The price is fair.
The course is…fine.
Orange Beach Golf Center
Orange Beach, Ala.
Date: April 20, 2019
Greens fee: $16.50 to walk nine holes
Beach town business owners are no idiots. They know that your family vacation is held together about as securely as Francesco Molinari’s front nine on Sunday at the Masters: superficially on schedule, but under tenuous control (overthought, perhaps?), and liable to fall apart after a couple of panic-inducing trips to the water. They know that you will pay $17 for an Auburn Tigers boogie board, even though your kids will use it for perhaps three days, and even though you went to Georgia Tech. They know that you will order two Bushwhackers without looking at the drink list to see that they cost $11 apiece, and that even after seeing the price, you will order a third, because a few hours of normalized blood pressure is a luxury for which you are willing to pay.
Gulf Coast-area golf courses in Alabama know this, too. And their rates are proof. During the spring, Craft Farms in Gulf Shores (a 36-hole facility designed by Arnold Palmer) runs $89 for 18 holes; nearby Peninsula goes for $99. Neither is worth anything near its price. Even Kiva Dunes, a very good (albeit out of the way) Jerry Pate design, runs as high as $131 in April. One hundred thirty-one dollars! I’ve bought suits for less than that.
All of which helps explain why the simple nine-hole, par-3 course at the municipally run Orange Beach Golf Center is a welcome respite for a budget. In this part of the world, you can barely sit in a coffee shop for two hours for less than $20. But for $16.50, you can walk nine holes and burn away enough calories for one more overpriced cocktail at dinner. Win-win.
. . .
The emblematic second hole at Orange Beach Golf Center: flanked by water and abutted by housing, but uncrowded.
OBGC is neither hidden nor a gem. It’s an unmistakable landmark for anyone pulling off the Foley Beach Expressway and heading into Orange Beach on Canal Road; the cars and trucks passing by are a constant soundtrack on most of the holes. And its architectural philosophy is rooted in the idea that a nine-hole golf course should involve nine holes cut into the ground — but little more. This is no tribute to minimalism, mind you; water features decorate three of the course’s holes, the eighth of which is perhaps the most offensive green in America (but more on that later). But! Less than $20 to hit golf balls at holes in the ground for 90 minutes. You could do much worse for much more.
All of the holes at OBGC are flat and straight, and most of them are under 110 yards. Finding a way to avoid the potential repetitiveness is key.
In an effort to spice up the experience, and against my better judgment, I brought my hickory clubs in lieu of my gamers. My time with hickory golf has been a constant effort at dialing in my distances, which I still don't quite have nailed down, and I thought a short par-3 track (probably empty, to boot) would be a good opportunity to hit every club a few times and get a better idea of what they do. Also, OBGC is not the most riveting mental test; it’s straightforward, and it can get repetitive quickly. If you don’t have a set of hickories hanging on your bedroom closet door, then a four-club challenge might be in order, or alternate shot with a partner — something, anything, to prevent you from simply hitting stock wedges and short irons. Otherwise, your experience is likely to be as rudimentary as OBGC’s architecture.
To be fair, the course’s rudimentary architecture didn’t keep me from washing my tee shot on No. 1. The opening hole is only 103 yards — six of OBGC’s nine holes are 110 yards or less — but it has water short and left, and (like the rest of the course) its green is very small. My tendency to pull my wedges was the perfect (or imperfect?) complement to that design. One Callaway Supersoft down the drain. I found more luck at the second hole, which is only 75 yards (one of two holes under 100 yards), where the water is on the right, with as much dry land as you could want left and long.
Conditions: not bad! Especially for a course that you can get around for under $20.
At the 140ish-yard fifth hole, I finally found a distance suited to an experiment I’d been hoping for weeks to conduct. Of all the clubs in my hickory set, the midiron is the most confounding. Its loft is comparable to a modern 5-iron (I don’t hit those well either), but with none of the bounce that my old man game-improvement irons provide, and a profile so thin that it looks like a razor blade. Imagine trying to get a golf ball airborne with half a spatula. So a few months ago, I snagged a 25-degree hickory “bulldog” club from Louisville Golf, principally on the promise that it could replace a midiron. I’ve put the bulldog in play a couple of times, but I’ve never actually hit it alongside the midiron to compare their distances. This was my chance. I teed up a dry Supersoft for my midiron and caught it atypically flush; then the same with the bulldog. When I got down to the green, I was pleasantly surprised to see that both shots had gone right at the same distance — both about 10 yards long for the hole’s setup, but the same distance nevertheless. The midiron’s days are now likely numbered, but after about 100 years of play, it’s had a good run.
. . .
OBGC’s lone sand trap, strewn randomly against the seventh green.
The seventh hole is OBGC’s longest at 181 yards, and it features — I believe? — the course’s only sand trap, placed randomly and maintained seldomly on the front right of the green. There is a fine line between quirky and offensive, and I might have debated this bunker’s placement on that spectrum — but for No. 8.
I don’t say this lightly: the eighth hole at Orange Beach Golf Center is the most reprehensible golf hole I’ve ever played. It is an awkward, 88-yard tee shot to a 12-paces-wide dollop of a green that is surrounded on two sides by water and on a third side by the cart path — with a fountain randomly thrown in for good measure. Although I narrowly (for real!) missed the green, the ball caught the cart path and bounded toward the water before being lodged — somehow — in the riprap along the water’s banks. What’s the ruling on a lie like that? Is riprap a manmade hazard? God knows this hole is. I dropped on the nearest patch of turf I could find (no easy search), bumped the ball on with my mashie, two-putted, and muttered obscenities to myself.
The godawful, very bad eighth hole at Orange Beach Golf Center.
There are two silver linings: first, that I made par at No. 9 and thereby shot only 8-over for the round (I’ll take it); and second, that I was out less than 20 bucks. Look, this is Lower Alabama, not Pinehurst. You can overspend on golf all you want in this area, but if you’re looking for an architectural adrenaline rush, then you’re going to come up empty no matter where you go. So why would you? Why spend $100 to be underwhelmed when you can be underwhelmed for $16? I don’t say that flippantly: at bottom, golf is hitting a ball at a hole, and most everything else about it is window dressing. And there is nothing frustrating about OBGC’s conditioning: with the exception of the bunker that God forgot on No. 7, the course is well cared for, so the surfaces are more than playable.
So if you’re choosing between one bland golf course that costs $16 and another bland golf course that costs $100, then save your money, enjoy the 90 minutes at OBGC, and then divert some of your savings on another Bushwhacker.