Hollywood Golf Club

Formed in 1898, Hollywood’s initial 9-hole course lasted only four years before the club moved to another site, where it remained for eleven years before members moved to their current location, next door to Deal Golf and Country Club in New Jersey

A Scottish professional named Isaac Mackie was tasked with creating a new 18-hole course at Deal which opened in 1913, but within a couple of years, Walter J. Travis (three-time US Amateur Champion between 1900 and 1903 and Amateur Champion at Royal St George’s in 1904) would work with Greens Committee chairman Frank B. Barrett to totally revamp the layout.

Travis dispensed with many of Mackie's sand traps and green complexes, combining some holes, removing and adding others. When the beefed-up Hollywood course reopened in 1915, there were no fewer than 220 bunkers incorporated into the design, with no fewer than 57 assigned to the 12th hole alone.

A number of architects have been involved down the years to maintain the integrity of the Travis design. Dick Wilson remodeled the layout in the mid-1950s, then Geoff Cornish carried out additional modifications in the 1980s before Rees Jones completed a renovation in the late 1990s.

In 2013, Hollywood embarked on yet another remedial programme, which included extensive bunker restoration, this time under the tutelage of Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design.

“The great depth of golf in the Met Section is illustrated here,” said Tom Doak in The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses, “Hollywood received scant attention before a recent restoration by Brian Schneider, an avowed fan of Travis’s greens. These are some of the old man’s best: the four-tiered 7th is not as excessive as it sounds, and the lower back-left hole location at the 9th a thing of beauty.”

Who knows, with all these changes completed, we may yet see the Women’s US Amateur Championships (won here in 1921 by Marion Hollins when she defeated Alexa Stirling 5&4 in the final) return one year to the grand old Hollywood Golf Club? After all, the club successfully hosted the 2014 US Senior Women’s Amateur, won by Joan Higgins.