Wilmington, North Carolina Golf Disapoints
I had the opportunity to live in Wilmington, North Carolina over the summer and early fall. It allowed me to play many of the public golf courses in the greater Wilmington area. Being in the southeast corner of North Carolina, along the coast and not too far from the North Carolina sandhills, I had high hopes of what I would find there in terms of golf.
Unfortunately, I came away totally disappointed. The public golf is pretty bad. The best of the public accesible lot is undoubtedly the City of Wilmington’s Municipal Course. It’s an old Donald Ross course that underwent a renovation in the late 1990s. Golf Club Atlas’ profile of the course details how Ron Prichard, along with the Donald Ross Society, restored the bunkers to give the course a lot of life. I walked the course, which was a pretty easy walk, and really enjoyed many of the holes. It is incredibly affordable.
The other courses that I played included Echo Farms Golf Club, Beau Rivage Golf Club, Castle Bay Golf Club and Magnolia Greens Golf Club. The publicly accesible golf courses I did not play that are in the area were the Cape Golf Club, Belvedere Country Club, Olde Point Golf Club, Porters Neck Golf Club and Topsail Greens Golf Club. The Cape was undergoing a total renovation and was closed. What I saw from driving around the courses at Belvedere, Olde Point and Topsail Greens was totally uninspring. Portners Neck is a Tom Fazio design that I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to play. From what I saw of the few greens driving around the course, they did show some interesting contours that would have been fun to play. Magnolia Greens, which gets high marks in Golf Digest’s Places to Play (4 stars…) was about as boring and lifeless a golf course that I’ve ever played. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how or why people rank it as high as they do.
There are three private clubs that I never did get a chance to play. I was able to see some of Cape Fear Country Club, another Donald Ross layout. It was recently restored by Kris Spence and it looked fantastic. The day I was setup to play it, it poured and I never got a chance to get back to the course. The ultra-private Eagle Point by Tom Fazio is reportedly a really good tract. And there are two courses located inside a planned development called Landfall. One course by Jack Nicklaus and one by Pete Dye. I was able to see a little of the courses in Landfall – they looked in immaculate shape, but not very unique.
There is one course under construction – the terribly named Cape Fear National Country Club. It is part of a planned development already well under construction and with many homes already occupied. While it isn’t scheduled to open until late 2009, an article The Real Estate Channel caught my eye because of the comments made by Cape Fear National’s architect, Tim Cate.
“It’ll blow everything out of the water up there,” says Cate, who also is working on a fourth new course at the Ocean Ridge resort-style community in Sunset Beach, N.C., called Jaguar’s Lair.
“You could bring (Cape Fear) down here (to Myrtle Beach) and it would be one of those top-five, best new courses and all that stuff. Up there in Wilmington they’ve never had competition like they have down here.
“I think the people that play it are going to be pretty surprised at what they see.
They’re going to see a sophisticated, detail level of golf that they probably don’t even know about. It’s a very good project with very good developers. And KemperSports is top of the line. Everybody’s just totally committed to make Cape Fear really good.”
Those are pretty interesting comments made by Mr. Cate. He must have seen the same thing that I saw – rather unispired golf. Hopefully his golf course will be something that adds an interesting twist to an otherwise rather boring golf landscape.
Hello Mr. Anderson,
I just wanted to point out that while you are ripping our home course over at Beau Rivage, you failed to spell the name correctly, demonstrating just how observant you are. New owners, a family of them, took over this course almost three years ago, and if you had played here before that time, you would have had a fair comparison to make. They have tirelessly renovated the course and clubhouse in pursuit of excellence and all it takes is some self-righteous “pro” writing a rather “uninspiring” blog to tear down the efforts of good people. Get a life pal. And please stop misspelling your blog titles.
Angry-
Thanks for the response. I appreciate your pointing out my spelling mistakes – I admit, that is not one of my strong points.
As far as “ripping” your course, I’m not sure where I ripped Beau Rivage specifically. Mr. Mull at the Star News called the course “tricked up”, not me. I didn’t like the course primarily because of all of the out of bounds throughout the course.
By the way, I don’t claim to be a “pro” – not sure where you got that. I’m just a guy with an opinion – that I put my name behind. And as far as self-righteous, well, I’m not the one bent out of shape and intolerant of somebody’s opinion.
Mr Anderson,
If you should return to Wilmington, NC, I would suggest that you ask some local players about the quality courses available. Porter’s Neck CC, River Landing, Carolina National and all of the courses at Saint James and Ocean Ridge (10 courses) are excellent layouts that are kept in great condition. None of them is more than 40 minutes from Wilmington.
I agree that some of the courses that you played are run-of-the-mill courses that lack character in some respects. However, a little more use of your engineer-level intellect would have resulted in your finding better courses at your disposal.
on vacation at Porter’s Neck CC, River Landing, Carolina National 2007 great month