Blaze Your Own Trail

The Villages is clearly an aging baby boomer's golfing Valhalla. Golf carts are everywhere, the No. 1 mode of transportation, with special paths for them through each development. (There are even cart bridges across Highway 441.) Many parking stalls around the faux village square on Main Street are occupied by golf carts, some with bags of clubs still attached. Wandering Main Street, I found I had just missed witnessing history. The previous September, residents had assembled a five-mile-long parade of 3,391 golf carts to shatter the old Guinness parade record of 1,138 golf carts.

Some very good courses at The Villages are open to public play, but they don't like to publicize that. So instead, I played just east, in the town of Lady Lake, at Harbor Hills Country Club, high on a hill overlooking Lake Griffin. It was designed by Clifton, Ezell and Clifton, the firm that did most of of The Villages' courses.

Harbor Hills is another surprisingly hilly Florida treat, with masterfully positioned bunkers, smallish greens with deceiving contours and a full range of forestry: palmettos, pines, oaks and slick-leafed magnolias. There are a couple of uphill, over-the-horizon tee shots, and several glorious downhill holes, particularly the 470-yard 10th, where a residential street runs through a tunnel beneath the forward tee boxes, so as not to interfere with golf. But there are out-of-bounds stakes on both sides of most holes, which made me wonder whether readers were overly generous with their rating. I decided they weren't. The live piano brunch in the dining room of the mammoth colonial brick clubhouse and the peacocks wandering about the property obviously count for something.

One guy in my foursome at Harbor Hills, Bill, a retiree from Philadelphia, told me this tale: A few days earlier, he had been hitting balls next to an elderly couple on the driving range. Somehow, the husband swung and bashed the wife on her forehead. Blood started streaming down her face, so the husband offered her his handkerchief. When she said her face was swelling up, he retreated to the clubhouse and came back with a Styrofoam cup of ice. As she pressed the ice against her forehead, the husband went back to hitting balls. The guy obviously didn't want to waste a bucket of balls.

Bill from Philly swore he saw it with his own eyes. I'd like to believe him, but as he told me this story, he drove our cart right over his own golf ball, in the fairway.

There's little development, and no golf at all, in the long stretch of Ocala National Forest from Lady Lake up to Palatka, and even north from there along Highway 17. It's clear that there is still plenty of beautiful, undiscovered country in this heavily populated state, pine forests so dense that each sun ray seems individually filtered, cypress swamps enveloped in murky mists and vast savannahs that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be ancient sink holes.

Ravines Club and Lodge seems only slightly removed from such isolation, even though it's on the outermost fringes of sprawling Jacksonville. I found it to be one of the prettiest courses—indeed, one of the prettiest spots—in all of Florida. The golf was a trek along high bluffs above Black Creek, over deep ravines of its tributaries and through bits of semitropical jungle.

It was also a miserable experience. Fairways were sponges and greens were barren, the lack of turf masked by a heavy layer of sand top-dressing. Bunkers were badly eroded, some faces crumbled away to apparent mole-cricket assaults, other faces shored up with vertical landscape timbers in some misguided attempt to imitate Pete Dye architecture of 30 years ago.

Tee markers looked as if they hadn't been moved in a month. On the par-5 15th, I sneaked atop a ridge to play from an old abandoned back tee; it was the only tee with grass on the whole course.

The Ravines reminded me of a grand old antebellum mansion much in need of several coats of paint. That it rates must be a tribute to its design, which I found to contain a number of sterling holes, like the 559-yard ninth, with its back-tee shot over a corner of tree-lined Black Creek, and the downhill, hourglass-shape, 487-yard 12th. Ron Garl, who routed the layout, and Mark McCumber, the tour player whose company constructed the course and freelanced many changes, used to argue about who was more responsible for the finished design. (Most have considered it a McCumber course. Who can forget McCumber yammering on about The Ravines after winning the 1985 Doral-Eastern Open, essentially turning his trophy presentation into an infomercial?)

After one final wiggly, bumpy putt across the patchy 18th green, I figured neither Garl nor McCumber would care to claim credit for a course in such deplorable shape.

I concluded my trail on the shoreline of the Atlantic, at the venerable Ponte Vedra Inn & Club, and came upon one last bit of military history. In front of the inn is a sign noting that on a spot four miles down the beach, on June 17, 1942, four German spies came ashore and caught trains to Cincinnati and New York City, where they were to rendezvous with four more spies to sabotage unnamed targets. By August of that year they had been captured, tried and convicted, and six were executed. Justice moved a lot quicker in those days.

I arrived at the first tee of Ponte Vedra's grand Ocean Course just as Ladies' Day was commencing, but a threesome of Beau, June and Terry, each of whom had probably completed finishing school by the year I was born, let me join them. They were delightful company, filling me in on Ponte Vedra's history as we pressed the heels of a foursome of fastidious, foot-dragging men ahead of us. The Ocean Course is one of the country's earliest residential-development layouts, with most houses sensibly placed on the far side of lagoons, away from the action. It's home of one of America's earliest island greens, the 144-yard ninth, and Beau (who grew up on the course) reminded me that Ponte Vedra would have hosted the 1939 Ryder Cup Matches, except they were canceled when Great Britain declared war on Germany after the invasion of Poland, the start of World War II.

Thanks to a wonderful restoration of its original Herbert Strong design by architect Bobby Weed, who lives just minutes from the course, Ponte Vedra plays much like it probably did when it opened in 1932. Weed reclaimed old cross bunkers on some holes, retained quaint knobs in many fairways and re-established some terrifying bunkers, like the deep one across the face of the 182-yard 12th—the "round killer," as June called it. Ponte Vedra is just 6,811 yards from the back tees, but with the Atlantic winds howling at 20 knots or more, even pros would struggle to record a good score.

That it rates just in Best Places to Play must be based largely on its price. I paid a rack rate well over $200, more than I'd paid in total on four other rounds. (I probably should have spent the previous night at the Inn, which isn't inexpensive but does offer golf packages.)

After my round, I ran into, of all people, Mark McCumber, who was walking off the island ninth. I told him I'd just played The Ravines, and he shook his head. He no longer has any ownership in the place, he said, and added that seeing the course in such shambles was like seeing a child gone bad.

McCumber then brightened. He'd just finished a new course in Macon, Ga., and hoped I'd get up there to play it. I told him I'd try my best. Later, I checked a road atlas. I could get there from Jacksonville by skirting the Okefenokee Swamp south of Waycross, then head west to Tifton, then north. Surely there are several good courses along that route. I thumbed through my Best Places to Play, yet another previously uncharted golf trail about to come to life.

Northwest passage

Spectacular beauty binds this collection of Seattle-area courses, with snow-capped mountain ranges (the Cascades and the Olympics), forests and Puget Sound vying to distract you. Start with east-side courses Washington National Golf Club and The Golf Club at Newcastle, framed by pine and fir. Then head up the coast, including a stop at one of golf's great bargains, Kayak Point Golf Course, cut breathtakingly through a forest. And, finally, loop back down for rounds in Port Orchard (Trophy Lake Golf & Casting) and the Olympic Peninsula (Port Ludlow Golf Club).