Wolf Hollow Golf Course
Wesson, Miss.
Date Played: March 13, 2021
Greens Fee: $20 to walk 18 (weekend)
A Blind Spot
Full of Blind Shots
You want to know fear? Try driving down an unfamiliar state highway in southwest Mississippi, late for a tee time with less than a gallon of gas left in the tank.
Mississippi’s public golf scene is badly underrated. One reason, I think, is that it’s so thoroughly scattered throughout the state. But in the few places where it’s clustered, generally it’s found in (relatively) metropolitan areas. The Coast, for example, is home to a number of tremendous courses; Tunica, just south of Memphis, has a handful of fun tracks; even Philadelphia and West Point have noteworthy 36-hole families. For a famously rural state, Mississippi defies the examples of famously rural golf courses out in the middle of nowhere — your Wild Horse, or your Fields, for example.
To a point, anyway. Wesson — about halfway between Jackson and the southern state line — isn’t much of a destination, unless you’re looking for an associate’s degree. Copiah-Lincoln Community College (“Co-Lin,” to the locals) doesn’t stop many travelers between Jackson and New Orleans. I’m no exception. But I wish I had been. It turns out that Co-Lin is home to perhaps the best bang-for-buck golf course in Mississippi. At $10 to walk during the week and just $20 on weekends, the 18-hole Wolf Hollow Golf Course is a preposterous value: hilly and bunkerless, cleverly routed to feature lots of blind shots and to avoid repetitive holes.
First, though, I had to get there. For starters, I’d left the house late. On top of that, I wasn’t sure I had enough gas to finish the 50-minute drive from Jackson, nor that I had enough time to stop and fill up. So I barreled onward, down Highway 51, past the same houses, farms, and fields that Arlo Guthrie wrote about. I flew into Wolf Hollow’s parking lot with 15 minutes to spare, threw on my golf shoes in the parking lot, felt bad about both of those things, but quickly deduced from the nondescript clubhouse that they probably get a lot of that. And for my trouble, I arrived at the first tee two minutes before my tee time — with the fivesome ahead of me still playing from the red tees. Sometimes the world moves at a different speed than you do. Wesson seems like the sort of place where they get a lot of that, too.
. . .
Wolf Hollow’s corridors are surprisingly wide, and views of other holes abound. But a little extra early-season tree clearing can’t hurt, either.
The first time I played the Fields in Georgia a couple of years ago, one of the things that impressed me the most was the opening movement of its routing: it’s full of blind shots, and rarely shows you more than you need to know for the shot at hand. When I finally got to ask the course’s architect, Mike Young, about it, he told me it had been more or less accidental — or happenstance, at least.
Whether the opening stretch that architect Kevin Tucker designed at Wolf Hollow is purposeful or likewise accidental, the similarity to the Fields’ first few holes is undeniable. From the tees at both the dogleg-left first hole and the downhill second, the greens are blind; at the rightward-bending third, only the top of the flag is visible from the tee, and at the fifth, the green is hidden behind another dogleg. And like the Fields, there’s a playfulness to Wolf Hollow’s blind shots: the corridors are wide, and the course is bunkerless, so tee shots rarely risk trouble — and the fairway slopes offer chances to squeeze extra yardage out of well placed shots by bounding drives closer to the green. The green at the par-4 second hole (405 yards from the back tees, 392 yards from the white tees), for example, probably could be driven with enough of a tailwind.
But Wolf Hollow isn’t a pushover, nor is it a one-trick pony. At 6,745 yards from the tips and 6,365 yards from the white tees, it’s plenty of golf course. And the hole designs, combined with the varied terrain over which they’re routed, add up to a layout that never feels repetitive or forced. It lacks the Fields’ breathtaking bunkering and greens — and without them, it misses some of the magic of the Fields’ shot values. But it shares the Georgia course’s balance between rustic authenticity and consistently finding new ways to make every shot fun. And at $20 to walk 18 on the weekends (just $10 during the week), Wolf Hollow delivers a lot more golf than many courses with much higher greens fees.
That’s why I couldn’t get too upset with the fivesome slowly makings its way around in front of me — that and the fact that, most of the time, I couldn’t hit my irons straight enough to keep up with them. At the par-5 first hole (504 yards from the back tees, 494 yards from the whites), a collection of hummocks defends the right side of the green; I fanned a hybrid behind them, and by the time I made it onto the putting surface, I wished I’d been hitting out of the sand instead.
The woods lining the left side of the fifth fairway give way to an elevated green framed on three sides by pines and in front by a creek.
There’s an unhealthy comfort that comes with playing on a $20 golf course: the unhelpful feeling that mistakes don’t matter, because if you hack it around all afternoon, who cares — you’re only out $20. And maybe that lowers one’s blood pressure in the moment, but in the big picture, I’m not sure it does much for self-esteem. After a couple of double bogeys on the first two holes and a by-the-skin-of-my-teeth bogey on the third, I left my tee shot short — yet another uninspiring iron — on the sharply downhill par-3 fourth hole (170 yards from the back tees, 157 yards from the white tees). The front of the green is guarded by a small ditch that seems more inspired by function than form; but when I popped the ball with my putter, the ball rolled up the side of the ditch, hopped into the air, and trickled slowly up to within four feet of the hole. And I started to just slap at the ball again, with a two-putt bogey in hand. But I stopped myself. “Treat this putt like it’s important,” something inside suggested. “Treat yourself like you’re important.” So on a small, scruffy green in southwest Mississippi, with no one watching, I lined up my ball, calculated some break from the green’s back-to-front tilt, and judged the speed just right for an up-and-down par. Giving a damn about something, really trying for it, and having it work out — that’s worth a $20 admission fee all by itself.
At the fifth hole (345 yards from the back tees, 325 yards from the white tees), Wolf Hollow’s routing begins to crescendo. What begins with the appearance of just another drive into a dogleg guarding a hidden green reveals a beautiful approach over a creek to an elevated, secluded green — like a poor man’s Muirfield Village No. 3, or an inverted 10th at Black Bear. The long par-4 sixth hole (444 yards from the back tees, 419 yards from the white tees) requires another approach over a creek, this time a longer shot to a downhill target. And at the par-5 seventh (538 yards from the back tees, 513 yards from the whites), the landing area runs downhill into a creek — demanding either a layup and two difficult, right-to-left shots, or a booming drive that might clear the water and deliver a clean view of the green. I made bogeys on the last five holes of my front nine, and I couldn’t have been happier; the array of looks that the course offers and shots that it demands hold your imagination all along the way. And since the layout has no bunkers — and with many of its greens lying neatly on the ground — Wolf Hollow practically begs for running approach shots.
Much of Wolf Hollow’s back nine is built along the lake in its center. The approach shot into the 10th green is the first of several shots that demand players flirt with disaster.
With the beginning of the back nine comes an end to the front’s seclusion. From the 10th fairway, views open up of several holes built along a lake, reminiscent of Pinehurst No. 4. At the par-4 13th (400 yards from the back tees, 384 yards from the white tees), the fairway hugs the bank as it curves to the left like a psuedo-cape design — before ultimately breaking off and demanding a shot over the water.
Finally, Wolf Hollow finishes with a flurry of quirkiness, like any course that can be played for $10 should. The fairway at the 15th hole (387 yards from the back tees, 377 yards from the white tees) doglegs sharply from left to right — but it also features a narrow clearing in the trees around which the fairway bends; the safe play is out to the left into the fairway, but a drive that stays between the uprights of that clearing offers the shortest possible route to the green. The par-5 16th hole also doglegs from left to right, but offers the possibility of cutting off the dogleg with a drive over the 17th green (in a rewarding flash of revenge, my effort came up short and bounced off a tree onto the 17th green; the fivesome of old men in front of me crested the hill just in time to see the ball come to rest, and one of the old men thought he’d driven the green). And the green at the par-4 18th (400 yards from the back tees, 334 yards from the white tees) is guarded by a chasm, rendering the tee shot an exercise in laying up with a shorter club for a clear view of the green. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have smashed my drive into the chasm. As it were, I dropped — finally flushed a 6-iron onto the green.
. . .
Like a poor man’s Pinehurst No. 4, Wolf Hollow’s back nine is slammed full of views of the lake and the holes built around it.
I’ve never lived anywhere but Mississippi. Coincidentally, most of that time has been on varying sides of Copiah County. And I’ve lived here long enough to feel entitled to presume that nothing much about this state surprises me anymore.
Wolf Hollow, though, is a surprise. Even if it found its home in one of Mississippi’s more golf-crowded metro areas, it would hold its own and deserve a place in the conversation over the state’s best public-access golf courses. But to warrant that credit while hiding in plain sight on a rural community college campus, with solid conditioning and a weekday rate that costs less than the sleeve of Titleists you’ll play?
Again, nothing much about Mississippi surprises me anymore. Pleasant surprises are even fewer and farther between. But count Wolf Hollow among them.
. . .
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