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Member's bounce Take it from me, AAC's Highlands Course is a bear
Updated: Thursday August 16, 2001 10:57 AM
DULUTH, Ga. -- Much is being made of the grandiose gesture by the membership of the Atlanta Athletic Club to stop playing the Highlands course three weeks before the PGA Championship in order to allow it to quietly heal and settle and grow it's fangs. Baloney. They were damn glad to stop playing it,truth be told. "Leave us to the Riverside eighteen,"was the common call, "where we can actually find our children when they wander into the rough, where a good drive can actually reach the fairway and a good putt can actually remain on the green." I know all this, you see, because I'm one of them. I've been a member of the AAC, proudly, since 1983 but have been playing both courses, off and on, since well before the 1976 U.S. Open. A card-carrying 7-handicapper, I've loved the variance between the two eighteens, Riverside being a bit of a breather after the vagaries of Highlands. In all, both wonderful tests. But I can honestly say that, beauty and grace aside, they have turned our beloved old Highlands Course into an honest-to-goodness bear. Where we play it to a par of 72, they've made two of the par-5s into 4s and the second of those will probably prove the most controversial hole on the course. The 18th will play to 490 yards -- the longest par-4 in major championship history -- and the second shot is all carry over a lake to a two-tiered green. Bet your mortgage the Sunday flag will be bottom left, about 10 paces from the edge of the water. Fun. The rough will be just a shade under 4 inches deep and as thick as your Uncle Vito's back hair. We all, in our days of penance before they closed down the course, lost perfectly good balls inches off the fairways and greens. So when Tiger asks who's playing the Titleist x-out, you'll know it's a leftover. Not mine. No, silly me, I lose only the ones you have to wait six months for the honor of buying. And of course, being the sadist fools that we are, we decided to see the course from the pros' viewpoint and so we attacked it -- and I use that word after exhausting the thesaurus for something resembling torture -- from the very tips. Not from the blue tees where we usually play, no, from 7,300 grueling yards. Three new tee boxes were added to achieve that remarkable distance, at eight, 14 and 16, and thus we saw parts of the world we never knew existed. And I must tell you, it's humbling to hit driver, 3-wood, pitching wedge, and hit them all reasonably well, to reach a par-4. The par-3 might just be the best set anywhere around. All of them pure carry over water and the best of the lot -- No. 15 -- will play 245 yards on Sunday afternoon. (but of course, that's 245 yards downhill so the boys will probably be choking up on 7-irons) So yes, consider us gracious hosts, willing to sacrifice our play to allow yonder eighteen it's growth. But while we may look stupid, and some of us actually may be stupid, we do know when we're beaten. Have at it, boys. All we ask is, don't any one of you say it's too easy. For the 11th consecutive year, Turner Sports will provide live coverage of the 2001 PGA Championship with TNT's 17 hours of programming from the Atlanta Athletic Club in Duluth, Ga. The PGA Championship is the only golf major that features four days of live cable coverage. Jim Huber will serve as an essayist/reporter for TNT's Championship coverage. In addition to his television work, Huber has written A Thousand Goodbyes, which was published earlier this month.
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