OMNI GROVE PARK INN
ASHEVILLE, N.C.
GREENS FEE: $175
DATE PLAYED: JUNE 13, 2024
Slow Down,
You Play Too Fast.
Donald Ross Would Be Aghast.
JERRY: Hey, Silvio, just out for a little stroll in my favorite fur coat.
SILVIO: That is your coat?
JERRY: It sure is.
SILVIO: Kramer says you need it because you're an entertainer and you're desperate for attention.
JERRY: That's true.
[Kramer giving Jerry his carryall.]
KRAMER: Jerry, you forgot your purse.
JERRY: Oh, thanks.
KRAMER: Hey, Silvio, look at Jerry here, prancing around in his coat with his purse. Yup, he's a dandy. He's a real fancy boy.
JERRY: Maybe this isn't my coat.
KRAMER: All right, you're not fancy!
SILVIO: No, he's very fancy! Want me, love me! Shower me with kisses!
[Elaine, coming up to them on the street.]
ELAINE: Jerry, where'd you get it? That's his coat.
JERRY: No, it's not. It's mine. I'm a fancy boy.
Seinfeld, season 9 episode 12 (“The Reverse Peephole”)
. . .
You know what? Sometimes, minimalism sucks.
Sometimes I don’t want a beer. Sometimes I want a frozen cocktail with a huge slice of fruit, served in a hollowed-out coconut with glitter on it.
Sometimes I don't want black coffee. Sometimes I want a triple decaf iced latte with extra vanilla syrup and Lucky Charms sprinkled on top — in a koozie, to keep my delicate fingers from getting cold.
And sometimes, I don’t want to scrape it around on a scruffy, obscure, life-altering golf course in Podunk, Alabama, where your great-grandfather hid out during the Civil War carving hickory shafts with a sharpened rock and creek water.
Sometimes, I want to throw a 67-pound staff bag on the back of a cart that runs on shredded stock certificates, blaring Mariah Carey’s greatest hits at an overpriced hotel’s golf course with grass so green that it looks like icing on a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cake.
And after nearly sprinting through my best effort at a 90-minute round at lovable but rough-around-the-edges Black Mountain Golf Course a couple of days prior — well, I don’t own a staff bag, and I don’t even like Mariah Carey. But by God, I deserved it.
Cart paths are the true hazard throughout Grove Park's back nine.
So with my bride’s blessing and an entire day to kill, I threw my green canvas Jones bag (a stand bag…like I said, sometimes minimalism sucks) in the back of the family minivan and made the 20-minute drive down Interstate 40 from Black Mountain to Asheville, the supermassive black hole at the center of the hipster universe.
Don’t get me wrong: everything about Asheville is lovely — even the early-30s doofuses who quit their jobs at investment banks to open art studios full of sculpted paper mache soaked in the mouths of hand-raised pufferfish. But if there is a fortress of resistance for the region’s horrified minority of money-soaked AARP members, it must be the Omni Grove Park Inn — a palatial, 111-year-old hotel with a cobblestone exterior and a $500 per night room rate. If the hotel’s 43,000-square-foot underground spa doesn’t pique your interest, then its 1926 Donald Ross-designed golf course will have to do.
For some Ross disciples, mentioning the Grove Park Inn draws the same teeth-gritting head shake reserved for your college dropout nephew who spends his days tweeting vaccine conspiracy theories from his mother’s basement. Its design was monkeyed with many times during the 20th Century, to the point where some aficionados found it no longer deserving of the Ross label. It’s also possible that Ross’ involvement in the 1920s design is overstated. Architect Kris Spence led a full-scale renovation in 2001 with the goal of restoring the course to what Ross knew; his summary of the project on Golf Course Atlas shows the difficulty of piecing together puzzle pieces that, even in 2001, were several decades old.
Spence left Grove Park Inn better than he found it: coherently routed with something resembling a Ross feel, plenty of memorable shots, and more than enough width to avoid the design’s occasional feint of tenacity. It’s not Pinehurst No. 2. It’s not trying to be. It’s an overpriced hotel golf course. But in a town where you could blow through $175 at some hipster bread shop, it’s a perfectly good respite for a would-be fancy boy from both starving paper mache artists and Ross’ better-known torture palaces.
. . .
“We’ve got a full tee sheet today, so it’s gonna be slow out there,” the starter warned. “Hit a couple of balls any time, if you want to.” Instinctively, my purist-aspirational instincts clutched their pearls. No three-hour round?? The shame of it!
Donald Ross, famous advocate of small greens and tree-lined fairways.
But sometimes, you’ve gotta be strong-armed out of your habits, good or otherwise. For the past decade, podcasters and off-beat Instagrammers have propagandized me on the virtue of the three-hour round. “It’s how the Scots do it!” OK, fine. You know what else the Scots do? Two words: blood pudding. I didn’t care, though. For 10 years, I’ve rushed from shot to shot, irrespective of how sparsely attended the 17 holes around me were. Gottahurrygottahurrygottahurry, hittheshothittheshothittheshot, chasetheballchasetheball, threeputtthreeputtthreeputt. A little while later, I’d leave the course with a horrifying scorecard, a consolation prize of having appeased my podcast masters, and head home to a wife wondering why the hell I was back so soon.
Life is short. And so are its days and hours. When you’re lying on your deathbed, are you gonna wish you’d spent more of those hours on a golf course, or less of them?
Yeah, exactly.
So when I found myself on the second tee box already waiting on the group ahead of me, I did something I’ve infrequently let myself do on the golf course: not a damn thing. In front of me was a full golf course; behind me was not a soul. I couldn’t hurry if I tried. I wiped off the hybrid that I’d hit from the rough on the first hole. I admired the view. I scouted (unsuccessfully) for a spot behind the tee box to pee in privacy. When the green cleared, I hit my shot. Until then, I did my level best not to give a shit.
Coincidentally, Grove Park’s second hole (173 yards from the back black tees, 169 yards from the blue tees) was a great spot to hurry up and slow down, because it’s the first of the course’s five (five!) enjoyable par-3s — and also the first sign that, one way or another, Donald Ross was here. At a glance, the second green (like most of Grove Park’s others) isn’t much to look at: roundish with a swollen protrusion on one end, like a jelly bean in a microwave. But as with microwaved confectionaries, the good stuff is inside — like the ridge running through the left side of the green, dividing it into upper and lower shelves. If Pinehurst No. 2 is Super Mario Bros. World 8-4, then Grove Park is more like World 3-1: probably not much trouble for anyone who’s been playing for more than a few days, but not completely absent of challenge.
Those resort-size fairways came in handy for accommodating the high fade into which my swing morphed during my sabbatical from golf. Grove Park’s fairways show very little trouble off the tee; even the sand traps along the right sides of the long-ish par-4 third and fourth holes are out of reach for most guests. Many of Grove Park’s greens are either fronted by bunkers on both sides or unguarded by bunkers altogether — which minimizes the importance of driving the ball onto the correct sides of fairways. Between the light demand on strategy, the tree-lined fairways, and the occasional water feature, there’s a lot at Grove Park that Donald Ross wouldn’t have recognized. Then again, Ross is dead, so he’s got bigger problems.
That’s not to say that Grove Park doesn’t have its defenses. Especially on the back nine, Grove Park bears its teeth on nearly every hole — and those teeth are made of asphalt. Cart paths are to Grove Park what squirrels are to Pinehurst. If they’d monogram a cart path onto a quarter-zip, I’d buy it. Actually, I could probably design it for them, because I spent most of the back nine watching the paths intently as my drives rocketed off them again and again. On some holes, the cart paths run along both sides of the fairways. Both sides!
Luckily, with my resort-friendly score in my back pocket and my time-is-a-social-construct ethos, cart paths were the only thing I had to worry about. That was the problem: monotony. During the middle of the back nine, three out of four holes (the 13th, 15th, and 16th) are all par-4s between 318 and 325 yards long from the blue tees. Generally speaking, one of the best things about par-70 courses is that it opens the door to par-4s of unconventional (even quirky) lengths, from bizarrely short to long and everything in between. On that count, Grove Park misses the boat.
By the time I reached the closing holes, I’d grown a little bored. But I still walked off the 18th green a mere 4 hours, 10 minutes after teeing off: proof, I suppose, that slowing down isn’t necessarily the same thing as playing slow. Perhaps that lesson was worth a $175 greens fee, even if Grove Park wasn’t.
. . .
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