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Northern Exposure
August 14, 2008
The U.S. Coast Guard base in Kodiak, Alaska, has a lot of responsibility, a lot of great people, a lot of wind and a golf course with some startlingly natural hazards…
Words and Pictures: Reade Tilley
Three of us were from Florida—and not just from Florida, we were from the same part of Florida. We knew summers on the same beaches, took dates to the same restaurants. We probably drove too fast on the same roads when we were kids. Several thousand feet above the Gulf of Alaska in a Coast Guard helicopter off Kodiak Island, this seemed significant somehow, that three of the five of us on board were from the same part of the world. A much warmer part of the world, several thousand miles away.
But Alaska can be funny that way, offering up things you don’t necessarily expect. Like, for example, an otter on the golf course.
The golf course is a nine-hole public course called Bear Valley and it’s on Kodiak Island, approximately three miles from the largest operating U.S. Coast Guard base, Integrated Support Command Kodiak. I got to see it on the ground and from the air, the latter via a ride in a USCG helicopter. In a word—a word I rarely use because so few things are—the golf course is unique. Unique for the weather, unique for its location and unique because of the otter, which is only one example of the wildlife you might see on the fairways.
Wildlife aside, the real story of the golf course is the people who use it. Unlike so many courses, a significant number of the golfers at Bear Valley on any given day are some of the bravest men and women alive. Committed to protecting our borders, our interests and our people in the cold north, the USCG personnel stationed at Kodiak risk their lives every day. Any time they get on Bear Valley is certainly well-earned, and hopefully well enjoyed.
The Course
The course is on USCG land, and it used to be run by USCG personnel. Some years ago the Coast Guard got out of the golf course management business, but Bear Valley is still a big part of recreational life on base.
“I release a lot of frustrations on that little golf course,” says CAPT Andy Berghorn, Air Station Kodiak's commander. “I must have played 30 rounds last year.”
With the responsibility of looking after the lives of fishermen and women in the Bering Sea, enforcing the law and maintaining navigational aids throughout the extreme north, it’s no wonder several people on base expressed similar sentiments of the course’s stress-relieving attributes, but Berghorn’s frequency of play was the most impressive—all the more so because Bear Valley isn’t always playable, at least not by Florida standards.
“I’ve been out there on days where it’s horizontal rain and 30- to 40-knot winds and you’re in your rain slicker and everybody’s playing like it’s a beautiful day,” says Berghorn. “You have to take what nature gives you here, otherwise you’d never play.”
When you consider that it rains an average of 193 days per year and that the temperature is below freezing on 133 days (and above 90 only seven days), you realize Berghorn isn’t kidding.
Still, there are advantages to the weather: “I get to work on my wind game,” says LCDR Steve Jutras, C-130 pilot and former rescue swimmer. “The wind always comes into play.”
As a point of illustration, Jutras tells me about the course’s two par 5s, which run in opposite directions across the main water hazard, a creek that cuts through the course.
“You can try to knock it across, which is easily done with a tailwind,” he explains. “I’ve hit a driver and sometimes I’m 50 yards this side of the creek; sometimes I’m 50 yards on the other side of the creek. It’s just the wind.”
Jutras seems to handle it ok; he and several teammates won a trophy that I dubbed the “Colander Cup,” due to its eccentric construction. A base of what appears to be two dogfood dishes glued together supports a colander full of range golf balls, all stuck together with some kind of airplane-related epoxy. A bright orange range ball serves as the ornament on top, and winners’ names are immortalized in Sharpie on a “Hello, my name is” sticker affixed to the base. Clearly a coveted award, it triumphantly gleams down from a shelf over Jutras’ desk, daring anyone to challenge him and his team on a course they obviously know well.
“The best part about [the course] is the slight doglegs, so you get to work the ball both left and right. And there are no sand traps! There’s no way they’d be able to keep up with that in the rain and wind.”
The wind effects everything, including the shape of the course itself. “Sometimes we lose a big tree,” says Art Bors, Bear Valley’s manager. “And some of them are important strategically, inside the corner of a dogleg. When the big trees go down it makes it a little easier.”
Of course, “easier” is a relative term on a course that still had snow on it in May.
“If you can keep it in the fairway you’re a good golfer,” says Berghorn. “If you hit it in the woods, you never know what you’re going to meet out there. Between the deer and the mountain goats… Well, it’s a unique place.”
I saw goats and plenty of rabbits for myself, both while I was standing on the course and while I was flying over it. Others report seeing deer, foxes, vermin, even the odd bear. And, of course, there was the otter, which Bors told me he saw.
To be fair, he did qualify the sightings: “We’re making the thing sound like a zoo, and it’s really not. It just happens occasionally.”
In other words, don’t come here on safari; come
here to golf.
Palmer Stories
As many of his fans know, Arnold Palmer served in the U.S. Coast Guard, and even built one of his first golf courses at the training base in Cape May, New Jersey, with a wheelbarrow and a shovel. He recently told Kingdom that he’d certainly consider working on a course with the USCG again, and there are a few people around the base who would welcome his coming. Turns out a few of them already have their own Palmer stories to tell.
Here’s a sampling:
Art Bors, manager of Bear Valley Golf Club on Kodiak Island, once played in a tournament at Laurel Valley Golf Club in Pennsylvania, in which Mr. Palmer took part. “That’s me,” says Art, pointing to a picture of himself with Arnie and a few others. “You can tell Arnold Palmer that was the highlight of my golfing career. It had as much to do with meeting him as it did with playing in the tournament.”
LCDR Steve Jutras, C-130 Pilot and former USCG rescue swimmer met Mr. Palmer while attending flight school in Milton, Florida.
“He was there at The Moors Golf Club, a seniors tournament. It was during one of the practice sessions and everybody was waiting for autographs. I was waiting out in the parking lot, he came out in his Cadillac… Some other folks gathered around him. They were all talking about golf, and I said ‘Hey Mr. Palmer, how do you like that new Citation X?’ [Referring to Palmer’s Cessna Citation X jet.]
Mr. Palmer turned around, his eyes lit up and he said, ‘I LOVE IT!’
I told him I was in the Coast Guard going through flight school. He goes, ‘Oh yeah? I was in the Coast Guard.’ I thought he was kidding, but after the tournament I went home and looked it up and sure enough... He gave me the autograph, made small chat and was on his way. I still have the autograph. After the tournament on Sunday, he overflew the golf course and did the old wing dip. I said, ‘I know who that is.’
Be sure and tell him that if he ever needs a backup pilot…”
Posted: August 14, 2008 01:19 PM
The 'King' Dynasty
August 01, 2008
The Scots and the Dutch have been arguing for well over 200 years about which of their nations invented the game of golf. However, the historian Wei Tai wrote in 943AD that a sport called Chuiwan (from the words “Chui,” meaning hitting, and “Wan,” meaning small ball) had been played in China from as early as the 7th century.
The theory of golf ’s Asiatic origins continues with the suggestion that the Mongols brought this ancient version of golf to Europe during their invasions of the 12th and 13th centuries, along with a set of rules that bore an uncanny resemblance to those first formulated by the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews some 500 years later.
By the end of the Ming Dynasty (1644), all mention of Chuiwan or Buda had disappeared from contemporary chronicles. Golf reappeared on the radar with the 1889 founding of the Hong Kong Golf Club, which is home to three layouts at Fanling in the New Territories, the northern corner of the former British province.
No doubt golf courses were built at Beijing and Shanghai to accommodate colonial visitors during the early 1900s, but records of such constructions were not kept. Eventually all evidence of the game disappeared under the dead weight of the communist pall, which did not begin to lift until the mid- 1980s. When it did, the catalysts that hastened an end to the golfing (and cultural) blackout were Henry Fok, one of the richest men in the world at the time, and Arnold Palmer.
In the early 1980s, Fok, a Hong Kong tycoon and one of the political architects of modern China, approached Mr. Palmer to design the first golf course in post-Revolutionary China. The product of their union was Chung Shan Hot Springs Golf Club. Located near Chungshan City in Guangdong Province in southern China, it officially opened nearly a quarter of a century ago.
In the intervening 20-plus years there has been a remarkable boom in golf-course construction in China. Current estimates put the number of courses in the world’s fastest-growing economy at more than 400, with perhaps double that number under construction.
One of them, Mission Hills Golf Club in Shenzhen, is already the biggest golf resort in the world with 12 different 18-hole courses now open for play, all of them designed by superstars of the modern game.
As recently as the mid-1990s, it was estimated that barely 1,000 Chinese nationals played golf. Now that figure is comfortably in excess of one million.
Mr. Palmer, famed for his entrepreneurial spirit and business acumen as well as his ability both as a player and a course designer, is therefore acutely aware of his unique position in China's golfing history.
He acknowledges, too, the huge part played by Fok, who died in 2006 at age 83, and the hundreds of Chinese laborers who used rakes, shovels and their bare hands to fashion a championship golf course out of a featureless tract of land.
“We were contacted by the Henry Fok organization in Japan,” recalled Mr. Palmer. “Mr. Fok had seen our work in Japan and asked me if I would consider designing him a championship course in mainland China. I said: ‘Yes, we would be delighted to.’”
“The land was one half flat and one half severe mountain slope. All of the features of the course were designed. It was not what you would call a great or natural golf course site, and it was a pretty tough build because it involved so much manual labour. We are very proud of how it all came together to create what now looks like a very natural site.”
Mr. Palmer met Fok to discuss the history-making project, and made various site visits during the construction period.
“The fact that it was part of history was one of the reasons I agreed to design the course. As it has turned out, we really did lay the cornerstone for golf in mainland China and we are all very proud of that,” said Mr. Palmer, with obvious pride.
“I met Mr. Fok on two occasions. We had a lunch and a dinner together. He was a great host and a true visionary for the game in Asia. Mr. Fok's construction of Chung Shan golf course was a very high financial risk endeavour, but its success has always made it the tycoons' club in South China.”
Mr. Palmer remains in awe of the workers who built the course without the benefit of heavy equipment or much knowledge of the game.
“The course turned out much better than I expected. It was built by hand. They had no equipment — bulldozers, trucks, tractors or loaders,” he said. “Imagine for a moment that this project was built by men and women using shovels and rakes, working on a task they had never undertaken before.
“I played the course and was more than satisfied with the putting surfaces and the strategy being asked of a player on each of the holes. The golf course has a very nice rhythm.”
Beijing
Palmer’s second Chinese course is as daunting in terms of work, but this time at least the workers had the benefit of proper equipment. Still under construction, The Cascades sits 20 minutes due east of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square with its first 18 holes (of a 27-hole design) now open to play. Incredibly, 2.5 million cubic meters of earth had to be moved to transform the flat site into rolling hills. Now, complete with lakes and dramatic waterfalls, everyone familiar with the original lay of the land is simply stunned by the metamorphosis that has taken place. Moreover, in and around Beijing, there is simply no other course like it. With the first 18 measuring 7,400 yards, look for the capital city’s future major tournaments to be hosted here.
Throughout the course, elevated tees provide golfers a good perspective on each hole, and things get rolling straight away. Upon leaving the clubhouse, the player is swept along a magnificent pathway that “floats” on pedestals above a 20- meter long parabolic shaped waterfall. The effect is immediate, stimulating and refreshing. It signals your entry into a garden of golfing delights. Like any good opening hole, the bunking, movement in the shaping, and character of the putting surface on the first are restrained but still provide an early indication as to the design of the remainder of the course. Hole No.6 is a 634-yard, par 5 that looks like you’re driving to Tibet. Hole No.9 is a 197-yard par 3 that plays downhill to a long narrow green, flanked on the right by a lake with elegant rock outcroppings. The tees on the 9th afford the golfer expansive views of the entire front nine, and the way they cascade down the edges of the massive waterfall feature makes this hole one of the signature designs of the course. Hole No.11 is a 563-yard par 5 where China’s largest and most challenging sand bunker complex first snakes its way into the fairways and greens of the back nine holes. Nicknamed “The Intimidator,” this huge hazard starts at the first landing area of the 11th and then wraps and coils its way through the fairways and greens of the next three holes. The majestic scale of the eleventh is readily apparent; a tee shot with a slight draw will carry deep into the landing area due to the dramatic falling gradient. Club selection for the second shot must be thoughtful and accurate to give any chance of a birdie on this hole. The elevated green is guarded by deep sand bunkering in front. All pin placements on this hole are difficult to putt as the surface of the green has so much subtle movement. The par 3 No.17 hole measures a modest 131 yards. However, the green sits on an island and, depending on the tees you play from, lies between 20 and 30 feet below the player. Wind and water are the big hazards, and the short length only makes club selection and line of flight more difficult. Behind the green is a line of mature trees that block the wind on half the green and permit its full impact to be felt on the remainder. Given that all tee shots will be made with lofted clubs, no matter how well struck, the line of flight will only be partially under the control of the player. A gust of wind or a sudden swirl means that shots that start out good will often become wayward. So much so that some consider the sand bunker to the left front of the green more of a bailout than a hazard. Many rounds will be saved or demolished on this pretty but tricky little hole.
The 18th is all risk and reward. It’s a 448-yard hole, but the green lies 340 yards away — if you are willing to attempt to fly the water that guards the hole from tee to green. The best pros will be able to drive the green or bite off most of the dogleg. The hole is set up to tempt the player to reach further than they might grasp; play a safe tee shot to the generous landing area and you can capture a par or even a birdie, go for it and you will be a hero or a zero. One thing is for sure: as you tap in your final putt you will look around and marvel at the amazing golf course that surrounds you. This is what golf is all about and it guarantees a golfing experience like no other in Beijing.
Kunming
Moving southwest from the capital, bustling Kunming in Yunnan province is potentially a golf destination that could one day match the might of Mission Hills. One of the reasons for this is that Arnold Palmer Design Company has begun construction on what may become the most memorable 18 holes in the region.
Kunming is already home to Spring City Golf and Lake Resort, which has two championship courses: the Mountain designed by Nicklaus, and the Lake by Robert Trent Jones Jr. With the addition of the mountain-styled, Palmer-designed Kunming Golf & Country Club, the area is even more certain to attract visitors, and plaudits, due to the quality of its golf.
The tee position for the par four 4th at Kunming
Mr. Palmer’s layout embraces a stretch of land where the imagination can run wild. The opening hole gets your attention right away, and the tees on holes 3 and 4 cling to the side of a canyon with greens perched 300 feet above the lake. Only 20 minutes from downtown Kunming, this course certainly possesses the “wow” factor so beloved of Mr. Palmer’s former design partner, the late Ed Seay.
The drama is contained in the many peaks, cliffs, canyons, lakes and streams that help form this challenging 7,214-yard test of golf. In Mr. Seay’s words, “the holes were there, we just had to go find them, refine them and beautify what nature gave us to work with. We did a lot of route plans but we finally found 18 great holes of golf that minimized earth moving while taking the golfer through all the natural beauty the site had to offer.”
Lakes have been added and there has been considerable strategic shaping of the terrain, but these additions and refinements complement the rare beauty of the site and look as natural as the vast areas of the course that remain untouched. Kunming’s temperate climate and modest altitude allow for jade-green, cool-weather grasses on the fairways and ultra-fast, bent-grass greens on this links style layout.
When the XXIX Olympiad unfolds in Beijing this year, visitors from all over the world will be there — including the Dutch and the Scots. Will they care about or even acknowledge Wei Tai and the game of Chuiwan, or will they be too busy arguing with each other about golf ’s European origins? Whatever they decide to believe, it’s certain golf in China will press on regardless with Palmer and his design team leading the way, just as they have from the modern rebirth of the Chinese game.
The rock gorge on what will be hole 13
Posted: August 1, 2008 03:49 PM
