You Don’t Have
to Choose Between
Challenging and Fun
Mossy Oak Golf Club
West Point, Miss.
DATE: April 18, 2020
GReens Fee: $180
West Point has a thing for dramatic, across-the-street showdowns. On the south end of town, Popeyes and KFC sit directly across Highway 45 from one another, locked in a bitter stare-off between good and evil.
Bunkering in the fairway shared by Mossy Oak’s second and fifth holes is blind from the second tee, thanks to the hummocks they’re built into.
A couple of miles away, two more titans straddle Waverly Road almost perfectly — although, unlike the Popeyes-KFC matchup, this pairing features no wrong answer. Since 1988, Old Waverly Golf Club arguably has featured Mississippi’s best golf course: a heathland homage playing across the swirling, rolling hills of the state’s northeast, and thrice the host to a USGA championship. Nearly 30 years later, in 2016, a sister course opened right across the street: Mossy Oak Golf Club, one of Gil Hanse’s only designs in the Deep South. As with Old Waverly before it, there truly is nothing like it anywhere in Mississippi — or many other places in the South, for that matter. “Links-style” is a phrase that gets thrown around too often, and too unjustifiably; but climbing up and down Mossy Oak’s hills and hummocks is more familiar at Cruden Bay than in Clay County. Despite its name, the course is nearly devoid of trees, and none comes into play; it plays firm and bouncy when weather allows — and even when it doesn’t, its greens are wild and full of movement. Its bunker layering routinely plays tricks on the eye, and a burn meandering across the course repeatedly demands tee shots with something shorter and smarter than a driver.
It’s not a links. It’s not. But the truth is that you could go all the way to Scotland and find courses that are a lot less fun.
. . .
More than a month had come and gone since COVID-19 had grown from “very much under control” to national emergency. I’d spent the weeks home-schooling, teleworking, and grappling with whether playing golf was responsible during a pandemic that had left 45,000 Americans dead. Eventually, solo home-schooling seemed less daunting to my wife than putting up with me for the day, and she generously kicked my ass out of the house and told me to go to West Point.
The COVID-19 curve might be flattening, but Mossy Oak’s greens are another story.
This wasn’t my first time at Mossy Oak, but the course is so full of nuance that every round shows something new. Each time I’ve been, the course has looked and felt maturer, and by now — some four years after Mossy Oak opened — it truly has grown into its potential. Different people have different ideas of what’s “best,” but for me, this is it.
My opening tee shot headed toward the right side of the first fairway, but to my momentary relief, short of the fairway bunkers; but the huge bounce that the ball took when it landed sent it straight toward the traps, and sent panic through my chest. My bunker game is questionable enough even after I’ve warmed up; and for the length of that 240-yard walk, I fretted calling on it so early. But when I reached the first trap, I couldn’t find my ball: the five fairway bunkers visible in a line from the tee actually aren’t clumped together as they appear. Hanse, an admitted romantic for visual tricks, layered the first two bunkers (which are clearable) against the next three (which are near the green, and well out of range), with a large but invisible landing area between them. It’s an architect’s harmless prank — after all, the price for not knowing is the surprise of finding your ball on short grass rather than in sand — but also an early warning: you’d better think your way around out here, or it’s your ass.
Hanse’s use of space is no less thoughtful. Mossy Oak’s older sister, Old Waverly, rolls across 360 acres; Mossy Oak sits on just half of that. But the layout never feels cramped; to the contrary, in most places the course is sprawling, with brawny fairways and nearly wall-to-wall short grass. Even the second hole, which runs along Mossy Oak’s property line, offers more than enough room for tee shots by sharing an expansive fairway with the nearby fifth hole. Most of the layout rolls through the site’s interior (Hanse wisely designed a handful of tee shots with the player’s back against a property line, giving him maximum use of the space without cramping a player’s sightline). And with so few trees on the course, views of the full layout are nearly totally unobstructed from anywhere on the property. Mossy Oak’s footprint might be relatively small, but its feel isn’t.
The view back from the green at Mossy Oak’s short but tricky third hole.
And the holes within that layout are hardly just taking up space. The range of challenges — two par-4s are at least arguably drivable, and the par-3s vary from a pitching wedge (the ninth) to a long hybrid (the eleventh) — constantly require decisions about not only how to cover yardages, but how to traverse landforms. For example, the scorecard yardage for the third hole (253 yards from the white tees, 299 yards from the tips) is arguably drivable, but the final 100 yards race sharply uphill to perhaps the undulating course’s highest point — and the green’s entrance is pinched tightly by two sand traps. You can try to thread the needle with a driver, or you can lay up off the tee — but any second shot demands enough loft to drop straight down onto the green, and any layup tee shots threatening the hole’s last 100 yards must flirt with fairway bunkering. It’s a microcosm of the course at large: simple at first glance, but demanding careful thought, and defying even many well reasoned strategies.
The 10th is also drivable, but its presentation is completely different: flat (or as flat as anything gets on this course, at least), with a severe left-to-right dogleg. I’d been leaving my tee shots out to the right all morning, so I welcomed the chance to make my miss work for me; but when my usual pull unexpectedly returned, I half-shouted, “Shit! Don’t hit the cabins, don’t hit the cabins…” My ball rolled to a stop in some of the property’s only rough, just short of a line of white stakes; I happily settled for bogey.
At the 11th — the longest par-3 on the course, and the only hole with a shot over water — I (unintentionally) faded a hybrid over the back-right pin, and down onto a sharp, rough-covered slope between the green and the drainage pond. With little other choice, I opened the face on my 60-degree wedge, swung out of my shoes, and flopped the ball inside two feet of the hole.
One hole later, at the par-5 12th (the subject of an outstanding walkthrough on The Fried Egg), I again found myself right of the green on a slope. Again, I pulled a wedge and flopped the ball toward the middle of the green; I heard it land, and I climbed the slope to the green to eye a long birdie putt. But one of Mossy Oak’s mischievous greens had other ideas. Imagine a giant Biarritz tipped on its side, and you’ve got the 12th green. After some searching, I eventually found my ball 50 yards back in the fairway; it had landed in the middle of the green, alright — and that was the worst place to be, as it rolled quickly away. I laughed and put my putter away. Either you can take surprises good and bad, or you can’t; if the latter, then maybe this isn’t your type of place.
. . .
Mossy Oak’s 11th hole is the course’s only one with water in play — but it’s in play twice, both off the tee and for any shots that go long.
A couple of years ago, with days off and gasoline to spare, I followed up a trip to Mossy Oak with a next-day round at Fallen Oak on the Gulf Coast. The courses are 250 miles apart geographically, but worlds apart philosophically. Hanse’s design at Mossy Oak prioritizes fun, options, and creativity above all else, while Tom Fazio’s Fallen Oak is unabashedly a Tour course: its design dictates every shot, and it punishes any diversions from its prescription. It’s not fun, and it doesn’t try to be. Walking off Fallen Oak’s 18th green felt completely different than finishing the day before at Mossy Oak — a relief, more than a climax. But I couldn’t deny that Fallen Oak, like Mossy Oak, was a perfect representation of its designer’s intent: it flawlessly achieved exactly what Fazio intended to achieve. In that way, both are perfect.
Neither philosophical view is “better” than the other, but Mossy Oak unapologetically occupies one end of the philosophical spectrum. It demonstrates the futility of rankings (although even those have given Mossy Oak some of its due) and of marking one course “better” than another (although, if a more enjoyable course exists in Mississippi, then I haven’t played it). It’s not for everyone; some people like difficult Fazio designs, after all. But it’s worth noting that one of my trips to Mossy Oak was with a friend — not an architecture nerd — playing the course for the first time; he wasn’t playing his best, and I kept waiting for an opportunity to ask what he thought of the place. Finally, after another missed green, he said, “I’m not playing worth crap today, but this course is so much fun.”
Nothing else should matter.
. . .
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