BACK TO THE BELFRY: The former spud farm gets a fourth shot at respect

Golf Digest, Sept, 2001 by John Barton

And the fourth, now shortened, becomes a really tough, 442-yard par 4 to a reshaped, re-mounded green that's fronted by water--a stream just in front of the green has been widened. Play each of these holes in 4 at the Ryder Cup and there's a good chance you'll win at least one of them.

Other changes to the course were more cosmetic. Some TPC-style spectator mounds have been added, so a lot of holes are now framed by faux dunes made of clay. (Some look better than others.) And many of the fairway bunkers have been improved--a lot of the old ones were simply flat ovals of sand. "They looked like they fell out of a plane and hit the ground," says head green superintendent Dave Sammels, who also designed and built the handsome redbrick bridges that are scattered across the property. Now the bunkers have been re-sculpted into pleasing shapes, and some new ones have been added, too (which is just as well, as many of the originals, conceived in the days when a good whack with a persimmon driver traveled 270 yards, are obsolete for Ryder Cup play).

Wisely, Thomas more or less left The Belfry's stars, the 10th and 18th holes, alone. The 10th, which can play anywhere from 280 to 311 yards, depending on the tee, tempts all golfers to go for instant glory by emulating Seve Ballesteros, who in the 1978 Hennessy Cup became the first person to drive the green. If you're not up to it, you have to lay up and wedge on, suffering the ignominy of hitting a short iron off the tee of a par 4 (the hole can even be played wedge-wedge). The silly flower bed that used to sit in front of the green is, thankfully, gone.

And the 18th remains one of golf's best finishing holes. The drive must carry the original Moxhull Pond, where perhaps errant knights once washed their swords, to what from the tee looks like a thin sliver of fairway, squeezed by the pond on one side and an elongated, amoeboid bunker on the other. (The only major change to 18 is that the area to the left of the pond--where Paul Azinger got his highly controversial drop in the memorable singles battle with Ballesteros in the 1989 Ryder Cup--is now out-of-bounds. A Belfry employee was asked when that change was made. "Probably the next day," he said.)

The redesign has certainly greatly improved The Belfry. "We used to have a few holes that were good," says Sammels. "Now we have a lot of holes that are good."

But is The Belfry yet great?

The course still retains an odd collection of borrowed bits of architecture--a Carnoustie pot bunker and a St. Andrews burn here, for example, and a multifingered Florida bunker and an Augusta pond there. And the Poa annua greens are still predominantly flat, apart from a few too-severe tiers. But perhaps the worst remaining characteristic of The Belfry can be best illustrated by the par-3 12th, where we find the least appealing part of the redesign. ("I wanted to create a picture hole," says Thomas--unfortunately, it's not a pretty picture.)

As at the fourth, the little stream that fronts the green at the 208-yard 12th has been unnaturally widened into a fake-looking pond, and worse, a "water feature" has been added off to the right--a series of four muddy brown pools stair-step down the grass (it can only be hoped that this will go the way of the flower bed at the 10th). Aesthetic considerations aside, the fact is that neither of these hazards should see a lot of action in the Ryder Cup, but for short-hitters and slicers--99 percent of golfers--they will cause untold sleepless nights. The 12th--and much of the course--thus seems designed to punish the high-handicap golfer, yet give the best players in the game a free ride. It should, of course, be other way round.