Golf Georgia May/June 2010 : Page 28
Serving Another Slice of C h amp ions R e t R e at Heaven in augusta By DereK DuNCAN i have seen a slice of Georgia nirvana, a place that must surely qualify as one type of Platonic golf ideal. it takes the form of a secluded club shrouded in a land of tower- ing pines, specimen hardwoods, creeks and streams and cascading earth that seems — waiting through eons for the game to discover it — like it was created solely for the purpose of someday hosting these particular holes. 28 GOlF GeOrGia The playing surfaces are velvet — no, make that angel’s velvet spooled from the heavens’ finest factories — and the bunkers are lined with luxurious hues of light white sand, their edges scalpel-cut to microscopic precision. Hushed zephyrs of serenity swirl through the treetops and across the slip- pery greens, and the footprints of giants — Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player, specifically — are blazoned across every blade of grass.
A Slice Of Heaven In Augusta
Derek Duncan
The playing surfaces are velvet — no, make that angel’s velvet spooled from the heavens’ finest factories — and the bunkers are lined with luxurious hues of light white sand, their edges scalpel-cut to microscopic precision. Hushed zephyrs of serenity swirl through the treetops and across the slippery greens, and the footprints of giants — Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player, specifically — are blazoned across every blade of grass.
I have seen a slice of Georgia nirvana, a place that must surely qualify as one type of Platonic golf ideal. It takes the form of a secluded club shrouded in a land of towering pines, specimen hardwoods, creeks and streams and cascading earth that seems — waiting through eons for the game to discover it — like it was created solely for the purpose of someday hosting these particular holes.
Did I mention this club is in Augusta, Georgia?
It’s not, however, Augusta National.
Rather, this is Champions Retreat, a 27-hole club carved from 1,200 acres of old, private lumber forest along the banks of the Savannah River. And if the club can’t quite match Augusta National’s hallowed tradition or status as historical touchstone (what club can?), then it delivers a version of those goods on a very contemporary level.
Established in 2005, Champions Retreat operates, like Augusta National, on the national club model. Though a majority of the 370 members hail from Georgia, many others come from across the United States.
When they fly into one of the Augusta-area airfields, the club’s concierges arrange for their or any member’s transportation to the club, stock one of the 13 cottages (which total 78 suites) with whatever they and their guests need or want, and can even arrange to have a private chef cook for them in the cottage kitchen. It’s the modern golf club’s highest level of member service.
“That’s the way we’ve been set up from the beginning,” says Director of Golf and Club Development, PGA Professional Brian Stock. “[As] a full-service concierge club, we provide all the services and amenities our national members need in order to be able to come down and stay and entertain friends, guests and clients. If you don’t MAY /JUNE 29 Have on-site accommodations, it’s hard to be (considered) a national club. Members won’t want to stay off site and not be on the premises.
The cottages provide that amenity.” When members and their guests arrive, they enter through the Golf Village, a kind of town square lined with cottages and bungalows as well as separate buildings for the locker house, golf pro shop and grill room.
From there, the first tees to the three ninehole courses are just steps away. Members also can partake in professionally guided striped bass fishing trips on the 72,000-acre Clarks Hill Lake, or fish in 22 acres of onsite ponds stocked with largemouth bass, catfish, bluegills and shell crackers.
Of course, it’s the golf the members come for, and if you’re going to build a national membership club in Augusta, you’d better have some serious juice to back it up.
That juice comes from Player, Palmer and Nicklaus and the combined 13 green jackets they won just 10 miles away as the crow flies, each of whom have designed one of the three Champions Retreat nine-hole loops: Creek, Island and Bluff, respectively. How did this arrangement come about?
“I would call it a coup,” Stock says. “And I don’t think it will ever be done again. That in itself is pretty unique, to have those three guys. And we are the only club in the world with those three names as designers.” The Champions Retreat story dates back to at least 1766 when Great Britain granted 416 acres at the center of the current property — including the island on which six of Palmer’s Island holes reside — to one Robert Germany. Over 100 years later General Robert Wood, chairman of Sears Roebuck and Company, acquired the land, along with numerous surrounding tracts totaling over 4,000 acres that the family used for seasonal hunting and fishing. Later, Canal Industries purchased the property for timber and operated here until Pollard Land Company and Riverwood Land, the current owners and developers, finalized purchase in 2000.
Development of the club, originally conceived in the late 1990’s as The Big Three Club, began with the hiring of Gary Player Golf Course Design. Majority partner and project manager Wayne Millar, who is from South Africa and remains a close friend of the Player family, convinced Player to not only sign onto the project but to recruit Nicklaus and Palmer, which he did successfully during the 1999 Masters Champions dinner.
Once aboard, Player devised a system for how the architects would decide upon which of the three distinct parcels they’d build — a blind draw. Palmer, the eldest member, drew the Island section. Nicklaus, with his six Masters titles, drew the Bluff portion of the land next, and that left Player with the Creek section.
In reality, none of them could go wrong.
Each nine is routed on stunning, pristine ground that most would consider classic Georgia terrain. There is modest development throughout the property, but for the most part each course at Champions Retreat is a walk in the woods.
“It’s hard to describe how beautiful this property is. It’s just naturally rich,” Stock says. “The timber on the property hasn’t been harvested in the last 60 years to my knowledge, so you’ve got these beautiful century-old hardwoods and tall pines and Uchee Creek — that’s a big watershed that flows into the Savannah River that borders the south side.” Of the river, he says it’s “just a gorgeous river, to begin with. It’s a big, broad river that’s Very clean, and there’s a national forest on the other side of the river so that will never be developed. When you’re out here you’ve really escaped into a perfect golf environment.” As you might expect, the Big Three competed here as much with bulldozers as they would on the golf course, though it’s tough to keep score of this match. Palmer’s Island nine, which drops down to Germain Island in the Savannah River, is shaped with wide fairway swells and enormous, detailed white flashed-sand bunkers rising up.
There’s a sense of artistry and largesse here, everything flowing and fit to scale, and the three-hole stretch of No. 6, No. 7 and No.
8 — including a rather sexy drivable par-4 sandwiched between two par-3s, the first playing over the island’s marshy interior and second across the Little River — is the club’s most evocative.
Player’s Creek nine is a natural match to the Island nine: the bunkering is similarly shaped and flashed, and the opening holes run through the Uchee Creek marshes on the property’s low side. The action picks up at the par-5 fifth. A creek bisects the broad fairway at 150 yards out and runs up the elevated green’s right side creating an upper and lower fairway, and the babbling water and steep grassy banks of the creek can’t help but evoke Augusta National’s famed 13th. From there, the holes hit upland terrain and the greens and bunkers become ever larger to match the scale of the hillside landforms.
The Nicklaus Bluff nine is something altogether different. Where graceful movements and voluptuous forms identify the Creek and Island nines, the Bluff tackles some serious up and down topography.
With 80 feet of elevation change, much of it quite abrupt, Nicklaus recognized the ground itself was both the primary obstacle and the primary character, so the features added are less stylized: the bunkers are benched deeply into the slopes but more basically presented (oval-, bean- and roundshaped), and the flattish greens offer relief from all the hill-climbing.
The holes are also narrower and the trees demand — not request — that drives be shaped into the terrain. The seventh, a 319 to 340-yard par-4 that plays downhill, is a strategic ringer for the 10th hole at The Belfry’s Brabazon Course in England, site of four Ryder Cups, where aggressive drives can try to cut over the trees on the right corner of a dogleg in hopes of finding a narrow sliver of green banked by a creek.
Harrison Minchew, lead designer for Palmer Course Design, said upon Champions Retreat’s opening that, “There is not a better setting for golf in the South.” That’s impossible to verify, but what isn’t debatable is that Champions Retreat does exist in rarified space, providing members and their guests with impeccable service, amenities and conditions, as well as one of the most graceful golf experiences in Georgia. It is, to be sure, a slice of Augusta heaven.
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