High Pointe Golf Club

From Golf Digest architecture editor Derek Duncan:

High Pointe qualifies as golf’s feel-good story of the year. This was the first course Tom Doak built beginning in 1986 as a 26-year-old getting his big break. Located outside of Traverse City, Mich., it was and remains the only course at which he personally shaped all 18 greens. In 2008, the daily-fee course closed and a large section of the property, primarily the first nine holes, were sold to become a hops farm with the remaining parts left to nature.

Though sitting fallow and inert, there was enough remaining of High Pointe’s ghostly form to continually tantalize Doak, who still lives in Traverse City. Then, several years ago, Florida-based businessman and entrepreneur Rod Trump became interested in reviving the design after hearing Doak on a podcast express his desire to someday bring it back. The hop-farm land was not available, but Trump was able to eventually secure what remained of the course along with 160 acres to the east of the old routing and asked Doak to round out an updated version of High Pointe. He was able to resurrect six holes and parts of another, but the other 11 holes are completely new, with nine of them routed within the eastern bloc that Trump acquired.

High Pointe was always a tale of two courses, with the one rugged, tree-lined nine playing off the other more open and delicately shaped. That split character remains. The saved holes retain a fearless vigor that’s to be expected from the debut performance of a young and confident architect. They’ve been refined, but the topography and green shaping remain ambitious. These contrast with the additions that are more measured and mature, moving across subtler rumbles of meadowland. The greens are tempered, by the wisdom of the designer perhaps, or the preferences of the owner and modern green speeds, with more edge-to-edge slope than internal billowing. Driving the ball into position is the chief challenge—there’s room to miss but narrower lines must be tip-toed to be in position to attack greens. New holes like the par-5 fourth with a hogsback fairway and green anchored against a side slope of land behind a nest of bunkers, and the infuriating uphill par-4 seventh with a reachable yet inaccessible plateau green stand apart, as do wrinkles like alternate par 3s at the third, one long, one short, leading to different sets of tees for the fourth. High Pointe, when it opened, was a portrait by an artist as a young man. It’s still that, but the course is also now a portrait of an evolution.