Not a Links,
But Not An
Average Muni Either
Ballantrae Golf Club
Pelham, Alabama
Date: October 19, 2019
Greens fee: $62
Birmingham’s abundance of top-notch golf courses is no accident. Its exclusive private designs (Country Club of Birmingham, Shoal Creek, Mountain Brook, et al.) are widely praised, and its portfolio of public courses (Oxmoor Valley, Highland Park, plus nearby Farmlinks and Limestone Springs) likewise is nothing to sneeze at. Much of the credit belongs to the area’s landscape: the Appalachian foothills along which the city sits create a natural, rolling terrain that serves as a perfect canvas for rollicking layouts. Nature has provided the bones; for designers, the trick is just not to screw it up.
Ballantrae Golf Club — suburban Pelham’s municipal course — belongs in Birmingham’s portfolio of tremendous public courses if for no other reason than that it doesn’t screw up the tremendous terrain on which the course is plotted. And its conditioning keeps it in that conversation: it is maintained at a level every bit as high as its high-end neighbors, with quick, consistent greens.
As the course’s name suggests (it shares its name with a small town in southwest Scotland), Ballantrae spends some effort toward presenting a “links style” (whatever that is). To be clear, Ballantrae is nowhere close to being a links course; it’s a parkland course, but to its credit, it successfully incorporates a number of elements that are common to links courses (as any golf course, parkland or otherwise, should): fairways wide enough to offer a number of routes from tee to green, and uneven lies throughout the course. These characteristics, combined with the landscape’s natural rises and falls, create an untamed feeling to the design.
The view from Ballantrae’s 10th green.
That successful marriage makes Ballantrae’s shortcomings baffling: for a design inspired by links principles, Ballantrae’s frequently smallish greens and lack of fairway bunkering diminish the course’s strategic thoughtfulness. And the distance between some holes leaves the design feeling more like a smattering of 18 holes rather than a cohesive course.
Still, in a state where the standard for public golf is set by the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, Ballantrae holds its own. It’s no less thoughtful, no less well maintained, and no less scenic than most Trail courses. It can be argued whether that’s enough to warrant heavy praise, but nevertheless, it’s the watermark for public golf in Alabama — and at the very least, Ballantrae meets it.
. . .
My first clue that Ballantrae isn’t your average muni hit me in the parking lot: the borderline palatial clubhouse, with purposefully disuniform brickwork and tall, rounded spires, all in the style of something you’d sooner see a Castlevania video game than at a golf course. I’ve been to Scotland just once, but I don’t remember seeing anything quite like it; maybe it was on the other side of Dornoch. Still, the building is impressive — the sort of place that silently insists you not change your shoes on your tailgate; I slipped mine on in the driver’s seat. Together with the club’s kilted, bagpiper logo, Ballantrae is a place that works hard to offer a slice of something Scottish. The weather certainly supported that effort: the mid-October air had turned cool and windy, and the stern, grey sky yielded just enough rain to complete the picture, somewhere between mist and drizzle.
But my first clue that Ballantrae falls short of that Scottish standard was the refusal to allow walkers before 11 a.m. Old Tom Morris would never! It was, in truth, a blessing in disguise. Ballantrae does a lot of things really well, but providing a walkable experience isn’t one of them. The course is, ultimately, somewhat representative of the era when it was designed: a sprawling, pre-recession landscape adorned by real estate.
But Ballantrae also stands as proof that not all courses built in that era need be dismissed out of hand as architecturally phoned-in. Its front nine includes three par-5s and three par 3s, which prevents the round from settling into something monolithic. The routing thoughtfully uses the property’s rises and falls, especially for the course’s excellent par-3s. Its fairways are wide, but not generous for the sake of generosity: they are just broad enough to offer an array of strategic choices off the tee. Fairways run all the way up to the greens, which allow run low, running shots — a welcome characteristic on this windy day. And the course finishes with three short holes, allowing the hope of last-minute salvation for a sloppy round.
Ballantrae’s second is the course’s best green, and perhaps its best hole altogether.
At times, Ballantrae is magnificent. The long, par-5 second hole (591 yards from the back tee, 520 yards from the member tees) might be the course’s best: a downhill tee shot to a wide fairway, with a leftward-bending dogleg guarded by heavy woodlands; a tee shot away from the dogleg offers not only safety but also a clear view of the green, but taking on the inside of the dogleg allows a shorter (albeit blind) chance at getting on in two. The green itself is tremendous: set in front of a rock outcropping and fronted on its left by two bunkers, it cascades downhill and right, around the sand traps to the fairway.
At still other times, though, Ballantrae feels incomplete. Of the course’s five par-3s, the most breathtaking and challenging is the long, downhill 14th (232 yards from the back tee, 185 yards from the member tees), with water running rightward and away from the player the entire length of the hole. With the wind in my face, a fairway wood was the only sensible option — a terrifying prospect on any day. Such a shot calls for a large green. But the 14th is inexplicably small: it stretches neither to the edge of the pad before a slope runs to the water, nor to the edge of the bunker on the left. It feels thrown in rather than thought through.
. . .
Ballantrae’s seventh hole, a par-5 in excess of 500 yards, runs parallel to the long par-4 sixth, in the style by which Pinehurst No. 2 matches its fourth and fifth holes.
True to municipal form, I spent most of my day waiting behind a foursome. I frequently found myself standing on a tee box, waiting for one of them to find a lost ball, or in the fairway waiting for the green to clear. I loathed the scorecard’s admonition to keep pace of play under four and a half hours, and I felt as though I’d spent most of the day waiting.
After settling for par on the finishing hole, I checked the time on my phone: three and a half hours. I’d been wrong. The group in front of me had kept a pace that was more than adequate; maybe I’d wanted better, but they’d still done fine.
It occurred to me that this is a metaphor for Ballantrae as a whole: it’s far beyond alright. It has a few avoidable imperfections, but it remains an impressive, solid option for public golf in the Birmingham area. It’s not a links, but it doesn’t have to be.
. . .
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