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The Good Golf Course1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Itinerary | Home
It’s no coincidence that Inverness looks (and sounds) like it should be in Scotland, where golf was born. Mike Keiser, the man behind the famous Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon, is breaking ground here this month on Cabot Links, a links-style course that some say is poised to become one of the country’s best. Along with Canadian entrepreneur Ben Cowan-Dewar, new-breed golf architect Rod Whitman and some very inventive town planners, Mike Keiser is about to recycle the hopes of this tiny town and, possibly, change the future of the game. “GLFSGR8” said a New York State vanity plate spotted not long ago on a large sedan. Yes, golf’s great, but is golf good? It certainly hasn’t been the greenest of games lately, an irony not lost on environmental groups. Then there’s the argument that golf simply puts too much valuable land at the service of too few. It wasn’t always this way. The earliest Scottish links courses were situated – “built” would be the wrong word, since the land was used just as it was – on the sandy, non-arable scrub that “linked” the beach and sea to higher, more fertile ground. Sheep and cattle grazed on links land, and some historians surmise that the first golf clubs were shepherds’ staffs and that the original Top-Flites were bits of dried sheep dung. Even bunkers seem to have been created by sheep, which would burrow into hillsides and expose the sand beneath the grass. Great designers like A. W. Tillinghast, who fashioned the extraordinary Winged Foot Golf Club, or Canadian Stanley Thompson (the man behind the Fairmont Banff Springs Golf Course), had a genius for rustic lay-of-the-land courses, following the natural contours of the sites. Playing golf on such golden-age tracks is as much an esthetic pursuit as a physical one.
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