GolfNewsRI

Happy Spring everybody! I know, it has been a while. This past winter definitely put a crimp in playing golf year round but hopefully, barring an April Fool’s surprise (has it been 20 years since that storm?) we can get on with our addictive pursuits.

How was my winter? Oh, thanks for asking. Well, the winter weather drove me indoors. I played at Golf365RI quite a bit. I also decided to be proactive and start doing weights at the gym. And what did that get me? Tennis elbow from overuse. But weeks of PT and some acupuncture have put me on the road to recovery.

And of course, the tennis elbow flared up a month before a golf trip to the Carolinas. But one of those old man arm straps you see golfers wear did the trick, which of course, makes me an old man. It was daunting to fly down knowing I’d be playing 5 days in a row, but I was able to swing with very little pain and icing after took care of the rest.

The first course I played on my trip was a gem. Old Barnwell in Aiken, SC (a stone’s throw from Augusta, GA) is a relatively new course with the finishing touches being put on the new clubhouse. It is a hilly Carolina sandhills course and was ranked 51 on Golf Magazine’s top 100 U.S. courses. I was able to get on through a Golfer’s Journal event. I understand the course is open to the public during Master’s week as well.

When you drive into the parking lot, the course looked like it was carved out of the woods and formed into a bowl.

When I arrived, the car thermometer indicated it was 27 degrees and a sheen of frost was covering the course. It looked magical. But it was a relatively cloudless day and as soon as the sun came over the trees, the frost was gone and it eventually got up to 60 degrees.

There are two courses at Old Barnwell. There is the 18-hole regular course and a 15-hole par-3ish course they call the Kid’s Course. The course owners solicited hole designs from children in the area and implemented the best of them.

There was a hole that you could hit off a regular tee or off a talldirt mount with a circular path that led you to the top. Another had a dual green with a tunnel leading down from one to the other.

For the event, we played a 2-man best ball in the AM on the regular course. After lunch, we could go out to the kids course. Oh, the courses are walking only and 11 miles were put in that day.

The greens on the 18-hole course were immaculate and fast. There were a lot of undulations and one hole had a potato chip-like green. There was plenty of sand to hit into on the fairways and around the greens. Our starting hole was 8. I didn’t take a caddie but two players in my group shared one.

He knew the course well and his knowledge of where to put your drives and reading the green helped a lot (I gave him a little something, you know, for the effort). But coming up to our finishing holes of 5-6-7, he mentioned these holes were their version of the Bear Trap at PGA National. All 400+ yard par 4’s.

And sure enough, through the power of negative thinking, he was right. I scored the sign of the devil on the last 3 and took what could have been an low 80’s round up to an 87 (47-40). I’ll make all the excuses in the book. Didn’t eat at the turn, legs were spaghetti in the midst of an 8-mile walking round, yadda, yadda, yadda.

If you ever have the chance to play this course, I highly recommend it. A few people there mentioned it was similar to The Tree Farm and Broomsedge, also in SC. I’d also mark it down as very similar to Pinehurst #10, which I also got to play later in the week.