following spring, on April 13, 1986 at the 50th Masters at Augusta National, Jack William Nicklaus, at age 46 and with son Jackie on his bag, finally off his diet, shot a final round of seven-under-par 65 to leap over a Who’s Who of Golf on the leaderboard – Seve Ballesteros, Greg Norman, Bernhard Langer, Nick Price, Tommy Nakajima, Tom Kite, Tom Watson and Sandy Lyle – and win his sixth and final Masters.
Yep, never underestimate the power of an ice cream cone at one of America’s great golf courses. Butter pecan and The Point.
They added to Jack Nicklaus’ career.
They helped make mine.
-30-
(Of all the sports John Fineran has covered in more than 40 years as a sports journalist, he prefers golf because of the people he has met, most of them men and women with plenty of integrity and honesty, and the courses he has been able to play. Fortunately, he writes about the game better than he plays it.)