Gone, But Perhaps
Not a Goner
Isle Dauphine Golf Course
Dauphin Island, Ala.
Greens fee: $20
Date played: August 1, 2021
Within a few months of my 40th birthday, I congratulated myself by putting on 10 pounds.
I’m still not sure how it happened. I hadn’t neglected myself any differently than in the preceding year, when I clung to my pre-pandemic shape, Covid be damned. Maybe it was my metabolism taking a midlife sabbatical. Maybe it was the occasional extra midweek beer, or the less-occasional week of skipping the gym. Maybe it was a little of it all. Given enough time and torpidity, a little negligence will go a long way.
Isle Dauphine Golf Course is proof. After nearly 60 years overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, Isle Dauphine — once a Golf Digest top 200 course — is past showing her age: she is on life support. Jim Hartsell’s outstanding profile in Issue No. 16 of The Golfer’s Journal tells the story more thoroughly than I can, but suffice it to say that years of mismanagement and bad luck have left a golf course full of potential with little more to show than that potential alone.
Elevated above the fairway, Isle Dauphine’s infinity-style 10th green is guarded both by bunkering and the wind blowing off the gulf and straight into the player’s face.
This place has been fighting both bad weather and bad stewardship for longer than the golf course has been here, though. Twenty thousand years ago, Dauphin Island wasn’t an island at all: it was connected to the southern mainland. As the planet began warming and the last Ice Age lost its hold, sea levels began to rise, and the land here slipped beneath the waves. But as the seas kept rising, those waves kept pushing farther inland — and with them, they carried sand from the gulf’s floor closer and closer toward the shore. Sand bars developed. And as the planet’s warming leveled off, sea levels did too — which allowed the sand bars to emerge and grow into barrier islands. Dauphin Island is one of them.
Thousands of years later, temperatures began rising again — although this time not of Earth’s accord. As the oceans warmed, hurricanes’ intensity and frequency grew. Dauphin Island paid the price more than most: in 1969, there was Camille; in 1979, Frederic; in 1998, Georges; in 2004, Ivan. Katrina Cut — a mile-long gash running clear through the island — was filled in 2014, but is still visible from overhead. A writer from Yale described the place as “the unluckiest island in America.” The label is hard to contest.
With comparably less development than other areas on the Gulf Coast, the golf course’s support from local play has been elusive. That leaves Isle Dauphine with a cruel, ironic distinction as perhaps the most potential-laden golf course in America, but also the course most unlikely to capitalize on that potential absent a dramatic intervention. Unless something changes, nothing is going to change.
. . .
My new old clubs, with Isle Dauphine’s sandy 10th greens in the background.
I recently inherited about 50 vintage golf clubs — some of which are older than me — from my former stepfather. He’s still alive, but hasn’t played golf in probably 20 years, which explains why he’s so pleasant now. I’m not sure whether he knows it, but my earliest efforts at golf were afternoons on scruffy munis and driving ranges with these same clubs, smuggled out of the hall closet in his staff bag. After reacquiring them, I laid them out on my living room floor to start grouping them into plausible sets. “You realize,” my wife noted, trying to mask the incredulousness, “that he’s trying to clean out his house, and he just emptied out a closet into ours?” Well, sure. But I got a set of Ping Eye 2 irons out of it. I cleaned them up, got them regripped, and found them a new home in a Jones carry bag alongside a Taylormade Pittsburgh Persimmon driver and a couple of original Big Bertha fairway woods. And there they sat, in my closet.
A few months later, though, a long-planned family trip to Dauphin Island drew near — and with it, no good reason to skip out on Isle Dauphine. It seemed like as good a time as any to bring along the Ping Eye 2s. One long-neglected bit of golf nostalgia deserved another. So on the first full afternoon of the family beach trip, with the little ones down for a nap, I threw the Jones bag in the back of our minivan and made for Isle Dauphine.
A beautiful, sprawling live oak marks a point of return among the 12th, 13th, and 15th greens.
The golf course, like the island itself, is a place where one doesn’t arrive accidentally. Perched on the banks of a south-facing cove near Dauphin Island’s eastern end, Isle Dauphine is only 15 miles from Gulf Shores’ Kiva Dunes, as the gull flies — but a full two hours by car, thanks to the circuitous drive around Mobile Bay. At the end of a residential street, my minivan’s GPS directed me down a skinny, broken path that turned out to be a sidewalk, past a perplexed, wrinkled face sitting outside a ramshackle starter’s hut. “Just act like you’re supposed to be here,” I told myself as I nodded and drove by. It didn’t occur to me until I slung my bag across my shoulder that the face had probably belonged to the starter. When I walked up, either he’d forgotten already or it wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d seen all day.
One look at the man left no doubt that he was a local: brown, sun-wrinkled skin stretched over a face that had spent its entire life in the sun, and could be anywhere from 30 to 70 years old. He explained that the hard-luck golf course had recently fallen on even tougher times: its leaseholder hadn’t renewed, so a group of local volunteers were doing their best to keep up the nine holes closest to the gulf; the front nine was closed. “The fairways are good. But the greens are in pretty rough shape,” he warned me. But for $20, he handed me a cart key and told me that if the course didn’t get too crowded, I was welcome to keep playing as long as I liked.
Sand far outmatched what little grass grew on the 10th tee box. And the old Taylormade driver head — about the size of a modern hybrid, if that big — was looking more intimidating by the second. I slid a tee into the ground, tried to find footholds in the sand, pulled back the club, and gave it a lash — and watched the ball donk off the driver’s toe into the woods. The golf course, then, wasn’t the only thing that required me to adjust my expectations. With a second ball on the tee, I narrowed my stance, shortened my backswing, allowed a little handsiness, and somehow connected. The ball took off low toward trees on the right before drawing safely back into the fairway.
When I found the ball, I stood over it, looked at the green, and laughed: I didn’t see have a rangefinder, and a yardage marker was nowhere to be seen. Even if I knew the yardage, though, there was the issue of the loft differences between the Ping Eye 2s and my gamer irons; if I squinted at the Ping 6-iron, I could almost see my Callaway XR 8-iron. I hoped for the best and let it fly — which isn’t so different than how I play with newer clubs on more pristine courses.
The inside of the dogleg guarding Isle Dauphine’s 14th green.
Once the shock of the course’s appearance fades, its simplicity becomes seductive: a secluded, quirky, oceanfront golf course that looks more like an accident of landscape architecture than purposeful agronomy. The layout bleeds into the natural surroundings. And as the tee boxes, greens, and nearly every other square inch of the course attests, the layout sits on pure sand; it pours out of the greenside bunkers and separates fairways, with native plants springing up in it like a poor man’s Pinehurst No. 2 with an ocean view.
By the par-3 13th hole, I’d nearly figured out the equipment. Outside the size of the driver head, the biggest difference between the Pittsburgh Persimmon and my modern driver was the low trajectory that drives took off the aged clubface. By the time I found each drive, the shots had finished at a serviceable distance, but I owed a lot of that to rollout. And the irons, with their smaller faces, were less forgiving than I’m used to; even catching one “a groove low” looked like a bladed wedge. But the lofts were consistently playing two clubs shorter than what I’m used to, which made adjustments easy. With the gulf breeze at my back, the 13th normally would be a comfy 8-iron for me — so I pulled the 6-iron and let it fly. The ball started out over the tree guarding the green’s right side, then drew back over the flag just long enough for me to admire the hilarious possibility that this bizarre golf course might be where I found my first hole-in-one. But the shot continued drawing and landed with a puff of sand about 12 feet from the hole. I muscled a putt through the sandy surface and tapped in for par.
Accidental though it doubtlessly has been, the natural transition between sand traps and sandy fairway surrounds underscores Isle Dauphine’s minimalist appearance.
Once upon a time, these greens — small, but proportioned to Isle Dauphine’s undersized footprint — must have been special. The pin flags flap continuously in the stiff, unabated Gulf breeze, and putts would have had to contend with contours and the wind. But today, the greens are effectively gone. In places, there’s just enough tilt left to hint at something that used to be; but mostly, it’s just flat sand, with a few patches of hardpan and whatever wild grass has hung on long enough to send down roots. The conditions turns your short game on its head. On the long par-4 16th, for instance, I crushed my driver into the fairway, then came up just short of the green with a 3-iron. With my ball sitting down in the soft white sand surrounding the greens, I chipped on, and the ball landed four feet from the hole like a ton of bricks. I slammed the putt toward the hole and felt certain that I’d overshot it by 10 feet or more, and then watched the ball creep forward just far enough to die into the hole — my strangest but most rewarding par in recent memory.
In another life, the finishing hole must have been like a dream: a long par-5 doglegging left along the water, with a green guarded by two bunkers — like Pebble Beach’s 18th with less scale, and now, with more ruin. After two rips with the driver and a thin wedge, my talent for getting up and down on the sandy greens left me at last, and I walked off with a closing bogey. As I walked away, I took one look back from the parking lot overlooking the 18th green, with the pin flag bending against the gulf’s hot wind, and the water framing the entire scene. I would come back and play here anytime, I thought. Then again, it’s not clear how long Isle Dauphine will be around to return to.
. . .
Though Isle Dauphine frequently makes you squint to see its potential, the finishing hole drips with character.
A recent United Nations report summarized the climate crisis as presenting a “code red for humanity.” Without meaningful changes to the way governments respond, the planet will continue warming; seas will continue rising; coastlines will continue disappearing; and hurricanes will continue strengthening. It’s hard to imagine Dauphin Island surviving that onslaught.
A hundred years from now, will any of this be here? The island, the golf course — any of it?
Along with the extra 10 pounds, midlife has made me more cynical. I have seen enough politicians unable to govern past the next election to doubt their willingness to confront the challenge meaningfully. But I do know that this place is worth saving — first, saving the golf course from its misfortune; and second, saving the island from humanity. And anyone with a wish is still holding onto hope.
. . .
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