22 golf digest | issue 4. 2020photos: Larry LambrechtPlay Courses
The “collection architecture” celebratesthe centripetal force of gravity.grove near Hobe Sound—is
South Florida flat and unam-
biguously landlocked.
“We started to gradually
raise this land where the club-
house is, and as we did, we
realized we had views across
the whole course,” he says.
“We could see everything.”
The vastness of the property
and the sandy, grass-covered
spaces between the holes
reminded Weed and senior
design associate Chris Monti
of the famed U.S. Open venue
on Long Island. A visit to Shin-
necock to double-check their
instincts confirmed the idea.
The logic works. Seen from
the patio, The Grove XXIII’s
holes spool and unspool
against the open backdrop of
undeveloped pasture—the
sea. And from the golf course,
the clubhouse is never out of
sight, a modernist stand-in for
Stanford White’s omnipresent,
wood-framed landmark.
The Grove XXIII (the Ro-
man numeral represents the
number Jordan wore with
the Chicago Bulls) twists in
an ingenious double-helix
routing that can be played
in four nine + nine combina-
tions, and in shorter three- to
six-hole loops. The key to the
flexibility is the clustering ofgreens and tees, and a cross-
over junction after the fourth
and 13th holes. Walking off
the fourth green, for instance,
play can continue on at the
fifth, or it can switch over to
the 14th and finish in the op-
posite direction, so each nine
can be broken into sections.
In fact, it’s possible to play
continuous internal circuits
without ever returning home,
enhancing the likelihood of
ongoing presses, overtimes
and emergency holes.
Architects love to work
with nature’s broken lines
and irregular shapes, but
little of that splendor existed
here. Each hole was cajoled
and massaged using fill
from a chain of lakes that
Weed transformed into a
marshland habitat. Jordan’s
primary requirement that
the course play fast and firm
with features that produce
dramatic matches gave way to
broad fairways that glide over
dips and swales and melt into
low-slung putting surfaces.
Watching players putt or bump
7-irons onto greens from 20
yards makes Weed giggle.
In an era when nearly
every new and remodeled
course bears a naturalistic or
faux-historical aesthetic, TheGrove XXIII skews clean and
contemporary, all short grass
and sophistication. Weed’s
“collection architecture,” rife
with hollows, depressions and
shallow scoop bunkers that
gather shots, celebrates the
centripetal force of gravity.
There’s certainly nothing
pacific about the 15th and 16th,
two holes that can quickly
flip matches. The first is a
par 3, drawing diagonally over
a ridge of moguls to a partially
blind green kicking everything
rightward into a deep chipping
hollow. The other, just 260
yards from the regular tees,features a strand of central
bunkers separating routes to
the hole and a convex putting
surface that moves chips and
putts in irrational directions.
Although limiting in some
ways, the old, agricultural
property did offer an
unexpected bonus in the
form of two deep irrigation
canals bordering the north
and eastern boundaries. Weed
notched slender strips of
tees atop the high banks on
the opposite sides, using the
canals as the rarest of features
in American golf: long, dead-straight hazard lines that play
like inverted versions of the
stone walls at North Berwick
in Scotland.
“We kept asking ourselves
if we were overdoing it [hitting
across the canals],” Monti says,
“but then we’d cross to the
other side, and it was a better
hole from over there.”
Architecture’s best rule is:
Use what’s there. Sometimes
that’s a perfect landscape, a
Shinnecock Hills with wild
grasses, sand ridges, a distant
bay. Sometimes it’s Florida
citrus land, a pasture and
canals.▶ wet & wild The brutish par-4
12th (left) and the par-3 13th (below)
playing toward the “sea.”