Toronto: The changing golf landscape - Canadian golf courses in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver

Golf Digest, March, 1999 by Ron Whitten, John Fry, John Barton

For this visiting golfer, the view of Toronto from the airport tarmac is not particularly encouraging. There are eight lanes of concrete, rows of drab warehouses and legions of electrical towers with outstretched arms in every direction. The CN Tower can be seen from 25 miles away.

North America's fifth largest city (behind Mexico City, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago) hardly seems to be the landscape of great golf. But I soon discovered that golf architects up here have taken advantage of every dip, wrinkle and seam in the tabletop to give their golf courses character. Golf isn't exactly an underground game in Toronto, but you rarely see many flagsticks poking up above the horizon.

The exception is the best course in town, Glen Abbey, in the southwest suburb of Oakville. Most of the holes sit on a high plateau, artfully reshaped by the addition of lakes, mounds and trees. The heart of the course rests 100 feet below the clubhouse, in a series of holes strung along a narrow, high-walled gorge of Sixteen Mile Creek.

Glen Abbey should be the starting point of any golf trek around Toronto, mainly because it has been the longstanding home to the PGA Tour's Canadian Open. It's also the first course designed by Jack Nicklaus without the interference of another brand-name architect. The 1977 design is a surprising early example of Nicklaus architecture, with shallow fairway bunkers and genial green contours- very different from the kind of courses the Bear was building a decade later.

After the round, stop by the adjoining museum of the Royal Canadian Golf Association and spend a few minutes watching the old broadcast of the 1955 Canadian Open, Arnold Palmer's first PGA Tour victory. Arnie had an army even then. With no fairway ropes, crowds rushed every green after his approach shot, sometimes even before the ball landed. Palmer's acceptance speech was as classy as his play.

Within the museum is also the RCGA's Canadian Golf Hall of Fame, honoring, among others, Jack Nicklaus, even though he never won the Canadian Open (he finished second seven times).

From Oakville, it's less than a half- hour drive north to Brampton, home of Lionhead Golf & Country Club. There are two 18s here, designed by Canadian architect Ted Baker in the early 1990s. The more dramatic of the two is the Legends Course, fashioned entirely within the Credit River valley. As one local sportswriter put it, Lionhead brings out the cowardly lion in all of us.

I was drawn to St. Andrews Valley in Aurora by its 77.5 course rating, the highest in the province. The owners constructed the course to Canadian architect Rene Muylaert's design, but they darn near doubled the dimensions. Where Muylaert prescribed a six-foot mound, they built one 12 feet high. If he penned in a 6,000-square-foot green, they made it 12,000 square feet. A simple bunker became a sinkhole. A knob on a green became a humpbacked whale. Thankfully they didn't double the yardages-as it is, the course measures 7,305 yards from the back tees. For all its exaggerations, St. Andrews Valley is great fun to play.

Southeast of St. Andrews is the pricey Angus Glen, Golf Digest's Best New Canadian Course of 1995 and a personal favorite, even though it sports the toughest opening hole in the northern hemisphere, a 475-yard par 4. Canadian architect Doug Carrick wound the layout along both sides of Bruce Creek and made every hole memorable.

Farther to the north is Deerhurst Highlands. To visit Toronto and not play Deerhurst is like visiting San Francisco and not driving down to the Monterey Peninsula. While the Highlands isn't quite Pebble Beach, it's certainly one of Canada's top 10 courses, public or private, and well worth the three-hour drive from the city center.

Deerhurst is a 1990 collaboration of American designer Bob Cupp and then-upstart Canadian architect Thomas McBroom. It covers a wide range of territory, from mountain slopes to open meadows.

The course lulls you into complacency at the start, with only four bunkers on the first three holes. But the 319-yard fourth slaps you in the face with 11 deep ones. After three more meadow holes, the course veers into forest and ravines, and has an absolute killer finish, with two ponds and a stream to negotiate over the closing holes.

Before heading back to town, for comparison play the Lake Joseph Club (resort guests only), a solo McBroom design and Golf Digest's Best New Canadian Course of 1997. It's a marvel blasted from even more granite than Deerhurst, with huge outcroppings remaining in play on some holes.

Back in civilization, in the place that has been called "New York run by the Swiss," I played Don Valley, a hilly, narrow muny within Toronto's city limits. Half a dozen times during the round you find yourself in the shadows of a huge highway overpass, with traffic buzzing and grinding 100 feet above on Highway 401 (Toronto is busy-a quarter of all Canadian's live within 100 miles of the city). Behind the last green, there's an old rope lift that players use to reach the 19th hole-thanks to golf carts, the contraption doesn't get much use these days.