Cabot offers welcome changes
In the 2006 hit movie, The Devil Wears Prada, there’s this great scene where Meryl Streep, playing a diabolical editor of a snobby high fashion magazine, gives her rookie intern (Anne Hathaway) a verbal dressing down on her ignorant attitude toward the fashion industry.
Streep’s character delivers a twominute diatribe about the crucial yet widely misunderstood role that high fashion and runway shows play in influencing the clothes that are worn not just by the super-rich fashionista class, but by the frumpy, unwashed masses who shop at Old Navy.
In light of our recent preview play of Cabot’s latest jewel, Cabot Citrus Farms in central Florida, I returned home thinking about how this company’s unique brand of destination golf might be more than just a refreshing change to the Pinehurst/ Pebble Beach model of the past 40 years. But perhaps a signal of how public and private golf everywhere will look and feel in the future.
It is a brand of golf experience that seems to be dialed right into the younger generation’s desire to cut ties with the serious, stuffy, whisper-quiet version of golf we learned from our parents and grandparents.
It’s a brand of golf that is high quality but more casual. It’s replacing frumpy dining rooms with food trucks and cocktail stations. Supplementing standard 18-hole layouts with eleven-hole Par 3 courses and extra full-length holes to fill in the balance of your day. Dead silence replaced by outdoor speakers playing modern country music. And yes, trackman stations and patio couches instead of metal buckets and shag bags decorating the practice range.
Cabot Citrus Farms hasn’t officially opened yet, but the chance to return to the property formerly named World Woods was something our foursome couldn’t pass up.
We had spent many a week at the central Florida resort over the past two decades, often playing 36 holes per day on the two Tom Fazio-designed courses consistently ranked in the Top 100 in the United States. The Pine Barrens and Rolling Oaks eighteens were surely the best golfing value on the continent for many of the years World Woods was open, but had fallen on hard times and were suffering from a lack of investment by Japanese owners.
When the Canadian company that brought us Cabot Links and Cabot Cliffs, then Cabot St. Lucia and Cabot Highlands, purchased World Woods the golf world sat up and took notice. The architectural transformation of Pine Barrens into Karoo lives up to expectations. Still tough as nails, but wide open vistas, kind of like links golf meets Florida dunescape, with a few extra miles per hour of wind gusts thrown in.
Whenever I reflect on my experiences at Cabot properties, my heart and soul is warmed by what the future of golf could be. And if I was a betting man, I would double down on the notion that the innovations in the game we see at places like this, on course and off, will trickle down and impact what we experience at our home clubs, be they private, public, or somewhere in between.
I’m of the mind that we need to be more protective of the game itself: the rules, the distances, and the technology we use to get the ball in the hole.
But as far as the rest of it, the periphery, what we wear, what we listen to when we are playing, and what before-and after-round activities and ambience look and feel like, I say bring on change and bring on a more subtle transition between the rest of our lives and what we experience at our clubs.
If it takes more innovators like the smart minds behind the Cabot company to push us outside of our comfort zone, then bring it. I can handle the stuffiness, rules and white picket fences of Augusta National one week of the year, but for the rest of it I’ll take large doses of Cabot style and aesthetic, please and thank you.