This is the first in a series (of maybe one) reviewing Top 100 golf courses played by an Obvious Brother. Friday, June 24th's podcast will discuss where we'll be playing together in Ireland; obviously, we'll have some input as to the quality of those courses somewhere.
But this is about Bulle Rock (pronounced Bully, in case you care) in Havre de Grace, Maryland. It is on BOTH Golf Digest's and golf.com's list of top 100 public courses in America.
The clubhouse is nice and the locker room nicely accoutered -- marble sinks, wood lockers, and all the high end finishes you'd expect.
The service was great. One thing I'd never seen before was a TV screen that showed all the carts on the course -- you could see how spaced out things were. The guy at the desk said "yeah, if you stray off the path, we blow you up." Uh huh. Funny.
The course is not old and was designed by Pete Dye. We saw only one instance of his signature railroad ties (maybe it got so he could no longer find them?) on the course. It has hosted 5 LPGA Championships.
First, there's nothing particularly impressive about the property. There are a couple ponds, but it is not like there are ocean views (Rumor has it you can see the Chesapeake Bay at some point, but I never saw it). The couple of pictures here probably tell you that.
The golf course is full of hazards. First, pretty much every hole had sand traps in play off the tee -- the GPS on the cart told you how far away they were. So you played around, sometimes over, those constantly. This, of course, shaped your play. Several holes had creeks in play -- most obviously the treacherous 15th, a short par-5 where the creek is constantly in play.
Screen shot of the page in the yardage book.
Now let's talk about the greens. They were very firm and from my first putt on the putting green, I thought were fast. Scary fast from above the hole.
Did I mention firm? Did I mention 2" bluegrass rough around the firm greens?
And full of subtle, and not so subtle, contours. We discussed several times the difficulty of getting near the pin from the fairway -- one shot in particular from the fairway, we talked about the pin tucked on a visible mound back left, with a lot of cabbage left, but the "safe play" to the center meant making sure you covered a trap, and it was clear everything fed away from the pin to the right. It is that type of course.
And we both had "good" shots skip through the greens to the back and off -- unlike most courses, many of the greens didn't tilt back-to-front but fed off the back. Treacherous.
It was beautifully manicured. And more than once deer were nearby on the course. I've seen that before, often, so I didn't bother with the pictures.
As this blog may be read by people like Josh and I, it should be noted that this is like the 7th course I have played out of the public 100 and it is BY FAR the LEAST expensive. (If you put Bethpage Red into the list, then it is about the same). That's something for a quality, public layout.
We had a good time, survived some shaky weather, moved at a brisk pace (played in 3 hours 20 minutes), and felt satisfied. All in all, deserves to be considered for those Top XXX lists.
