Streamsong a Virtuoso Performance for Doak, Coore & Crenshaw - Part 1

By: Jay Flemma

"I'll sing my song to the wide open spaces
I'll sing my heart out to the infinite sea
I'll sing my vision to the sky and mountains
I'll sing my song to the free

The Who

When the bobcat started chasing two deer across the third fairway at the Coore & Crenshaw-designed Red course, that's when I knew that everything people told me about Florida's Streamsong Golf Resort was absolutely true.

New golf resorts by big-name designers open to great fanfare all the time, but the expectations for Streamsong were stratospheric. After all, the two architects who helped Mike Keiser give true links golf back to America at Bandon Dunes Resort -Tom Doak and Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw - were tasked with building two courses on sandy soil over the remnants of an old phosphate mine in Try-to-Find-Me, Florida.

This area is a thinly-traveled recess, to be sure, a vast emptiness of inland savannah, scrub, trees and lakes, 16,000 acres in all. It's southwest of Tampa by 45 minutes, southeast of Orlando by 80 minutes, and unlike anything in Florida, by light years.

"If you build a great golf resort, ardent golfers will come," explained golf-architecture expert Bruce Moulton. "They flock to Bandon Dunes, they are making the long trek to Cabot Links, and now they are streaming to Streamsong. People may be crying doom and gloom about the cyclical downturn in the golf industry. But things sure look healthy with all the great new projects coming on line, and Streamsong may the best of the recent crop."

Bandon Dunes East, that's exactly what Streamsong is, now that celebrated architect Gil Hanse has signed on to design a third course, called Black. An epicenter of golf, all designed in the flavor of the wonderful UK and Ireland courses by the greatest links designers of our age. It may not have the ocean and golf holes that cling to the edges of cliffs like at Bandon on Oregon's Pacific coast and Cabot Links on Nova Scotia's Cape Breton. But the river is impressive, the greens and bunkering more so, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get to than Bandon, which began with 18 holes designed by Scotsman David McLay Kidd.

And Dude, seriously! A bobcat chasing deer across a fairway? Are we in Florida or the African Serengeti? What? No okapi or gnus?

"When Bill Coore and I were walking the property, I thought to myself that Florida would be my 47th guess as to where we were," admitted Blue course architect Doak, and he's right. It looks like Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, at least for a moment. But typical, flat Florida? Thank goodness, no.

It was the Mosaic Company that, for decades, operated a phosphate mine on the property, becoming one of the largest suppliers of the material in America. Golf enthusiasts as well, company officials - once the mines closed - repurposed the land into a golf resort. After all, what more perfect terrain could you ask for? Piles of windblown, sandy soil shaped into magnificent dunes.

What a scene it was during construction - Doak metaphorically vs. Coore and Crenshaw. You can bet they were each trying to one-up each other; this had to be the golf-architecture rejoinder to a game of H-O-R-S-E. If I have to choose a winner, Doak took the war - the Blue is stronger 1 through 18 - but Coore and Crenshaw's Red has the best individual holes, especially the wrap-around green at the par-5 seventh and the spectacular Biarritz at the par-3 16th.

In the same vein as Doak's Ballyneal in Colorado and Pacific Dunes, the Blue is old-school: blown-out bunkers, rumpled fairways, random bunkering, fairways slithering around towering dunes. The Red Course is more visually arresting than most of Coore & Crenshaw's work, and more challenging, with several forced carries over lakes and streams.

Both courses feel eminently natural as the phosphate mining created dunes almost 200 feet high. Doak estimated that 12 million cubic yard of earth were moved while constructing the two courses, a surprisingly large amount of earthwork for minimalists like he and Bill and Ben.

"Their greatest success is in making the courses look natural," confided Moulton. "If you didn't know better, you'd think they'd just gone out and put in the stakes for the tee boxes and the greens and then cut out the bunkers and called it a day."

In Part 2, we'll break down the individual attributes of Blue and Red.

Since launching his first golf writing website in 2004, http://jayflemma.thegolfspace.com, Jay Flemma 's comparative analysis of golf designs and knowledge of golf course architecture and golf travel have garnered wide industry respect. In researching his book on America's great public golf courses (and whether they're worth the money), Jay has played over 420 nationally ranked public golf courses in 40 different states, and covered seven U.S. Opens and six PGA Championships, along with one trip to the Masters. A four-time award-winning sportswriter, Jay was called the best sports poet alive by both Sports Illustrated and NBC Sports writers and broadcasters. Jay has played about 3 million yards of golf - or close to 2,000 miles. In addition to Cybergolf, his pieces on travel and architecture appear in Golf Observer (www.golfobserver.com), PGA.com, Golf Magazine and other print magazines. When not researching golf courses for design, value and excitement, Jay is an entertainment, copyright, Internet and trademark lawyer and an Entertainment and Internet Law professor in Manhattan. His clients have been nominated for Grammy and Emmy awards, won a Sundance Film Festival Best Director award, performed on stage and screen, and designed pop art for museums and collectors. Jay lives in Forest Hills, N.Y., and is fiercely loyal to his alma maters, Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and Trinity College in Connecticut.

Tweet