In Louisiana’s Era
of Austerity, a State-
Owned Course Withers
Black Bear Golf Club
Delhi, La.
Date: August 24, 2019
Greens fee: $45
Most of Louisiana is full of places that you’ve got to mean to get to. More than half the state’s population lives in the metro areas of New Orleans, nearby Baton Rouge (both in southeast Louisiana), and Shreveport (tucked in the state’s northwest corner). The remaining chunk of the state has a population a little smaller than Houston, spread across a swath the size of Tennessee.
The impressive sand trap guarding Black Bear’s first hole offers a taste of the fairway bunkering that has been lost in recent years.
About halfway from Vicksburg to Shreveport on Interstate 20 lies tiny, dusty Delhi, La. — less remote than some, but it’s still not a place you’d wind up by accident. A couple of R.V. parks lie on the south side of the interstate; a Burger King and a Sonic Drive-In to the north. The town’s population has fallen consistently since 2000: down from about 3,200 then to a little more than 2,800 today. A loss of 400 people doesn’t sound like much, in the grand scheme of things — but in the rural South, populations aren’t measured on a grand scale. Over the course of a generation, an eighth of Delhi has vanished.
History may be repeating itself. Twenty minutes north of the Burger King lies Poverty Point, a World Heritage Site where indigenous Americans established a massive commercial center more than 3,000 years ago — the largest trading hub of its kind in North America at the time. Around 1100 B.C., the site was abandoned. No one knows why.
Against this backdrop — a small, withering southern town, perhaps paralleling an exodus centuries before — golf seems a trifle. But Black Bear Golf Course, at Poverty Point Reservoir State Park, is not some oasis that is immune from the outside world’s concerns. Over the past several years, Louisiana has cleaved away at public services, including its state parks budget. Not coincidentally, Black Bear has been greatly diminished. It opened in 2006 to deserved fanfare, designed by Roy Bechtol and Randy Russell (the team that collaborated on the University of Texas Golf Club). In 2012, Golfweek dubbed Black Bear the state’s best publicly accessible golf course. But that was a political lifetime ago. Today, the course’s signature fairway bunkering is almost completely gone — resodded in some places, left as miniature wastelands in others. Maintaining bunkers is expensive, and it’s unimaginable that budget cuts haven’t forced this decision. The traps could be restored, of course, provided that funding returns to pre-austerity levels. But that seems equally unimaginable.
. . .
The comfortable par-3 sixth hole at Black Bear (188 yards from the tips, 163 yards from the white tees) calls for a fade, but beware coming up short in the front-right bunker.
Five years ago, on a mid-August Sunday morning, I came here for the first time. I suppose I’d driven past Delhi before, on the way to somewhere else — the same reason most people come to Delhi, no doubt. But the golf course had been on my radar for long enough, and a new baby was about a month away from making day-long golf jaunts much rarer. So I crammed my Adams A7 irons into the back seat of my Toyota Corolla, cranked the little car’s overworked air conditioning up as high as it would go, and set out on Interstate 20.
Black Bear was astonishing — a little scruffy, but not unmanageably so. But its routing was tremendous — across hills, through pine forests, along marshland — all with far more land movement than you imagine Louisiana providing. Its greens were creative and fun, but the course’s ace in the hole was its fairway bunkering. The traps were beautiful: sprawling, deep, wild and splashy, nearly psychedelic (or, depending on how often you found them, psychotic). When I recalled Black Bear in recent years, it often came to me in the same thought as Bethpage Black — not just because both courses are at state parks, but because Black Bear’s fairway bunkering was that good.
Five years later, I was back. And at first, nothing struck me as being dramatically different. Delhi was dustier than I remembered it, the fairways and rough a little more unkempt than I remembered it — nowhere near unplayable, but for no good reason, the rough is thick enough to lose a ball in. At the dogleg-right No. 1, the first of a handful of water hazards creeps in from the right side — eminently avoidable, as long as you don’t try to bite off more of the dogleg than you should (I did) and also leave your clubface open (I did). After another rightward miss off the No. 2 tee, I arrived at the third hole determined not to miss right. I closed the clubface hard at the top of my backswing and smashed my drive, tugged toward the left — playable, but headed straight toward the third hole’s huge, beautiful fairway bunker.
Except that the bunker wasn’t there.
Five years earlier, my ball would have been stuck in a twisting sand trap, pressed into the face of a rise on the edge of the third fairway. But on this day, it was sitting on dried, cracked hardpan, with crabgrass here and there along the concave face of what used to be a bunker. The sand was all gone. So was any evidence that the area is being maintained at all. The hazard hadn’t just disappeared, it had been abandoned.
At Black Bear’s seventh hole, a huge, splashy fairway bunker once guarded the right side from an aggressive tee shot. Now, like most other fairway bunkers on the course, it has been abandoned and left to return — or devolve — to nature.
It wasn’t the only one. Throughout the course, Black Bear’s sprawling fairway traps have largely disappeared or been left to rot. In some places, sodding confirms a conversion to grass bunkers; in other places, hardpan and weeds evince more of a devolution than a conversion.
The loss is more than an aesthetic one. Before the sand traps disappeared, the ninth hole not only put an exclamation point on a terrific front nine but also steered the player into the best three-hole stretch on the course. The long par-5 (574 yards from the tips, 531 yards from the white tees) opens with a tough drive through or over a chute of tree branches, with the landing area pinched on the front end by gigantic, MacKenzie-esque bunkering and flanked on the back end by more sand. An aggressive drive over the front bunkers set up the best chance at a good score, but a more conservative line wasn’t guaranteed to be safe either. But now, with the bunkers gone, the danger — and the strategy it demanded — is gone too.
Black Bear’s 10th green stands framed on both sides, elevated above the fairway below like a sanctuary above its nave.
That’s not to say that the course is now unenjoyable. The ninth hole’s length and sloping still make it a difficult test, and it still opens the door to a tremendous back nine. The 10th — Black Bear’s best hole — is a medium-length par-4 (382 yards from the tips, 339 yards from the white tees) with a drive toward a wide landing area. The fairway then turns sharply to the right (an aggressive drive can run through) and presents the player with a short iron into an elevated green, fronted by thick bushes and framed by trees on both sides and behind. Imagine hitting a 9-iron from the back of a cathedral toward the sanctuary, and you’ve got the idea.
The 11th is a short, secluded par-3, to a long, narrow green that demands precision but also allows for a run-up shot. And the 12th is a short, dogleg-left par-4 that is drivable with a hard-rolling draw, provided that the player can avoid the sand traps that once guarded the inside of the dogleg and the front of the green.
Even diminished, Black Bear is beyond playable — it is rollicking. The course has tremendous bones. The tragedy of Black Bear is not that it is unremarkable. The tragedy of Black Bear is that a remarkable, affordable course less than 15 years old has been reduced to bones by politicians who were less interested in providing for the public than they were in providing tax cuts.
. . .
It’s hard not to wonder about the future of this place — both the golf course and the town. After years of swapping tax cuts for public services, Louisiana adopted a sales tax increase in 2018 to stabilize the state budget. But even that is only designed to stop the bleeding, not restore funding. And one questions how “stable” it is to trade tax cuts on corporations and incomes for an increase in sales taxes — the most regressive form of taxation available. At best, Black Bear can hope for no additional austerity.
For both small towns like Delhi and struggling, publicly subsidized golf courses like Black Bear, it is not too late. But withering does not go on forever; one day, a thing is no longer withering — it is gone. Poverty Point proves that nothing is guaranteed to last forever.
. . .
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