There’s a Fine Line
Between Serenity and Solitary
Dancing Rabbit Golf Club (Oaks)
Philadelphia, Miss.
Date: May 27, 2019
Greens fee: $45
Mississippi is a land of paradoxes — self-contradictions, even. It is a place of tremendous natural beauty, full of kind people and a proud culture of art and literature. It is also a place of unspeakable injustice. Mississippi can be warm and welcoming. It can also be very lonely.
This is a lonely place.
It would be nearly impossible to overstate Dancing Rabbit Golf Club’s impact on Mississippi public golf when it opened in 1997. Today, Mississippi has several Top 100-level public courses, but that wasn’t true in 1997: Fallen Oak and the Preserve didn’t open until 2006; Shell Landing opened in 2000; and Mossy Oak wasn’t even yet in a glimmer in Gil Hanse’s eye. Old Waverly had been founded nearly 10 years prior, but most of its play was private. Dancing Rabbit changed the landscape of public golf in Mississippi. It was a truly top-tier, nationally renowned course open to anyone. Mississippi had never seen that before. By the time the club opened its second course, the Oaks, in 1999, it was still the epicenter of public golf in the state.
The large bunker running alongside the second fairway. If I’ve played 20 rounds at Dancing Rabbit’s Oaks course, then I must have sent 15 tee shots into this sand.
And casino gaming — the industry that made the new wave of high-end public golf courses possible — was still booming. In 1999, Mississippi casinos took in more than $2.5 billion. Even as late as 2007, just before the Great Recession, gaming took in nearly $2.9 billion in revenue. Ever since, though, the industry’s revenue has fallen nearly every single year: in 2018, Mississippi’s casinos took in about $2.1 billion. When adjusted for inflation, that’s a drop of about 40 percent in a little more than a decade.
Dancing Rabbit appears not to have escaped that trend. I’ve been playing golf there for 10 years. I don’t remember it being as desolate then as it is now. On most days, the tee sheet is wide open. The parking lot is sparsely trafficked. It’s not uncommon to play 18 holes without seeing another group. Staffing appears to be minimal; conditioning on both courses is far above adequate, but also not immaculate.
Not that there’s anything wrong with discounted tee times, the serenity of nature, and not having to wait on slow groups. But there is an absence of something here that goes beyond peace and quiet — there is emptiness. A few miles from here, three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 on the side of a county road. It was an unholy, shameful crime. That roadside would have been a lonely place to die. Golf is an escape, but I’ve never crossed the county line here without thinking of those three men. Every time I do, I feel lonely too.
. . .
The top 100 lists that have given Dancing Rabbit its moments in the national sun have always favored the Azaleas course over the Oaks, but for reasons I’ve documented at length, the less-heralded little brother is the better track: it offers more lines from tee to green, it punishes mistakes less callously, and its playing corridors are free of arbitrary obstructions (read “tree branches”). The land on which the Oaks sits is a little less dramatic than the Azaleas’ routing, but it’s still more than adequate.
The green at the par-3 fifth hole, as seen from the left side of the approach with the No. 6 fairway on the ridge to green’s right.
If the Oaks has one shortcoming, it’s the presence of a handful of fairly mundane holes: the first two holes, for example, are mostly straightforward with duplicative fairway bunkering on their fairways’ right sides. But the Oaks makes up for that repetitiveness with a diverse collection of more entertaining holes: short par-4s, thoughtful par-5s, and a set of dramatic, downhill par-3s among them. To be fair, the Oaks was intended to be a more playable alternative to the headache-inducing Azaleas course; it’s supposed to be easier. But the course’s best holes prove that playable doesn’t have to mean boring. In several places, the Oaks fails to keep that balance.
The fourth hole begins the best five-hole stretch on the course, and also is the Oaks’ best par-5: a 498-yarder (from the white tees) that, for mere mortals, requires three well placed shots: off the tee to the left of yet another righthand fairway bunker, a second shot short of a gorge, and finally to a green guarded by the gorge and another bunker. Theoretically, the green would be reachable in two with a nuked drive that flirts with the fairway bunker — and there’s room to miss on the green’s right, if you’re feeling froggy. I’ve never been that brave, though, or that accurate off the tee.
The unfortunate view awaiting a player from the greenside bunker on No. 8.
But my favorite chapter of this five-hole stretch is its last chapter: the drivable par-4 eighth, which careens downhill for 274 yards (again, from the whites) through a fairway shaped like a halfpipe — the sides of which can help save overworked drives and steer them back toward the green, when the course is firm enough. But the bunker fronting the green’s right side poses a harrowing shot to a smallish target, with water immediately behind it. So if you’re going for the green, don’t miss right (trust me).
The ninth is a ho-hum par-5 that lacks the strategic thoughtfulness of the fourth, but the opening stanza of the back nine might be the best hole on the course: another short par-4, drivable at just 278 yards (from the whites), but — unlike No. 8 — littered with bunkers along both of the fairway’s sides. For all but the shortest of layups, there’s trouble left; for the slightly more adventurous, there’s trouble right; and for the truly adventurous, a deep bunker sits ready for anything erring too far toward the green’s left side. The 10th does everything that a great golf hole should: it presents a series of risk-reward options, forces the player to decide on the option best suited for her game, and requires decent execution of that decision.
Aside from its share of the course’s enjoyable par-3s, the back nine’s excitement falls off after No. 10 — until the 18th. The closing hole measures 378 yards with bunkering on the (surprise!) right side of the fairway, but which runs downhill to the green and incentivizes an aggressive play: if a tee shot carries the bunkering, the downhill slope can carry the shot to within a wedge’s reach of the green. It’s an appropriate finish for this course: half of it is mundane, and half of it is exciting, but even at its most ordinary it’s still fine.
. . .
Exposed rock along the right side of the Oaks’ final par-5, the otherwise forgettable 16th hole.
The public golf boom that birthed Dancing Rabbit never got any closer to Jackson than Neshoba County: it was gaming-driven, after all, not golf-driven. That makes Dancing Rabbit — and the Oaks course in particular — the best public golf option in central Mississippi. It’s a distinction that says as much about the dearth of competition as its own merits: even in the post-gaming boom era, an Oaks course being presented at perhaps 80 percent of its potential is still better than anything else within a 90-minute drive from Jackson.
Maybe the crowds will return one day. I have my doubts; Mississippi’s economy has never really been known for roaring comebacks. But either way, the emptiness that’s been part of this place’s soul for more than 50 years isn’t going anywhere. It’s still a lonely place to die — even for a golf course.