The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Not so easy Ryder: Le GolfNational
Adam Ruck plays the French course next in line to host the great battle of the greens
After a long summer of professional percentage play, the Ryder Cup at Hazeltine, Minnesota, is about to remind us that there is more to the game than scoreboard pressure and victory for whoever makes the fewest mistakes. The cup’s matchplay format, which happens to be the way most of us play our social golf, makes for the sport’s most exciting contest, a gladiatorial encounter encouraging the gambler to play an attacking game.
Teamwork comes into it, along with intimidation, all forms of needle not explicitly penalised by the Rules of Golf and tactics more subtle than not hitting the ball into the bunker, with lashings of flag-waving jingoism on the side.
When the dust of battle has settled after next week’s instalment of war by another means, attention will turn to next time, when the contest comes back to Europe and strikes camp a few miles from Versailles where Louis XIV’s landscape architect Le Notre bent nature to his will for the greater glory of France.
Hubert Chesneau and Robert von Hagge did something similar at Le Golf National, whose championship course, L’Albatros, has hosted the French Open every year but two since it opened in 1991. It is by no means a typical French course, if such a thing exists. Other vaunted golf clubs in the Paris region – St Germain, Fontainebleau, Chantilly – are cliquey old places hidden away in the forest and harbouring an Ancien Régime membership. If not impenetrably private, they are selective in the welcome they extend to visitors.
Le Golf National is relatively new, open to the public and has no members: a pay-and-play for the citizen golfer, with a big teaching facility, a democratically priced hotel and a less demanding course for the early learner and chronic intermediate who knows his limitations.
I played soon after this year’s French Open, which saw the course reopen after a 10-month refit to improve its drainage and cater for the expected influx. The wettest June on record, which saw Paris up to its knees in the Seine, put the replumbed Golf National and its new porous-concretebased bunkers to the ultimate test, and they passed.
Fortunately for those of us whose short game starts on the tee, the forward starting positions were open for business and it was a fine warm evening with drinks supplied by staff members sympathetic to our plight during an unusually slow round. It gave us plenty of time to study our surroundings and discuss the finer points of course design.
L’Albatros is described as linkstype, which golfers will recognise as the usual code for new courses on converted farmland. There are few trees, a cause for rejoicing that reflects the architects’ reluctance to wait decades for their course to mature. In contrast to the sandy and quickdraining terrain of a links, the rich earth of the Ile de France retains water and requires a sophisticated drainage system involving large lakes.
So far, so not very links-like. That element lies in the hills and undulations, all man-made, which separate and shape the holes and provide viewpoints for spectators. Rainfall captured in the lakes is recycled for watering and the whole thing is sustainable, the mounds trampled and eroded by the ebb and flow of spectators but reinforced by a stream of lost golf balls to which I have contributed my share.
While we wait, the question is raised: what makes a good Ryder Cup course? Tempting risk/reward holes suit the matchplay format. Driveable par 4s or par 5s with punitive hazards around the green make for an exciting duel, with the golfer in control of the match playing safe while his opponent goes for broke.
L’Albatros has no short par 4s but risk/reward opportunities abound. Often the outcome took the form of risk and punishment. The course sets out its stall at the first with a blind drive around or over a corner, favouring the right-hander’s fade but punishing the slice with a lost or unplayable ball. (Play a provisional, or award yourself a mulligan).
Survive that test, and you face a long approach over the first lake, then, having played sensibly to the safe side of the green, a slippery downhill putt to a flag positioned inches from the water’s edge. “Never up, never in” may not be your best swing thought here. Next comes a long par 3, back over the same lake. Looking on the bright side, our bags were quite a bit lighter by the time we reached the third tee.
And so it went on, with many varied degrees of difficulty – dog legs, domed greens, bunker complexes, marsh zones, streams – to a climactic closing stretch of water holes where the safe haven of short grass threads a narrow green ribbon between great lakes. As former Ryder Cup captain Paul McGinley predicts, “Those last four or five holes are going to create incredible drama.” And yes, unlike Hazeltine, L’Albatros has a lake beside the 18th green for the winning captain to be thrown into.
I had read and heard much about L’Albatros before my visit, not all favourable, so I was ready for a pleasant surprise – and I got one. Featureless wasteland? Far from it. Features proliferate, to a fault. Artificial? Not noticeably. Within the constraints of golf, all looks natural, green and mature. It could be an ancestral patch of up-and-down hunting estate, or a pockmarked Western Front battlefield, transformed for sporting conflict.
Versailles may be just around the corner but there are no fountains or big perspectives leading the eye to equestrian statues and pillared façades, nor any reference to jardin français formality in the design of
the course. Tough? Certainly, but also inviting, easy on the eye and immaculately maintained, which matters a lot on a top-dollar course and is not always a given in France.
In short, a course for the bucket list and one where, as I can report on the evidence of my own eyes, a steady golfer on a good day, starting from the right place, can play to a double-digit handicap. On a steadier day, that golfer might have been me.
No visit to Le Golf National would be complete without a tour of Versailles. De Gaulle once hosted our Queen there, but the palace and its outlying trianons are no longer considered comfortable enough for the flower of European and American golf. From their base in a luxurious Versailles hotel, the Ryder Cup teams will attend the palace for their opening ceremony, appropriately enough in the Galerie des Batailles, beneath mural paintings of French generals and their glorious victories, from Charles Martel at Poitiers to Napoleon at Wagram.
In these inspiring surroundings the golfers will ask themselves, as I did, whether it would be a 9 iron or a pitching wedge to the far end of the gallery. And looking out from the Galerie des Glaces they will see myriad water hazards artfully disposed, and reflect, as I did, that perhaps Le Golf National’s architect had the Sun King in mind after all.
How to play the Ryder Cup venue for 2018
Le Golf National, St Quentin en Yvelines (0033 1 3043 3600; golfnational.com) has three courses.
L’Albatros: 5,568-7,316 yds, par 72; Green fee €150.
Aigle: 6,224 yds, par 71; €75.
Oiselet: 9 holes, par 32; €30. Buggy €45, rental clubs €25.
Ryder Cup Experience: 18 holes on L’Albatros with a teaching pro: €249 (9 holes €190).
Where to stay: Novotel St
Quentin Golf National. For a full review and booking details, see telegraph. co.uk/ttgolfnational. Doubles from €135.
Getting there Le Golf National is two hours’ drive from Le Havre or Dieppe via the A13/A12 (see telegraph. co.uk/ttferryguide for 2016 services). It is four miles from St Quentin-enYvelines station, which is about an hour from central Paris by RER Line.