What’s in a Name?
Sometimes, Everything.
Contraband Bayou Golf Club
Lake Charles, La.
Greens fee: $104
Date played: March 20, 2021
What is there to say about Contraband Bayou that I haven’t already written? Which is to say that, past Contraband Bayou’s name, there isn’t much to write. Like the oil refineries that put its hometown on the map, Contraband Bayou is impressive until you look closely and consider the thing’s costs — after which bemusement at the novelty turns to horror, or worse, boredom.
It’s doubtful that the golf course, the casino that owns it, or many other of Lake Charles’ novelties ever should have been built here. Tucked deep in the swamps of southwest Louisiana, Lake Charles was an afterthought for most of the Twentieth Century’s first half. Then the refineries came: the Phillips 66 facility, which stretches over a full square mile along Interstate 10, came online in 1941; Citgo’s refinery — which today is one of America’s largest — followed just three years later. Then, so did the people. When the 1940s began, Lake Charles was home to just over 21,000 (about the size of Hammond today); by 1950, its population had nearly doubled. Today, it’s the sixth-largest city in Louisiana.
During an ongoing bunker project, many of Contraband Bayou’s sand traps have been abandoned. Its full greens fee, however, has not been abandoned.
Lake Charles owes its Twentieth Century explosion to several factors, one of which was proximity of reliable oil fields to waterways — among which, I was disappointed to learn, is Contraband Bayou. It twists between Lake Charles (the body of water, not the city) to the northeast and Prien Lake to the southwest — beyond which lie Moss Lake, Mud Lake, and eventually the world’s largest mud lake, the Gulf of Mexico. Contraband Bayou is, in other words, an actual place, and not a buzzword bonanza contrived during some sleep-starved marketing team’s fever dream.
That knowledge was only the first of many disappointments that Contraband Bayou delivered. When I learned of Contraband Bayou’s existence in early March, I threw together a quick trip to Houston to play Memorial Park — with a plan to stop at Contraband Bayou on the way home. I arrived giddy, but 15 minutes before my tee time, the first fairway was slammed full with an elevensome — most of them surrounding a beverage cart to stock up on overpriced domestics. I complained at the front desk, but the cashier corrected me: “Oh that’s not an elevensome. That’s just a sixsome that met up with a fivesome.”
“Do you have a marshal?” I asked. No, the cashier responded. “Today’s his day off.” It was a Saturday. I asked for my money back.
It’s not good, OK? It’s not good.
Three weeks later, with a Contraband Bayou tee time less than 24 hours away, I ran into Kevin McArthur at the Korn Ferry Tour event just outside Lafayette, Louisiana. Kevin hails from Lake Charles and warned me that the golf course had seen better days. “That’s OK,” I responded. “My real goal is just to play a golf course named Contraband Bayou.”
No one can take that away from Contraband Bayou: it’s an actual golf course actually named Contraband Bayou. But no one will take much else away from it, either: even by the standards of its architect, Tom Fazio, Contraband Bayou is formulaic and uninspired. The swashbuckling, heavy-metal image inspired by its name could not be farther from its dull, repetitive design. Like the casinos and refineries on all its sides, it sits on this land awkwardly and unnaturally — but it’s too late to do anything about it now.
. . .
There are no blue, white, or red tees at Contraband Bayou. In a nod to the casino that owns it, Contraband Bayou’s tee colors are metaphors for gamblers: black (for “in the black”), gold (obvious), green (for the color of money), and silver (for the color of the average customer’s hair). And like casinos themselves, the tees didn’t fit me; generally, I like to play at about 6,300 yards, but the high-intermediate black tees stretched out over 6,500 yards, and the more intermediate-intermediate green tees were just over 6,000.
At its full length of 7,077, Contraband Bayou must do something right: it hosts the Louisiana Mid-Am later this year, and will host U.S. Mid-Am qualifying too. From the more modest green tees that I settled on, though, its boredom hits like a pillowcase full of nickels, with its few hazards more window dressing than strategically relevant.
Nothing harkens back to golf’s ancient roots like excavators belching diesel fumes on a Saturday morning at a thoughtless casino-owned layout.
It’s just as well, though, because the design’s repetitiveness wasn’t the only thing hitting home. I’ve never been a threat to win long-drive titles, but I hit it farther than most 15-handicaps — so my driving has always been the foundation of my meager skillset. Over the past year, though, I’d been leaking distance throughout the bag — to the tune of 20 yards or so with my driver, and a full club with my irons. I don’t know whether it’s my quarantine from the gym or a death knell hidden in my 40th birthday cake — but either way, the ball just isn’t flying like it used to. At the par-5 first hole (611 yards from the back tees, 543 yards from the green tees), my drive snuggled close to a bunker that, normally, I would’ve carried by 20 yards; and the 4-wood that I pounded for my second shot would’ve trickled inside 50 yards a year ago, but instead came up a full wedge short of the green. The birdie that I scraped out deflected my frustration. For a moment.
That moment allowed for taking in Contraband Bayou in all its mediocrity. On a cool, foggy Saturday at just past 8:30 a.m., the maintenance crew was still working the course’s opening holes. Excavators and front loaders rumbled alongside fairways as part of some sort of bunker renovation, and the traps not yet in mid-facelift had been abandoned altogether (the greens fees are still full-price, though, so you’re paying for the bunkers even if you’re not playing them). Even the golf cart was a miserable experience: the steering wheel was still slick with Armor All, and the GPS didn’t work.
And then there’s my swing, the most nonfunctional part of it all. Even after my revelation at Memorial Park’s driving range a few weeks prior, it still didn’t feel quite right. My weight was moving too far outside, and my speed was completely gone. The tee shot at the par-3 fourth hole (189 yards from the back tees, 143 yards from the green tees) would’ve been a stock 8-iron last year; at Contraband Bayou, though, I slid the 7-iron out of my bag, reached back for something extra, and caught it flush — even pulled it a little. In the air, I wished the ball would go long, wished it’d prove that those lost 10 yards were still in there somewhere. But the ball landed softly on the left side of the green, right where my 8-iron might have done last year. I limped away after a three-putt, proving that some parts of my game haven’t changed.
There are moments — entire seconds, even — when Contraband Bayou feels like an actual golf course.
Contraband Bayou doesn’t change much, either. Nearly every hole on the front nine looks and plays exactly the same: tee shot to a huge, mostly flat fairway with bunkering that makes only a token appearance, followed by an iron into a green with trouble on the left. The back nine begins with a hint toward a changeup — the 10th is a good, uphill, dogleg-left par-4 (373 yards from the back tees, 316 yards from the green tees) with a deep bunker inside the fairway’s bend, and the 13th (169 yards from the back tees, 132 yards from the green tees) is a short par-3 with a long, rippled green that tilts toward the pond that guards its front.
But that hopefulness evaporates at the 14th, which must be the laziest short par-4 I’ve ever seen. Great short par-4s force a litany of strategic decisions, all of which are answerable by any skill level — but the 14th’s length alone (346 yards from the back tees, 279 yards from the green tees) makes it about 30 yards too long to consider anything short of driver off the tee. A small bunker sits between the green and a water hazard on the right, but no one would come into the green from that angle, so it’s not in play; and a tree sits on a direct line from the tee to the green’s right side, but the green’s entrance — not to mention half the acreage in Calcasieu Parish — sits on the left side of the fairway. So the only play is a drive left, followed by a wedge into the green. I have never seen anyone screw up a short par-4. Perhaps the bayou’s real contraband is the fun it stole along the way.
Contraband Bayou’s 18th green is a microcosm of the place: flanked on the left by a retaining pond, overlooked on the right by a casino, backed by a four-lane road that shuttles gamblers to and fro, and fronted by a sand trap with no sand in it. The course’s signature moment is returning to the parking lot, where your car awaits to take you mercifully home.
. . .
On the one hand, Contraband Bayou’s 18th green is an underwhelming end to a mediocre experience. On the other hand, you’re two putts away from being able to leave.
My first year of law school was the most miserable nine months of my life. Two things got me through it: therapy, and having learned that a movie was being made called “Snakes on a Plane.” I spent the entire summer reading about it; when the movie’s website began allowing visitors to sign up for promotional robo-calls from Samuel L. Jackson, I spent an afternoon enrolling every number in my cell phone. Maybe it never could’ve lived up to the hype, but it definitely didn’t.
Contraband Bayou, though, doesn’t even rise to the low heights of “Snakes on a Plane.” The movie, at least, is self-aware enough to lean into its own ridiculousness. There is no frivolity on this frivolous golf course, though. Its land moves awkwardly, with no relationship to the surrounding terrain. There is no strategy to navigating it; there is no feeling here, save the feeling of relief with the course in your rearview mirror as you drive away. It is as though its owners ordered a prefabricated golf course from Amazon, which then dropped the entire thing from the sky on the other side of the casino’s parking lot. It is soulless: a green, 200-acre penny slots machine, with no purpose but to accept greens fees and spit out hints of joy at intervals determined by some unimaginative algorithm.
The refineries, at least, are here because we still need them. That leaves Contraband Bayou unexplained.
. . .
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