Nicklaus at His Best,
and Maybe Golf
at its Best Too
Shoal Creek Club
Birmingham, Ala.
DATE PLayed: May 2021
Is a place destined to live under the shadows of its worst moments?
Or is it possible to emerge — to walk out from the shadows, and to step forward?
Bunkering at Shoal Creek ranges from long, relatively shallow traps — like the one guarding the left side of the third fairway — to deep, punishing hellholes.
Forty years in Mississippi will make you wonder. I once heard Congressman John Lewis say that his young friends often remarked that nothing had changed since the days of Lewis’ youth — and he shook his head, insistent that they were wrong. He was right, of course: it is true that, in 2021, the Deep South’s trees have fewer lynchings hanging from their branches than they did a century ago. At best, that’s a sad measurement of progress; at worst, it’s more a reflection of the changing face of white supremacy in the Trump era. And either way, it’s a gut punch of a realization: this place isn’t changing in my lifetime — not in any fundamental way. I can do my part to push the boulder up the hill — to make space for pockets where commitment to progress takes root. But the truth is that real change — the kind that sustains itself — doesn’t happen simply because a few years have gone by. It only happens when a critical mass of people want it to happen and resolve to work toward it. That Lewis spent his entire life fighting for it speaks to the endurance of the resistance.
If there’s a silver lining to this realization, it’s that those pockets of change sometimes arise in unexpected places.
Three decades ago, Shoal Creek was a flashpoint in golf’s belated struggle with Jim Crow. The club’s all-white membership policy rightfully dominated media coverage of the 1990 PGA Championship, exposing the game’s lingering indifference to racial justice (“I play golf, not politics,” Fuzzy Zoeller said) and confirming that golf — and all of us — still had a long way to go. Wayne Grady beat Fred Couples by three strokes. But that’s not why people remember Shoal Creek.
Squint hard enough, and the bunkering at Shoal Creek’s par-4 seventh hole seems to form a bear pawprint.
The club would not have been the first to respond to public criticism by doubling down. But eventually, Shoal Creek chose a different path. Its Black members today have just as much access to the course and club leadership. There aren’t enough, but that’s as much a reflection of golf’s larger struggles as anything else. The club invites every college golf team in the state — including the three golf programs at Alabama’s historically Black colleges and universities — to use the course once per month. By 2000, just one Black member had joined the club; a decade later, the number stood at six; today, the club’s number of members who are people of color is estimated to be approaching 40.
We are not to the finish line — at Shoal Creek, in golf, and in America. In truth, I doubt there is a finish line. The commitment to racial equality and equity requires constant reassessment and work; it no more ends than the process of feeding your family. But like any process, it must begin before it can succeed. In a game where the need for progress has often been as glaring as it has been ignored, Shoal Creek stands out: it has stepped out from the shadows. The 1990 PGA Championship will always be part of Shoal Creek’s legacy. But what has happened since 1990 deserves to be, too.
. . .
A golf course cannot choose the ideals of its club’s members. Would that golf courses — places that inspire thought and joy, places where the single most important goal is to move forward at all costs — could force those qualities on the clubs that play them. There are too many sad examples of clubs who play remarkable courses but whose membership policies are undistinguished. There is relief, then, is knowing that Shoal Creek has made so much progress in bridging the divide between the best of golf and the worst of it: Shoal Creek is an unpretentious treasure. It somehow balances allusion to the South’s most famous golf course, Augusta National, with challenges that are fresh and unexpected.
The Anniston Star (Nov. 2, 1977).
That Shoal Creek draws so much of its inventiveness from Augusta National could have come as little surprise, even when it opened in 1977. Shoal Creek’s founder, Hall Thompson, was a member at Augusta National; and its designer, Jack Nicklaus, won his fifth Masters championship just two years before Shoal Creek’s opening. Nicklaus’ design career, now nearly a half-century old, was still in its infancy (Muirfield Village opened in 1974); and where his later designs often lend themselves to criticism for predictability, Shoal Creek defies repetition. The design dances across the hilly north Alabama landscape, constantly mixing and matching its elements to create new challenges. For instance, the par-5 third hole (500 yards from the 6,535-yard “three-star” tees) is the longest hole on the course, zigzagging through a landscape of bunkers — but with big landing areas where a smart player can avoid trouble, if willing to forgo aggressive shots; but one hole later stands the long par-4 fourth hole (420 yards), where a solid drive and long approach face no bunkers, but lead to a huge, difficult green laced with rumples and runoffs.
Shoal Creek’s greens complexes are an embarrassment of riches — but ironically, the large, undulating fourth green, with no bunkers, is probably the course’s best.
There are moments that feel familiar, like the par-5 sixth hole (475 yards from the three-star tees) — an inverted homage to Augusta’s 13th, with a dogleg-right fairway offering a choice between a safe layup or a long approach that must confront a creek and a heavily bunkered green. In other moments, Shoal Creek offers challenges that are uniquely its own, like the difficult 12th hole — the longest par-4 on the course (430 yards from the three-star tees), where the uphill approach must grapple with a gaping grass bunker guarding the left side of the green’s entrance.
Shoal Creek’s bread and butter, though, are its par-3s. They test every shot in a player’s bag: straight downhill, both short (the 135-yard eighth hole) and long (the 175-yard 16th); and yardages more in between, for both left-to-right (the 165-yard fifth) and right-to-left (the 170-yard 13th) ball flights. Like the rest of the design, the par-3s feature aggressive bunkering, but none of the traps are gratuitous; and with the arguable exception of the eighth (Shoal Creek’s shortest hole), all the bunkers can be played away from if needed. Shoal Creek is a difficult test of golf; on courses of its caliber, effective par-3s offer struggling players a chance to recover strokes without handing success away for free. Shoal Creek’s par-3s do that while maintaining the variety at the heart of the layout.
Even the routing moves among changing themes. By the fourth tee, the slightly hilly but playful opening holes have given way to brawnier, more challenging exercises, capped by Shoal Creek’s toughest test — the par-4 ninth (380 yards from the three-star tees), where a dogleg-left fairway offers little margin for error before a short iron to a green surrounded by water on three sides. The back nine’s first four holes are more secluded, navigated shot-to-shot along the meandering creek that gave the club its name; and then a dramatic, downhill tee shot to the bunker-laden fairway at the par-4 14th (370 yards from the three-star tees) begins an up-and-down rollercoaster ride that finishes on an idyllic walk along the mercifully downhill 18th.
The 14th hole’s imposing, downhill tee shot begins Shoal Creek’s frantic final stretch.
That deftness with which Nicklaus repeatedly conjures new challenges is Shoal Creek’s defining trait. It’s one thing to say that a great course like Shoal Creek has no weak holes — but Shoal Creek shows the difficulty of repackaging and reimagining design elements in a way that stays imaginative and fresh throughout a round. It’s an ironic flash of inspiration for a designer known more today for paint-by-numbers designs where the most common strategic choice is between a high fade or a double bogey. Shoal Creek, though, is a glimpse of Nicklaus with his architecture fastball: young and imaginative, unburdened by the cynicism of formula.
Then again, we all get old. Cynicism comes for us all.
. . .
Bunkers, like the one guarding the entrance to the 18th green, are a common hazard at Shoal Creek — but not a gratuitous one. Each trap factors into players’ decisions.
Twenty-something years ago, I was a freshman at Ole Miss when an author visited to discuss his book about the civil rights era — in which he described Mississippi as a “scar” upon the nation. You can imagine how that would have gone over in a roomful of mostly white, 18-year-old Ole Miss students: outraged at the suggestion that Mississippi’s crimes might never be fully forgotten. Then and now, though, I found the metaphor overly generous to Mississippi: it suggests that the wounds it inflicted have healed, and all that remains is a reminder of those wounds.
Would that it were true. Twenty-something years later, white supremacy is fashionable again. When our leaders have no problem saying the quiet part out loud, there’s little wonder that ordinary people follow suit. It’s a dangerous time for our country: when our neighbors and loved ones have been given permission to give in to their own worst impulses, and seem proud to do it.
Resistance to those impulses must be no less active and purposeful than the work to move forward. And in a game with hundreds of years of racism bubbling under the surface, the risk to golf is greater than most institutions. The progress marked by golf since the 1990 PGA Championship must be defended now more than at any point since.
At Shoal Creek, the progress is incomplete — but it is also undeniable. And if Shoal Creek can move forward, then maybe we all can.
. . .
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