Think Audubon Park,
Minus the Spanish Moss
Bobby Jones Golf Course
Atlanta, Ga.
Greens fee: $45 to walk nine
Date: Sept. 6, 2020
I can never drive into Atlanta without hearing Will Ferrell, in late-1990s Harry Caray schtick, proclaiming it to be “the jewel of the South — you know, it’s in Georgia!” It is, for better or worse, the closest thing the South has to New York City: the restaurants, the sports, the ungodly traffic — and now, the slow-moving but enjoyable public golf.
Even on a golf course as lightly defended as Bobby Jones GC, hazards abound in 2020.
Bobby Jones Golf Course has been a fixture of Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood since it opened in 1933, but it hasn’t always been an ideal neighbor. By the early 2000s, the municipal course was thoroughly run-down — and if its mere 128 acres had ever been enough to contain 18 holes, then modern technology had changed that and rendered the course borderline dangerous. So the people who cared most about the course did what every municipal course ought to do: they reimagined everything. They orchestrated handing over the course to the State of Georgia, and they rebuilt Bobby Jones into a fun, wide-open, reversible nine-hole layout.
The course is not perfect. It’s not even a perfect representation of what its masterminds were trying to achieve. But Bobby Jones is miles closer to what publicly accessible urban golf must look like 20 years from now to remain a going concern in the ecosystem of American recreation. It emphasizes playability over penalty and community over exclusivity. Golf’s most reliable constituency is older and more suburban than ever; and as those trends accelerate, so too does the risk of golf losing its place in city centers. If the South’s greatest city can’t avoid that, then no one can — but Bobby Jones gives Atlanta and public golf their best chance to stay together.
. . .
I’ve been mildly obsessed with the idea of reversible golf courses since Andy Johnson’s 2018 interview with Tom Doak, when Doak discussed his longstanding interest in reversible routings and the one he eventually designed at Forest Dunes in Michigan. D.J. Piehowski’s terrific account in The Golfer’s Journal No. 11 of the reversible design at Silvies Valley Ranch in Oregon didn’t help matters. The topography needs of a reversible course necessarily mean that Bobby Jones — so far as I’m aware, the only reversible public golf course in the South — wasn’t going to be a stunner (“The more dramatic the land is,” Doak told Johnson, “the harder it is to do that, and the less you’d want to do it. … It only really makes sense on a property that’s kind of dull.”). But the practical execution of the concept still intrigued me.
An outsized pin marks the Azalea routing’s sixth hole, which waits for players on the back end of the hole’s second blind shot.
From the top of the hill where the clubhouse sits, Bobby Jones quickly reveals the first component of its reversibility: circularity. Like the Old Course at St. Andrews, Bobby Jones’ routing turns around the center of the property before eventually returning to its beginning. Bobby Jones alternates between an “Azalea” routing (the easier version, I’m told) that runs counterclockwise to red pin flags, and a “Magnolia” loop moving around the property clockwise to white flags. Instead of standard “blue” tees and “white” tees, Bobby Jones uses large teeing grounds a la Pinehurst No. 2, with eight sets of numbered tees: the No. 8 tees are the tips, and the No. 5 tees (which I played) the equivalent of the whites. As Doak prescribed, the ground is docile (too docile, at times), and mostly wide open with wall-to-wall short grass.
That’s not to say the course lacks trouble. On the Azalea routing’s first hole (557 yards from the tips, 495 yards from the No. 5 tees), I pulled my drive into a bed of pine straw beneath a large oak tree, then flubbed my punch out and left a 6-iron into the green. My shot toward the white flag started left and stayed there — but before I could utter a profanity, my playing partner asked, “Are we playing to the white flags today or the red?” I realized that I’d aimed at (and badly missed) the wrong flag — and inadvertently landed 20 feet from the correct pin. Sometimes, it’s better to be lucky than good — but even when you’re neither, Bobby Jones’ sprawling fairways and enormous greens do everything they can to pull a good round out of you.
Like any layout, Bobby Jones is at its most interesting where its land is at its most undulating: near the property’s northwest corner, where the Azalea routing’s fifth and sixth holes lie. The short par-5 fifth (505 yards from the tips, 412 yards from the No. 5 tees) winds right to left around the base of a large hill, whose slope is covered in pine trees. Slinging a big draw around the inside of the fairway sets up a short iron into the green, but overcooking the shot and landing amidst the pines can quickly ruin an otherwise prime birdie opportunity. After crushing my drive into the right half of the fairway, I had just a 9-iron into the green: on the one hand, a ridiculous outcome on a par-5; on the other hand, I could get used to it. A hole later, the sixth’s blind tee shot climbs the steep hill that the fifth steers around, and leaves another blind shot into a green sunk on the back of the hill. Neither hole is oppressively challenging, but they’re fun — and that’s the side of the line that architect Bob Cupp chose.
Generally, Bobby Jones GC’s nine greens are fairly accessible. But the Azalea routing’s second hole — a long par-3 guarded in front by a sprawling sand trap — is a notable exception.
If there is any difficulty on the Azalea routing, it lies in the par-3s. At the second hole (223 yards from the tips, 166 yards from the No. 5 tees), players face one of their longest approach shots of the day; and at the seventh (195 yards from the tips, 148 yards from the No. 5 tees), the long, shallow putting surface is guarded by four sand traps, making it by far the most heavily defended green on the course.
Still, no one is grinding out here. But that’s partly the point: if Bobby Jones is designed to attract newcomers, then it’s equally designed to accommodate them. There’s little wonder to the place, but it does enjoy a sense of community: joggers run along a walking trail to the righthand side of the first and second holes, and the wide open layout allows players to see other groups meander around the track. There’s a little big of Audubon Park here, and a little bit of Sweetens Cove. Bobby Jones matches neither the former’s character nor the latter’s creativity, but it embodies the central lesson of both Audubon and Sweetens: that first and foremost, golf should be fun. And Bobby Jones is.
. . .
Andy Staples doesn’t even use the term “municipal golf.” To him, it’s “community golf” — the idea that publicly owned golf courses should operate more like public centers; golf courses are part of the idea, but not the whole of it. If recruiting new players is golf’s greatest challenge, then one of the easiest ways of bringing new players to the game is first to bring them to the course — and that means dropping pretense and being a gathering place for everyone.
Bobby Jones GC’s Azalea routing plays counterclockwise among the course’s nine unusually large greens; the Magnolia routing runs clockwise.
Bobby Jones comes closer to that than any publicly owned course I’ve seen. Tennis courts sit atop its parking garage, and it has a large driving range that feels more like a social scene than a practice facility. You don’t have to be a golfer to want to come here. But when you’re ready for golf, the course itself is unintimidating. It’s not a proving ground for hardcore golfers, but it’s not supposed to be: it’s a breeding ground for golfers.
It’s ironic, then, that the course bearing Bobby Jones’ name is so far philosophically from the one up the road in Augusta bearing his imprint — a perfect work of both art and architecture, but built on the worst of American golf. Bobby Jones isn’t beautiful, and it’s not genius. But it’s unpretentious, and it’s open; it is surrounded by neither literal nor figurative walls. If public urban golf is to survive this century, then the example set by Bobby Jones the golf course will have more to do with it than that of Bobby Jones the golfer.
. . .
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