A Pilgrimage To Plymouth

The big-name designers of Pinehills Golf Club have created a golfer’s paradise

By Jeff Blanchard

Four hundred years after the Europeans first settled here, the Plymouth side of Cape Cod Bay is once again attracting waves of newcomers to the pine-filled, bog-dotted countryside just beyond its craggy shore.

What the Pilgrims found in Plymouth was a place more welcoming and workable than the outer reaches of the Cape where they had first sailed ashore. What golfers in recent years have been discovering is that Plymouth can be easier to reach and just as worthy a destination as the course-rich, tourist-heavy Cape on the other side of the canal.

Plymouth residents have been playing quality golf for a century, or at least since 1906 when the Donald Ross-designed Plymouth Country Club opened. But the golf world has been hot on Southeastern Massachusetts in general, and Plymouth in particular, for the past decade, with excitement building to a crescendo such that “Plymouth Rocks” has become a recurring headline in the sporting press.

At the leading edge of this front has been Pinehills Golf Club, a sprawling, high-end residential development featuring championship designs by Rees Jones and Jack Nicklaus II. The Jones is one of several courses that can be seen from Route 3, the highway that connects Boston to the Cape, about an hour drive from the North Shore, eight miles from the Sagamore Bridge. If you can remember to take Exit 3 off Route 3, the comely signs to Pinehills will take care of the rest.

It was the Jones course that came first, a couple of seasons before the Nicklaus opened in 2002. They didn’t just slip onto the scene, either, but rather splashed down one after the other and created a sensation that had pretty much everyone with a metal driver showing up to see what all the fuss was about. Golf magazines from here to eternity put Pinehills on their “Best Of” lists, first as best new courses and then as two of the best courses you can play for under $100 (the standard fare is $85).

When Pinehills began to offer “memberships” of its own, as a natural response to the number of repeat customers it was drawing, 140 golfers signed up almost immediately, happy to pay the $4,400 annual fee for unlimited play.

It takes about five minutes to understand the allure. Even before you have struck your first approach shot to one of the hard-to-hold greens, you can see that Pinehills is a different sort of operation than your average public golf course. Here they scurry to fetch your bag and shoes from the trunk and they welcome everyone as if you are somebody, putting on a curbside manner that is hard to find these days – public, private or municipal – and throwing in all the little things like carts and range balls.

Along with a top-shelf pro shop and a grille room so inviting that you don’t need golf as an excuse to visit, Pinehills offers a full-service teaching facility and an extensive caddie program as part of its self-imposed mandate to feel like the best of the private clubs without the constraints of exclusivity.

The feeling begins in the parking lot, with its random gathering of snappy cars, and gets a lift at the steps of the handsome clubhouse – a neo-New England lodge with an R&A interior. The golf is out back, starting with the wide, flat, spacious range and then the sprawling practice green and beyond that the chipping green with sand and grass bunkers and all sorts of shot possibilities, all fanning out from the clubhouse patio and rewarding those who arrive early.

Between the other players hitting and reloading, putting and chasing, chipping and mingling over golf balls, the carts and mowers coming and going and the flags flapping in a familiar breeze, the setting is enough to induce your own little pre-round trance, until along comes the voice from above: “Blanchard to the starter on Jones, please!”

This is about when the first-tee jitters appeared, which is why I like the snack shack right there next to the starter, where you can meet your partners and know right away whether they share any of your vile habits (or maybe all of them!), exchange handshakes and vital information such as first names, tee box preferences, brand of ball and magic markings.

Both courses were carved out of the same forest, yet they can provide the player with very different golf experiences. The Jones flows, often uphill, with a Ross-like feel, long and wide and heavily-bunkered, with lots of natural contours often leading to crowned, open greens with false fronts and vast collection areas. The Nicklaus is more angular, more suggestive of a direction to follow for success, and more penal when it comes to hitting through the fairway.

The Jones punishes with its slick greens, yawning bunkers and rolling hills. The Nicklaus punishes with its narrow landing areas and gnarly fescue, which can seem too tall for such a nice young course.

Actually, what’s most remarkable about both - and they do have their similarities – is how mature they seem for their age. The trees are ancient, the bent grass took hold from the get-go and everything else – the perfectly flat, square tee boxes, the large, smooth-rolling greens, the shapely bunkers with their soft sands, the yardage-marked cart paths and Shinnecock-long roughs – felt established right out of the box.

The Jones is longer from all but the black tees and for a bogey-golfer it’s the more difficult of the two, even though the ratings are similar and the slopes are identical. Jones has a habit of humbling right from the first, a testy little dogleg left measuring only 348 from the blues, but with just enough going on – junk between the tee and fairway, a prevailing wind, a landing area that slopes steeply to the right and a huge bunker at the corner – that nice swing thoughts can be hard to remember.

Carved neatly out of a thick stand of pine and stretched between the peaks of two hills, No. 7 is the quintessential Pinehills Jones par 3, and provided the highlight of my round when I dropped one over the deep valley to the front-sloping green, safely left of the hydra-headed bunker that guards the right side and about four feet from the pin in front.

The esteemed Jones, who, like Nicklaus, could scarcely have avoided a life of golf, made maximum use of the topography here, and injected danger with wickedly steep shoulders that threaten the wayward approach (on 4, 8 and 12), with green-side water (on 9 and 17) and with elevation dips that bring tree-tops into sight lines (on 14, 15 and 16).

At the public unveiling of his 25th design, the son of the Golden Bear redirected praise for the course by comparing the land he was given in Plymouth to another famous forest track, Pine Valley. Jack Nicklaus II said his goal was to work with natural contours and vegetation as much as possible, and to create something playable for all skill levels, which he accomplished.

Trouble is not easy to find off the drive, but every other hole is tucked – behind bunkers banked like NASCAR turns, bumps, roughs, knolls, ponds and more bunkers. The Nicklaus flair for the unconventional shows through at 13, 14 and 15, which have pars of 3-4-3 and measure 165-280-144 from the whites, but will challenge anyone who doesn’t find the right side of each green the first time.

With the new choice at Pinehills, Jones or Nicklaus, golfers in this part of seaside New England now have another decision to make besides shorts or pants.