On the Nature
of Our Nation
Cider Ridge Golf Club
Oxford, Ala.
Greens fee: $64
Date played: July 4, 2021
I’ve thought too often recently about “Terminator 2.”
As Sarah Connor, the Terminator, and young John Connor flee Los Angeles about halfway through the film, they stop at a roadside burger stand. In the midst of their bizarre family lunch, two boys begin fighting nearby with toy guns, arguing over who “shot” who first. In their struggle, young John sees something dark.
“We’re not gonna make it, are we?” John asks, realizing it for the first time. “People, I mean.”
The Terminator, incapable of both cynicism and lies, offers worse than an answer. “It is in your nature to destroy yourselves,” he said.
At a glance, Cider Ridge (seen here from the sixth fairway) is an eyeful. But on closer inspection, the design retains just enough natural beauty to hide the housing and infrastructure that permeates the site. It’s less a quality golf course than the appearance of one.
Anyone who’s lived through the past two years would be hard pressed to argue: 18 months into a pandemic that’s getting worse, not better; a pandemic started by a virus for which vaccines are now readily available, yet widely scorned; the most dangerous public-health threat of our time, against which millions of people outright refuse to protect themselves and their communities. Here in Mississippi, the state’s teaching hospital recently began sending patients to beds in a concrete parking garage — in August, in Mississippi — because the rest of the hospital is full.
When public resistance to basic precautions like masking and social distancing began popping up in the pandemic’s early days, I assumed that skeptics would behave differently if children were being affected. And now they are. An hour down the road from Jackson, a 13-year-old girl caught COVID (her school district did not require masks) on a Wednesday and died that weekend. And yet many schools continue to prioritize grandstanding over schoolchildren’s safety. “We’re going to lose more kids,” warned the state health officer, Dr. Thomas Dobbs. “It’s just going to happen.”
It is a moment in our history for which we should keep no pride. Many years from now, I hope our children have found the humanity and clarity to judge us for failing them. We deserve it.
America is a wonderful country, built on wonderful promises. It is vexing, then, how often we slip into the worst of those promises — how frequently we seem to take something good and pure, and pollute it. Our culture’s respect for individualism and personal responsibility are noble and important; there is a fine line, though, between individualism and selfishness.
Like many courses in northern Alabama, the terrain at Cider Ridge — like that on which the par-3 eighth hole sits — is dramatically hilly. At times, though, it passes from dramatic to nearly impassable. And since the design is disjointed by homes and neighborhood streets, it is accessible only by carts — whose descents down some of the course’s steepest paths can be precarious.
Compared to a tragedy that has taken more than 600,000 American lives, golf is a trifle. But so too did our adoption of golf come with distortions. In Scotland, where the game was born, the culture is so deeply steeped in golf that accessibility is baked into the game: its greatest courses are almost all public, with preposterously low greens fees and membership rates for locals. The greatest of its golf courses, the Old Course at St. Andrews, is held in a public trust — like a national park. And once per week, it closes for play so that the public, golfers and non-golfers alike, can enjoy it. When we Americans brought golf to these shores, we forgot its best parts; we made it an exclusive game, expensive with the best courses segregated both racially and physically (Augusta National, arguably America’s greatest golf course, is literally walled off from the community around it).
Which brings us to Cider Ridge Golf Course in Oxford, Alabama.
Early on the Fourth of July, with the sun rising on the United States’ 246th year, I pulled my golf cart alongside the first tee, little suspecting that one of the least pleasant golfing experiences of my life awaited me. It is as if Cider Ridge tried to pack as much ill-conception into its presentation as realistically possible, and succeeded: a residential golf course, with terrific conditioning and little sense to its design, totally unwalkable and generally unimaginative. It’s a classic example of another American phenomenon: a golf course built to sell real estate, with virtually every other consideration thrown out the window.
Avoiding Cider Ridge won’t stamp out the pandemic. But it’ll make better use of whatever time the the pandemic has left us.
. . .
“What do you know about Cider Ridge?” I texted a golf-savvy friend a few days before a weekend trip to northern Alabama.
With narrow fairways and hazards frequently lurking just off them, Cider Ridge tends toward tedious. Throw in the fact that tee shots from the middle tees often make these hazards blind, and a round quickly becomes a chore.
“Feels like a Trail course,” came the reply.
That should have set off alarm bells, the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail being the P.F. Chang’s of American public golf. But I have an affinity for bottles of wine with quirky labels, and for golf courses with funny names. And there’s an apple right on the logo, for God’s sake. How could it be bad if there’s an apple involved?
A century ago, the 200 acres on which Cider Ridge was laid out served as a real apple orchard — heir to an Alabama tradition dating back to at least 1773, when the naturalist William Bartram observed apple trees growing near Montgomery nearly a half-century before Alabama’s statehood. In turn, apple trees came to North America in 1620 when Pilgrims set sail from England, where the apple’s highest form — cider — had been a staple of that country since coming ashore with French invaders at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. All that to say that western Europeans have brought the humble apple along for many forced carries over the past thousand years.
The dearth of those forced carries might be Cider Ridge’s only healthy offering. The disjointed, tight design offers little to no room to miss its targets, strongly suggesting that the surrounding neighborhood (and its thoroughfares, Apple Blossom Way and Golden Delicious Drive) got the site’s best land and that the golf course took the scraps.
Cider Ridge wastes little time confronting players with the consequences of that decision. After a handshake opener, the fairway at the second hole (426 yards from the back tees, 366 yards from the middle tees) bends leftward around a retaining pond, with no more than the width of a subdivision home to land the ball, and the water lurking just off the landing area. And with a cart path just behind the green, and woods just behind the cart path, any approach shot that misses long is as good as gone.
Cider Ridge’s 10th hole encapsulates all its problems: a poorly planned tee shot, leading to a tiny green surrounded by brush, steep ground, and a nearby cart path.
Those close brushes with the wilderness are common moments at Cider Ridge, where just enough of the natural landscape has been preserved to hide houses and create backdrops for the website’s photo gallery. At the par-3 third hole (205 yards from the back tees, 163 yards from the middle tees), I stuffed a 6-iron to within five feet on the push-up green — while, off my left shoulder, a shirtless man on a second-story patio scraped his grill with a wire brush in the morning sunlight. On the par-5 fifth (533 yards from the back tees, 490 yards from the middle tees), another narrow fairway meanders alongside a stream, while shots ramble through formulaically placed bunkers. I’ve always thought that northern Alabama’s rolling topography made it the golf design equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel: plop down a course any old place, I thought, and even if you didn’t know what you were doing, the land would turn it into something enjoyable. Cider Ridge proved me wrong.
Even when the routing picks up, Cider Ridge’s presentation gets in the way. The par-4 10th hole (412 yards from the back tees, 353 yards from the middle tees) begins with a downhill tee shot, but only from the back tees; farther up where the middle tees lie, the player can’t see over the hill, so the tee shot is blind — making the hole more difficult for higher-handicap players. From atop the hill where the back tees have been placed, a player can see the weeds and brush that create a lateral hazard across the fairway — but players at the middle tees can’t, and a good drive will bounce in. Even if the drive stays safe, the approach must find a green that yet again offers nowhere to miss: surrounded by more brush, with a cart path unnecessarily close by. Unlike much of the rest of the course, the land on which the 10th hole sits could have made for a good golf hole — it simply wasn’t executed well.
Yet again, at the par-4 14th (449 yards from the back tees, 353 yards from the middle tees), another blind tee shot reveals that this place was more about housing than golf: this time, down a steep hill to a creek. I don’t have a problem with blind tee shots; I can live even with blind tee shots with trouble in play. But there’s no strategic value to a blind tee shot toward a hazard with red stakes around it. At best, it’s lazy design. And like untold drives before me, mine bounded down the hill into the water. As I eased my golf cart down the hill, it began to slide on the overwatered grass, and spun sideways. I could feel it begin to tip. In a panic, I leaped from the cart as far as I could, then rolled commando-style down the hill to dodge what I was certain would be a falling golf cart. Somehow, it didn’t fall, and slid to a stop near the creek. I picked myself up, massaged my knee, and raked my ball out of the water with a wedge, then pitched on and three-putted for double bogey. On my way to the 15th tee, I crossed a bridge over a serene, babbling brook. “Fuck this course,” I muttered.
. . .
The surrounding housing development is never far from view at Cider Ridge, despite the best efforts to landscape the houses away.
Trees line both sides of the uphill 16th hole (454 yards from the back tees, 369 yards from the middle tees), but from the landing area (alongside yet another paint-by-numbers bunker), a slim gap in the trees shows a house just behind the foliage. I’m not oblivious to the fact that, for much of the past 50 years, golf course development and housing development were joined at the hip. A residential golf course is not inherently a bad golf course. But there is something obnoxious about Cider Ridge’s half-hearted efforts to hide the houses and streets that wind around and through its design. Whether it’s the overly narrow fairways routed across land that clearly wasn’t chosen for its charm, or the asphalt constantly winding along the other side of a hedge, Cider Ridge is more a forgery of a golf course than a real one. We Americans have a habit of choosing locations and rules for our golf courses arbitrarily; and so long as enough water can be dumped on it to keep the grass green, it’s good enough for us.
That attitude isn’t so different from the one that’s led us to the avoidable calamity of COVID in 2021: not so much freedom as the appearance of it. There’s nothing individualistic about shutting down vaccination events, as anti-vaxxers did in Georgia. There’s nothing enlightened about threatening school board members, or withholding money from schoolchildren whose leaders adopt mask requirements. And yet, here we are. It’s not freedom. At best, it’s minoritarianism. At worst, it’s a herd of lemmings determined to pull everyone else over the cliff, too.
And like the thoughtlessness that led to Cider Ridge, it’ll take more than an apple a day to cure this disease.
. . .
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