Close to Home,
Far From Perfect
LeFleur’s Bluff Golf Course
Jackson, Miss.
Date: Feb. 16, 2019
Greens fee: $11 to walk nine holes
Mississippi has always been home. I love Mississippi for the same reason a wife loves her husband: despite, not because.
So it is with LeFleur’s Bluff Golf Course in my hometown. Whatever feeling I have for LeFleur’s -- certainly not love, but some modicum of affection -- is despite what it is, not because of what it is.
The course is part of the larger LeFleur’s Bluff State Park, smack dab in the middle of Jackson. The golf course is a 10-minute drive from downtown and maybe five minutes from my house. It’s routed over tremendous land that rolls dramatically, especially by central Mississippi standards. If proximity and topography count for anything -- and they do -- LeFleur’s has a lot going for it.
Unfortunately, that’s most of what LeFleur’s has going for it. The course is a dump. The fairways are overgrown with weeds and clover. The greens are spotty and inconsistent. And the routing is...well, the course literally ends in a swamp. So there’s that.
LeFleur’s trump card, though, is its price: $11 to walk nine during the week. That’s $11 to hit a golf ball for an hour and a half and to burn enough calories for a guilt-free beer that night. You could do worse.
. . .
I put together a short set of hickory golf clubs last year. “Let me get this straight,” my wife said when I showed them to her. “Now you don’t want the ball to go as far?”
At the time, I had dreams of taking them to exotic locales like Pasatiempo and Bethpage Black, to play the game’s greatest layouts as their masters had intended.
Instead, they get almost all their action at LeFleur’s. It’s not the ethereal experience that I envisioned. But they fit at LeFleur’s, which tips out at 2,931 yards for nine holes (I generally play from the white tees, which measure 2,790 yards). And playing hickories adds a jolt of excitement to a course that needs it: “God, am I really going to trudge around this trash heap again?” turns into, “Hey, I get to play the hickories today!”
I carry them in a green, single-strap, canvas Jones golf bag, and I play Callaway Supersoft balls. Some hickory golfers claim the clubs’ ancient shafts and soft iron faces can handle tour-level balls just fine, but if I can’t spin a Pro V1 with a modern wedge, then what hope do I have with a 100-year-old niblick? Supersofts aren’t rigid enough to damage anything, and they run $20 per dozen. That’s good enough for me.
. . .
No. 1 fairway, LeFleur’s Bluff GC.
I can never decide whether LeFleur’s is bad or merely not good. No one could be expected to look past its innumerable maintenance issues, but if the course suddenly were pristine, the layout still would be debatable.
No. 1 is a good warmup hole: a short, straightforward par 4. I particularly appreciate the mounding behind the green that acts as a 180-degree backstop.
The view from above, back toward the fairway from the No. 2 green at LeFleur’s Bluff GC.
But the long, par 4 second hole is an animal. A large pond crosses the fairway well beyond the landing area off the tee. Assuming you crush your drive, you’ve still got a long iron or hybrid to the green (which, like all the greens at LeFleur’s, are obscenely small). But over the pond, the fairway begins climbing a large hill, with the green on top -- not exactly an ideal target for a shot that has to come in low and hot. And of course, if you didn’t crush your drive, you’ve got an even worse dilemma: taking a hybrid or fairway wood to clear the pond, or laying up on a par 4?
Is this a good hole or a bad one? Reasonable people can differ. All I know is that I made par one afternoon last year and almost jumped in the water to celebrate. If that makes it a good hole, then so be it.
Late-afternoon shadows falling across the sixth fairway at LeFleur’s Bluff GC.
And then there’s No. 6, another long par 4 that’s fairly unremarkable except for the enormous oak tree directly in front of the green. The fairway is wide, by LeFleur’s standards, so you’ve got plenty of room to swing away off the tee. The farther down the fairway you drive the ball, though, the more the tree starts to come into play for your second shot. You can mitigate that interference by hanging back a little off the tee, as your second shot with a longer club will come in lower -- but assuming you sneak your approach under the branches, good luck holding the green.
Good or bad design? For $11, it’s all academic anyway.
. . .
This round also served to christen two new clubs that I added during Louisville Golf’s Black Friday sale last year: a 25-degree bulldog (sort of like a hybrid) and a center-shafted mallet putter that’s basically a wooden version of my modern gamer.
On the third hole, with maybe 180 yards left, the bulldog came on stage for the first time. I gazed at the polished, flawless clubhead, damned to begin growing less flawless in mere moments. “You’ll never look this good again,” I said, and after a practice swing, I gave it a whack. The ball flight was impressive for a hickory (they launch much lower than modern clubs), but my swing path wasn’t: the shot started dead on line, but eventually drifted right of the green.
I can never remember how far my hickory clubs go. I play with them maybe once every other month, and I’m bad with numbers anyway. Is the mashie the equivalent of a 7-iron, or is that the mashie niblick? I can never remember. Throw in the fact that yardage varies greatly depending on how squarely you strike the ball (and usually, I don’t), and club selection frequently involves guesswork.
Walking up to the tee on the par 3 ninth hole, there was one thing I didn’t have to guess about: I remembered very clearly hitting my midiron the last time I played here, and I remembered very clearly launching the shot clear over the green. But where did that leave me now? Mashie or mashie niblick? And which one of those was the 7-iron again?
I guessed mashie niblick. I caught it clean, right in the middle of the face, and watched the ball crest 20 yards too early. Oh I’m sorry, the game show host in my head lamented, the correct answer was the mashie.
One re-tee and three putts later, I was done in a clean 90 minutes: $11 poorer, a couple of golf balls lighter, and no closer to figuring out whether I hate this place.
. . .
Playing the Cradle last summer in Pinehurst, N.C., was a revelation: golf doesn’t have to be 18 holes, or some arbitrary yardage, or even 14 clubs. And in fact, golf is frequently most fun when it gets away from that mould.
The first place I thought of after the Cradle was LeFleur’s. The land is perfect for it, I told my friends. Just nuke the course, start over, and do the same thing that the Cradle does.
It’s a nice idea; the land at LeFleur’s really is too good not to have a solid golf course on top of it. But it’s almost certainly not going to happen: if Mississippi’s state government won’t even fully fund its public schools, then it’s probably not springing for many state park golf course renovations either.
Most likely, LeFleur’s will continue on as Mississippi does: full of potential that it has never fully met.