New Arcadia Bluffs course offers a fresh take on a familiar idea

Below are excerpts from an article that originally appeared in Golf Digest.

Before I give my thumbs-up to the new South Course at Arcadia Bluffs, the latest design by Dana Fry, I must confess a bias. It’s not that I’ve been good friends with Dana for decades, or that he, Mike Hurdzan and I collaborated on the design of Erin Hills in Wisconsin back in the early 2000s. I’m friends with a lot of architects and can still offer honest critiques of their work. No, my bias is that I was originally unenthusiastic about Dana’s idea of designing this new resort course in the geometric fashion of Chicago Golf Club.

I certainly understood his motivation. He was faced with the task of creating a companion course (a mile to the south) to one of America’s 100 Greatest, the spectacularly dramatic Arcadia Bluffs, whose rumpled fairways tumble down genuine glacial dunes to holes along a bluff above Lake Michigan. Dana was given an inland site for his 18, a rather flat parcel of Michigan pastureland and fruit orchards as drab as my wardrobe. He couldn’t compete with the pizazz of Arcadia Bluffs on that site, so he had to come up with something entirely different and distinctive. Which he has done.

But still, I was leery of his plan because I suffer from MacRaynor Fatigue. That’s the condition brought about by seeing an excessive number of courses designed in the fashion of C.B. Macdonald and his sidekick Seth Raynor, the architects of Chicago Golf Club. It was an original design concept at one time, 20 years ago, back when the late George Bahto did it when remodeling New York’s Hauppauge Country Club into Stonebridge Golf Links, and when Kelly Blake Moran did it at Hawk’s Pointe in New Jersey and when Brian Silva did it best of all at Black Creek Club in Chattanooga.

So I was one reluctant troubadour stepping foot on the completed yet still-not-open South Course at Arcadia Bluffs. But I changed my tune by the second hole. Oh, the first is a fine opener, a slight dogleg-right, its uniformly 60-yard-wide fairway slashed left and right by diagonal bunkers of uniform width and depth, its dogleg green hugged by a double-dogleg bunker along its left and back corner. But the second hole is what hooked me. It’s another slight dogleg-right, with another wide fairway slashed by another diagonal bunker. But the green is less like a MacRaynor than a William S. Flynn inspiration. It’s shaped like a piece of toast, squared off in the front, rounded at the back edges. The contours of the green brought to mind Oakmont, because there’s a prominent Y-shaped swale dug through the heart of the green, moving excess water (and golf balls) off at several points. It dawned on me that Fry wasn’t copying Macdonald or Raynor, he was drawing on many classic old styles of golf design. Indeed, I later learned that owner Rich Postma didn’t want any replica holes, so while Fry’s design does hint at a Redan and a Biarritz, he took such motifs and did his own thing with them.

Granted, Arcadia Bluffs South certainly looks like Chicago Golf Club, with its gently rolling fairways that play up and over ridgelines, framed by stretches of tall fescue, and those long, skinny rifle-pit bunkers dug in at all angles of attack and those linear putting surfaces with right-angle corners mown at almost fetish intensity. But this is Chicago Golf Club for the Average Joe. The various diagonal and perpendicular carry bunkers are mostly short distances off the tees and easily carried by all, and nearly all have fairway mown beyond them to reward such faux bravery. (For good players, far more ominous are singular pot bunkers placed somewhere close to the middle of fairways on nearly half the holes, always at the spot where one would want a great tee shot to end up.) For the most part, the bunkers are shallow and the grass faces are laid back, so one can still advance balls toward the target. (The deepest bunker on the course, a surprise one behind the par-5 11th green, is maybe six feet deep.) The greens are generous sizes and approach fairways are mown not just up to their front edges, but also around one side or the other of most greens. (But beware: some of those fingers of fairway lead directly into greenside bunkers.)

Click here to read the full article on golfdigest.com.