Long Cove Club
HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C.
O
ne of the
L owcountry ’ s
Long Cove
classic layouts,
showcases the early work
of Pete Dye, who completed
the layout in 1981 as a sequel to his crossisland design at Harbour Town Golf Links.
However, Dye was careful to give Long
Cove a personality of its own. Landing
areas look narrow but are amply wide. A
superb second shot golf course, Long Cove
provides ample challenge on and around
the medium-sized greens.
“The genius of Long Cove is that it was
built by people who love golf,” says P.B. Dye,
Pete’s younger son. P.B. created most of the
mounding on site.
Featuring exceptional variety, notably
its world-class collection of par 3s, purists
maintain that Long Cove, ranging from
7,026 to 5,083 yards and playing to a par of
71, is one of Dye’s finest designs.
Doak apprenticed under Dye and worked
on the construction crew at Long Cove.
“I thought from the beginning that it
would be one of Pete’s best, and I love the
result,” Doak says. “Pete kept telling us
we had to keep it soft because of the older
clientele who would be playing the course,
but its quality of design has attracted a much
more sophisticated audience.”
Doak says that although there are waste
bunkers at Long Cove “the holes are well
differentiated by the variety of the terrain,
which includes lagoons, live oaks and salt
marsh,” along with piney uplands and a
sandhill ridge Dye built to screen the course
from power lines.
While Dye’s gently contoured greens
were built to accommodate faster green
speeds, his experimentation with slowgrowing, low maintenance grasses, including
centipede, carpet grass, love grass and blends
of bermudagrass, provides distinctive color
contrasts and textures at Long Cove.
The club offers more than golf. Nestled on
the banks of Broad Creek is the club’s marina,
an 85-slip dock facility that provides deepwater access to Calibogue Sound and the
Atlantic Ocean. Green-thumbed members are
provided with complimentary garden plots.
There’s also a beautifully landscaped tennis
facility with eight Hard-Tru courts (four are
lighted) at the residential community, which
encompasses 630 acres with 450 homes and
120 lots. Membership is obtained through the
purchase of a home or lot. (longcoveclub.org/
club/scripts/home/home.asp)
LONG COVE CLUB
The breathtaking setting that predominates at Long
Cove has helped the region become a popular retreat.
It was at Wade Hampton, as Fazio
recorded in his book, Golf Course Designs,
where he turned the “Mother Nature can
do it better” cliché on its ear.
“I don’t believe nature can make
great golf all by itself,” he wrote. “In
hilly or steep terrain like that found
at Wade Hampton, I think it’s pretty
obvious that you have to shape the land
forms to create a quality golf setting
and to produce acceptable shot values.”
Fazio melded his holes into the
uneven terrain while preserving the
natural landscape, leaving it to golfers
to figure out what nature provided and
w w w. v s g a . o r g
what he created.
Wisely, Fazio chose not to overexpose
views of Chimney T Rock, the layout’s
op
signal feature.
“No matter how great or how dramatic
each hole might be, if every one were laid
out underneath that landmark, the golf
course would become so monotonous
golfers wouldn’t remember many of the
holes,” he says. Only a select few holes are
backdropped by the sheer granite face of
Chimney T Rock.
op
While all of one piece, there are
some truly outstanding holes at Wade
Hampton, which hosted the 2013 USGA
Senior Amateur Championship. The
club’s loveliest green setting is found
at No. 3, where the putting surface is
benched into the base of a hill framed
by heavily treed slopes and a natural
waterfall. At the reachable par-5 18th, a
stream that purls along the left side of the
fairway was piped underground by Fazio
in front of the green to enable players to
bounce the ball onto the putting surface.
Set back from the home hole is a cozy,
tasteful clubhouse, its wide verandah
angled to the 18th fairway and its spacious
living room warmed by fireplaces on cool
days. (wadehamptongc.com)
J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 4 | V I R G I N I A G O L F E R
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