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The Good Golf Course1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Itinerary | Home Of course, a conventional thinker probably wouldn’t build a course in Inverness in the first place. The facades of the white wooden houses and businesses that line the main street bear the scars of years of financial difficulty. Paint is peeling, porches need mending. Since the turn of the 20th century, the economy of this town on Cape Breton’s west coast had been driven by coal mining. By the end of World War II, the mines began to decline and by the 1960s they’d disappeared altogether. The dissolution of the town’s primary industry left it searching for a fallback that could replace some of the lost jobs. In the meantime, the mine site lay still, as if time had stopped. A two-hour drive north, the fabled Highlands Links course (designed by Stanley Thompson) has been, for 70 years, a sustaining factor for the communities of the Ingonish area. The Inverness economic development committee began to ask themselves the obvious question about the land that sat empty just off the main street. Could golf save their town as well? Before golf can rescue whole communities, however, it has to rescue itself. The current model of the American “golf town” is the gated community, set off in self-exile from the rush of the real world. On some links courses in the U.K., the proximity of the town is part of the fabric of the game, and an extremely errant shot might have a chance of hitting the local pub. But on newer North American courses you’re more likely to hit someone’s retirement bungalow. |
