Less Than the
Sum of Its Parts
Tot Hill Farm Golf Club
Asheboro, N.C.
Greens fee: $54
Date played: November 21, 2021
What is a good golf course?
The question itself invites subjective answers — no less than efforts to apply that question to a specific golf course. To be sure, there’s room within the question for varying tastes, one’s trash being another’s treasure and all.
Still, the question seems to include elements to which players of all tastes could agree. Does it show you things you haven’t seen before? Does it make you think things you haven’t thought before? Is it fun?
On no fewer than 12 holes, Tot Hill Farm forces players to grapple with water hazards on their approach shots — including at the 12th hole (392 yards from the black tees, 338 yards from the white tees).
By some of these metrics, Tot Hill Farm — a Mike Strantz design that opened in 2000 an hour northwest of Strantz’s masterpiece, Tobacco Road — is a good golf course. The land upon which it sits is among the most dramatic (or severe, perhaps) on which I’ve ever seen a golf course routed. Its scorecard yardage, which tips out at less than 6,600 yards, suggests playability. Many of its green shapes and contours are like something out of an acid trip. And it constantly presents players with uncomfortable questions that have no obvious answers.
Over and over again, though, those are questions for which Tot Hill Farm allows just one answer. There is no room for strategic decision-making. The playing corridors are too tight to allow for error. It is not walkable. For four hours, Tot Hill Farm demands specific shots again and again — and if players do not execute, they are penalized. The joy that pervades Tobacco Road is nowhere to be found. The sense of adventure — of plotting through a puzzle and imagining different ways to make it work — is replaced here by a tedious sense of duty. Tot Hill Farm is not experienced — it’s escaped.
. . .
It didn’t help that it was cold. For the moment, though, it didn’t matter, either.
Tot Hill Farm’s greens — like the one at the par-3 sixth hole (155 yards from the black tees, 140 yards from the white tees) — are frequently perched high above their surrounds, leaving difficult, limited options to try to get up and down.
Late November had arrived in full force in central North Carolina. The Sunday before Thanksgiving awoke with frost on the ground and smoky breath on the mouths of foolish golfers hoping to squeeze one last adventure out of 2021. The cold air bit through all the layers I’d managed to cobble together from my token assortment of Mississippi-inspired winter gear, and the rising sun stared straight into my eyes on the driving range as I tried to shake my body from hibernation.
It was a fairly miserable scene, actually. But I couldn’t care less. Ever since I’d begun putting together an itinerary for a quick, late November golf trip to North Carolina, Tot Hill Farm had been near the top of my Christmas list: a fairly under-the-radar layout by the late Mike Strantz, the godfather of maximalist golf course designers. Strantz’s design at Tobacco Road — which also sat near the top of my itinerary — needed no introduction. But Tot Hill Farm was a bit of a blind spot for me. “I’m glad I saw it,” a friend had told me months earlier, “but I’ll probably never go back.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Neither were the reports that conditioning had slipped. None of that mattered to me, either. I was ready for the full Mike Strantz experience: to see bizarre, manmade landforms directing play through unconventionally routed holes. I didn’t need pristine greens to appreciate that.
And the view from the first tee didn’t disappoint. The first hole (448 yards from the black tees, 350 yards from the white tees) swoops dramatically from right to left, like a gigantic waterslide that would give a defense attorney nightmares. Tee shots pour off the slope and careen downhill to the left edge of the fairway, from which an approach shot right of the green will again roll down toward the pin. It’s a breathtaking opener — but a quiet harbinger of what’s to come. In hindsight, the hole offers no options: whether you aim right or left off the tee, you’re going to finish left; and your only chance of keeping your approach shot on the planet is to aim right. For the moment, though, my bliss kept me ignorant, and I was happy to make bogey.
The stunning par-3 third hole (180 yards from the black tees, 147 yards from the white tees) opens up to full display Tot Hill Farm’s frustrating paradox: remarkable creativity, surrounded by no margin for error.
But by the time I reached the green at the par-3 third hole (180 yards from the black tees, 147 yards from the white tees), Tot Hill Farm’s penalties were hitting me too hard to ignore. A downhill tee shot over a rocky outcropping flies toward a skinny, boomerang-shaped green that hugs an intimidating bunker on the right. In between clubs, I pulled the longer choice and pured it a couple of yards too long. Which final reward my ball ultimately found, I’ll never know; the creek running immediately behind the green is my best guess, although the woods a few yards further can’t be ruled out, either. This arrangement recurs with maddening frequency at Tot Hill Farm: tiny greens guarded by water and woodlands, where the penalty for missing is typically a lost ball. When Strantz carved this design from the native rocks, he neglected to carve out enough room to miss. For an architect who professed to prioritize opening up golf to players of all skill levels, the oversight is impossible to understand.
What makes Tot Hill Farm so confusing — and, from an architectural perspective, confounding — is that the design does so many interesting things and does them well. At the par-5 fifth hole (535 yards from the black tees, 489 yards from the white tees), the green is like nothing I’ve ever seen: shaped like a fidget spinner, with its front-facing limb running down a sharp downslope. Even here, though, Strantz’s creativity is untempered by practicality: the tongue at the front of the green is pinched between water to its front and left, and bunkering to its right. The safest play is past the slope, to the fat part of the green sitting uphill; but from there, a putt downhill would never stay on the green. The target for any pin in front, then, is a window measuring no more than two square yards, and anything that misses is penalized.
The mounding on which Tot Hill Farm’s greens sits exacerbates these problems. Most of the greens are pushed up dramatically, so that any shots on their edges tumble down toward the nearby hazards. At the par-4 10th hole (397 yards from the black tees, 339 yards from the white tees), anything left of the green will bounce into a stream, and anything right of the green will require a pitch toward that stream.
The green at the par-5 fifth hole is Tot Hill Farm distilled: stunning creativity, with no room for anything but a perfect shot.
Even where hazards are no issue, though, Strantz’s creativity gets in his way. The fairway at the par-4 ninth hole (371 yards from the back tees, 342 yards from the white tees) runs left to right up a breathtakingly steep hill — no less than 40 yards high from the fairway’s lowest spot, and perhaps more. Nothing but a high fade will work here, and if the player lacks that shot — well, that’s tough. From the fairway, any approach that does not carry the rest of the skyscraper-like hill will run back down its length — and yet again, there is almost no room to miss among the green’s surrounds. Like the rest of the course, it is creative but joyless.
Among those creative components is Strantz’s use of fairway undulations in lieu of bunkering: like an imposing sand trap, the land’s movement obligates players to choose one side of the fairway over the other. It’s a brilliant idea. When overdone, though — as at the par-4 14th hole (376 yards from the black tees, 323 yards from the white tees) — the sloping roughhouses tee shots toward the disadvantageous side of the fairway, which you were trying to avoid to begin with. Unlike fairway bunkering — which, if successfully challenged, usually will result in a better angle to the green — the massive fairway contours at Tot Hill Farm assure that nearly all shots into its greens are the same, regardless of where a tee shot landed.
Tot Hill Farm’s 14th green sits above the fairway like the top half of a clamshell, with surrounds designed to deflect errant approaches.
At the par-5 16th hole (527 yards from the black tees, 475 yards from the white tees), the routing emerges from the forest and opens up — but its options still do not. To a skinny fairway running diagonally left to right, the 16th hole’s tee shot must find the correct line for its yardage and hold that line — both of which are asking a lot of average players. And reaching the green requires carrying yet another creek.
By the par-5 18th hole (469 yards from the black tees, 429 yards from the white tees), Strantz was nearly finished with me, and I with him. From a steep uphill lie in the fairway, I hit the 6-iron of my life to yet another green falling away right and short; by some miracle, the shot found the middle of the green, and I limped away with par. I picked my ball from the cup, slumped into my cart, and made for the parking lot. I didn’t look back.
. . .
A few months before David McLay Kidd’s 32nd birthday, his design at Bandon Dunes opened to universal acclaim. Success so early in his career was a blessing and a curse: it raised his profile near the top of his profession, but left him trying to one-up himself for years. Nowhere did those efforts hamstring Kidd more than at the Castle Course in St. Andrews. During the Castle Course’s construction, he invited Tom Doak to come look at his work. “He called me up,” Kidd recalled years later, “and he said, ‘It’s like, when you did Bandon, you really only had the one arrow in your quiver, and you shot it straight and true. And when you got to the Castle Course, you had a clutch of arrows, and you were shooting them in every which direction. It was like you spewed every skill you’d learned out onto this one piece of land.’ His point was that maybe I was overcooking the soup, and I needed to think about using fewer arrows better, than lots of arrows in every direction.”
Even when Tot Hill Farm’s layout opens up for the last three holes, its options don’t. At the par-5 16th hole, as at so many others, the approach is guarded by water and prevents a running shot.
Perhaps Kidd’s journey through the wilderness helps explain how Mike Strantz went from Tobacco Road in 1998 to Tot Hill Farm in 2000. Strantz certainly was still saying all the right things when Tot Hill Farm opened. “Golf, the way it was envisioned, is a game of choices,” Strantz told a North Carolina newspaper that summer. “It’s a game of decisions and feel and touch. The shorter you make a course, the more people you bring into play.” But at Tot Hill Farm, Strantz’s effort smacks more of trying too hard than trying to recommit to the principles that make Tobacco Road great.
How Strantz’s decisions at Tot Hill Farm could coexist alongside his professed ethos is a question we’ll never answer. But the course certainly doesn’t fit within that ethos. Its choices are too limited; its targets are too small; and its penalties are too exacting. The only explanation for such a result to have come from someone who knew better must be that Strantz was trying too hard. “It’s worlds different (from Tobacco Road) even though it’s just an hour away,” Strantz said in 2000. He was right. And the fact that he’d gotten worlds apart from Tobacco Road underscores Tot Hill Farm’s fallibility. Tobacco Road is a pole star: a perfect illustration of balancing creative, unprecedented design concepts with indispensable design principles. Tot Hill Farm shows plenty of the former, but with too little allegiance to the latter.
Ultimately, though, Tot Hill Farm might be no less an important element of Strantz’s legacy than Tobacco Road — not as a playground, though, but as a cautionary tale. No other golf course I’ve seen has done so many creative things so well, and still fallen flat as a whole. Whatever views one holds about the makings of a great golf course, it seems obvious that a golf course is more than a series of remarkable components all strewn about in proximity. A great golf course must be more than the sum of its parts. Many of Tot Hill Farm’s parts are exceptional. Their sum is disappointing.
. . .
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