OH TO GET ANOTHER SHOT AT SEBONACK, JACK AND TOM’S LONG ISLAND STUNNER

by Vic Williams
illustration by Calder Chism

For once, the score didn’t matter.

That familiar mantra often bangs around between my ears whether I heed it or not, especially when I’m dealing with a completely unknown, or at least previously unseen, quantity.

But Sebonack, the much-discussed 4-year-old baby of Jack Nicklaus and Tom Doak next door to National Golf Club of America and Shinnecock Hills near Southampton, N.Y., wasn’t exactly either. I had read about its gestation from a dream in principal owner Michael Pascucci’s mind to hard-won, expensive, spectacular reality, and slobbered over photos taken by Joann Dost and others in the coffee table tome Building Sebonack by Bradley Klein.

Yet in my 49 years on the planet (now 50, so keep those AARP cracks to yourselves), I had never physically visited the cradle of American golf design — anchored by National, Shinnecock, Maidstone and several lesser-known but no less spectacular courses dotting the dunesland two hours east of Manhattan.

In fact, I hadn’t set foot on Long Island at all until a week earlier, when I arrived at a friend’s home in Garden City, my digs for last year’s U.S. Open. Driving there every night after another slog through the Bethpage sludge, I’d pass yet another classic, Garden City Golf Club, where Walter Travis won the U.S. Amateur in 1900 long before returning to redesign the course into Top 50 territory.

Old-school heaven. That’s where I was.

Now, after what seemed like the longest and soggiest Open week in history — and less than an hour after Lucas Glover buttoned up his two-shot win over Phil Mickelson, David Duval and Ricky Barnes — I was heading out Sunrise Highway, beyond the Pine Barrens and into the Hamptons, a land of gazillion-dollar mansions and invitation-only memberships. The skies over Long Island Sound to the north and the Atlantic to the south were swollen and dark: more rain, more wind and no rest for the exhausted desert-dwelling golf scribe looking to end his trip east with a bang.

I’d landed a tee time at Sebonack, where memberships were reportedly going for $500,000 a pop, via a connection in New Jersey, who got me through to Pascucci’s assistant, who ran it by her boss. And like that, I was in, originally set for a morning starting time, a plan foiled by the Open’s spillover into its messy but electrifying Monday finish. A frenzied e-mail led me to Director of Golf Jason McCarty, a native Kiwi who, when the snow flies in the northern hemisphere, is the head pro at Cape Kidnappers, the eye-popping Doak design on New Zealand’s North Island.

He gladly moved my tee time to 3:30.

And I was one happy hacker. I also happened to be lost. My iPhone’s map app gave me a rare bum steer and by the time I reached Bridgehampton, I knew I’d gone too far. Finding a spot to turn around on the thin, two-lane ribbon of road, I got stuck in the daily conga line of blue-collar types who keep the other half’s properties looking, well, like a million bucks ... or a couple billion bucks if your boss works for Goldman Sachs.

Ten miles and 45 minutes later, I found the turnoff to Shrubland Road. To my right, beyond a fence, was Shinnecock Hills, the stage for a quartet of U.S. Opens won by Retief Goosen in 2004 (remember those baked-out greens?), Corey Pavin in 1995, Ray Floyd in 1986 and James Foulis way back in 1896, the event’s second edition. Foulis beat out 34 other entries on the classic, bunker-laden design; when Sebonack joins the USGA’s championship fraternity by hosting the 2013 U.S. Women’s Open — a major coup for such a new club — thousands of hopefuls will look to qualify for the 156-player field.

Winding my way through alder and oak groves and around several reedy ponds, I spotted bits of rolling green grass on my left, later revealed as Sebonack’s sixth and seventh holes. Another bend took me through the club’s ornate cast iron main gate, preserved from the old Bayberry estate that occupied the 298-acre parcel from 1919 to 1949, when the land was purchased by a New York electricians’ union, who used it for member recreation and education until Pascucci wrote them a check for $46 million in 2001.

Then I saw the cottages built for members and guests, and finally the magnificent gabled, cedar-shingled clubhouse, a 20,000-square-foot East End estate on steroids placed on a bluff high above the course, its broad veranda looking over Great Peconic Bay. I couldn’t help but notice that the building sits several yards above the National’s smaller, century-old clubhouse a mere 7-iron away. Pascucci had originally planned to build the clubhouse where the No. 10 green now sits, but Doak and Nicklaus prevailed, the site was moved to higher ground and a not-so-subtle “there’s a new kid in town” message for National members was born.

It was nearly 4:30. Good thing the previous day was the year’s longest, and even better that Sebonack is as private as clubs get, which means a wide-open tee sheet on a cold and breezy Monday. “If we get going right away, we can finish by nightfall,” smiling host pro Mike Finney said as he greeted me at my rental car and set me up with a set of well-loved Titleist blades from one of his assistants. “Normally we’d walk, but if we do, we’ll never finish.”

Bummer. I was hoping to get that step-by-step, soak-it-all-in rush I get at Pacific Dunes or Ballyneal out west, but my sunlight-sucking detour negated that deal. We loaded up a cart. I laced up my adidas in an angering breeze, ran into the pro shop for ammo and a stogie, and we were on our way to the first tee. The full clubhouse tour would have to wait.

Joining Finney and me was Paul Reid, a tall, slim, sweet-swinging New Zealander on vacation from his job as assistant pro at Kauri Cliffs. I’d met him a couple days earlier in the media tent at Bethpage. “It’s all yours,” he said, pointing to the small tee box. Wrapped in three layers and loosening up with a couple of wobbly practice swings, I settled on the equivalent of the blue markers and looked down the first hole’s rumpled fairway, which dove slightly downhill and to the right. “It’s a short hole, a little over 300 yards,” Finney said. “You only need to put it out there about 160.” My eyes stinging from the stiff wind at my back, I three-quartered a 6-iron to the left side of the short grass. An 8-iron approach bounced twice on the firm, shallow fescue green and into a shaggy blowout bunker. I blasted out to four feet and made par. “So this is how it’s gonna be,” Finney needled.

The real me showed up on the very next hole, a big, rambling, uphill, bunker-riddled par 4 that parallels No. 18 with the bay beyond, so I just let it be, sullying Sebonack’s doubleheaded design pedigree with a ceaseless, comical progression of skulls, slices, pulls and fats. As the course moved quickly inland to the brutal third — which normally plays downwind but today was into the teeth —
I marveled at the variety and visual splendor of this site, and the way it brought out the best in two of my favorite modern architects and their respective teams. And as we moved through the front nine’s stunning middle portion, I could see and feel the designers’ widely disparate philosophies oozing from every landing area, bunker placement, perfectly positioned tree, green complex and transition zone — two equally healthy branches of the Pete Dye tree from which each guy’s architectural ideas first grew.

It’s amazing that two such outspoken artists got along so well through the process, with Pascucci acting the part of arbiter and referee. However, there were more than a few tough spots.

“First of all, Sebonack is a Nicklaus-Doak-Pascucci project,” Doak says in a golfclubatlas.com interview. “Michael was much more focused on having a course that’s difficult for Tour pros than I am, so even if Jack had not been involved, I would have had to wrestle with Michael about all of those issues.

“There was one particular hole where I thought we had something rough shaped that was very cool, but Jack did not like it at all. Our agreement was that we both had to be happy with every hole, so that one had to be sacrificed, even though I liked the original version more than the hole we wound up with. It was the only day that was really uncomfortable. From beginning to end, Jack respected that I might have a different point of view and that Michael wanted to hear that side, too.

“Above all, Mr. Nicklaus pressed us to add bunkering to distinguish different routes of play for the B and C and D player. My own style would have been to give the C player a break here and there, but I am sure that people respect the course more because of those added features. Apart from the hole I alluded to above, the one that is 95 percent Jack’s is the short par-4 fifth, which is one of my favorites.”

As we spied the tee shot on No. 9, which carries a faint echo of No. 4 at Bethpage Black (by mutual agreement, according to Nicklaus and Doak), the pro pointed to our right. “Just over those trees is the green for the National’s famous Alps hole, with its big blind shot from the fairway,” he said, causing my mouth to water. “If you stuck your head through there, you could see it.” I didn’t, instead concentrating on the shot at hand — in my case, another yank-hook to the far left of the uphill 5-par’s vast fairway, leaving me a million miles away, into the wind.

Hello snowman.

The more my game deteriorated on the back nine, the deeper my fascination with Sebonack’s layered personality grew. No. 11 moves sharply downhill and left to a green framed by water and a half-moon shaped beach, while No. 12 is a slightly longer version of No. 11 at Pacific Dunes. No. 14, a 550-yard par 5, could’ve been lifted straight from Bandon Trails (ironically a Crenshaw-Coore course), while No. 15 is one of those swarthy Nicklaus-length three-shotters — 616 sea-level yards from the tips — that becomes a Doak hole down the stretch, with a duneside green framed by bay views on its left. No. 17 might be the toughest 3-par I’ve ever played, or maybe it was just the fact that I was worn out from a week of Open fun; at 210 yards over dunes to a narrow green, sniffing par demanded more concentration than I could muster.

Even a reload didn’t help.

After a round that passed all too quickly in conditions more fitting for late March than late June, I had mixed feelings as we stood on the final tee. I wanted to keep going, or rewind, but daylight was gone and my flight home was 12 hours away. So there we were on the site of another crossroads: Nicklaus’ 18th hole stretched inland and moved due east, while Doak’s went north along the water. Doak’s became the final dramatic setting; Pascucci demanded it be a par 5 though both architects originally envisioned a 4-par. The boss got his way and it’s now one of best finishers in the nation, protected by water on the left and a succession of cross bunkers and trees on the right with the green nestled between two low dunes.

I pumped one, then two duck-hooks into the howling wind, over a row of shrubs and into the bay. Finally I found the fairway and limped in to what must have been triple digits for the day.

But it didn’t matter. On this day, there was no counting. Only an accounting of what two — make that three — great minds can render under the right conditions.

All I could think about was how great a beer would taste in the warm twilight of the clubhouse bar, how lucky I was to get the chance to play what may remain the world’s only Nicklaus-Doak collaboration, and when could I finagle a way back out there to do Sebonack justice.

Perhaps it’ll never happen.

But if it does, I’ll be ready.

I won’t get lost.

And I’ll make it count. FG

Published in FG Magazine, July-August 2010

AMERICA'S MOST HONORED MAGAZINE AT ING AWARDS
It’s getting to be a habit, and we can’t seem to help ourselves. For the fourth straight year, FG racked up an impressive load of hardware at the International Network of Golf Media Awards announced at January’s PGA Merchandise Show. We scored six awards in all, besting writers and photographers from such national publications as GolfWeek and Sports Illustrated. First-place honors went to Vic Williams in Competition Writing for his piece on Tiger’s historic U.S. Open victory (July-August 2008), Joann Dost for her epic shot of Tiger’s 72nd hole putt on Open Sunday; and Calder Chism for his “Weekend Wisdom” drawing of Vic in the May-June 2008 issue. Outstanding Achievement awards went to Williams and Darin Bunch for Travel Writing. Other FG contributors who took home awards included Tony Dear and Bob Seligman. Next year, look for the clean sweep.