I Hate This Course
Dancing Rabbit Golf Club (Azaleas)
Philadelphia, Miss.
Date: March 23, 2019
Greens fee: $45
Lush greenery on rolling topography, surrounded by scores of azalea bushes and towering pine trees, with a large, plantation-style clubhouse. Sound like anywhere you’ve heard of?
In 2008, Golf Magazine wrote a quick snippet acknowledging the hard truth that none of us is going to play Augusta National in this lifetime — so as an alternative, the author wrote, “we found an Augusta clone you can play.” The headline was unhelpfully less qualified: “The Augusta You Can Play.” Dancing Rabbit Golf Club, whose Azaleas course was the beneficiary of that comparison, took the headline and went into marketing overdrive. Nowadays, its website, promotional materials, and pretty much anything written about the course all repeat that tagline — The Augusta You Can Play. The public-relations blitz worked: in 2015, Dancing Rabbit returned to Golf Digest’s list of America’s top 100 public courses, where it currently sits at 99th.
Dancing Rabbit’s familiar clubhouse, as seen from the 18th green of the Azaleas course.
But the Azaleas course bears a passing resemblance to Augusta National to the untrained eye only. It is roughly the same color, and it features some of the same fauna. But it presents almost none of Augusta’s strategic genius. Where Augusta offers players options on virtually every shot, the Azaleas course repeatedly requires a golfer to choose between a specific shot and a penal result. Dancing Rabbit isn’t an Augusta clone — at best, it’s a knockoff.
I do this to myself every time. I’ve played the Azaleas course at least a dozen times, and every time, I walk off the 18th (a particularly bad hole) muttering curses and listing all the things I hate about it. Months later, a favorable rate will catch my eye, and I’ll rationalize the uncommon chance to play a top-100 golf course for around $50. Four hours after teeing off, the cycle begins anew. This is the course’s only redeeming feature: if you want to play a top-100 course on the cheap, then Dancing Rabbit is your place. Its rack rates go as high as $100 during peak season, but on most days, the online booking system offers steep late-morning markdowns. If you’re flexible on when you play, then there’s no reason you can’t get on for $60 or less; I played for $45. “Just $45,” I told myself, “and gosh, it’s the Augusta you can play!”
. . .
The front-left bunker guarding the No. 1 green from an uphill approach shot.
In spots, the Azaleas course’s ham-handed effort at Augustafication is borderline embarrassing. The first hole features a downhill tee shot with a fairway bunker in play, followed by an uphill tee shot to a green protected by a front-left bunker. Sound familiar? The second hole is a par-5 just short enough to be reachable in theory; in truth, it’s three shots for all but the most skilled players. Again, perhaps you’ve seen that idea before.
The third hole is the Azaleas course’s best — maybe the best on either of Dancing Rabbit’s two courses — but even here, the course’s stifling architecture begins to reveal itself. No. 3 is a long par 4 with a split fairway, separated by a rough-covered slope rolling down and left. The right-hand side is by far the preferred landing spot; it offers a better view of the green and a safer approach shot. But the pine trees on the right pinch the player’s access to the right-hand fairway so severely that the only practical way to finish there is to play a fade — but the fairway runs left, so a left-to-right tee shot almost certainly will run through into the rough.
Even the most imaginative hole at Dancing Rabbit can’t avoid getting in its own way: the rightward fairway on No. 3 is the more preferable landing spot, but the left-to-right shape required all but guarantees that the tee shot will roll through the fairway into the rough.
This is a pattern that the Azaleas course repeats again and again: ostensibly large playing corridors, with all but one option pinched off. The fifth hole commits the same sin: the fairway doglegs rightward only slightly, but a huge tree on the right demands a left-to-right ball flight to finish on short grass. On the par-4 ninth, pines jut out into the fairway on the right-hand side; if you can’t draw your tee shot away from them, then the trees block your approach, and par is out of the question.
The setup also takes too little inspiration from Augusta’s true nature. Unlike Augusta, Dancing Rabbit’s Azaleas course surrounds its mounded greens with thick rough, not short grass. At Augusta, shots around the green are the course’s most interesting because of the options they present. But near the greens at the Azaleas course, there is only one option: hack out with a wedge, and hope the ball stops rolling before it finds more rough.
The 16th hole at Dancing Rabbit’s Azaleas course.
Nowhere is this more evident that at the 16th, a standard-issue par 3 that is virtually inaccessible without traversing a large sand trap. I pured an 8-iron but underaccounted for the wind in my face, and landed on a small tongue of steep ground between the sand and the green, covered in rough. Here I was, no more than five feet from the putting surface, with no options at all: putter was out of the question, as was any sort of bump-and-run. My only choice was to launch a wedge shot into the air and hope to God I didn’t blade it into the woods (I somehow made par). On a great golf course, the options multiply as you get closer to the green. This confounds a good player (by forcing her to choose between an increasing array of available short-game shots) and delights a high-handicap player (by opening up play to whatever shots his under-equipped short game includes). But at the Azaleas course, as you get closer to the hole, your options dwindle. That’s not what happens at Augusta, nor at any course that takes away its most important lessons.
. . .
If you can get over the fact that it’s inherently bad, Dancing Rabbit’s Azaleas course offers a few silver linings. It’s remote, and almost always not crowded. It’s beautiful, and for a course maintained so well, it’s cheap.
But these qualities also are present at the Azaleas’ sister course, Dancing Rabbit Oaks. The Oaks course was added just two years after the Azaleas, and it stretches over similar land, but its architectural soul could not be more different. Its fairways are not choked off, so they welcome wider varieties of shots; the surrounds of its greens present more options. And it’s just more fun: it has two drivable par 4s, and its bunkering is less severe.
It isn’t Augusta, but it doesn’t pretend to be. Now there’s an idea worth ripping off.