Texas Children's Houston Open

Memorial Park Golf Course



The Loop

Every course should copy these awesome features

March 15, 2016

On Saturday, Addison, Todd, Hacker (real name), and I took a field trip to Wintonbury Hills, a muny that's roughly an hour and fifteen minutes from where we live. The course, which opened in 2005, was designed by Pete Dye and Tim Liddy.

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There are four sets of tees, at 6,700, 6,300, 5,700, and 5,000 yards. As is seldom the case at golf courses of any kind, though, the scorecard at Wintonbury lists ratings and slopes for both men and women from all four sets:

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Furthermore, neither the scorecard nor any of the course signage mentions "women's tees," or "senior tees," or "regular men's tees," or "championship tees," or anything else. There are just four different sets, at four different yardages, and the scorecard contains enough information to enable players of both sexes, at all levels, to calculate handicaps for matches of all kinds, in all conceivable combinations.

Every course should do this.

Addison and Todd played from the black tees, I played from the greens, and Hacker played from the whites, and we were able to adjust our handicaps accordingly. (The USGA actually makes doing this much, much harder than it needs to be -- but that's a semi-complicated issue, which I'll explore in a couple of future posts.) We played three matches, switching partners every six holes, and everything came out virtually even. (Todd and I each lost a dollar.) And if Michelle Wie and my mother had joined us we would have been able to work them into the game, too.

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Another awesome Wintonbury feature -- and one that should be copied by public courses everywhere -- is generous fairways accompanied by challenging green complexes. This is a feature that Wintonbury shares with Muirfield Village and Augusta National, to name two member-friendly golf courses that great players don't dismiss as too easy. Wide fairways keep play moving. None of the four of us lost a ball.

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Another awesome thing about Wintonbury: the Bag of Beer, available in the grillroom (which is called the Tap Inn):

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That's what the guy in the photo below was picking up. Weirdly, though, he had ordered just two beers -- both Budweisers. What was he planning to drink when he got to the third hole?

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The only thing I didn't like about Wintonbury: they charge you extra if you walk. (They don't think of it as a walking penalty -- in their view, they give away carts, since carts are included in the greens fees -- but a walking penalty is what it is, since you don't pay less if you don't take a cart.) As far as I could see, though, we were the only walkers, so they probably don't get a lot of complaints.

Still, it's a terrific course. We're definitely going back.

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