Sebonack Golf Club

Not since Augusta National, or maybe Peachtree, had the nation’s greatest golfer teamed with one of the most highly regarded course architects on a design project. But developer Michael Pascucci's joint venture by Jack Nicklaus with Tom Doak at Sebonack was complicated by the fact that golfer Nicklaus was also an esteemed course architect in his own right, and the project sat right beside two American icons, Shinnecock Hills and National Golf Links. Some pundits have reduced Sebonack to “Tom’s bunkers, Jack’s greens,” but in truth it’s just the opposite. Doak convinced Nicklaus to go with small greens of sweeping contours and little imperfections the likes of which Jack would never have considered on his own. Meanwhile, Jack insisted that Tom tone down his usual ragged, jagged bunker faces to make them palatable to high-handicap club members. The course is fundamentally representative of neither designer's tenets, yet is a remarkable piece of architecture for the way it blends sometimes conflicting artistic outlooks into an ambitious whole on a genuinely inspiring piece of land.