A peak behind the curtain at Seminole
McIlroy, Johnson, Fowler and Wolff compete in benefit skins game for two health-care foundations at posh Florida golf course
While I’m not a Florida lover from a golf perspective, having found courses in California and North Carolina much more to my liking, spending a day at Seminole Golf Club back in 2013 made me a believer.
But the problem is, once you’ve played Seminole, there’s only one way to go from there. The course’s spectacular setting along the ocean in North Palm Beach is a striking contrast to most clubs in Florida.
The golfing world got a muchanticipated peak behind the exclusive, posh Seminole curtain Sunday when Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff competed in a charity skins match to raise money and awareness for two important health-care foundations.
There’s little doubt that golfcourse architecture, and the way holes look to your eyes and feel under your feet, is a personal thing. One man’s or woman’s heaven is another’s hell.
At the end of the day, if you love playing a certain course, who cares if others feel likewise, or if the experts place it high or low in the world rankings? Nonetheless, for a state that is known for its sheer quantity of golf courses, Florida is quite absent from the World Top 100 rankings, with only Seminole cracking the Top 50 (34th).
Seminole combines elements you don’t usually find in Florida golf, including seaside dunes and Donald Ross’s famously designed green complexes.
If I was to explain Seminole in just a few words, it would be Pinehurst No. 2 meets the beautiful Atlantic coastline, with waste areas and pine needles replaced by expansive white sand dunes, palm trees and sea grape bushes.
What from the air must have looked like a pretty typical 200acre (80-hectare) plot of flat,
Florida, swamp and scrub land back in the day, is today a most wonderful routing through the dunes, around the dunes, all the while building anticipation of the player getting right up next to the roar of the Atlantic Ocean for the final three holes.
Seminole is a tough club to gain entry to. Unless you are a high-profile athlete or business tycoon. Safe to say that, unless you know someone who knows someone, you’re not going to get beyond the front gate.
In my case, I happened to be travelling to Seminole with not only an ex-National Hockey Leaguer, but a former Pittsburgh Penguin, and I would learn in the locker-room that the Pittsburgh-Seminole connections run even deeper than I had imagined.
The head professional at Oakmont, just outside Pittsburgh, is also the wintertime pro at Seminole, and wouldn’t you also know that the best caddies at the club were diehard Penguins fans, as they spent half the year back in Pennsylvania before heading to Florida for winter work.
While it’s a treat to be at a place like that, playing the sport you love on a course that gives you non-stop goosebumps, it’s always a downer when you see your caddie learn that he’s not carrying the bag of a Stanley Cup champion, but instead his childhood buddy whose autograph wouldn’t be worth the price of the paper it’s written on.
My friend is always gracious, and he’ll tell the caddie that I own my own ad agency, or carry a low handicap, or some factoid in hope that it will make the pain and disappointment go away. It never does, as there’s no great advertising story that has the cache of hoisting the Cup.
I’ve learned over the years, whether it’s being a guest at Seminole, Oakmont, Cypress Point or Pine Valley, when you can’t play the fame card, the best you can do with caddies is hit it solid, have a featherlight golf bag and go as low as you can.
And maybe, just maybe your looper will appreciate the fact that he’s not looking for balls or raking sand traps for four straight hours. Did I just say that? It was a wonderful day. A solid mid-70s day on both my card and on the thermometer.
The Pittsburgh caddies made sure we got everything out of our games. During these strange times, it is a treat to see four of the world’s best play what looked like a casual Sunday afternoon round in their shorts with no crowds cheering them on.
No doubt the Pittsburgh caddie crew were disappointed they were carrying their own bags.