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

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

If there's time for one last round, the Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry-designed Royal Woodbine in Etobicoke is right across the road from Pearson International Airport. Perfect for long layovers.

Ron Whitten

Montreal: Golf with French accents

I was born and raised in Montreal, and for many years I've revisited my old hometown to see friends. Lately, though, I've been going back to the world's second-largest French-speaking city for another reason: to play golf.

Driving north from New York, you cross the border from Vermont into Quebec onto Autoroute 10, which accesses the Eastern Townships (Cantons de l'Est). Immediately, there's good golf to sample not far off the highway. Owl's Head and Royal Bromont are both the work of one of Canada's finest golf course architects, Graham Cooke.

North of Montreal, I had hoped to play at the 36-hole Golf Le Mirage. But it has recently been converted to a private club by decree of its new owner, Montrealer Celine Dion, the rich pop singer (you heard her voice on the "Titanic" soundtrack). A nouvelle golf fanatic, Dion is rumored to have ordered the filling-in of several Mirage bunkers, presumably because her ball was straying into them with annoying frequency.

Crossing the river into Montreal, it's tempting to stay at the luxurious, centrally located Ritz Carlton. But I'm also partial to bed-and-breakfasts, where I can talk with the locals and catch up on Quebec politics. The perennial topic, of course, is whether the province will ever secede from Canada. The closest I came to an answer was from a francophone (French-speaking Canadian), who sighed: "I'm completely weary of the subject"-not surprising, since it has been dragging on for more than 20 years.

Montreal is a modern, subway-equipped island of 1.7 million souls, mostly French, but also including large neighborhoods of Greeks, Haitians, Portuguese, Italians and Orthodox Jews, as well as a dwindling population of WASPs. If your French, like mine, was learned years ago out of a Parisian schoolbook, you'll find it difficult to understand the heavily accented local joual, but Montrealers are invariably happy to converse in English with an American visitor.

The best game in town is at the ultra-private Royal Montreal, host of the 1995 Canadian Open and North America's oldest golf club. In 1873-15 years before the oldest U.S. club, St. Andrew's in Yonkers, N.Y., was formed-members of Royal Montreal, mostly Scots, were already striking gutties on Fletcher's Field, today a downtown park.

The best public-access golf, however, lies 90 miles north in the Laurentian Mountains at Mont Tremblant Resort, where I've been skiing for more than 40 years. Since 1992, Tremblant's owner, Intrawest, has built a fantastic hillside village, an architecturally ersatz version of a cobblestone street and square in old Quebec City.

More than half a billion dollars has been lavished on new condo hotels, restaurants, ski hills and golf. In the last three years alone, a trio of new courses has opened, each costing in excess of $6 million Canadian: Le Geant (The Giant), Le Diable (The Devil) and La Bete (The Beast). The latter, together with an older fourth course, La Belle (The Beauty), comprise the Gray Rocks Resort. Taken together, these courses make up one of the largest eastern golf complexes north of Pinehurst.