Royal Adelaide Golf Club

Once you start to get really serious about playing the top 100 golf courses in the world, you start to look beyond the obvious courses located in places you might otherwise travel to. That’s when the maps come out and you try to figure out where places like Hutchinson, Kansas (Prairie Dunes) and Adelaide, Australia are.

A time-space trivia question to start. Where in the world can you fly for one hour and arrive in only thirty minutes? The answer: Melbourne to Adelaide. Adelaide is a city of 1.5 million people located in South Australia, west of Melbourne. Their clock is set thirty minutes off those of the big cities on Australia’s east coast. Thus, when it is 3:00pm in Sydney and Melbourne, it is only 2:30pm in Adelaide, an interesting quirk.

Royal Adelaide Golf Club (ranked #50 in the world) was founded in 1870 and is the oldest golf club in Australia. This current location in Seaton is the club’s third. This course was first laid out in 1903 and the original designers were H.L. Rymill, and C.L. Gardiner. And, like many of the great courses in this country, the course was changed by Dr. Alister MacKenzie in 1926. In the middle of MacKenzie's Melbourne visit he traveled by train to Royal Adelaide for four days.

One of the things you notice immediately at Royal Adelaide is the Grange-to-Adelaide train line. It runs through the middle of the course including right by the club house and first hole. It is a pretty active train line; we saw the petite two train cars shuttle back and forth from the suburbs to the beach about twenty times during the round. The train is only twenty yards from the thirteenth green and runs quietly so you really must look both ways before crossing it several times during your round, since there are no protective gates. Many of the great courses of the British Isles have train tracks running alongside the course; none have a train running through them.

Grange-to-Adelaide train running through Royal Adelaide by the first tee

The first hole plays with the train running down the left and is a relatively straight forward 342 meter (add 10 percent for yards) dogleg left hole with one well placed bunker in front of a small green. In general, the greens at Royal Adelaide are small, and the breaks are very subtle. We had trouble all day reading the fast greens.

Approach to the first green

The second hole plays on the other side of the train tracks and is a 468 meter par five. I hit my tee shot onto the tracks, which is not O.B., and it bounced down the line and back into the path running alongside. You can see the distinctive reddish sand at Royal Adelaide, the natural color.

The well protected 2nd green

Many golf books, including Planet Golf, rate the third hole as one of the world’s great par fours. The small green sits among sand dunes set in a narrow hollow. It is only 265 meters and potentially drivable, but the shot is blind from the tee. The fairway gets progressively narrower the closer you get to the green. I agree that it is a real cracker, as they say down here.

Blind tee shot, Royal Adelaide third hole

The area around the green, like many at Royal Adelaide, has closely mown areas for chipping, with a Pinehurst style upside-down bowl green. The narrow green is set at an obtuse angle to the line of play. The third is a tantalizing hole, the type where as you are walking off the green you start to think, "I should have hit a driver," or you begin to imagine a dozen different ways you could try to birdie or eagle this hole, or like the greatest holes, perhaps make a six or seven if you get too aggressive...

The beautiful third green at Royal Adelaide, from behind

The fourth is also a very good hole. It is a 369 meter par four with a blind tee shot. You have to hit over a grassy knoll to a hole that doglegs to the left slightly.

The blind tee shot of the par four fourth hole

The fourth fairway has many humps and bumps that send the ball ricocheting.

The fairway, fourth hole

MacKenzie’s major contribution was to re-route the course through the dunes on the central part of the property. MacKenzie's re-routing eliminated the back and forth across railroad tracks. Aside from the back tee on fourteenth, all holes now play on either one side or the other. MacKenzie said, "If the suggestions put forward for the reconstruction of the Royal Adelaide course are acted upon, it will be superior to most, if not all, English championship courses." He wasn't far off.

When you drive into the Royal Adelaide property, it has the flat and wide-open appearance of a links course, similar to when you first pull in to many classic links courses such as Lythan & St. Annes, St. Andrews or Royal Liverpool. It doesn’t look like much, but it is.

The seventh hole is a 148 meter uphill par three and is guarded by the “big six” bunkers. The green slopes back-to-front and it is a standout hole.

The well bunkered, elevated green, seventh hole

As you would expect from MacKenzie, Royal Adelaide is a well routed course that offers a lot of variety. Long par fours mix with shorter ones and great dogleg holes. This variation is important to keep shot variety interesting when the wind is blowing. Another interesting hole is the 483 meter par five ninth, which first doglegs to the left and then to the right. It is seen from the green below.

Ninth green looking back at fairway

The back nine reminded me a lot of golf in the Hamptons, although you cannot see the water from anywhere on the course. The course feels a bit like Maidstone around holes nine through fourteen.

Royal Adelaide is an easy walk and has so many pine trees that it has a fragrant smell of pine as you stroll about. I really like sandy courses like this that have a great routing and don’t try too hard to impress you. The eleventh is another standout hole, called the "Crater Hole." It plays 354 meters from the back tees and is another blind tee shot (the third at Royal Adelaide) up a slight hill. The second shot is a beauty.

Once you climb the crest of the hill, you can see the amphitheatre setting the green is set in.

Approach shot to the eleventh hole

The 382 meter par four fourteenth is also listed as one of the top 100 golf holes in the world. If you can carry the plateau landing area you will have a clearer shot at the renowned humped green. The plateau is guarded within the right elbow of the dogleg by three bunkers that run consecutively from the edge of the fairway farther into a fourth. The plateau can also produce a downhill lie for a ball struck well enough.

The fairway is also unsheltered and open to the wind. The club has removed many trees over the last three years in an effort to return the course more to the way it originally played.

The fifteenth also ranks as one of the 500 greatest, and the challenges begin the moment you reach the tee. The double-dogleg fairway goes first left then right through a narrow chute of trees, and from the sheltered tee box it is virtually impossible to gauge the affect of the wind. The par five hole plays 450 meters and has very deep greenside bunkers.

Tee shot, par five fifteenth hole

What do you get when you combine a seaside links-style course with a MacKenzie routing and several of the world’s great golf holes? Simply, one of the best courses in the world. I count it among my personal favorites and can see why it is rated as one of the top fifty courses in the world. It’s hard to say that any course in the top fifty in the world is under-rated, but I think Royal Adelaide is. For example, I think it is a better and more interesting course than several of the courses on the list that rank above it such as Baltusrol, Oak Hill and Royal Birkdale. I think the same is also largely true of New South Wales and most of the premier courses in the Southern Hemisphere. If courses such as these got more exposure, their rankings in the world would undoubtedly rise.

My only complaint at Royal Adelaide is the brand new seventeenth hole that seems out of character with the rest of the course. It has a massively wide split fairway with huge bunkers in the middle that are in play off the tee. No other holes have wide fairways or bunkers in the middle. The green is very large, also out of character for this course. The hole seems more appropriate for Barnbougle Dunes than it does for Royal Adelaide.

The City of Adelaide

Despite being the place where Rupert Murdoch got his start, I liked Adelaide a great deal. Named after the English Queen consort of King William IV, Adelaide is filled with many charming Victorian buildings. As my regular readers know, I like to go for an early morning walk to explore cities I am traveling to for the first time. Adelaide is very walkable, has interesting architecture, a glorious Botanical Garden and a quaint University. It is one of the most livable cities I have ever been to. It has beautiful weather year round, minimal traffic and is close to Australia’s biggest wine growing region. It is big enough to have a lot of amenities but small enough to be intimate. As a university town it has a similar feel to Palo Alto, California or Stellenbosch, South Africa.

The city is the capital of South Australia, the only state that was freely settled. As a planned city, it was laid out in a grid system with wide boulevards, public squares and is surrounded entirely by parkland. As you can see from the pictures, it has more of a Western feel to it than the more cosmopolitan and urbane cities of Melbourne and Sydney.

Rundle Street, Adelaide

The travel writer Bill Bryson sums up Adelaide succinctly and perfectly: "It feels rather like an urban version of a gentlemen's club - comfortable, old-fashioned, quietly grand, slightly drowsy by mid-afternoon, redolent of another age. It is to Australia essentially what Australia is to the world - a place pleasantly regarded but far away and seldom thought about." Let’s hope it stays that way, I would hate to see it change.

Routing map of Royal Adelaide

If you are going to Australia to golf and are debating whether to make the side trip to Adelaide, by all means do.

Dodgy - Pure Golf 2010

It was my pleasure to host Dodgy on his travels through the U.S. recently. Dodgy, or more formally a modified 1988 Dodge Ram Family Wagon, was part of the traveling caravan accompanying the two "crazy kiwis," as I call them. Michael Goldstein and Jamie Patton are testing the age old question of "How much golf is too much?" They are 25 year-old lawyers from Nu Zillin, who have decided to travel the world and play golf for 365 straight days, raising money for the First Tee New Zealand. You can follow their daily travels here: Puregolf2010.

They began their quest at Kauri Cliffs, and spent an extended period of time in Australia before flying to the U.S. I met them at Kingston Heath and joined up with them again as they were coming through New Jersey. They were about as impressed with the New Jersey Turnpike as most people are, but it was good to see them again and we had a fabulous time, despite the fact that they made fun of my golf shoes and think I'm a sandbagger. 88 to 1.

Dodgy at Hidden Creek

Dodgy turned out to be quite a useful purchase for the crazy kiwis since it provided a backup when they have nowhere to stay overnight. They are doing their quest with a minimal amount of money. If they can't find a host for the night, then Dodgy it is. Thus far in their travels they have played Royal Melbourne, Cypress Point, San Francisco Golf Club, Riviera, Pine Valley, Winged Foot, Baltusrol and both Shinnecock and National Golf Links on the same day, with the lobster lunch! I tried to impress on them how lucky they were to be able to play them at all; that most folks never get the chance to play. Even more amazing, they have paid for only one greens fee thus far.

I don't know if you remember what you were doing when you were 25, but these two have maturity well beyond their years. They are observant, witty and have it all together. They are great company and very good golfers. I think their winning combination of traits makes them uniquely qualified to pull this journey off. Young professionals who are affable and articulate with serious golfing abilities. Plus, people generally have a fascination and fondness of Kiwis given their place in the world and charming accents. Can you imagine a couple of middle-aged Germans duffers trying to do this? Fat chance.

Their writing style is very good and it has provided a welcome relief every day to read their amusing posts and keep track of their travels. Some of their best examples are below:

1. In South Carolina: "A cantankerous swine of a woman hogged the shuffleboard table all night, so we didn’t get the chance to experience what looked like an interesting game."

2. "Sawgrass, really, is a deviant."

3. "As Dodgy pulled up at the TPC Louisiana track the hooter was going off to suspend play. "

4. Sleeping in Dodgy in Silicon Valley: "The state trooper that banged his 6 foot long torch on our window just as we’d got to sleep wasn’t too impressed. He probably thought we were glue sniffers. We’re not."

5. Traveling to Adelaide: "On these long straight roads the temptation is to cut loose, autobahn styles. Mike succumbed and was duly pinged by the South Australian Police Force; an unwelcome pouring of $220 down the drain."

We shall soon be closer to having the age old golf question answered. Can it be done? Can your body take golf every day for a year? Can your psyche? Can you retain your friendship and not kill your traveling companion? Will you be lucky enough to have flights run on time and not hit a thunderstorm? I wish them all the luck in the world and hope they are successful. They leave the United States tonight and are off to Scotland.

Godspeed and safe travels boys. Hope to see you in New Zealand this winter. Thanks for not burning the house down!

Is There a Free Drop From the Propeller?

To take advantage of the 4th of July weekend half day Friday, my friend and I scheduled an after-work tee time at our favorite local executive muni, Penmar in Venice, CA. It's a great little track that is always in great shape with lots of challenging holes. The only real downside to this course is that it is located within a stone throws away from Santa Monica Municipal Airport. Lots of small planes take off right over the golf course and can be a distraction. But after a while you get used to it and accept it as just background noise.

The night before our tee time we were shocked to discover that a small plane had crashed near the 8th hole. Apparently, the student pilot lost power on his ascent and the plane dropped like a rock. Unfortunately, he died but luckily no one else was hurt since golfers were still on the course. I guess it was bound to happen.

I assumed that the course would be closed the following day after such a tragic accident. However, we called the next morning about our tee time and the grumpy starter told us it was business as usual. They had already removed the wreckage! We played our round and indeed the only evidence of the crash was broken tree limbs and that police yellow tape surrounding the area. Air traffic was normal, if not even more busy than usual. It's just amazing how quickly things can return to normalcy.

Royal Melbourne Golf Club

A golf course ranked in the top ten in the world should be a special place and Royal Melbourne is. There are two courses at Royal Melbourne, an East and a West. The composite course at Royal Melbourne Golf Club (ranked #8 in the world) is made up of twelve holes from the West course and six holes from the East Course. The composite can only be played in tournaments, thus I played both the East and West courses on separate days.

Alister MacKenzie did the routings of both the East and West courses in the mid 1920s. Club member Alex Russell and superintendent Michael Morcon oversaw the implementation and building of the courses and thus are co-credited with the design since MacKenzie spent only 23 days there.

Like many great designs including Pine Valley and Sand Hills, the course has wide open fairways that are playable for the average golfer, yet demand the more skilled player to drive the ball into dangerous corners to get close to the flags. It is also compared to Pine Valley because it is a “second shot” course.

Like Pine Valley, the first thing that strikes you when seeing Royal Melbourne is the scale of the course. It has a “big” feel to it with holes routed around big sand dunes, forced carries over bracken fern and sweeping fairways with big doglegs. The World Atlas of Golf describes Royal Melbourne as a “kaleidoscope experience of obstacles and emotions.”

The second hole (West), is a 485 meter (add 10% for yards) par five of excellence with a formidable sand bunker off the tee on the left and a big sweeping fairway to a well protected green.

The approach to par five 2nd green

From the World Atlas: “The third hole is a Russell creation of 324 meters. Few holes of this length anywhere have its class. The tee shot aims out to a wide expanse except for the spread of sand on the right at the crown of the hill. Beyond, the fairway rushes down to a hollow before a two-tiered green that steps down from right to left, the third stage dropping into a final huge trap at its lowest and farthest left point.”

The 3rd green

The fifth and sixth holes on the West course are two great ones. The fifth is a 161 meter par three that plays up a hill. It has the MacKenzie look and feel of Cypress Point and is clearly well-bunkered. You also get a good sense from this picture of the massive scale the course achieves by using the elevation changes to maximum impact. This is a real man's course with some teeth.

The classic par three 5th hole

One of the distinctive features of Royal Melbourne are the hard edges many of the greens have, cut at a 90 degree angle to the bunkers. As a result, it is highly likely that a shot not perfectly hit will remain in the bunker or run through the green.

Detail of the 5th bunker and green

The 391 meter par four sixth is one of the best in golf. It plays from an elevated tee down into a sweeping valley over bracken and with tea trees protecting the right side. It’s classic risk-reward. If you can pull off a shot further to the right over the bracken and bunkers, you will have a much shorter shot to the demanding green set on top of a hill. The farther left the tee shot runs, the more it brings into play the deep bunker guarding the left side of the green.

The view from the tee at Royal Melbourne West's 6th

The green has appropriately been described as “lethal.”

The wicked 6th green at Royal Melbourne West

I also very much liked the West’s tenth hole, a 279 meter par four. Note the “big bertha” style bunker protecting those who dare to shoot directly for the green. Nobody rings a bell when you get to one of the greatest golf holes in the world. There also isn’t a sign telling you; there doesn’t need to be. You just know it’s a fabulous hole because it bowls you over. The tenth is a hole like that. It was the inspiration for Tom Doak’s world-class short par four fourth hole at Barnbougle Dunes.

The short par four tenth from the tee

The World Atlas of Golf describes the tenth hole eloquently: “Few holes of 300 yards can be reckoned to be anything more than stop-gaps. This hole is a grand exception. In golf course design two interesting themes run counter to each other. The one standard principle, that the farther one hits and the nearer one approachs the target the finer becomes the margin of error, is cleverly offset by the axiom that the more finely judged second shot gets progressively more difficult the farther one falls short of the green. The hole crosses a pleasant valley from one crest to the next.”

The second shot on the 10th features a short, blind pitch over this bunker


The small green on the 10th hole, Royal Melbourne West

The 416 meter eleventh (West) has a feel similar to Pine Valley and Sunningdale, with a demanding tee shot that must be hit through a long chute of trees.

View from the tee, Royal Melbourne West course, 11th hole

The difficult par five holes ate my lunch at Royal Melbourne. I played all four of them poorly. Below is the approach to the 435 meter par five twelfth (West).

The 12th green

The composite course was devised for tournaments in 1959 so that crowds would not have to cross Cheltenham Road. While it can be confusing playing the courses trying to figure out which holes are part of the composite, the easy rule of thumb is that if you are still on the side of Cheltenham Road near the clubhouse, you are on the composite. The holes from the East course (1,2,3,4, 17 and 18) that are part of the composite are a worthy bunch. The green on the first hole (East):

The 1st green, Royal Melbourne East Course

The second on the East is a great par four that has a blind tee shot to a fairway that starts far left and comes back to the right.

Royal Melbourne East, 2nd hole approach to green

The third hole on the East is a dogleg right down a sweeping hill and the fourth is an interesting uphill par three. The East course has recently reached the top 100 world rankings on its own merits and I can see why. It's a great collection of holes. The par three 13th on the East, 135 meters, which doesn't play in the composite courses is a spectacular little par three. It has the best protected green of the 36 holes at Royal Melbourne.

Royal Melbourne, East Course, 13th hole

As is the custom at Australia’s top private courses, they allow visitors from overseas if you have a letter of introduction from your home club. The day you play you are made an “honorary member” and granted full privileges including the ability to eat in the clubhouse. The normal greens fee rate is A$300.

We played at Royal Melbourne for a pittance! The course has been undergoing renovations in preparation for the upcoming Presidents Cup matches and thus the course was not in the usual condition they expect, so they didn’t feel it was right to charge us. To be honest, and as you can see from the photos, the course was in very good shape. They must have an extremely high standard that they keep the course in if the conditions we played in weren’t considered good. This was a very classy move on the part of Royal Melbourne.

Congratulations to one of my mates and playing partners, Smythe, who shot a 78 on one of the premier courses in the world the first time he played it! Well done; an impressive display of golf.

Aside from one of the best golf courses in the world, Royal Melbourne also has a genteel and historic feel to it. I suggest looking around the large room located off the entrance to the clubhouse which has an impressive display of memorabilia and old course maps.

The manicured hedges add a classy touch to the entry drive:

As do the grass tennis and lawn bowling courts:

Summertime Golf Excursions

Spanning the globe to find great golf is a never ending pursuit. In the next couple of months I’m traveling to a diverse group of destinations to play some great courses and write about them.

First up is Venice, Italy. Yes, you read that correctly. Not Venice, Florida.  A group named Amazing Venice Golf, a marketing coop, says there are about a dozen courses in close proximity to the canal-only city.  I’ll play and tour courses like the Golf Club of Venezia and Golf Club Montecchia in nearby Padova. I’ve been to many unique golf destinations in my career—Kenya, The Canary Islands, Morocco and China to name a few—but this one should be very special.

Later this month I’ll go to Panama City, Florida, which has exceptional courses like the Greg Norman designed Shark’s Tooth and Tom Fazio designed Camp Creek Golf Club. What saddens me is the anxiety the NW Florida Gulf Coast tourist area is undergoing about the massive oil spill and what the eventual effect it will have on the beaches. Right now, they’ve discovered a few isolated oil balls, but who knows what the future holds especially in the next few months, which is also hurricane season.

In early August, I’ll venture to Sun Valley Resort in Idaho. Everybody knows the area as a great snow skiing destination, but I’ve been told there’s some pretty good golf up there as well. I’m anxious to play the Robert Trent Jones Jr. designed Trail Creek Course, which is a Golf Digest “Top 75 Resort Course in North America” and the 18-hole Sawtooth Putting Course, a 52,000 square-foot nirvana for the flat stick. There’s also a new 9-hole layout called White Clouds, which I’m told, has stunning views of surrounding mountains. I can’t wait. It’ll be a nice reprieve from the sweltering Florida heat.