A Doorway,
If You’ll Walk Through It
Tobacco Road Golf Club
Sanford, N.C.
Greens fee: $131
Date played: November 22, 2021
There’s a narrow corridor on Tobacco Road’s first hole, where two huge series of mounds framing the fairway’s left and right edges creep uncomfortably close together — maybe wide enough for two golfers to carry their bags and walk abreast. Beyond the outdoor hallway lie blind targets: a wide layup area, the green, and three hellacious bunkers guarding its right side.
Despite its difficult reputation, Tobacco Road generally offers comfortable landing areas for players willing to play conservatively. But anyone eager to challenge the course must take on otherwise avoidable danger — like at the par-5 fourth, where players hoping to get home in two must carry an enormous swath of sand.
This feature — a tight, landform-framed passage — recurs throughout the golf course: at the 13th, again at the 16th, always leading to another blind target. Eventually, it dawns on you: they’re not passages. They’re doorways. Beyond them, again and again, lie hidden hazards and opportunities born of brushstrokes seen in a dream, or a hallucination — and somewhere amid them all, your golf ball; and, eventually, you, caught up in the middle of it all, with more hazards and hallucinations still ahead. They’re doorways to something that first-timers have never seen before. The whole golf course is.
Since Tobacco Road opened in 1998, it has earned a reputation matched by few others as a great polarizer; you’ll either love it or hate it, so the narrative goes. But that suggests that sentiment is evenly divided, and I’m not sure that’s true. Bradley Klein, Tom Doak, Ran Morrissett, Andy Johnson — they all have spoken highly of it, and none of them spends too much time bucking the customs of golf minimalism. Yet few golf courses have ever taken more creative liberties than architect Mike Strantz did at Tobacco Road: the volumes of earth moved, the dizzying routing, the shapes of the greens, the creation of needlessly blind shots, and the breathtaking sandscapes make Tobacco Road one of the boldest, least restrained designs on the planet — yet some of golf’s staunchest defenders of design tradition glow at it.
Tobacco Road’s par-3 third hole, with twisting sand in front leading to a wild half-Biarritz, half-Redan green.
That’s not to suggest that Tobacco Road is universally beloved. It’s not for everyone. But just because a topic inspires strong opinions doesn’t make it symmetrically polarizing. More than 80 percent of Americans favor background checks for gun purchases; two-thirds describe climate change as a serious problem; nearly three-quarters support turning over redistricting to nonpartisan commissions. Passions are hot on all sides of these conversations — and yet, consensus has coalesced on one side of these questions. To say that these issues are polarizing, then, is not merely lazy. It is misleading.
No empirical polling tests public sentiment toward golf courses. Anecdotally, though, there is little support for the notion that Tobacco Road is polarizing — not when it bucks tradition so unabashedly, and yet finds favor with advocates of that same tradition. There is no “it’s great, but” with Tobacco Road. It’s just great.
. . .
Mike Strantz and I had gotten off on the wrong foot.
My impromptu, late November roadtrip to North Carolina had been motivated principally by my desire to see two Strantz designs: the widely heralded Tobacco Road, and the less famous yet polarizing Tot Hill Farm. Two days earlier, I’d left Tot Hill Farm disappointed and frustrated: too narrow and severe to allow for error, and too restrictive to afford different strategic decisions from tee to green. An afternoon at Southern Pines the next day had reinvigorated me — and set a high bar for Tobacco Road to finish the trip with an exclamation point.
After shots to two wide landing areas, Tobacco Road’s par-5 first hole requires a blind approach to a green guarded at right by three massive sand traps — a rude welcome to a rollercoaster ride the likes of which few courses can match.
But the frigid morning air was testing that invigoration. Temperatures still hadn’t broken clear of 30 degrees, and although the sun had climbed high enough to brush away the frost, a stiff north wind kept me huddled against the slopes of the massive practice green — less concerned with warming up than with not freezing to death. Tee time waits for no one, though. A few minutes before 8:30, I slid my putter back into my bag, tightened the straps holding it to my push cart, and began the cold walk to the first tee.
Standing atop the par-5 first hole (558 yards from the back “ripper” tees, 521 yards from the middle “plow” tees), though, my blood started pumping hard. Tobacco Road’s introduction eschews handshakes for drama: two massive landing areas with winding edges alongside and separated by a narrow chute, framed on all sides by gigantic mounding. For all the first hole’s drama, it’s a gateway drug transitioning to the harder stuff to come: hitting balls outside the ultra-wide corridors is nearly impossible, and the forgiving width makes the two blind shots from the fairway (of which there are many to come) easier to stomach — all with the margin for error that comes with a par-5. The approach to the green is more fraught, but with plenty of room to miss short and left; the only danger is the green’s right side, guarded by a set of three huge bunkers — which I found. I finished with an eight. At least I’d finally warmed up.
On a golf course that defies conventions, Tobacco Road’s par-3 17th resists the “aim for the middle” mantra: a green with two distinct pinnable areas, virtually inaccessible from one another and connected by a sliver of sand-guarded green
Of all the features Strantz created at Tobacco Road, sand might be the boldest — although it appears less as discrete bunkers, and more as a piece of the landscape that flows in and out of the playing area. For all the work done here by bulldozers, the sand’s flow drapes Tobacco Road with naturalism — like a rough finish on painstaking woodwork. In short order, my brain stopped seeing the land’s exaggerated rolls as unnatural, and I felt myself become part of the scene rather than an eavesdropper. In hindsight, the sandscape probably is to thank.
Rarely outside one’s view, the sand is imposing — but only occasionally a true threat. At the second hole (392 yards from the ripper tees, 344 yards from the plow tees), drives must carry more than 100 yards of sandy waste — but on the other side of the drive lies a fairway 70 yards wide. And at the short par-3 third (152 yards from the ripper tees, 125 yards from the plow tees), sand wraps all the way around the green, and twice juts in front of the green like fingers in a player’s line of sight; but at more than 50 yards deep, the green itself is a fair target. That’s when the most hallucinatory details of Strantz’s vision come into view: its wildly contoured par-3s. The third is half-Biarritz, half-Redan; the Redan-style eighth places a kickplate in back; and the 17th’s long, shallow putting surface looks less like a green and more like a withered string bean.
Even in a golfing region famous for swale-filled greens, Tobacco Road stands out — not the least reason being that its swales, bold they may be, more often tend to funnel balls toward pinnable areas and cover up players’ mistakes. At the third, my 6-iron landed soft on the kickplate and popped politely left, toward the pin in the middle of the green. At the eighth, I thinned a 7-iron that scooted up the slope at the green’s rear — but after running out of gas, the ball tumbled back down onto the green, and then caught a slope that took it all the way to the pin at the bottom right.
Those sorts of kindnesses are Tobacco Road’s greatest contrast with Tot Hill Farm, where the playing corridors are too narrow, and the margin for error too small. At Tobacco Road’s sharp dogleg-left fourth (535 yards from the ripper tees, 478 yards from the plow tees), I duck-hooked my drive into the trees lining the fairway’s left side, but then punched a 5-hybrid across the sandy waste that guards the dogleg’s gap, and lofted a wedge to within 10 feet. Ultimately, the biggest difference between the two designs is that at Tobacco Road, you’re never out of the hole.
That’s not to say that Tobacco Road is an ice cream social. The uphill approach shot at the par-4 ninth (427 yards from the ripper tees, 394 yards from the plow tees) must find a small green with nowhere to miss, and must avoid a steep falloff to a brutally deep waste area on the right. And at the par-5 11th (531 yards from the ripper tees, 486 yards from the plow tees), some of the course’s most aggressive sandy waste guards the right side, ready to catch tee shots with any hint of slice — like mine. My second shot was even worse — a thinned 3-hybrid that rocketed toward the bank of the trap. Improbably, the ball shot up and into the fairway like the world’s least deserving bump and run; three shots later, I escaped with par.
Tobacco Road is a paradox: a juxtaposition of wild, manmade contours and mounding, punctuated by natural accents — like the brush in this bunker behind the par-3 sixth green.
If there are nits to pick with Strantz’s design, then the back nine holds most of them. Tobacco Road deserves to be walked, but some of the back side’s green-to-tee connections aren’t great. And any players disinclined toward Strantz’s fairways and greens — with all the straight lines of oil spilled on water — will hate the par-5 13th hole (573 yards from the ripper tees, 497 yards from the plow tees), which curls left to right off the tee, then right to left before demanding a blind wedge into a green surrounded by mounding, accessible only by another of Tobacco Road’s recurring hallway-style entrances. It’s golf course architecture in a fever dream. But the 13th is also a microcosm of Strantz’s vision of Tobacco Road: a golf course with enormous playing corridors, but no clear suggestions of the correct answers. Like the double fairway at the par-4 15th hole (365 yards from the ripper tees, 351 yards from the plow tees), with a huge mound blocking views of the green from the rightward fairway, the course frequently pairs relatively simple shots with wildly uncomfortable views. Tobacco Road has its fun with you, without being mean-spirited. It’s up to players to return the spirit in kind.
. . .
On the 18th, after leaving my approach between a false front and the journey’s last mound-pinched doorway, I clipped the trip’s only perfect pitch. Its arc turned downward an inch above the green, biting and then gently releasing to within a couple of feet of the hole. Maybe there’s hope for my short game in the new year. The world has seen more unexpected surprises.
Golf holds few remaining undiscovered surprises. In an era of websites, blogs, Instagram accounts, and endless write-ups, nearly every golf course on the planet has, by now, been thoroughly documented. The golf course with the unexpected still in store, then, is a rare thing.
Tobacco Road’s eighth hole, like many of the greens at the course’s par-3 holes, offers a twist on an old classic: here, a reimagined Redan.
No one would accuse Tobacco Road of being a hidden gem. It is a recurring and deserving guest in magazines’ public top 100 lists, and a well known must-see course for visitors to nearby Pinehurst. But years before my first trip to the North Carolina Sandhills, I sat slack-jawed at my office computer, staring for the first time at Tobacco Road’s yardage guide. I’d never seen anything like its bizarre design. In the years since, I’d probably read as much about Tobacco Road as any other course on the planet; the course does not hurt for publicity — which is to say that I’d had long enough to paint a picture of what to expect, and to lift my own expectations. Even after all those years, Tobacco Road delivered. It is, if nothing else, an adventure: precisely what Strantz meant for it to be.
That’s not to say that Tobacco Road is a roadmap. It is not a design to be copied, even if it could be. It should be seen less as a proposal for what golf in the Twenty-First Century should look like, and more a concept for it: an idea not of what golf design should be, but what it can be. Tobacco Road is a license to imagine ideas that no one has seen before — a permission slip to try anything, no matter how unprecedented.
It offers the same for golfers: to see things you’ve never seen before, and to face decisions that you’ve never met before. In the end, not everyone at its doorway will choose to walk through. But they’ll have the chance. And Strantz’s ultimate goal at Tobacco Road was forcing players to decide.
. . .
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