Loft in the Time of Corona
Whippoorwill Golf Course
Altoona, Alabama
GREENS FEE: $10 to walk 18
Date: March 14, 2020
I quit watching “The Walking Dead” after Season 4. It had become too repetitive. But a scene from Season 3 still comes to mind often. In a rare moment of calm, the Governor — the series’ ultimate villain — stood atop a camper with a driver, leisurely hitting golf balls at zombies outside his compound. “We should visit Augusta,” he tells someone. “Only take the women — let them play. It’ll be historic.”
Whippoorwill’s groundskeeping is, shall we say, unconventional. But once the shock passes, then comes the realization that that’s part of the place’s allure.
Since watching that episode, I’ve wondered from time to time what Augusta National would look like in a zombie apocalypse. At what point would the birds and squirrels return? Would the old Wendy’s employees retake their acreage? How long would it take for the course to devolve from its sickly sweet hue of green to MacKenzie’s vision of a scrubby, wily mishmash of clovers and crabgrasses?
Less time than it ever took “The Walking Dead” to make narrative progress, probably. But however long it took, the result wouldn’t be far from what you get at Whippoorwill Golf Course in northeast Alabama. Whippoorwill is the most minimalist presentation I’ve ever seen at a golf course: cut through hillocks and across streams in an exhilarating routing reminiscent of The Fields and in a setting reminiscent of Mossy Oak, but with the lightest imaginable maintenance to preserve playability. It is short, but tests every club. It is rough, but demands precision. I say this in the highest praise: Whippoorwill is the weirdest golf course I’ve ever played. It is a captivating hallucination.
On the one hand, Whippoorwill resembles golf as it might look at the end of the world; on the other, its 18 holes are so wildly enjoyable to command pre-apocalyptic attention. It’s how golf can look today, too.
. . .
“Could you fit in a single to play 18 around 10:30?” I asked.
The old man on the phone laughed. “Yeah, I think we can sneak you in,” he laughed. “Come on out.”
Whippoorwill’s humble website doesn’t allow online reservations. And as an unapologetic introvert, I am loathe to suffer actual phone calls. But ever since catching wind of Whippoorwill on Instagram a few months ago, my thirst for its quirky, scruffy shot values has exceeded my aversion to live interaction. So less than 24 hours after the declaration of the coronavirus national emergency, I piled in my minivan with enough hand sanitizer to drown a rat and headed for Altoona.
Whippoorwill’s 11th green, clinched on three sides by a creek, with the eighth green in the distance.
The road from Birmingham to Whippoorwill, like the course itself, is replete with hairpin twists. From Birmingham, drive to Palmerdale; from Palmerdale, take the road to Oneonta; from Oneonta, head toward Snead; and if you get to Snead, then you’ve gone too far. Alongside County Road 14 lies Whippoorwill Golf Course, tucked among forests and farmlands as forgettable as Whippoorwill might have been, but for Odis Williams’ wild hair. In 1993, he built the course on an old cattle pasture, without much idea of what he was doing. “It wasn’t fit to play on,” Williams told WBRC’s Magic City Weekend. “The greens was terrible. The fairways were terrible. But I had 27 people to play the first day, and the next day I had 47. I said, ‘Man, this thing might make money.’” Williams came to golf late in life. But as Whippoorwill demonstrates, there’s no right and wrong way to do golf.
To be sure, Whippoorwill frequently reflects Williams’ novicehood. The routing is bizarre at times — the second tee, for example, hides about halfway back up the first fairway — with unconventional yardages (the back nine features four straight par-4s between 210-220 yards, and three par-3s measure 80 yards or less). But therefrom grew much of Whippoorwill’s character: Williams’ design breaks conventions because he didn’t know what the conventions were to begin with.
The 14th green at Whippoorwill: a true island green, but a small one demanding precision and backspin.
Whippoorwill is largely treeless, frequently presenting no discernible playing corridor — just a teebox (if you can find it) and a flag in the distance (if you can read it). If it sounds disorienting, it is. But the result isn’t chaos — it’s adventure. After finishing the first hole, I couldn’t find the second tee, but I noticed a pin flag in the distance that just had to be the second green. So I stuck a peg in the ground where I stood and went for the green — which, as luck would have it, turned out to be No. 7. But who cares? Whippoorwill is golf in its rawest possible form, where the game truly is little more than a ball, a hole in the ground, and your own imagination. Who cares about the routing?
The front nine, which sits on the more interesting half of the property, runs across choppy terrain, over a small creek, and along a bigger one before returning to Whippoorwill’s makeshift clubhouse. The bulk of the course’s few trees cordon off most of these holes from the rest of the course, giving the front nine a sense of solitude that you wouldn’t expect from a wide-open, mostly treeless layout. And the routing, if bizarre, also plays through landforms as well as if a veteran architect had drawn it up. On the far edge of the property, a ridge runs across the third and fourth fairways, which sit on the slope of a large hill; the third plays downhill, and the fourth runs uphill, but the ridge makes tee shots blind. Whippoorwill isn’t long (the course stretches a little more than 4,500 yards), but it isn’t dull, either.
Whippoorwill’s irrigation system is powered by an old pickup truck long past the days of any other conceivable use. If Whippoorwill sold merchandise, then this would have to be the logo.
Throughout the course, awkward yardages are the norm. The charming par-3 fifth hole, with Whippoorwill’s pickup-powered irrigation motor just off the teebox’s left, is a 70-yard pitch to a half-turtleback green built into the side of a hill. The 450-yard, par-5 ninth hole offers a birdie chance to finish out the front. The 11th — an 80-yard wedge to a green sharply downhill and over a creek — is the best hole on the course. And Whippoorwill’s toughest — the 220-yard, par-4 14th — plays to a preposterously small island green only 25 paces wide. What Whippoorwill lacks in length, it makes up in potential as a match-play venue: the par-3s are actually more like par 2½; the par-4s (only two of which stretch 250 yards or longer) are par 3½; and so on. If you want to take it easy, then so will Whippoorwill; but if you want to challenge the course, then its subtle defenses — tiny greens and clever mounding — are ready to fight back.
And although the greens are scruffy and inconsistent, even they contribute to Whippoorwill’s aura; anything else would seem out of place, and regardless, they have more speed in them than a first glance suggests.
. . .
You wouldn’t think walking a 4,500-yard course would beat you up. But Whippoorwill’s hills add up. After putting out on No. 18, I staggered into the dusty, makeshift clubhouse — lightly converted from something sterner during the property’s cattle grazing days. In the next room, the old man was shouting through a conversation over the whir of club-grinding. True to Whippoorwill’s ultra-minimalist ethos, the clubhouse stocks only what you absolutely need: a few snacks, some drinks, a box of used pencils, and some photocopied scorecards. I snagged a can of Coke Zero from the refrigerator. “How much to take this from you?” I asked. The old man nodded. “Dollar bill,” he said. I handed him exact change — the eleventh dollar that I’d sunk into a three-hour trip around one of the most surreal golf courses I’ve ever visited.
Like the golf course, Whippoorwill’s clubhouse exudes buckets of character without a stitch of extraneousness.
Back in the minivan, I slathered on a fresh layer of hand sanitizer and cracked open the aluminum pop top, then took one last look at this wonderful, bizarre place. For some reason, my thoughts kept returning to Alister MacKenzie. Whippoorwill is the last course on the planet that ever will be confused for Augusta National, but I think MacKenzie would enjoy this place that’s full of surprises and devoid of any pretense. MacKenzie believed that golf should be an adventure, that no hole — no matter how unusual — was unfair, and that a mixture of fairway grasses was not only tolerable but desirable.
To be sure, not everyone agrees with MacKenzie on those points — and for that reason, Whippoorwill isn’t for everyone. It is undoubtedly the rawest, simplest presentation I’ve ever seen — a reminder that, as long as you’ve got a ball and a few holes in the ground, nothing else matters. Whenever we move on from the end of the world, golf will be waiting.
. . .
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