45 Photo: Lukas Michel/CDP Walton Heath to the Belfry, Valderrama, the K Club, Celtic Manor, the Nicklaus course at Gleneagles (the one John Huggan calls “the fourth best course in Auchterarder”) and Le Golf National. On the European Tour the French Open left Chantilly for Golf National, the Irish Open went from Portmarnock to Mount Juliet and the European Open from Sunningdale to East Sussex National. The modern courses may be great venues – and the modern Ryder Cup underpins the financial viability of the European Tour – but is anyone thinking the architecture matches the quality of the Golden Age? A Ryder Cup at Simpson’s Chantilly would have been as enchanting and representative of first-class French golf as Le National was unrepresentative of it. The ball goes too far for the Kings at Gleneagles and wealthy owners bought the Cup in other, obvious instances. The Belfry is, however, worthy of more discussion because it’s the poster child for what happened to English golf course architecture in the era coinciding with the tour’s boom on the back of the ‘Ballesteros generation’. Unlike the London heathlands, the links, or the great inland sites, so many courses built in the last few decades of the twentieth century were made on less-than-ideal land. There was neither much sand nor ideal undulation, so the quality of the courses was dependent on imaginative routing, interesting, subtle strategy, first-class construction, and beautiful greens. Instead of embracing what made English golf so great, so many courses began to look like facsimiles of what we were seeing on our televisions from the PGA Tour. Of course, it wasn’t so surprising as many of the commissions went to big-name architects from across the ocean. Why else would anyone build the eighteenth hole at the Belfry? Sure, it made for some memorable moments, but so have the finishers at Sunningdale, Birkdale, Muirfield or the Old course at St Andrews. I caddied at the first stage of this year’s European Tour school on a course presumably built as an adjunct to what looked like a beautiful hotel. You hear all the excuses for these modern courses – it’s lousy land, the soil is no good, the New Zealand in Surrey, an example of beautiful golf from Britain’s Golden Age
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