The Last Course Standing
Timberton Golf Club
Hattiesburg, Miss.
Date: December 23, 2019
Greens Fee: $50
Mississippi is shrinking.
Just eight states in America failed to see population growth in both 2018 and 2019. One of them was Mississippi. And between 2010 and 2016, Mississippi lost more millennials than any other state. Political leaders have dismissed this drift — Gov. Phil Bryant called news coverage of the pattern a “lazy Fake News narrative” — but the diminishment was no aberration; it’s part of a years-long trend that’s seen Mississippi lagging behind the rest of the country’s growth. From 2010 to 2019, for instance, Mississippi’s population grew at just one-twentieth the pace of the country as a whole (0.3 percent versus 6.0 percent). Those figures aren’t narratives — they’re numbers.
The idea of population loss in Mississippi naturally raises images of small, dusty, long-struggling Delta towns. And while some of the state’s rural areas have suffered dramatic outmigration, the problem is not uniquely rural. Hattiesburg, the state’s fifth-largest city, is proof.
December is Mississippi’s rainiest month, and even courses like Timberton that drain well struggle to remain open for play.
Like the state as a whole, the growth of the University of Southern Mississippi’s home has been nearly nonexistent (from 2010 to 2019, Hattiesburg experienced a small population loss). In contrast, Oxford — home of Ole Miss — has grown nearly 30 percent during the same time period; Mississippi State’s Starkville has roughly kept pace with the national average. And Hattiesburg’s lack of growth isn’t just a population problem: even enrollment at Southern Miss was down slightly in Fall 2019.
Small wonder, then, that golf’s nationwide contraction has been particularly acute in Hattiesburg.
Twenty years ago, Hattiesburg’s three largest golf courses — Hattiesburg Country Club, Southern Miss’ Van Hook Golf Course, and Timberton Golf Course — combined for nearly 90,000 rounds in a single year. Those days are gone. Van Hook closed in 2004, and Hattiesburg Country Club’s members sold the club to private investors in 2017. Pine Belt National Golf Course, located 10 miles north of town on Interstate 59, closed around 2015 less than 20 years after opening.
Golf hasn’t disappeared altogether, of course. For that matter, neither will Hattiesburg. But here and elsewhere, the golf industry could have avoided a great deal of pain — financial and otherwise — if its past 20 years had seen more moments of self-honesty. For golf, many of those opportunities are gone. For Mississippi, they are not yet.
. . .
Of the courses that dominated Hattiesburg’s public golf scene in the early 2000s, Timberton Golf Course is nearly all that remains. But Timberton — twice the host of the Mississippi Amateur Championship — is proof that a contracting golf scene need not be austere: the course is fun, well maintained, and affordable. The design is routed through a residential subdivision, but its corridors are wider and feel more isolated than most residential golf courses. To make the most of the layout’s space, the edges of fairways frequently bank back toward their centers to keep wayward tee shots from straying too close toward a homeowners claim. Highland Park Golf Course in Birmingham uses the same feature with success on its landlocked site, and it’s equally well executed — and perhaps even more important — at Timberton.
Timberton’s bunkering is well done throughout the course, but nowhere better than at the ninth hole, a short par-4 peppered with sand traps large and small.
The course was former PGA Tour pro Mark McCumber’s second design in Mississippi (McCumber laid out Windance Country Club in Gulfport in 1986; in 2004, his design at Tunica National Golf Course opened). Like Tunica National, Timberton pairs impressive bunkering with creative greens to generate playfulness in a setting that is somewhat docile. And as at Tunica National, Timberton frequently presents short holes with significant doglegs — forcing a player to choose between a safe, short tee shot or an aggressive, potentially dangerous tee shot.
For two reasons, though, the formula produces a more enjoyable result at Timberton. For one, Tunica National’s mostly treeless landscape generally makes doglegs a feature in concept only; except where bunkers guard the margins, Tunica National’s twists and turns rarely take driver from the player’s hand.
But the most dramatic difference between the two was beyond McCumber’s control. There is a loneliness to Tunica National that pervades the region; it is a ghostly place, where golf feels unnatural. Timberton feels at home with itself, though — like it belongs precisely where it is.
I’m not going in there, you go in there.
If anything, Timberton pulls off some of Tunica National’s design elements better. Like Tunica National, Timberton uses short grass all the way up to the greens, with run-ups flanked by bunkering that allow rolling shots but demand accuracy. The tenth hole, for instance, is an otherwise unremarkable, short-ish par-4 (388 yards from the back tees, 306 yards from the whites); but the wide fairway practically begs for a driver, leaving less than a full swing into a green pinched in front by two sand traps. The ninth hole is similarly short (388 yards from the back tees, 314 yards from the whites), but it layers half a dozen pot bunkers across an uphill double fairway to frustrate distance perception and to create confusing lines of play.
But well placed sand traps weren’t the only hazards to contend with. December is Mississippi’s rainiest month, and Timberton was soaked. Probably half the bunkers had standing water, and so did fairways on the lowest-lying sections of the property. But wet golf is better than no golf; the course being open at all, cart path only or otherwise, is a testament to the grounds crew and to how well most of the course drains.
Those hazards (the ones McCumber designed, anyway) present more than enough challenge to complement the course’s shorter length: it maxes out at 7,032 yards, but most mid-handicappers will play from 6,009 yards. A first glance at the scorecard suggests a gap in teeing options (the next-longest set of tees measures more than 500 yards longer), but distance is not the object at Timberton: navigating its sand traps and water hazards is.
. . .
Timberton’s difficult 18th hole, as seen from behind the green. Even a well struck drive leaves a mid-iron or hybrid over water to a green guarded on three sides by bunkers — including this deep one at the green’s rear.
Timberton is a good golf course. A few of its holes get repetitive, but others stand out, and the layout accomplishes the difficult task facing any residential course designer: making the most of the land made available for golf. If a contracting marketplace is inherently a survival of the fittest, then it’s easy to see why Timberton survived Hattiesburg’s golf crunch.
Whether golf’s withering customer base has taken its final pound of flesh from this region is, of course, unknowable for now. Much more certain is the fact that, at a moment in history where Americans are moving from rural to urban areas, Hattiesburg’s and Mississippi’s growths are flat at best. But Timberton is proof that less doesn’t have to mean none; shrinking doesn’t have to mean disappearing. Contraction and flourishing needn’t be mutually exclusive — but only if the former is met with self-honesty.
. . .
You might also enjoy reading…