Maybe a Losing Effort,
But Making the Effort
Bent Brook Golf Course
Birmingham, Ala.
Date played: Sept. 4, 2021
Greens fee: $69 to ride 18
A group text with some high school friends has recently taken a change in tone.
After 25 years of giving each other hell, we’ve suddenly become nice to each other. Encouraging notes. Happy birthday wishes. Selfie video lunch reviews. Nothing — except negativity, apparently — is off limits.
Most of Bent Brook’s green complexes are fairly cookie-cutter. The Brook nine’s seventh hole is an exception, with tough bunkering and lots of tilt.
I’m not sure how it happened. Maybe it’s “Ted Lasso,” or COVID, or turning 40, or all of the above. It’s probably not as objectively funny as it used to be. But it’s enjoyable. And I’m at the point in my life where there’s room for merely enjoyable.
Bent Brook Golf Course in Birmingham, Ala., is likewise enjoyable. Probably merely enjoyable, if we’re being honest. It’s not gonna win any awards for architectural significance. It’ll never overshadow its deep-pocketed neighbors down the street — the Birmingham area’s three Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail courses. And it has none of the natural, hilly landscape that makes most golf courses in this part of the state so enjoyable. But it’s wide open, well cared for, and unpretentious. There’s room for that, too.
. . .
After seven holes of anticipation, the Graveyard nine’s namesake appears between the seventh green and the eighth tee.
For anyone making the drive into Jefferson County on Interstate 459, Bent Brook makes an eye-catching first impression: a fetching blend of verdant fairways, clean-edged sand traps, and wide-open corridors. Realistically, though, most golf travelers driving into Jefferson County are headed for either Oxmoor Valley or Ross Bridge, the two Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail sites just a few miles farther down the road. With a bottomless supply of resources for everything from advertising to spray-on fertilizer, the Trail is like a black hole at the center of the region’s public golf galaxy, sucking up greens fees and preventing new life from developing anywhere nearby. In that shadow, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine a course being content to wither. To Bent Brook’s credit, it has resisted that. A full greens renovation in 2015 is still bearing fruit, with putting surfaces remaining consistent and smooth even under summer’s unforgiving heat. Likewise, conditioning across the rest of the site’s 27 holes is tremendous.
When it opened in 1988, Bent Brook was Birmingham’s first public golf course built in nearly 15 years. And it met a ready demand: the John LaFoy design hosted 4,000 rounds in its first month alone.
Water is in play throughout Bent Brook, but nowhere more than at the Brook nine’s sixth hole, where the layout’s namesake guards against short approaches.
But outside its maintenance standards, Bent Brook tends toward bland. It sits on none of the region’s hilly terrain, which injects dramatic land movement into designs and thereby makes fun public golf so easy to find (with some exceptions). Even the Trail — golfing monotony in its purest form — benefits from that topography; the two courses at nearby Oxmoor Valley are among the portfolio’s best. Without that, Bent Brook is left to rely on the strength of its own design — which, candidly, just isn’t overwhelming. I can’t attest to the Windmill nine; but on the Graveyard and Brook nines that I played, the landmarks for which the two loops are named were the course’s most exciting features.
And there is, in fact, a graveyard on the property. After beginning with an opening drive alongside the course’s namesake waterway, the Graveyard routing meanders along the site’s western side, before hopping across Harpers Dairy Loop for four so-so holes (I enjoyed the long par-3 fifth, hugged on four sides with bunkers but with the front one turned perpendicular to allow for a couple of narrow entrances; and the short-ish par-4 sixth, whose dogleg fairway bends sharply rightward and begs for a risky shot over a cluster of trees). Then the loop returns across the street, where the eighth tee sits next to a small cemetery. Imagine spending eternity tucked between a street called Harpers Dairy Loop and an endless stream of weekend duffers. It’s enough to make you want to die again.
But the Graveyard loop, like life itself, ends on a downer. The par-5 eighth is mundane; and although the brook crossing the ninth fairway demands a little more thought on the finishing hole, both fairways are only a little wider than the street you cross to return to them.
The Brook nine’s fifth green complex is more intricate than most others at Bent Brook — but even there, the bunkers are saucer shapes without much individuality.
The Brook loop has its moments. It opens with a par-5, introducing players to the layout with some margin for error built in. The fifth hole’s green complex is the best I saw all day: raised up, with two bunkers guarding the front left, and contour that is uncommon across the rest of the course.
Again, though, the layout’s namesake is its most noteworthy element. At the par-4 sixth hole, the stream runs flush against the front of the green (and parallel to the cart path, incidentally), creating a tough forced carry. Moments later, at the seventh tee, the creek rolls down a hilarious staircase-style waterfall — less breathtaking than evocative of the flooded-basement scene in “Home Alone.”
By the par-3 eighth, I’d lost interest. After coming up well short of the green, I tried putting on, but the grass around the green was too thick to allow it. The ninth finishes alongside a lake, between the clubhouse and the neighboring Windmill nine’s namesake. Maybe the Windmill nine packs a little more excitement (allegedly there’s a Biarritz green — and either way, there’s an actual windmill, so it can’t be all bad). As for Bent Brook’s Graveyard and Brook nines, though, the designs offer fewer moments worth looking forward to. They’re fine, but forgettable.
. . .
The Brook nine’s finishing hole, with the Windmill nine’s chief landmark in the distance.
For a long time, I thought north Alabama’s widespread rolling ground made it an ideal spot for routing a golf course: plop it down any old place, I thought, and the land’s movement will take care of the rest. Highland Park, I thought, proved the point: “If a scruffy municipal course in the middle of town can be this good,” I told myself, “then anything around here would be good.”
Cider Ridge, east of town in Oxford, Ala., proved me wrong. And Bent Brook confirms it. To be clear, Bent Brook is nowhere near as offensive as Cider Ridge. But it has none of the frivolity of Highland Park, or even of Roebuck. It faces an unenviable challenge in the shadow of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail’s Oxmoor Valley site just minutes away — but in fairness, both the Oxmoor Valley courses are superior offerings. Between the more memorable shots and the higher public profile, it’s little wonder that the Trail site draws more attention.
But that same gravitas undoubtedly deters the development of other nearby public golf offerings. Matching up against a competitor who has no pressure to turn a profit is not a a fair fight. And still, Bent Brook makes the effort. It’s hard not to root for an underdog.
. . .
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