60 WI CKER POINT When you think of top quality golf, Alabama isn’t a location that springs immediately to the forefront of the mind. About the only times the state has touched on the consciousness of the international golfing world have been when the Nicklaus-designed Shoal Creek, outside the city of Birmingham, has hosted big events – two PGA championships, a US Women’s Open and a US Amateur; oh, and also when club founder Hall Thompson became involved in a very public debate about the club’s lack of African-American members at the time. Next year, though, a course will open that promises to take Alabama golf to a whole new level. An hour and a half southeast of Birmingham is Lake Martin, a reservoir created in the 1920s by the damming of the Tallapoosa River. At the time of its creation, Lake Martin was the largest man-made body of water in the world, and it remains among the largest man-made lakes in the United States, with over 700 miles of shoreline. Most of that shoreline is owned by two organisations, Alabama Power and Russell Lands. A long-established family-owned company, based in Alabama since its foundation, Russell Lands traces its history back to the 1840s, when the family started acquiring land in that part of the state. It continued expanding its holdings for eighty years, until the lake was created in the 1920s. The family farming business officially changed its name to Russell Lands in 1960, and, later in that decade, began the development of the Willow Point Golf & Country Club on the lakeshore. Now, the company has developed eight neighbourhoods on the shores of Lake Martin, and wanted to do another golf course development, just a couple of miles away from Willow Point. Russell hired Coore & Crenshaw to design the course, to be known as Wicker Point. Bill Coore says: “When I first visited the site, Russell Lands president Tom Lambeth said to me, ‘Bill, we want to showcase the lake and this part of Alabama. If you do the course, we definitely want you to use the lake. We have plenty of shoreline here!’ He wasn’t kidding either – the lake has so many inlets that it creates hundreds and hundreds of miles of shoreline. I have heard that there is as much water frontage on Lake Martin as there is in the whole of California. But it’s all ins and out, and it is very, very beautiful. The
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=