Jefferson Golf & Country Club: Jefferson

From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:

Jefferson Golf & Country Club in the Columbus, Ohio suburb of Blacklick was designed by the same architects, Robert Trent Jones Jr. and Bruce Charlton, and built at the same time as Wedgewood Golf and Country Club on the other side of Columbus. But it's on a far different site.

Jefferson's front side was originally an open field that required over half a million cubic yards of earthwork to shape hills and dales, mounds and swales—as well as eight lakes that generated most of that earth. Jones and Charlton were definitely trying to be neo-Scottish on this nine, with mounds lining holes and heavy undulations in fairways peppered with shallow pot bunkers, and they provide open approaches into the slightly perched greens.

This nine is chock full of variety. The tricky 321-yard fourth requires a drive and an approach that must slip by separate ponds. The long par-4 fifth features a punchbowl green surrounded by high mounds, while the green on the short par-5 seventh is recessed into the hillside and backed by a near-vertical slope. The tiny par-3 eighth has an eye-catching bunker snaking down the left side all the way from tee to green.

In contrast, Jefferson's back nine is cut through acres of dense hardwood cover. The 579-yard 10th features a huge tree that bisects the fairway into two routes—a longer, safer right-hand avenue and a shorter, riskier left side that offers a shortcut over the slender pond that protects the rolling green. Fourteen is a downhill par 5 to a humpbacked, kidney-shaped green that curls around another pond. There are three par 3s on the back side, including the downhill 238-yard 12th over a wetlands hazard that Charlton dubs, “a gorse marsh.” The uphill 15th is just a pitch shot but has a very skinny and severe green.

The 18th is a monster hole, 652 yards, popping out of the tree line to a conversation-piece green, a huge horseshoe that’s 125 yards wide, a full 20,000 square feet wrapping around a cove of a lake. When I played it, the green had two flags and players could settle bets by putting from one location to the other. I think they abandoned that practice long ago in the interest of pace of play.