El Camaleón Mayakoba Golf Club
Playa del Carmen, Q.R. (Mexico)
Greens fee: $159 (afternoon)
Date: February 14-15, 2020
Occasionally Real Fun,
But Never Really Real
I had to travel nearly a thousand miles just to play golf.
Back home in Mississippi, the wettest winter of my lifetime was getting even wetter. Even after January’s near-record rainfall, February did not relent. The area’s cold, soggy, clay-laced soil had been saturated for weeks; it could hold no more rain, so each inch that followed rolled down hills, ditches, and streams, until it found the Pearl River. The river is Mississippi’s second-largest, behind only the one that gave the state its name — but even she has her limits. By Valentine’s Day, the Pearl — which runs through the state’s heart and down Mississippi’s southwesternmost border — could take no more, and spilled her banks onto Jackson; a holiday gift of the worst flooding in my lifetime.
It wasn’t my problem, though. I was on vacation.
Playa del Carmen’s thick, ancient mangrove forests were an unlikely setting for a resort golf course, but not an impossible one — for a price, anyway.
In sunny, cloudless Playa del Carmen — just south of Cancún on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula — a cool, steady sea breeze perfectly balanced the mid-80s temperatures. Birds I’d never seen before sang outside my resort bedroom, while coatis (imagine a cross between a raccoon and a lemur) rummaged along the forest floor for snacks. Lagoons traipsed through a dense forest of ferns and mangroves, buttressed by swimming pools, swim-up bars, and a breathtaking beach overlooking the sapphire northwest Caribbean.
It takes little examination to see this paradise’s inauthenticities, of course. It wasn’t discovered — it was created. The palatial Fairmont Mayakoba resort is carved out of the region’s impossibly dense mangroves, whose spindly branches and roots twist and tangle over the forest floor into a thick, impassable, 20-foot-tall latticework near the beach. The only local accents are the employees’; the remaining dialects are undeniable international, but mostly English — the American, British, and Australian brands — along with the occasional French or German thrown in for good measure.
English-only signs at El Camaleón’s immaculate practice facility leave little doubt of whom the course sees as its clientele.
The resort’s El Camaleón Mayakoba Golf Club is no less manufactured. Built at a reported cost of nearly $24 million, the course is adorned with English-only signs. A snack stand at the clubhouse accepts only U.S. dollars. Don Henley, Mike and the Mechanics, and the like blare out over the exquisite practice facility, where an American flag inexplicably flies alongside Mexico’s national banner and a couple of corporate logos.
This is a place for finer tastes, but not for one of local flavor. El Camaleón was designed by an Australian (Greg Norman) for American and European tourists at a Canadian-owned resort; it attempts no suggestion otherwise. Like the resort that the course calls home, El Camaleón is beautiful, well kept, and gives away all its inauthenticities at the slightest examination. It is enjoyable, most of all with suspended disbelief.
. . .
El Camaleón’s place on the PGA Tour schedule is easy to understand: the course is a straightforward, uncomplicated test of execution, with demarcated boundaries, flat lies, and mostly docile greens. It tells the player what to do, and if she does, then she scores.
Intentionally or not, though, there is more to El Camaleón that just that. The course’s collection of par-3s is genuinely enjoyable; its routing zig-zags through the ocean wind, constantly requiring a player to rethink ostensibly simple shots; and its place at this meeting of sea and a remarkable landscape gives it an inescapable character. If El Camaleón is not a great golf course, then it’s close to being one.
Shortening El Camaleón’s seventh hole would bring its unique centerline hazard more into play, and would force an internal debate over club selection off the tee.
The course’s signature hole, No. 7, makes the point. The par-5’s length (554 yards from the tips, 509 yards from the white tees) is just long enough to rule out most players from going for the green in two — which makes a driver unnecessary off the tee. That takes out of play the course’s most remarkable feature: the cenote (a cave, basically) playing as an enormous centerline bunker. Even if a player hits driver, the cenote lies nearly 300 yards from the white tees — too far to be reached. But the fairway in front of the cenote slopes downhill toward it so severely that well struck drives bound toward it, even if they don’t reach it — meaning that an aggressive drive toward this centerline hazard is “rewarded” with a new obstacle: the lip of the cenote’s roof, which the approach shot must clear. That’s no easy task with a fairway wood or long iron — but there’s no real reason to try that, since the green is effectively unreachable in two shots. The seventh hole is reduced to an irony, then: a par-5 with a brilliant, unique centerline hazard, but with no incentive to test that hazard. The smarter route — the only route, really — is to steer a tee shot toward the left half of the wide fairway, away from the slope rolling down to the cenote, and then two irons into the green. It’s a boring way to navigate a hole that shorter length would make much more exciting (by bringing the cenote into play off the tee) and interesting (by introducing more than one viable avenue from tee to green).
Where El Camaleón submits to the indignity of shorter length, though, it becomes a much more fun course. Three of its four par-3s are less than 160 yards (131 yards from the white tees), but two of those are directly exposed to the Caribbean and its permanent wind — making a stock wedge or short iron impractical. Adding more club is an option, as is flighting a shot low (no easy task at, for example, the fourth hole’s awkward yardage — 88 yards from the white tees). The par-3s make you think, but are short enough to be within the skill of every player who makes the right decision. That’s what the best par-3s do.
Elsewhere, though, options are rarer to find because of the course’s overuse of rough. In places, the strategic use of rough makes sense: behind the fifth green to prevent long shots from rolling into the water, for example — or in any number of places to keep balls from bounding into the mangrove forest. But El Camaleón uses rough the same way a dog licks at a sore: the habit probably began for innocent reasons, but by now, it’s just gross.
As it passes through the region’s signature mangrove forests, El Camaleón’s playing corridor runs out of real estate quickly.
The mangroves themselves certainly don’t help the course’s playability; outside the standard playing corridors, the forest quickly injects itself. Even within two or three feet of the forest’s edge, the mangroves are impassable, and an errant ball is almost certainly lost; there is absolutely no way to play out of them (on my first round, I hooked an approach left of the third green but saw my ball no more than two feet into the mangroves; pushing all the ferns and foliage aside, I half-expected a velociraptor ambush).
The mangroves — skinny and tall, somewhere between a live oak and a magnolia, with branches and roots flung in every available direction, woven together tightly over centuries — certainly aren’t the most golf-conducive way to frame holes. But they add an undeniable charm to the course, and at any rate, El Camaleón is married to them by now; they were here long before the resort, after all. Whatever limitations they impose on the course’s playability could be mitigated by creating better playability elsewhere — by cutting down greenside rough, for instance.
Replacing the greens’ surrounds with closely mown areas would be more than just a humanitarian gesture for 15-handicappers. Norman’s greens are routinely El Camaleón’s weakest features; they are almost all flat, rarely confronting players with more than a couple of inches of break. The handful of instances where Norman indulged a sliver of creativity (for example, the runoff area on the right half of the 12th green) are undoubtedly the course’s most interesting greens to putt. But they are the exception at a place where the rule is a dull, mostly flat creation, copied and pasted a dozen times or more.
El Camaleón’s par-3s are mostly short, but exposure to the unimpeded Caribbean wind complicates what otherwise would be stock wedge shots.
And often, the holes themselves fall into the same pattern: straight and unsurprising, with distance alone the biggest obstacle. The par-4 14th hole (452 yards from the back, 387 yards from the white tees) is the scorecard’s toughest, but is strategically unremarkable: a wide, bunkerless fairway, from which an elevated green is just a midiron away. A creek runs between the landing area and the green, but it’s not in play for anyone. And a large sand trap flanks the green’s left side, but the green is so large that there’s no need to challenge the bunker. It’s a test of execution alone. On my first trip around El Camaleón, a solid drive left me a 5-hybrid out; I hit the ball perfectly, and it drew safely to within 15 feet of the flag. “Nice shot!” shouted a bicyclist on one of the trails running along the course. Dutifully, I offered a modest wave (I’ve never gotten to do that before). But in truth, it hadn’t been a good shot; it had been a good golf swing, but the hole didn’t demand a good shot. It’s a microcosm of El Camaleón’s weakest holes: they’re not bad, they’re just boring.
. . .
Perhaps it’s true, as Jay Revell is fond of saying, that golf is everywhere — but it probably shouldn’t be. A mangrove forest on the shore of the Caribbean Sea could conceivably give way to a beautiful golf course, but the landscape has so few natural features that support interesting golf that any layout on that land must be impeccably thought through; if you’re the designer, nature is doing you no favors, so you must do all the favors yourself.
In all likelihood, both Norman and the resort achieved exactly what they wanted at El Camaleón. The PGA Tour comes once a year, and for the calendar’s other 51 weeks, the course is busy with tourists. Everyone is happy.
Ultimately, regardless of El Camaleón’s bonafides, golf is an act of escapism — whether you’re escaping floods, work, or just your own thoughts. For that, at least, El Camaleón delivers. It is a track built on the premise that golf courses shouldn’t ask too many questions. El Camaleón is best enjoyed when the player doesn’t, either.
. . .
You might also enjoy reading…