Doing More With Less
Can Only Go So Far
The Dogwoods Golf Course (Hugh White State Park)
Grenada, Mississippi
Greens fee: $45
Date played: June 29, 2021
Nothing good seems to last in Mississippi. Its history is littered with moments when something special — a breakthrough, a real chance at something new — seemed at hand, only to fade away like a mirage on summertime blacktop.
Even Mississippi’s public golf has not been immune to dashed promises. During construction of the Dogwoods Golf Course at Hugh White State Park near Grenada in 2005, architect Gary Roger Baird predicted that the course would become Mississippi’s top-rated design once it opened. And when it opened in 2006, maybe it was: the Dogwoods’ routing rambles across atypically hilly terrain, with thoughtful bunkers dripping with character and creative but understated greens.
The par-3 second hole offers an early glimpse of the Dogwoods’ occasionally aggressive bunkering.
But 2006 eventually became 2008. Our country has never been the same. Neither have Mississippi’s public services. Public schools have been underfunded by more than $3 billion since 2008. And funding for state parks, which has fallen by more than half since 2000, is now about a quarter of Mississippi’s neighboring states.
For any golf course facing the magnitude of funding cuts that Mississippi’s three state park courses have endured, withering is inevitable. But creativity is not. And the Dogwoods has managed that anyway.
. . .
“You’re from Jackson and you’ve never been up here?” the astonished club pro asked. The truth was that this wasn’t my first trip to the Dogwoods; I’d driven up one weekend morning six years prior, back before one kid had become two. But I had forgotten where the first tee was, and I needed directions. And I didn’t want to admit to the guy that my visit to the Dogwoods in 2015 had been a little underwhelming: the routing had been breathtaking, but the greens hadn’t been in great shape, and the bunkers were even worse — no sand, with gravel bottoms exposed. It had the look of a course past its prime before it’d even enjoyed a prime.
With state parks budgets withering, the Dogwoods has been forced to do more with less. One of its solutions: bunkers treated with curated neglect, for a more natural presentation and a true, unpredictable hazard.
But pleasant surprises have a way of hiding where you least expect them.
Today, the Dogwoods isn’t Mississippi’s best golf course, but if there’s a golf course doing more with less, then I haven’t seen it. The design’s beautiful bunkering has been carefully neglected — not abandoned — so that sandy soil and native grass fill the interiors (imagine a cross between Pinehurst No. 2’s sandy, wiregrass-laden edges, and the grass bunkers at Bandon Dunes’ Sheep Ranch) for a true, natural hazard. The greens are a touch slow, but consistent; the fairways are shaggy, but wide. Most importantly, the setup presents the Dogwoods’ terrific design in the best condition that its shoestring budget allows. There is none of the sadness attendant to Louisiana’s Black Bear, which has been devastated by state budget cuts. The Dogwoods undoubtedly could be better; but it’s doing the best it can, and that’s more than good enough.
Most importantly, the setup doesn’t sacrifice the golf course’s most thrilling moments: its tee shots. The Dogwoods repeatedly marries wide landing areas, sharp doglegs, and its bold bunkering to force players into difficult decisions. If the course’s maintenance lost any one of those elements — through narrower mowing lines, for instance, or bunkers too grown-over to create visual contrast — then the tee shots would be less strategy and more blind luck. But the design’s wild twists and turns and impressive land movement feel less like a shaggy state park and more like a poor man’s Tobacco Road.
At the par-4 third hole (409 yards from the back tees, 382 yards from the white tees), for instance, the fairway veers hard to the player’s left, which the player can reach only after carrying a huge waste area, navigating a collection of undulations, and dodging the fairway bunkers that guard the best line to the green. Again at the par-5 fourth (543 yards from the back tees, 523 yards from the white tees), the wide fairway is hard to miss, but the best view of the green comes from the right side — which is guarded by a fairway bunker.
The gnarly state of the Dogwoods’ bunkers works because the design brings them constantly into play. They are not an eyesore. They are calamity waiting to happen.
Of course, a solid drive is no guarantee of success. After nuzzling my tee shot up to within a few yards of the fourth fairway’s sand trap, I decided to lay up with a 6-iron — and shanked it sharply right, into what little rough the Dogwoods offers. In a former life, I could’ve played my third with another 6-iron — but from the rough, I knew my withering clubhead speed couldn’t manage. Instead, I went with a 5-hybrid — an embarrassing amount of club to need from less than 160 yards, but a man’s 40s hit like a ton of bricks. The ball never came more than about 15 feet off the ground, but like a gift, it bounded and rolled all the way up onto the green. Getting old is hell, but maybe admitting that you’re getting old has its moments.
For all the creativity that has gone into the Dogwoods’ setup in an era of austerity, not all its problems lend themselves to lovable solutions. At the long par-3 fifth (204 yards from the back tees, 188 yards from the white tees), the neighboring Grenada Lake has crept across its old banks and now pours across the cart path between the tees and the green. The only way to play the hole without waders is to hit a tee shot, hop back into the golf cart, drive all the way back to the second tee, turn onto a service road, and follow directions to the sixth hole — from which you further backtrack to the fifth green. If there’s a silver lining to this 10-minute detour, it’s the opportunity to drive along a service road that separates the golf course from the park’s raw, untouched wilderness — and to see, side by side, how well the course preserves the region’s rough, hilly landscape. The nobs and hummocks were here long before the golf course, and the design brings them into play without them feeling either like token minimalism or contrivance. They are truly elements of the layout — which, along with the bunkers having been naturalized by necessity, might make the Dogwoods the most natural-looking golf course in the state.
The 10th hole requires players to choose between a safe drive to the fairway’s right side or challenging the impressive fairway bunkers.
Ultimately, the deftness with which the Dogwoods alternates between minimalist presentations and more maximalist challenges — without either feeling out of place — is the course’s greatest achievement. At the par-4 eighth hole (423 yards from the back tees, 402 yards from the white tees), for instance, the downhill tee shot sets up an uphill short iron into a green sitting flat on the ground in a natural hollow. Two holes later, at the par-4 10th hole (401 yards from the back tees, 380 yards from the white tees), the challenge is one that would make Mike Stranz envious: a huge fairway fronted by water, which then darts sharply from right to left through some of the course’s biggest bunkering to a green that’s hidden from the tee. On the tee box, the right side seems to be the only safe play, and the bunkers appear to dominate the left side of the landing area, which is the part of the fairway closest to the green; but from the fairway, the bunkers reveal a wide landing area between them, hidden from the tee by “stacking” the traps on top of one another.
If the Dogwoods has weak moments, then they are confined to the back nine — although they probably wouldn’t stick out so much if the rest of the design weren’t so strong. The 12th hole (351 yards from the back tees, 323 yards from the white tees) is the closest thing the Dogwoods has to a drivable par-4, but a gaping centerline bunker effectively forecloses the possibility of laying up — although, improbably, I drove the green and made birdie, so I can’t complain. But on the long par-4 15th hole (454 yards from the back tees, 433 yards from the white tees), complaining is unavoidable: a long approach must deal with a green surrounded by bunkers. It’s a lazy way to defend a green (think Bethpage Black’s 17th, or Sewanee’s eighth — arguably the weakest green complexes at either course), but it’s even more offensive when the approach shot comes in with the low trajectory that a long club delivers.
On a tight budget, the Dogwoods has been forced to choose, in places, between good and good enough. The fairways are the latter. Somehow, though, it works.
Thankfully, the course finishes strong with a solid 18th hole where — yet again — one side of a broad fairway is clearly preferable to the other. From the right side, the approach is unobstructed to a green sitting on the ground and tilted sharply forward; from the left side, though, bunkers alongside the green’s entrance demand a long approach — which inevitably leads to a tricky downhill putt.
It’s an appropriate finish for the Dogwoods. A downhill putt, of course, demands flawlessness: the speed and the line must be perfect, and a mistake on either factor will be exacerbated. At the Dogwoods, post-recession budget cuts have made every season a downhill putt. To this point, the course has navigated that hazard as well as anyone could. But no one is perfect forever.
. . .
That the Dogwoods ever existed was a minor miracle, which is not something the Mississippi Legislature is accustomed to allowing. In 1997, the state’s House Ways and Means Committee rejected a bill to build five new state park golf courses on top of the two that already existed; one of those five would have been at Grenada’s Hugh White State Park. “We don’t even have enough room to put criminals,” one committee member said, “and we’re talking about more golf courses.”
Grenada Lake, now in play both as a hazard at the fifth hole and a metaphor for the Dogwoods’ rising challenges.
But the idea’s supporters didn’t give up. “We’re convinced there’s going to be a golf course here, it’s just a matter of when it’s going to happen,” Grenada’s mayor said. Two years later, the Legislature approved a $5 million bond issue to build the course, and the project was approved to go forward — but only after Grenada agreed to cover up to $300,000 in losses. That was supposed to be a formality, though. “All of our studies show it would be profitable,” the county’s Chamber of Commerce director said.
With nearly a quarter-century of hindsight, all those stakeholders were talking past each other. The Legislature doesn’t expect state parks to turn a profit; the Dogwoods never should’ve been expected to turn a profit, either. It’s a public resource. Publicly funded libraries, schools, fire departments, and roads aren’t expected to make money for the state; neither should publicly funded golf courses. And expecting the Dogwoods — or any other public service — to subsist on less and less each year is equally misguided.
Like Grenada Lake creeping in on the Dogwoods’ fifth hole, the challenges created by the Legislature are susceptible to creative solutions for only so long.
. . .
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