A Florida triple play

Touring three new Arthur Hills courses in the Sunshine State

There's one question I hear a lot. Well, besides, "Hey, when did you get parole?" It's about the name of this column, the Underground Golfer. The idea was that since I'm allegedly always sneaking off to play golf as I cover tournaments around the country, I could provide some highlights about the tracks I check out. In reality, I don't play that much on the road. I'm more like colleague John (Mats Only) Garrity, sneaking off to pound balls at a range for 90 minutes a few times a week. Also, if I am lucky enough to play a round of golf on the road, the snowbound boss in Sports Illustrated's mausoleum-like office in New York isn't really that enthused to hear about my good fortune ... if you catch my drift.

MAILBAG I'm an avid reader of your column, and unlike Bill (12) Gage I find the way you play with readers' names to be very funny. Keep it up. That guy needs to take a chill pill. —Rich Busey, Rochester, Minn. Thanks for your support, Busboy. I hear the senior waiter job may be opening up soon. Keep working hard. I stand behind your stance (no pun intended) on playing the ball as it lies. Steve from Australia said he deems it unfair to play out of an unrepaired divot or, god forbid, an unraked bunker. Isn't a bunker a hazard? I have no pity for poor Steve and I doubt that this problem actually has cost him tournament wins. It probably just kept him from breaking 100. —Brad Serton, Boston One thing's for Serton, Brad, golf isn't fair. Neither is life. That's part of its charm, part of what makes it so aggravating. You get a bad lie, you're hosed. You believe Enron's earnings reports, you're hosed. You can suck it up and keep going or whine like a little baby. Bostonians suck it up and keep going. Exhibit A: the ill-fated Red Sox, who would be the maybe-next-year Chicago Cubs of baseball if the Cubs didn't exist. Some additions for the reader who suggested a top 10 list of Tiger Woods' excuses why he didn't win the Masters: Kitties hate water. —Mark Handley, Mesa, Ariz. "Stevie's having trouble clubbing me with this inferior equipment I play." —Dan Lewis, Valrico, Fla. "It was Stevie's fault. He hit driver on 3." —John Cosgrove, Springfield, Mass. •Notah Begay won't stop calling him Urkel. •He has developed a strange Swedish rash. •Every time he swings, the gallery hollers, "Miss it, Noonan." —Mark Ernest, Tracys Landing, Md. Elin sapped him of his strength the night before the tourney. Maybe she's the real Masters. —John Sterling, Chicago Thanks, kids, for the effort. The bad news is Tiger has written down your names and addresses. All of you can kiss your First Tee scholarships goodbye.

However, the recent spring break did result in a golfing bonanza. Unfortunately, I wasn't lap-dancing and puking with scantily clad coeds in Cancun, although I can't wait to see that new movie. But I did tour three fairly new Arthur Hills-designed courses from our vacation base on the beach in Marco Island, Fla. -- it's on the west end of Alligator Alley, opposite Fort Lauderdale on Florida's east coast. (Vacation tip: If you're looking to cash in Marriott points for a free beach vacation, I highly recommend the Marco Island Marriott. It's one of the top U.S. mainland Marriotts I've stayed at.)

The arduous, tiring research for this report (playing 108 holes in five days) was done by a trio of intrepid golfers: me; my son, Mike, a high school sophomore with a 2 handicap; and Frank Massaro, a neighbor who also brought his family to Marco Island for spring break and whose handicap, I was going to say, is that he's a lefty -- but now that Mike Weir has won the Masters, that joke is obsolete.

Let's go right to the highlights:

The Golf Club at Fiddler's Creek

(www.FiddlersCreek.com)

This club is private, but it's an A+ in every category. The golf course does not have your typical, boring Florida landscape. What's impressive is how Hills made every hole memorable, not overly contrived and yet still playable. It's also alive with wildlife, which is both good and bad. The good: Host pro Jeff Raimer, who joined us with club member Joe Parisi in a fivesome, pointed out one of two bald eagles that frequent the course, roosting in a large tree overlooking the first tee. The bad: With no wind, the lowland swamp gnats on the course resemble the insect repellent commercial where the guy sticks his bare arm into a jar full of hungry mosquitoes. This was the first time I've seen golfers rooting for the wind to kick up because the gnats were a serious distraction.

Anyway, the opening hole is memorable, not because it's a medium-length par-4 with a lake in front of the green, but because the bridge over the lake bears a striking resemblance to the Ben Hogan and Gene Sarazen bridges you've seen at Amen Corner during the Masters. I smell photo op.

Fiddler's Creek snaps you back to attention with the second hole, an intimidating, 207-yard par-3 surrounded by lots of bunkers. I hit a career 3-iron to 25 feet and made par. In fact, all five of us scrambled for pars. "I don't think I'll ever see that again," Raimer said of the five 3s. "This hole isn't that easy."

One good hole follows another. I'll tell you about two. The 12th may be the coolest and scariest on the course. It's a short par-4, 348 yards from the championship tees, basically forcing you to play some kind of layup shot. The green is atop a large, elevated plateau overlooking a lake. The right face of this plateau is unkempt -- brush and plants. The effect is that you're shooting at an itsy-bitsy green on top of a beer can, a do-or-die shot. It isn't quite that difficult, since hopefully you have a pitching wedge in your hand, but it doesn't look like a typical Florida hole. And, hey, what's that? An elevation change? Is that legal?

The 13th is a shortish (151 yards), elevated par-3 surrounded by steep slopes and bunkers. In the left rough, not in play, is a large oak tree. "That's the only tree on this course we didn't plant," Raimer said. It's a good-looking hole.

When the new clubhouse is completed, the 15th hole will become No. 1 and the current 12th and 13th, a wonderful pair of aggravating holes back to back, will become the new 16th and 17th holes, an intriguing finish.

Fiddler's Creek has been open for 15 months. It has a $90,000 initiation fee (100 percent refundable) and currently boasts 240 members. Besides a big new clubhouse in the works -- I thought the current one was awfully nice, but it will become a fitness center/spa when the new one is finished -- plans call for perhaps as many as three more courses. The complex is in a gated community that's going to have 4,000 to 5,000 homes. Except for the gnats, the fact that I don't need/can't afford a second home, and the $90,000 (OK, mainly the $90K), I'd join in a second.

Fiddler's Creek also has one of the nicest practice areas I've ever used in Florida, and it's only a temporary facility. When the new clubhouse is built near the other end of the property, they'll just dig up this one. I asked if I could have it; Raimer said no. Guess I'm going to have to rip this place. Also, for the time being (at least until the membership fills up), the club offers temporary annual memberships for about $6,900 a year. If you're wintering in the Naples area, this wouldn't be a bad deal. Fiddler's Creek should be a lock to make anybody's modern top-100-courses list -- it's that good.

I'm thinking Golf Plus should probably open a Florida bureau in Naples. I'll check with the boss.

The Club at Renaissance

(www.DiscoverRenaissance.com)

Three things you need to know about this club, locatedin Fort Myers: 1) It has been open only two months, and as of last week, when I played there, it had only eight members so far. Most of the practice range was still virgin territory, without divots. When Bill Cox, the club's golf ambassador and our guide for a round, told us we were welcome to play another 18, we looked around at a nearly empty course, thought about it for all of three seconds, and took him up on the offer. Getting a tee time is not a problem. 2) It has a golf ambassador. Sounds like a dream job to me. "Everybody would like his job," said the guy who answered the phone in the golf shop when I called, "but I don't think he's going to give it up." What if he were to meet with, say, an unfortunate accident when I was playing a round with him? "Well, you will be driving the cart ..." he said. Cox is a delightful man and perfect for the job. He has the sweet swing of a retired club pro and he'll kill you with kindness, not to mention deadly fairway woods, which he hits a little more often than he used to. Golf ambassador? Sounds even better than golf writer. 3) The club spent $3.5 million to construct a brick acoustic wall along the length of the course to reduce the noise from adjacent I-75. I know of a lot of courses that were built for less.

Getting the idea that everything about this place is first class? I liked the sedate, unassuming clubhouse ... except that it's the future fitness center. The real clubhouse, which will be massive, is in mid-construction. Of course, there's a price to pay for this luxury: the $60,000 initiation fee. Which sounds like a lot, except Mr. Golf Ambassador said that if this course was in swanky Naples (where money goes to die), initiation would be $250,000. The good news for northern snowbirds is that Renaissance is right off the exit for the Fort Myers airport. It's convenient for commuting in your private jet, which I think we all can relate to. The bad news is that means a lot of jet traffic overhead.

While that might not be your idea of a dream retirement location, the golf course certainly is. My threesome had a couple of nitpicky criticisms, but after breezing around a second 18 in a little over 2 1/2 hours, they seemed nearly irrelevant. Again, Hills excelled at taking a flat, featureless Florida landscape and constructing a memorable course.

A cool hole, for instance, is the par-5 second, where you have to decide how much lake you dare cut off to reach an angled fairway. If you bail out left, you flirt with a couple of massive fairway bunkers. I bailed even further left, near the course boundary fence, and faced awkward layup shots out of rough on the side of a hill. Another cool hole is the 17th, a par-3 over the obligatory Florida lake.

Our nitpickiness related to four greens that we felt were overdone with undulation to the point of being silly. One par-5 green had a bowl in the middle, but when we played the pin was set on the narrow strip of flat surface on its right edge, maybe 8 feet across. Frank and I hit putts that caught the edge of the bowl and curled off to the middle of the green, 20 feet from the cup. It reminded me of one of those airport donation bins where you drop a penny down a slot, then watch it roll around and around and around before it finally disappears down the gravity well. This concept is good in an airport, not good on a putting surface. Another suspect green was on the 18th, a disappointing par-4 that's actually a layup hole -- 374 yards from the blue tees. It features a steep ridge dividing the green in half. Loved it in the Continental Divide, didn't love it on this green.

Everything about Renaissance's club and course adds up to an A, but the four funky greens (they'd be exposed as liabilities if the greens were stimped to tournament speed) drop its grade to an A-.

The Preserve course at Shadow Wood Country Club

(www.ShadowWoodPreserve.com)

This track in Bonita Springs had the sweetest greens of the week. They were firm, fast and true, which isn't easy to do with grainy Bermuda. Combine The Preserve's greens with the layout at The Club at Renaissance, and you'd have a major winner.

The Preserve is sneaky hard, which we figured out when trying to decide which set of tees to play. The backs were only 6,800 yards, which we considered until I noticed the slope index was 148. You don't get a slope that high at 6,800 yards unless your fairways are bowling alley-width and you have more water than a notoriously bad Kevin Costner movie. (Sorry, that doesn't narrow it down enough. The bad Costner movie I meant was Waterworld.) So we didn't play the back tees, called One, and instead opted for Two, at 6,378. I won't rip Shadow Wood's unimaginative choices for tee names, since it could be worse. All those courses with tees trendily named turquoise, copper and granite -- why not just go with Jason, Justin, Amanda and Zachary?

Anyway, apparently because of conservation and environmental restrictions, The Preserve course was a little cramped for space. So it's tight and not super user-friendly. I don't recall our threesome's lost-ball count, but I'm sure we were in double figures. This is the kind of course you'd like better the second time around, because with local knowledge you'd feel more comfortable. On the par-5 second hole, Mike and I hit drives just left of a large, rectangular fairway bunker in front of a cave-like mound. Good shots? We thought so, but it turned out we were through the fairway and into the palms and underbrush. Several elongated bunkers guarded angled greens.

The 11th was a baffling par-5, where a large, almost triangular-shaped lake wipes out most of the landing area for second shots, leaving only a thin strip of land around the left side to shoot at. Worse, a sprawling tree in a waste bunker guards the approach to the thin strip of fairway. I don't know how an 18-handicapper is going to finish this hole. I knocked it in the greenside bunker in two, avoiding the tree and the lake, then got up and down for birdie.

Another baffler was the 18th hole, a 455-yard par-4 with a 234-yard carry over a large bunker. The fairway is narrow, and trees on the right block your approach to the green, which is guarded by a lake on the right. In fact, another problem with the course is that many of the lakes play bigger than they really are. That is, the fairways slope off toward the water, and around the lakes the grass is thin and there are some erosion problems along the shore. So a shot that doesn't land within 20 yards of a lake sometimes kicks toward it and then, finding little resistance, bounces and rolls in. With good greens, though, you'll put up with almost anything.

Also, we were on the eighth hole, a short par-4 where I flew the green with my approach shot, when a man pulled up driving the beverage cart. "Aren't you supposed to be a young, good-looking girl?" Frank asked. It was a good line, although the guy had clearly heard something like it before. I would've laughed a lot harder if I wasn't in the middle of making a double bogey.

Bottom line: This could be a frustrating course for a mid- to high-handicap player. If I was looking for a retirement course to join, I think I'd keep looking. Grade: A+ for greens, maintenance and service, B- for fun factor.

Bonus course: The Rookery at Marco

(www.RookeryatMarco.com)

The Rookery is a resort course owned by the Marco Island Marriott, whose guests have access (and a discount) to this course, a very playable and fun, if not overly spectacular, layout. The Rookery has an excellent range and practice area, too, although the one at Fiddler's Creek was even better.

An excellent resort track, this course opens with two short par-4s, a short par-3 and a short par-5. Then the real course, a Bob Cupp design, begins. The signature hole is the seventh, a dogleg right around a lake. If you have guts and you feel lucky today, punk, you drive it down the right side, flirt with the lake and leave yourself a short iron to the green. Bail left to play it safe and you have a longer second shot. Mike voted it his favorite hole, mainly, I think, because he birdied it twice in two tries.

The par-5s were fun risk-reward holes. The ninth's fairway is a dogleg right that becomes an isthmus between a couple of lakes, with water guarding the front of the green. The 567-yard 11th features water crossing 70 yards short of the green, a pond on the left and a bunker on the right that totally hoses you if you play it safe to the right. I bailed right once, had 30 yards to the green and, because of the bunker, no chance to get close to the pin. It was an easy, discouraging bogey.

The 18th is a par-4 where your approach shot must carry a lake to a bulkhead-fronted green, a kind of Florida cliché. The wind made for a dicey second shot. Mike and I came to that hole with our match tied and our drives five steps apart. I knocked down a 6-iron shot into the wind a little too well -- it trickled just over the green's right side but was safe. Mike launched a hard 9-iron shot way up into the air, where the wind swatted it down like a bug and it fell into the water just short of the green. This is a demanding finishing hole for an otherwise delightful resort course.

Grade: A-minus, very enjoyable.

And now on to the kegger in Cancun ...

Sports Illustrated senior writer Gary Van Sickle writes for the magazine's Golf Plus section and is a regular contributor to SI.com. Click here to send him a question or comment.

 

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