65 The most famous hole at King’s North is the par-five sixth, known as ‘The Gambler’, after the Kenny Rogers song. It is, in fact, a rather good rendition of the famous Alister MacKenzie Lido Prize hole. Golfers prepared to take on The Gambler can aim their drives to the island fairway in the lake on the left, and then fire over the water to reach the green in two; those more cautious must take the safer route around the dogleg to the right. It is a very dramatic hole, but in my opinion, it is weakened because the brave second shot is just too difficult. There is water both in front of and behind the green, and especially now that the greens have been reconstructed and are extremely firm, it is very easy to imagine a player hitting a career three-wood and seeing it pitch on the putting surface and careen into the water beyond. I think a large amount of fill material dumped into the lake to create a runoff at the back would make the hole more interesting, though where the fill would come from, I have no idea. Probably the most obvious sign of Johnson’s work is on the short parfour eighteenth. Before he got to it, the hole played host to a frankly terrifying number of bunkers (47, I think). Johnson has, thankfully, removed the vast majority of the superfluous sand, and, in the process, created a rather lovely option for the player. There is a bunker to the left of the front half of the green, which is the high side. When the pin is at the back of the green, the contouring above and beyond this bunker makes it perfectly possible, and sometimes quite desirable, to play left of the sand and have the ball feed down onto the putting surface. It is a fun and playful way to finish a round. King’s North is now by a long way the best of the three courses at MBN. It cannot have been an easy project for Johnson; though the ground is sandy, it is mostly extremely flat, and there are plenty of spots around the course where moving water was not easy, given the lack of topography. That could, perhaps, have been solved more easily if he’d had the budget to regrade the entire course, but golf architecture, like politics, is the art of the possible (with apologies to Otto von Bismarck, who, so far as I know, never saw a golf course). The other two courses at MBN are both, in their own way, rather compromised: South Creek, in particular, will be difficult to significantly improve, as it is routed through a housing development, with consequent challenges for water flow among other things. But Brandon Johnson has some interesting ideas for both courses: I hope he gets to implement them. On the closing hole, new contouring to the left of the green feeds shots towards the putting surface Photo: Chris King KING’S NORTH
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