The RTJ Golf Trail
Could’ve Learned a Lot
From Prehistory
Cambrian Ridge Golf Course
Greenville, Ala.
Date played: October 10, 2021
Greens fee: $94 to ride 18
There are two things you need to understand about life on Earth: there’s pre-Cambrian, and there’s everything else.
Five hundred million years ago, southern Alabama — like most of North America — lay underneath a shallow ocean. Today, the area shows a varied topography, from steep hills to lowlands and everything in between.
Before the Cambrian Period began 541 million years ago, most of Earth’s organisms were single-cell creatures or small, simple multi-cellular critters. And then, something happened. Scientists don’t agree exactly what it was – but whatever it was kicked off an intense period of unprecedented evolution. Before the Cambrian Explosion, life on Earth amounted to tiny, tube-shaped creatures munching blindly on a gooey microbial blanket that covered the sea floor. And then quickly, bang: the world’s first predators emerged. Arthropods with seven eyes, shrimp that were three feet long – nothing was off limits. The soft, tubey bodies of pre-Cambrian Earth were replaced by hard skeletons. Life took on shapes that had never been seen before and changed the landscape of a planet that, to that point, had known only simple life or none at all for four billion years.
Cambrian Ridge – the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail’s site near Greenville, in southeast Alabama – nearly defies its name brand’s monolithism to rise similarly out of the muck. Like the period from which it draws its name, Cambrian Ridge offers a glimpse at what the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail could have been, rather than what it is: a repetitive, uninspired homage to post-World War II American golf. Cambrian Ridge ultimately falls short of its effort to evolve — victim to the penal elements of its namesake’s style. Maybe it’s just as well. Like the soft-bodied creatures that became dinner for the Cambrian Period’s first predators, maybe the South’s more thoughtful golf designs need the Trail to create a contrast between the past and the future. And Lord knows there are still plenty of American golfers who are content to feed blindly on blankets of primordial goo.
. . .
Cambrian Ridge’s three loops are routed along completely different types of topography — a microcosm of the quick changes that land movement takes in southern Alabama.
If you’re playing public golf in Alabama, then the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail is a little like P.F. Chang’s. First of all, you’re probably gonna wind up there at some point, even if you don’t care for it. Second of all, it’s less about a great product (food or golf) and more about creating an over-the-top setting — a setting resembling what people think a “good” place looks like. Most importantly, it’s gonna be overpriced and forgettable. You’ll walk away wondering how you wound up there at all, and inevitably, one day you will be again.
I ought to know. I spend a lot of time in Birmingham, but aside from hitting balls at Oxmoor Valley’s driving range, I don’t have much time for the Trail. Years ago, when these Alabama trips were in their infancy, I knocked off Trail sites like items on a checklist (which, as it turns out, is how they want you to look at it!), until I realized one damp morning at Anniston’s Silver Lakes site that it was all the same, and that most of it was pretty unenjoyable.
That was probably five years ago. Fast-forward probably five years, and I was sitting in my minivan, hunched over my iPhone in a Hoover parking lot, suddenly with an entire Sunday on my hands and scrolling through online tee sheets for every public course in a two-hour radius. My first thought went to Sweetens Cove; my second thought went to the fact that I didn’t have an all-day pass. I’d wanted to hit up Gunter’s Landing, 90 minutes northeast of Birmingham — but they were booked up until mid-afternoon. Even Highland Park was slammed.
And then a dark, quiet voice whispered in my ear, You should look at the Trail’s website. No, I answered. Out of the question. I’d rather hit range balls. But then I realized that I wouldn’t rather hit range balls — and besides that, I had a big round coming up, and I needed reps. I cycled through a few other courses that came to mind, but after coming up dry, I reluctantly looked to the Trail — and found a perfect tee time at Cambrian Ridge, about an hour and 45 minutes south of Hoover. I begrudgingly took the van out of park and headed toward Greenville. About two hours later, I walked out of the pro shop ninety-six dollars lighter and headed for the Sherling nine’s first tee.
Cambrian Ridge’s Sherling loop hints at how the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail might have avoided the vanilla, monolithic efforts that haunt its sites: by creating unique greens. On Sherling’s sixth green, a passingly bland kidney-shaped green contains a thumbprint on its front-right quadrant that acts like a punchbowl within a larger putting surface.
Cambrian Ridge is broken up into three nine-hole layouts, plus a nine-hole par-3 course. The layouts all run through different terrain — the Sherling nine around Greenville’s Sherling Lake, the Loblolly nine through a pine forest, and the Canyon nine through a…well, you know. The options underscore the variety of terrain in this part of the state — the Southeastern Plains — which can transition quickly from steep hills to easygoing lowlands. Of Cambrian Ridge’s three nines, the Sherling-Canyon loop is generally viewed as the site’s preferred 18-hole routing; and even among golf design aficionados, it’s well regarded — a notable exception to most of the Trail’s bland designs.
Between that attractiveness and my timing, the place was slammed. Understand this: Saturday afternoons in Alabama are perhaps the best time for public golf anywhere in the South, because everyone is home watching college football. Conversely, though, Sundays in Alabama are perhaps the worst time for public golf anywhere in the South, because everyone is playing golf to make up for the time they missed on Saturday. And there I was, late on a Sunday morning, at a popular stop on an overrated golf trail.
Predictably, then, as I waited for the Sherling nine’s first fairway to clear, a foursome drove up behind me. If there’s anything worse than standing on a tee box and being watched by four strangers, it’s doing it all without having swung a golf club in nearly a month. I indulged in a few seconds of back-and-through pendulum swings, then a couple of full-fledged practice swings, and stepped up to the ball — which I then toed. The ball flew off like it’d been hit by a persimmon, and hadn’t even landed in the adjoining fairway before my hand was coming out of my pocket with a new ball. This one I also toed, albeit it close enough to the first fairway to feign a chance of finding it. “Hit ’em good,” said someone in the foursome behind me. Thanks, jackass.
Somewhere between the first green and the second fairway, my swing slipped back into its grooves — and just in time for the Sherling course to begin showing where it differs from most of the Trail’s repetitive designs: on the greens. At the par-3 second (209 yards from the tips, 146 yards from the white tees), a benignly oval green consists of two tiers, with a ridge running diagonally and a rim in back that acts like a backstop. My 7-iron landed on the lower tier, and a putt over the left half of the spine and along the rim fed the ball up to within 10 feet of the hole. Likewise, at the short par-4 sixth hole (390 yards from the tips, 294 yards from the white tees), the kidney-shaped green looks bland at first glance — but a thumbprint indention on the front-right quarter of the green acts like a miniature punchbowl, funneling shots in from its edges down toward the pin for on-target shots, and leaving a difficult downhill putt for anything too long.
It’s a wistful glimpse at what could have been for the Trail. Even if its developers had been intent on building a series of photocopied, paint-by-numbers golf courses, injecting more creativity in the greens could have dialed up the collection’s character. Instead, Cambrian Ridge is a passing glance at a missed opportunity to avoid what the Trail ultimately became: repetitive.
The Sherling loop’s fourth hole at Cambrian Ridge is a fairly transparent homage to TPC Sawgrass’ 17th hole.
And ultimately, that formulaic approach to golf design is too much for even Cambrian Ridge to escape. The par-3 fourth hole (169 yards from the tips, 120 yards from the white tees) is a cover-band version of TPC Sawgrass’ 17th; and diagonal-running fairways throughout the design — like at the par-4 fifth (360 yards from the tips, 330 yards from the white tees) are too skinny for higher-handicap players to find consistently with driver. A generation after the death of the Trail’s namesake, his penal style of golf design has been relegated to disfavor; but for public golfers in Alabama (not to mention the taxpayers who subsidize the Trail), they’re stuck with its legacy.
Again, at the Sherling loop’s par-4 ninth hole (355 yards from the tips, 302 yards from the white tees), Cambrian Ridge almost gets it right — but the penal philosophy underlying its design gets in the way. As at the fifth hole, the ninth fairway runs away diagonally from the tee, allowing players to pick a line as aggressively as they like and try to carry the hazard. It’s a perfectly sound presentation, but it only works if the fairways are wide enough to collect well struck drives that run father than the player intended. With a skinny fairway running diagonally, though, only the best players — those who can hold their intended line and strike their drives with predictable distance — have a realistic chance of reaching the green in two strokes. But for players who drive the ball inconsistently, they are more likely to hit the ball on too aggressive a line and come up short of the fairway (usually their own fault), or to take a more conservative line and run through the fairway (usually not their own fault). And the likelihood of the latter is increased by the fact that they’re playing farther forward than better players. There’s bad golf design, really bad golf design, and then there’s golf design that makes the game harder for average players than for great players. In the end, Cambrian Ridge cannot save itself from becoming the third of those.
. . .
By the time I made the turn to begin the Canyon nine, two foursomes were in the fairway in front of me, with another waiting behind me. I could do this for another two-and-a-half hours, or I could cut my losses. I dropped my driver back into my bag. I’d seen enough to see the irony of this place.
The Cambrian Period that gave this place its name was a crossroads for this planet’s evolution: a moment when potential met opportunity, and changed things forever. Cambrian Ridge and the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail could have done the same thing. The period during which its 11 sites were developed — from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s — was a period of enormous change for American golf design; and today, the game is better for that change.
The Trail could have been part of that evolution. Instead, it doubled down again and again on the same handful of tired ideas, whose creativity infrequently rises above that of a seafloor-dwelling single-celled organism. It is not merely named for Earth’s past; it is a monument to a forgettable chapter of golf’s past. It is best left there.
. . .
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