Viva Las Vegas : The brightest lights—and best bets—in Las Vegas are the hot new golf courses

Golf Digest, Oct, 2000 by Hunki Yun

The Strip is a par 5, four miles long, with a slight dogleg to the right. It's best played at night, when neon signs light up the entire length.

Long, aggressive players--the gamblers, naturally--can go for the green in two. If you are conservative, you will want to carve a gentle fade off the tee to match the shape of the street.

Either way, you're sure to find plenty of diversions. Starting at the famous "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign, the Strip is strewn with landmarks. The green facade of the MGM Grand, the largest hotel in North America, for instance, or a facsimile of Paris' Eiffel Tower, which guards the corner of the dogleg.

Steer too wide of the Eiffel Tower and you're likely to end up in the man-made lake fronting the opulent Bellagio hotel. The nine-acre body of water is home to Fountains of Bellagio, a confluence of light, music and 240-foot-high sprays of water. To the right, a different type of water hazard awaits, in the canals of the Venetian--singing gondoliers and all.

Then there's the Mandalay Bay, the Statue of Liberty at New York, New York, and the Liberace Museum. This is a city rife with excess. You may find the lagoon at Treasure Island and be caught in a sea battle between the pirate ship Hispaniola and the H.M.S. Britannia, complete with pyrotechnics. From there, it's a straight shot toward the end of the Strip and the 1,149-foot-high Stratosphere, which dominates the skyline and more than adequately resembles a flagstick.

No stretch of road defines and dominates a city the way the Strip does Las Vegas. New York's Broadway, Los Angeles' Sunset Boulevard and New Orleans' Bourbon Street seem timid and watered down when compared to the Strip, a boulevard of lights, glitz and revelry, plus some broken dreams. The Strip is the epicenter of the only true 24-hour city in the world.

The appeal of "gaming," as the industry likes to call itself, attracts more than 30 million visitors a year to the valley on the edge of the Mojave Desert that holds Las Vegas. Gaming is evident everywhere in Las Vegas, not just on the Strip. The clank of slot machines greets arriving passengers at the airport; at 7-Eleven, you can try a couple of pulls along with your Slurpee.

But Las Vegas is not really all about gambling . . . er, gaming. Now that casinos can be found everywhere--in the forests of New England, the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, even on the Internet--Las Vegas has had to diversify. Its edges have been softened with mints on the pillows, full-service spas, Wolfgang Puck eateries and performers noted for their talent instead of what they aren't wearing. If it were a movie, Las Vegas would have received an X-rating in its early days. Now, it's lobbying hard for a PG rating--and is close to receiving it. In the new Las Vegas, it isn't enough just to build a hotel and a casino. The hotel must also have plenty of entertainment value. Whether it is in the form of the Roman empire of Caesars Palace, the Egyptian pyramid of Luxor, or the boulevards and cafes of Paris, the hotels of Vegas more resemble amusement parks than purveyors of sin.

From gambling to golfing

Nowhere is Las Vegas' shift from gambling mecca to multifaceted resort more evident than in its offerings of golf. In the past decade, the number of courses has tripled. And this theme-park city, naturally, is spawning theme-park courses. Bali Hai Golf Club, a tropical-theme course with holes reminiscent of the South Pacific, opens in November. Meanwhile, Royal Links is a collection of 18 holes modeled after the great layouts of the British Isles, featuring holes like the Old Course's Road Hole and Royal Troon's Postage Stamp. (It is also one of the few courses in the area to provide caddies, along with ultra-upscale Shadow Creek, the best game in town and technically a public-access course, albeit with a four-figure price tag. The Tom Fazio-designed Shadow Creek, ranked 20th among America's 100 Greatest Golf Courses, is incidentally itself as fabulously fake as the rest of Vegas, with its creation of a lush jungle in the middle of the stark Mojave Desert.)

At Royal Links, my caddie, Leon, greeted me with a strong handshake. He made me feel like a tour pro. Leon told me he'd caddied for Ben Hogan--"He never said a lot," Leon reports--including at the 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills, which Hogan nearly won. Leon also said he was on Tommy Aaron's bag when he won the 1973 Masters. I was curious, and called back a few months later to check those stories. I was told that they were all true, and also that Leon had left Las Vegas for pastures new.

Northwest of the Strip is Summer-lin, a planned community--down to the last pebble, apparently--stretching out for miles along the desert floor and a symbol of the city's growth. "The city is twice as big as it was when I went to school here," says tour pro Skip Kendall, who graduated from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in 1987. We're standing outside the clubhouse of the private TPC at Summer-lin, the venue of the PGA Tour's late-season Las Vegas event. "See all this?" he asks as his arm sweeps through the air, over a sea of roofs that end only at the foot of the mountain. "This was nothing. There was nothing here. Just desert. I can't believe it."