How Did It
Come to This?
Quail Hollow Golf Course
McComb, Miss.
Greens fee: $40 to ride 18
Date: Aug. 22, 2020
Outside perhaps “The Rising,” Bruce Springsteen’s best song of the past 20 years is “Long Walk Home.” It’s the story of someone returning to his hometown and not recognizing it; the town, and even some of its people, have changed.
In town I passed Sal’s Grocery,
The barbershop on South Street;
I looked into their faces
They were all rank strangers to me.
My hometown is McComb, Miss., a railroad town tracing its origins back to the 1870s, and sitting about halfway between Jackson and New Orleans. After a wave of bombings against Black homes and churches in 1964, Time magazine called McComb “the toughest anti-civil rights community in the toughest anti-civil rights area in the toughest anti-civil rights state in the Union.” Thirteen years later, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s airplane ran out of fuel overhead and crashed in a field about 10 miles southwest of town. “We’ve found them all except one,” a police spokesman told reporters on the scene. “We can’t find Leonard.”
Quail Hollow’s $7 million construction included a nine-hole, par-3 course, but budget cuts have left it shuttered for a decade.
I came along a few years later; we moved to Jackson when I was 7. Nearly all my family in McComb moved on or died years ago. Still, every time I pass through, an unsettled feeling washes over me — like just around the corner, there’s a place or a person I’ll know but won’t recognize. I’d rather avoid it than face it.
Quail Hollow Golf Course, just south of town in nearby Percy Quin State Park, has become one of those familiar but unrecognizable places. When the Arthur Hills-designed course opened in 1996 after a $7 million build ($11.5 million in 2020 dollars, adjusted for inflation), it was the first of the small handful of Mississippi’s truly great, public golf courses: in the company of Dancing Rabbit (whose Azaleas course opened a year later), Grand Bear (which opened in 1999), and few others. Golf Digest named it one of the year’s best new public affordable courses (greens fees opened at $30), and 33,000 rounds were played the first year.
The nematodes came shortly thereafter. The course never really lost the nematodes. But slowly, the park began losing the course. In 2012, hurricane damage to a dam required draining the course’s main source of irrigation. The next year, a last-minute hiccup at the state legislature cost the park its share of a $9 million bond issue. By 2017, the course saw fewer than 17,000 rounds; in 2018, it nearly closed. And all this happened during a decade in which Mississippi cut funding for state parks roughly in half.
Less than a quarter-century into its life, then, Quail Hollow is showing its age before its time — a place full of promise squandered through bad luck, mismanagement, neglect, and the reality that things worth preserving don’t preserve themselves. Anything will wither, if you let it. And not just golf courses.
. . .
Americans’ response to COVID-19, some people claim, should be a personal choice. A few minutes before I hit I-55 for the 90-minute drive from Jackson to McComb, I published my choice: that I’d felt unsafe traveling for my annual golf trip and had abandoned the plan. It was a strictly personal account, not an argument that anyone else should act similarly. Even so, half the responses were irate. Personal choice, it seems, is only legitimate when it bends toward the ravings of talk radio.
If the past four years have seen a nadir (and you’d be hard pressed to pick just one), our country’s struggle with the deadliest pandemic in a century surely would be it. And not just because the United States — the greatest nation in the world — has bungled through an unnecessarily negligent response, and cost 180,000 Americans their lives in the process. But for untold millions, that bungling — the willful recklessness that has guided our national response to this tragedy — has somehow become a source of pride. When did spite for the safety of our communities become a sign of patriotism? When did indifference toward the lives of our neighbors become a virtue? Even in an era of unmatched division, how the hell did this happen?
Last night, I stood at your doorstep
Trying to figure out what went wrong
You just slipped something into my palm,
Then you were gone.
The wear on the first green at Quail Hollow Golf Course is representative of what’s to come.
It’s easy to see why Quail Hollow was an instant favorite after its mid-1990s debut. The course is routed playfully among rolling — but not too dramatic — southwest Mississippi hills. Art Hills wisely prioritized enjoyability over challenge (even from the tips, it stretches just 6,754 yards, and just under 6,100 yards from the white tees), but managed to weave holes of all shapes and demands into the course. Fairway bunkering isn’t nonexistent, but neither is it aggressive; greens are large but not wildly contoured, so hitting the proper sections is crucial but sufficient. And the fairways are wide, so without much bunkering, Quail Hollow’s test mostly boils down to iron play: stay out of trouble off the tee, and choose the right club into the green. It’s not the most riveting design in the world, but the land sloping off in all directions wards off monotony.
By the sixth hole, I’d resolved to put my phone away and start ignoring the Twitter replies. My newfound disregard was well timed: Quail Hollow’s sixth, a short par-4 (319 yards from the tips, 273 yards from the white tees), is the best hole on the front nine and maybe the entire course. A layup off the tee to the impossibly wide fairway is just a mid-iron away, but the fairway cuts sharply right to a green guarded by huge bunkers in the fairway bend’s elbow. The careful strategy is to lay up in the fat part of the fairway, left of the bunkering — but a tee shot drifting too far left brings a second set of bunkers into play at the green’s front-left corner. No matter the route chosen, then, the player is required to flirt with trouble before reaching the green.
But the long par-4 10th hole (452 yards from the tips, 400 yards from the white tees) is more emblematic of Quail Hollow’s design, which relies more on the site’s natural rises and falls and less on creative elements to give the course its character. After a downhill tee shot into a large swale, the long approach shot must climb steeply back uphill but needs navigate just one greenside bunker. The 11th hole (420 yards from the tips, 383 yards from the white tees) repeats the formula.
The only challenge in the greens, sadly, is their conditioning. After two decades of battling nematodes, the course spent more than a month renovating the greens in 2016. But those improvements have been lost again. On the first hole, I had to slam a downhill putt just to get through the bare, sandy patches between my ball and the cup. And more than once, an iron shot into the green landed with a splashy puff of sand.
The veterans’ hall high upon the hill
Stood silent and alone
The diner was shuttered and boarded
With a sign that just said, “Gone.”
Tom Coyne has said that the mark of a great golf course is whether nearing its end brings sadness or relief. By the 17th hole, I was glad to be almost done — and not because I wasn’t playing well (I finished one shot off my career low). But there is an eeriness to Quail Hollow, a sadness that hangs about the place like the hot breeze swirling through its forest-carved corridors. I don’t know whether it’s the uneasiness I feel every time I’m near McComb, or the anguish of seeing Quail Hollow’s potential slowly slip away like sand through a fist. I’d like to believe that I’ll come back. I’d like to believe that the golf course will come back, too. I have my doubts about both.
. . .
Quail Hollow’s 18th green is built delicately into a hillside, but the final glimpse it offers of embattled greens and neglected sand traps summarizes the player’s round.
Twelve years ago, Americans chose their president between a young optimist promising hope and change, and perhaps the most honorable soldier of any of our lifetimes. No fault could have been assigned for finding it a difficult choice. Half a generation later, the choice comes to an incendiary, divisive scofflaw and a challenger whose entire campaign — for better or worse — effectively is the otherwise unremarkable promise to behave normally. Yet somehow, this moment’s question is nearly as close as the one a dozen years ago. Somehow, millions of people in a country built on equality and the rule of law feel obliged — proud, even — to defend the behavior of a leader who has spent his time in power marginalizing others, flouting norms, and manipulating his office for personal benefit.
And yet, we cannot shun these people. They are our uncles and aunts, our teachers and classmates. They are our countrymen, as much as we are theirs. We cannot bind up this place’s wounds without them, and we shouldn’t want to.
Here everybody has a neighbor
Everybody has a friend
Everybody has a reason to begin again.
It’s difficult to imagine how Americans could come together again; it’s not as if our division is new. But I have to believe reconciliation is possible. I cannot believe that we are too far gone, any more than Quail Hollow is too far gone. Allowing a $7 million golf course to wither within a generation is a tragedy, but it is worth salvaging. So are we. It will be, as Springsteen said, a long walk home. But for Quail Hollow and for our country, the walk is worth making.
. . .
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