Slicing in the Wilderness
Get past high winds, crisscrossing tee shots, and a stand of trees called The Office, and You have completed Dartmouth’s wildly eccentric golf course.
You THINK OF DARTMOUTH ATHLETES WITH sticks in their hands, you think about hockey players, right? Not so fast. There's another sport in which Dartmouth teams have excelled over the years, and it's not based at Thompson Arena but down at the end of Rope Ferry Road at the northwestern end of town. The sport is golf, the place is the golf course at the Hanover Country Club, and together they define one of Dartmouth's most venerable traditions as well as one of Dartmouth's best-kept secrets.
or started playing the game while you were here, it's quite possible you served a four-year hitch in Hanover without even knowing that Dartmouth has a golf course. For starters, the course spends more than half the school year hidden away under a thick blanket of snow. Many more students have used it for cross-country skiing, Show Many sledding, and once upon a time for ski jumping than for slicing and hooking their way into premature dementia. But, once the snow melts, there it is a verdant swatch of archetypal New Hampshire landscape, trees and hills, hills and trees, only this little slice of paradise Unless you were already a golfer when you came to Dartmouth, has been clear-cut to reveal fairways and greens and sand traps.
The Hanover Country Club—for that is the formal name for what everybody thinks of as the "Dartmouth golf course"—is not exactly your typical American country club. There are no tennis courts, no locker rooms, no swimming pools. No men's grill, no bar, no fancy restaurant. No place to hold wedding receptions, sweet-16 parties, or dinner dances. No dress code. No snob appeal or social cachet whatsoever attached to membership. And no discriminatory admissions practices that exclude people because of their race, religion, or national origin. Makes you wonder how the place gets off calling itself a country club.
rent location in 1908 probably by horses nine years after the golf course opened for play. What is now the snack bar was once the caddie shack, a familiar structure back in the pre-modem era of golf. There is a pleasant spot out back where you can sit and sip a beer after your round, but it's definitely more patio than verandah. Perhaps it's because this "club" comes from such modest "country" origins. For what is now the clubhouse began life as the horse barn of the Glidden House, just around the bend on Rope Ferry Road. It was moved to its cur-
The HCC golf course was completed in 1899, which makes it the oldest college golf course in the country. Remember that the next time some snotty Yale alumnus in madras pants and a tangerine golf shirt starts mouthing off about how his course is the oldest university golf course in the country, thereby confirming that the next-to-last refuge of scoundrels is semantic sleight-of-hand. For the record, the Yale University track was built in 1927, which even a Yale graduate must agree makes it 28 years younger than the Dartmouth College course. Not only that, but the Yale golf course was designed by a Dartmouth alumnus Ralph Martin Barton '04!
The Dartmouth course is to golf what Muggsy Bogues is to basketball: pesky and tough, just not very big. At 5,876 yards, the par 69 track has been described as "the longest short course in New England" and justifiably so, since four of its par fours play in excess of 408 yards from the tips. Golf coach Bill Johnson calls it a "lush New England antique." Always looking for a way to turn a negative image into a positive one when talking about golf, Johnson won't come right out and say that it is a tough little devil of a course, but he does allow that "some courses are easier than others." Suffice to say that the Dartmouth course would look a lot more at home in the Scottish Highlands than at a Florida retirement community.
Nobody is ever going to mistake Hanover for St. Andrews, but the Dartmouth golf course has attracted its share of no table golfers over the years, including a President (Dwight Eisenhower) and a sultan (Babe Ruth). But the best golfer ever to tee it up at the Hanover Country Club also has the distinction of being the best golfer ever to tee it up anywhere Jack Nicklaus.
The Golden Bear played HCC on one of his two visits to Hanover with his son When Jack Jr. was thinking about going to Dartmouth. (Junior ended up at North Carolina.) There remains a Nicklaus connection to Dartmouth. GolfForce a design team that is part of Golden Bear Enterprises, Nicklaus's business and architectural-services empire was commissioned to redesign the seventh and the tenth holes short-term, and to create a long-term master plan for renovating the course.
Another member of golf s royal family, Gene Sarazen the Squire of Sunapee New Hampshire, visited Hanover in 1971. Naturally enough, Coach Johnson invited the Squire to play a round of golf. But it had been 25 years since Sarazen had last set foot on the Dartmouth course, and the legendary pro said he would play only on the condition that Johnson would club him. Johnson agreed enthusiastically, and they set off for the first tee.
For non-golfers who have stumbled into this article, lost track of time, and stayed on this far, Sarazen's request that Johnson "club him" did not involve bodily harm. We're not talking masochism instead of mashies. In go If parlance, to club someone is to select the proper club required for a given shot, based on the selector's superior knowledge of local variables distance, terrain, wind, hidden obstacles, phases of the moon and of the selectee's ability to use that club in a consistent manner. The better the golfer, the more nuanced the options: "It's either a hard seven or an easy six," Johnson might tell a good golfer. Specifying a particular club for a hacker loses meaning in direct proportion to that golfer's inability to hit any club consistently. To someone like me, for instance, the coach might say, "It's either a full wedge or a bunker rake."
Anyway, when Sarazen and Johnson reached the third tee, the winner of the 1935 Mas ters paused for a moment, looked intently at the landing area of the short par four, and said, "I don't remember this hole." Now, top athletes are famous for their photographic recall of past accomplishments on the field of play. Roger Clemens could no doubt tell you the pitch sequence he employed the last three times he faced Joe Carter, and Larry Bird could draw from his athlete's memory a perfect play-by-play of the seventh game of the 1984 NBA Finals against the Lakers. And you would expect Sarazen to remember his double eagle that clinched the Masters on the fifteenth hole at Augusta National.
But the round of golf Sarazen played in Hanover back in 1946 had been a casual match with some New Hampshire cronies, not a major championship with an especially dramatic twist. Why should he remember any of the holes at a course he played just once a long time ago? But he did. The third hole had been completely changed since the last time he had seen it 25 years before. Johnson recalls that "I misclubbed him twice, and he mishit two shots and three-putted the final hole to shoot his age." Most golfers hoping to shoot their age have to live into their 90s, and then some. The Squire of Sunapee pulled it off at HCC when he was just 69.
After the round, sitting on the clubhouse deck, Sarazen turned to Johnson and said, "No wonder Dartmouth golf teams always do so well." Naturally, Johnson inferred polite praise of his work in clubbing Sarazen. But as he was mulling a suitably modest disclaimer in response, the Squire went on. Sweeping his arm across green and fairway toward distant trees he said, "With small greens like these, Dartmouth golfers get a lot of practice learning how to get up and down."
Over the years, Dartmouth has enjoyed surprising success in Ivy League golf competition surprising because Dartmouth golfers get a much later start than their Ivy counterparts. For instance, when Princeton's golf course opens for play every spring, Dartmouth's fairways are still in heavy demand by cross-country skiers. Despite this handicap, the Green has won the Ivy title three times in recent memory (in 1978, 1980, and 1983) and customarily finishes among the top three in the Ivies (with Princeton and Yale). For 15 years Dartmouth (and Johnson) have sent both individuals and teams to NCAA Division 1 tourneys. And Dartmouth women golfers coached by Isabella "Izzy" Johnson, Bill's wife have had a solid record Recently: four straight Northeastern Championships, 1989-93.
While Sarazen was at least partly right in attributing Dartmouth's success in intercollegiate golf to the special challenges posed by the Dartmouth golf course, another important factor is the practice facility east of Lyme Road which Nicklaus so admired. The practice course nominally consists of two par threes and two short par fours, but Coach Johnson has hacked enough additional tee boxes out of the woods so that he can replicate, or at least approximate, some of the looks his golfers will encounter at other Ivy courses. To get them ready for the long and narrow Yale course, for instance, Johnson has his players hit tee shots down a tight, tree-lined chute that stretches 240 yards from end to end. What's more, Johnson tells them there's poison ivy in the woods on both sides of the fairway and that they have to account for every single golfball at the end of practice.
Dartmouth's presidents have not, as a general rule, been avid golfers. Probably this is a good thing. A college president spending every Wednesday afternoon on a golf course would invite comparison with Nero fiddling while Rome burned. The one notable exception to this rule was Ernest Martin Hopkins '01, who used to play regularly before breakfast but only a "short round," i.e., holes 1 through 5 and 18.
John Kemeny, true to the Dartmouth presidential code of honor, was at most an occasional golfer, a casual hacker who never took the game seriously enough to fret about shanks, duck hooks, or chili dips. But he did harbor more than a passing interest in the golf game of his son Rob '77, who played on the team. And when he learned about a computer simulation program Coach Johnson used to help teach the game, well, the hacker in him stepped up to the tee. President Kemeny logged on to Kiewit, found his (unauthorized) way into the guts of Johnson's program, and jiggered numbers so that his son came out as holder of the program's course record. Devilishly proud of his little bit of hacker hijacking, kemeny used to pop in at the HCC clubhouse from time to time and casually ask Johnson if the record still stood.
It's never easy succeeding a legend just ask Jack Nicklaus how it felt taking over from Arnold Palmer in the early 19605. But in 1967 when Bill Johnson succeeded the legendary Tommy Keane, who seemingly had been the Dartmouth golf coach since the Dawn of Creation (1922), Johnson was too young and full of vinegar to feel daunted by the challenge. Anyway, he was only going to be in Hanover a couple of years, tops or so he thought. That was 28 years ago, during which time Bill Johnson has become a coaching legend himself. The strong face reflects a lifetime spent in the sun. The powerfully built body, more blocking back than wide receiver, suggests a long draw, not a weak slice. Definitely not a pitty-pat player, Bill Johnson strikes a golf ball with breathtaking authority. But even more impressive is the authority with which he speaks about the game.
"You hear people say that golf is a game of concentration," he says. "But I believe the key is to develop the mental discipline to avoid concentration. Concentrate too hard and you just grip the club tighter. Concentration leads to something I call 'tension attention,' and that is precisely what a golfer should avoid."
(Okay, I know what you're thinking. All these years being told to concentrate, to think about your swing keys, to stay mentally focused, to c-o-n-c-e-n-t-r-a-t-e! Now you're telling me all That was wrong? No, I'm not telling you all that was wrong. CoachJohnson is telling you all that's wrong. And if you concentrate on what he is saying, it starts to make a lot of sense.)
"A golfer needs to let his kinesthetics and senses take over. You want to free up your body to move the way you've taught it to through practice. If you feel it and see it, you have a better chance to do it. Concentration makes you think too much about mechanics, when the idea is to enter a Gestalt dream world." (At the risk of sounding unbearably snooty, one has to wonder whether the golf coach at Ohio State would ever explain the game in just that way.)
"To play good golf you need to be carefree, not careful," says Johnson. And he says it with such conviction that you know nearly three decades of Dartmouth golfers have heard the message before. Rather than tie yourself in knots worrying about all the things that make up a good swing, he says, a golfer needs "to step up to the tee with an LFF attitude." (This is a family publication, so anyone who doesn't know exactly what an "LFF attitude" is will have to send an SASE c/o The Editor.)
Wearing his other hat, as head pro in charge of the Hanover Country Club golf course, Bill Johnson is a highly regarded manager, an occasional instructor, and with respect to one monstrously annoying aspect of golf in America today an absolute zealot.
You see, Bill Johnson hates slow play. Really and truly hates it. Hates it the way Cotton Mather hated sin. Hates it the way nature hates a vacuum. And when he locks in on you with his best Ray Floyd glare and says, "I will not let this course go to four-and-a-half-hour rounds," there is no doubt that you have just heard the final word on the subject. His course rangers know this, and they also know that if they are unable to nudge, cajole, or shame golfers into keeping up the pace, they can get on their walkie-talkies and bring in the heavy artillery the Coach.
Last summer Johnson instituted the Flyers Club in an effort to speed up play on weekends, when the HCC like every other golf course in America these days overflows with people armed with dangerous weapons. A Flyers Club member pays just $34 for greens fee and cart (compared with the standard $44 weekend rate) provided he tees off between 6:00 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. (on a first-come, first-served basis) and finishes in three hours. Note that three hours means not one second more than 180 minutes. If you tee off at the Flyers Club rate and aren't walking off the ninth hole within one and a half hours, a ranger stationed at the tenth tee politely asks you to proceed to the sixteenth tee and play in. You got any trouble with that? Then head on up the road and try your luck getting on at Lake Morey
Johnson, who was elected to the Golf Coaches Association of America Hall of Fame in 1990, is also active in a National Golf Foundation program that teaches golf teachers how to teach golf. And over the years he has played a major role within the NCAA in the areas of instruction, program development, and intercollegiate competition. He is, from all evidence, a man widely respected by his peers. But forget about all that. Solely for his North Country crusade to speed up play, Bill Johnson deserves the Congressional Medal of Golf.
Now it's late on a lazy Friday afternoon in May, finals over, town half empty. The sun—which since early morning has bathed the tree-covered hillsides and the neatly trimmed swaths of emerald green grass—inches steadily towards the horizon beyond the Connecticut River. The warm air of the day begins its losing struggle against the oncoming coolness of night. Never a noisy corner of the world, the Hanover Country Club is swaddled in that special quiet between day and dusk. Far away, down by the river, a dog's throaty bark punctuates the stillness. It's a perfect time for golf. Four students sit on a little embankment behind the eighteenth green, talking quietly and watching three friends play their approach shots from the fairway. A cheer greets a nine iron to six feet. A groan follows a wedge from a flyer lie that comes in hot and runs through the green. Soon the final putts drop. There's no one else left on course. But there is just enough light for a few more holes, so the kids on the embankment grab their bags and join their friends for a "short loop the first, sixth, seventeenth, and eighteenth holes.
As the sevensome strides briskly down the first fairway after hitting their tee shots, Johnson smiles: "That's what I like to see. That's what is so special about this place. Those kids can come out here and play golf the way it ought to be played. No carts, no ceremony, no big deal. Just the game."
Course Description
The Front Mine#1 and #2: Hanover Country Club rolls out the welcome mat with two long par fours 430 and 416 yards from the back tees, respectively capable of ruining your day before it even gets started. The fairway of The first hole is wider than Kansas, but the second shot is a lot tougher than it looks because the old-fashioned green unframed by trees or other visual guides and built flat to ground plays tricks with your depth perception. It sits over the hill from the middle of the fairway, so you never see the entire flag stick. The second hole has a steep, grass-covered slope rearing up on the right, just where a nice power fade from the tee or, in my case, an enormous banana slice would normally land. Avoid this slope at all costs unless you're prepared to hit your second shot to the small elevated green from a mountain-goat stance, with the ball at approximately the same level as your belt buckle. Did anyone mention the wind? Well, if it isn't blowing in your face on one of the first two holes, it will be on the other so it's a dead solid cinch you'll feel like Sisyphus in spikes by the time you stagger to the third tee. This is a very tough way to begin the day.
#3: Standing on the tee, you're faced with adeep gully that's like the wart on Aunt Bertha's nose: It doesn't come into play unless you start thinking about it. This is not a good place to top your drive. This is also not a good place to hit your driver, because the grassy slope that punishes slicers on the second hole is at work again, only in reverse. This time, you have to worry about falling over on your face rather than back on your seat as you address the ball. The green is long and narrow, with a pronounced back-to-front slope, and it's even more uphill than it looks. Take plenty of club for your second shot, and remember to hit it straight.
#4: Just a little pitch, 107 yards from the back. Piece of cake. A nothing hole. Less than the sum of its parts. Remember, though, that lan Woosnam said something along those lines the first time he saw the similarly short seventh hole at Pebble Beach; he paid for his hubris by carding a double bogey five there in the final round of the 1992 U.S. Open. Steel yourself against the inevitable wave of self-loathing that attends failure to make par or better on such a pushover hole. But remember relax.
#5: Dr. Jekyll, meet Mr. Hyde. Like four, five is a par three,but there's not an iota of family resemblance. This one is 200 yards downhill to a distant green with beach right, jail left, and more beach behind, plus OB beyond all that if you guess wrong on the club or if the prevailing wind is stronger than you think or if you simply overpure it. Back-to-back holes like four and five remind you that golf spelled backwards is flog.
#6: Much of the charm of older courses stems from their, ah, eccentric features, and nowhere will you find a feature more eccentric make that Squirrelly than the tee shot at the sixth hole of the Hanover Country Club. From the elevated tee, a snap hook might conk someone waiting on the eighteenth tee, a determined slice could scatter a foursome on the seventeenth green, and a low liner might bean somebody crossing the bridge to the eighteenth fairway. Other older courses have criss-crossing fairways most notably the Old Course at St. Andrews but this is the only place I know where the criss-cross takes place on tee shots. No one in living memory has been seriously hurt, but that's because HCC regulars coming off 18 wear hard-hats over their visors. This conjunction of holes needs a name, and "Amen Corner" has been taken. How about "Logan Airport"?
#7: A wonderfully deceptive par three that was reworked a few years back. One of the largest greens on the course is made to look small by deft architectural sleight-of-hand. When the pin is on the left side, the green looks tiny because the right half is almost hidden behind a gentle mound. And when the hole is on the right side, it's hard to judge how much green you have to work with because you can't see all of it. Also, the bunker cut into the face of the mound on the right makes the hole look a lot Closer than it is 174 yards to the center of the green and 190 to the right back edge. The best of six par threes on the course.
#8: Hit it big and you'll be putting for eagle on this short (476 yards) par five.Tall trees on both sides make the fairway look tighter than it is. Cut loose. Come out of your shoes. Swing as hard as you possibly can. Hey, it works for John Daly.
#9: A big, strong par four, the number-one handicap hole on the course. No tricks, no flim-Flammery nothing evil lurking behind door number three. Just long and straight. Pay no attention to the pond 20 yards in front of green: It shouldn't come into play unless you hit a feeble tee shot. And to travel 440 yards with just two swings, you can't afford anything feeble. A golf hole for grownups.
Halfway House, R.I.P
As at a lot of older courses, the ninth hole at HCC doesn't come back to the clubhouse. That ordinarily poses a dilemma for the golf impaired: How to drown the sorrows brought on by the front nine? For Dartmouth golfers, the answer was always found at Pat & Tony's, a general store and unofficial halfway house just across Lyme Road from the eleventh tee. The first member of your foursome to putt out on the tenth green would run across Lyme Road, grab a couple ofsixpacks of beer and a bag of pretzels, and thereby ensure a happy back nine, if not a good one. Then a couple of years ago Progress, as she is wont to do, reared her ugly head. The comfortably ramshackle frame building that housed Pat & Tony's and a beauty parlor was torn down and replaced by a small, conspicuously ordinary strip mall. What had been a landmark oasis to thousands of HCC golfers over the years was now just another shop doorway in a line of shop doorways discreet signs, please, we're in New England. Alumni hackers returning to Hanover for reunions looked in vain for the old Pat & Tony's; newcomers to HCC didn't have much better luck finding the new one. But that's not even the bad news. Last summer Pat & Tony's moved two miles to the new medical center. Tennis, anyone?
Back Mine
#10: Before being relocated by Jack Nicklaus's design team, the tenth green used to be about 40 yards closer to Lyme Road. If you consider that (a) the average golfer slices his or her long irons and (b) the prevailing wind on the tenth blows from left to right, then you will understand why (c) the first thing the new owner of the filling station directly across Lyme Road did was install plastic windows. No one recalls an errant shot ever actually smashing through a window or windshield in all the years before the hole was moved west, but the laws of probability had been bent about as far as they could go. Even today, it would be prudent to risk a speeding ticket and race past this stretch of the course, at least if you see me with a club in my hands.
#11: Gene Sarazen loved this short (330 yards) par four because it forces golfers to think. On a good day, when the wind is right, a big hitter who is on his game can entertain the notion of going for the green with a mighty power fade. The temptation will be awful: how often do you get to stand over an eagle putt on a par four hole? For the rest of us, a long iron down the middle and a wedge will give us a chance to three-putt on the largest, flattest green on earth.
#12: Visualize a card table with only the two legs away from you opened. That's the green on twelve, an uphill par three. Now say to yourself: Make sure my tee shot is below the hole...make sure my tee shot is below the hole...make sure...damn! Okay, so now you're ten feet above the hole. Remember the one about Galileo, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and falling objects? Unless HCC puts in a local rule suspending the law of gravity, that's your first putt. Don't worry, though. Your second will definitely be uphill. Way uphill.
#13: Legend has it that Bill Johnson decided he would someday be the Dartmouth golf coach the first time he saw the thirteenth, a 350-yard downhill par four that drops through a canyon of trees to a green nestled beneath the ski jump that until last year was HCC's signature feature and inspiration for its logo. Not true. Johnson first saw the course as leader of a group of junior golfers in 1966. What he actually said at the time and only under his breath was that he hoped he would never see the HCC golf course again so long as he lived, much less play it. it was too tricky, too dependent on local knowledge witness the thirteenth hole, an intimidating nightmare for first-timers, a birdie opportunity for locals. Only later, after he accepted the job to succeed the legendary Tommy Keane as Dartmouth's golf coach, did he come to love the thirteenth, no doubt because of its tendency to petrify the niblicks of visiting Princetonians and Yalies
#14: Tricky. Dependent on local knowledge. The tee a good 30 feet below and 155 yards away from a long, three-tiered green with bunkers left and right. Far left is the back door entrance to The Office, the formal name of a stand of trees on a steep hill to the left of the thirteenth fairway. (Once you go into The Office,you never come out.)
#15: Short par five. A bang-bang, putt-putt, birdie hole, provided the bangs are big and the putts are true. Straight as a flagpole, with a fairway wide enough to accommodate all but the most dedicated hookers and slicers. (That's me over in the woods on the right.)
#16: A strong par four. Only medium length at 385 yards, but the green is small and wellbunkered. Easy bogey, hard par.
#17: A downhill par three to a green surrounded by four long, symmetrical, high-banked bunkers a surefire sign of the course's age. This hole will be replaced when the course redesign goes forward. Right now the green, exposed as it is to slices from the sixth tee, should be designated a hard-hat area.
#18: A splendid, medium-length par five dogleg left that offers a shortcut to glory for the bold and brave. Bend a big, high hook over the ravine and around a stand of tall pines and you'll have no more than a seven iron left. Fall a little short and you're looking at a big number. (Listen carefully after you hit. If you hear a clunk, as in ball-hits-tree, you're dead meat. If you hear nothing, prepare to soar with the eagles.) Or you can hit it safely to the right, lay up with your second shot, and have a short iron to the small two-tiered green. A great finishing hole for match play. And about a sand wedge to the obligatory Coke machine.
Writer GLEN WAGGONER, when he's not working on his handicap, iscompleting a book on golf.
