Triangle
 RALEIGH,
NC – The Raleigh,
Durham,
Chapel
Hill area, a.k.a. the “Triangle” bleeds college hoops. Duke
University, the University of North
Carolina, and North Carolina State are all within a half hour’s
drive of each other, and have cultivated some of the most intense rivalries
in all of sports over the past 40 years.
The Triangle also oozes technology. Research Triangle Park (RTP), home
to IBM, SAS Institute, and Glaxo Wellcome, among others, is one of the
largest conglomerations of tech and pharmaceutical companies in the U.S.
Hoops, big business, and an extremely comfortable community that has
been recognized by such publications as Newsweek and Money
magazines as one of the country’s best places to live, make the Triangle
a desirable place to dwell.
But if you’d prefer to surround yourself with shameful amounts
of daily fee golf, you’ll find that this portion of the Piedmont
lags behind its cousins to the south and west.
Charlotte
has almost 80 golf courses within a forty-five minute drive of downtown.
Greensboro,
High
Point, Winston
Salem, know as the Triad, is a panacea of affordable, daily fee golf,
with nearly 100 venues open to the public. The Triangle, on the other
hand, weighs in with a respectable, but hardly overwhelming 50 golf courses
you can play.
With hordes of white-collar workers and young people who would seem
to be prime candidates for jumping on the golf bandwagon, one would think
that the Triangle golf would be a haven for high-end, daily fee golf.
“It has caught up some here in the past few years,” says Scott
Martin, author of Golf in the Carolinas.
“Charlotte
had this incredible boom in the 1990’s, in large part because there
was still affordable land left around the periphery. But land has become
so expensive around the Triangle, there just aren’t as many new daily
fee courses coming on line.”
The early 1990’s saw the addition of two John
LaFoy designed courses in the Triangle – Devil’s Ridge Golf
Club in Clayton,
and the Neuse Golf Club in Holly
Springs. LaFoy, a former associate of George
Cobb, drastically departed from his mentor’s architectural style
with these two modern tracks. Both feature blind tee and approach shots,
uneven lies, and severely undulating greens that are similar to the Triangle
golf scene, but leave many players scratching their heads.
 In
the late 1990’s, the Triangle did experience a bit of a golden age
in public golf course construction, with the addition of Falls
Village, the
Crossings, River
Ridge, Eagle
Ridge, and the
Heritage Club. The PGA
even got into the mix, opening the semiprivate TPC at Wakefield.
“Since we have so many golf courses in North
Carolina, leave it to us to say that there’s a shortage of golf
courses in an area with 50 courses,” says Jay Allred, publisher of
Triad and Triangle Golf Today. “But you do have lines at first tees
and longer pace of play in the Triangle than you do in the Triad, where
there might actually be too many golf courses from where the owners sit.”
Courses in Higher Education
The University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University are the hubs of higher
education in the Triangle (with apologies to Wolf Pack alumni), and they
also happen to form the epicenter of the area’s traditional golf
scene.
The
Finley Course at UNC (919-962-2349) has long been recognized as
one of the better collegiate golf courses in the country, and that was
before Tom
Fazio completed his recent revamping of the course. The remodeling
job was heralded as “remarkable” by the Insiders Guide to
Golf in the Carolinas,” and carried a price tag of almost $8
million.
Even with the money spent on the remodel, Finley carries an affordable
$40 greens fee on the weekdays, and you won’t find a better place
to play for the money. The greens are walk mowed each day, a Border Collie
chases away any water foul looking to leave their mark on the fairways,
and Finley now boasts one of the best practice facilities in the state.
Leave it up to the Dukies not to be upstaged by the hated Heels. Just
down “Tobacco Road” at Duke University sits one of the Triangle’s
other great golf tracks, the Duke
University Golf Club.
When legendary Wake Forest basketball coach “Bones” McKinney
would pick up recruits from the airport (Wake Forest used to be in the
town of Wake Forest, just outside of Raleigh)
he would drive them around Duke’s campus and tell them it was Wake’s
“other campus”. Once a top recruit signed on, he’d matter
of factly let him know that he’d be living on Wake’s “original”
campus.
The point being, Duke has a gorgeous campus, and the course at Washington
Duke Golf and Country Club (pictured) takes full advantage of this prime
property. The course was designed by Robert
Trent Jones and originally opened for play in 1957.
In 1993, Rees
Jones was persuaded by his daughter (a Dukie at the time) to revamp
the course pro bono. The course is routed through some of the most beautiful
hardwoods in the area, and is walkable if you are used to hoofing it and
have a resting heart rate of 80 or under.
 Towering
pines and Carolina hardwoods frame every hole at the Duke Golf Club. In
the spring, with the azaleas and dogwoods blooming, the surroundings are
truly something to behold. Out of respect for his father (and recognizing
that the Duke Golf Club was already one excellent golf course) Rees Jones
retained the original routing, but completely blew up and rebuilt the
tee boxes and green complexes. The result is one of the most visually
stunning courses in the region.
Of Devils and Neuse’s
So you aren’t ready to dawn the cap and gown and march down the
fairway with a bunch of matriculating golfers? The Triangle Golf does
offer up a sisterhood of three high-end, daily fee courses that have garnered
some recognition from national publications.
Off the beaten path in Clayton,
about a forty-minute drive from downtown Raleigh, you’ll find LaFoy’s
Neuse Golf Club. The Neuse recently received four and half stars
from Golf
Digest in its “Places to Play” rankings.
The Neuse (919-550-0550) is a good modern golf course with rock outcroppings,
rolling hills for fairways and hundreds of homes -- you aren’t in
the back yard of higher education anymore, and developers have to make
a buck or two.
A few memorable holes at the Neuse provide the occasional glimpse of
the Neuse River. But chances are you will walk away with more memories
of the course’s blind shots, penal layout, and severe greens. The
course remains a steal at $40 on the weekdays, with afternoon twilight
rates dipping even lower.
Over in Holly Springs is one of the Neuse’s sister courses, Devil’s
Ridge (919-557-6100). Similar to the Neuse, Devil’s Ridge is
a modern course that sports a great deal of mounding, blind tee shots,
and undulating greens.
Devil’s Ridge is a course that will inflate your score by five
to seven stokes the first time you play: you simply don’t know where
you are hitting most of the time, so a yardage book is a key piece of
equipment.
The third member of the family is the Lochmere
Golf Club (919-851-0611) in the affluent Raleigh suburb of Cary (which
according to locals stands for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees).
Compared to Devil’s Ridge and the Neuse, Lochmere is flat and refreshingly
manageable at 6,867 yards from the tips.
As would be expected from a shorter course, Lochmere demands accuracy
on most shots, especially off the tee. And with short distances between
tee boxes and greens, the course is quite walkable and appealing to traditionalists.
Course Reviews
Features
|
