Golf course architecture is entirely subjective. That much is obvious. Some people prefer wide fairways, and some people want them narrow; some people like undulating greens, and some people something more subtle. All that is obvious, too. People like what they like, and no amount of rebuttal can convince someone otherwise.
Bradley Klein’s recent critique of Sweetens Cove is, undoubtedly, his genuine impression of the place. I think highly of Bradley, and I respect his viewpoint. But no one describes a beloved golf course as “impish” without expecting some pushback. This is that pushback.
More than anything else, Sweetens Cove represents the idea that golf ought to be fun. It looks different than most golf courses because most golf courses don't share that core philosophy. Sweetens is relatively short (6,602 yards over 18 holes) with wall-to-wall short grass and large greens characterized by jaw-dropping contours. Not everyone prefers those characteristics, but most golfers that I know do. They make Sweetens Cove a dramatic — and, more importantly, a purposeful — departure from most of the designs that have been built during my lifetime.
Bradley calls that a novelty. He’s right: Sweetens Cove is novel. But Sweetens Cove’s novelty indicts not itself, but the failure of the staid, paint-by-numbers philosophies that guided American golf course architecture for most of the post-World War II era. Emphasizing fun over everything else shouldn’t be novel, but that novelty is what draws pilgrims from across the country.
Undoubtedly, there is a generation gap at issue. Sweetens Cove’s architect, Rob Collins, has unapologetically credited millennial golfers with the course’s survival. Purposefully or not, Bradley tacitly recognizes the generation gap too, by backhandedly acknowledging Sweetens Cove’s “cult following among certain acolytes of new media websites.” Some people “get” Sweetens, and some don’t. For whatever reason, most of the people in the former group seem to be under the age of 50. That doesn’t make the Baby Boomers wrong (although, to be clear, Boomers are always wrong), but for an industry wrestling with how to attract younger players to a game that keeps getting grayer, you’d think that at some point, the naysayers would take a hint: if this game has a future, then this is what it looks like.
Admittedly, I do not come to this debate unbiased. I’m on the record as saying that Sweetens Cove might be the best golf course in America. The design is stunning in its creativity; every square foot of the property has purpose that was thought through. Its greens can be harsh enough to buckle the knees of a scratch player, and at the same time, its fairways can accommodate a beginner who can’t even get the ball off the ground. When Bill Coore appeared on The Fried Egg podcast in 2017, he said that Talking Stick Golf Club in Arizona — not the near-sacred Sand Hills Golf Club — might be his best design, principally because the natural contours of the land on which Sand Hills was built begged for a golf course, whereas Talking Stick was conceived out of a dead-flat plain. Sweetens Cove’s creation is no less impressive: before Collins and partner Tad King got their hands on it, the site was a featureless floodplain. The Tennessee Valley Authority still sees to it that Sweetens floods a few times per year, and its physical resilience is yet another testament to Collins’ and King’s brilliance. Sweetens Cove is a place that makes you wonder why every golf course isn’t like this. The intransigence of the sport’s elders undoubtedly has something to do with that.
None of this is to say that anyone who disagrees is wrong. But it is to say that, at a bare minimum, the passion that Sweetens Cove elicits among golfers of all ages — but especially those from Generation X and later — lays bare the need for golf’s leaders to reexamine their ideas of what is “good.”
No one will begrudge players who keep a soft spot in their hearts for the conventional designs of yesteryear. But younger golfers want to have fun. What a novel idea.
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