Old Sandwich Golf Club

Masa Nishijima of Japan is our International Consultant and he is the sixth person to have played Golf Magazine’s World Top 100 Golf Courses. Masa has this to say about Old Sandwich Golf Club which opened its tees for play in 2004:

"This lay-of-the-land course from Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore is a very good test, full of classic concepts. The green complexes are very interesting and include great contouring, and the bunker shaping by Jeff Bradley is excellent. I call him Mr. Sand Man. The scale is just right and fairway angles from the tee boxes are well done."

The course lies within an area of pine hills to the south of Plymouth, close to Cape Cod Bay, on a parcel of land that looks like it was always meant for golf. It’s a wooded property that offers a plentiful supply of sandy soil to support a wonderful mix of fescues; ideal ground for links-like golf.

The only earth movement of any note at Old Sandwich was carried out on the opening hole where a sand hill was removed to allow the routing for the par five 1st hole, with spoil used to build up tees and greens around the course.

Each and every one of the par three holes here is stunning, beginning at the 240-yard 4th (played to an enormous, contoured green) and ending with the all-carry 17th (where the offset putting surface slopes back to front with ragged bunkers built into the sides of the raised green complex).

Old Sandwich may not quite reach the dizzy heights of Coore and Crenshaw’s celebrated Sand Hills in Nebraska but it’s not a million miles away either.

Darius Oliver, in this short extract from the book Planet Golf USA, writes: “Typically kept in firm condition and with genuine links characteristics, the playing corridors here are quite generous, but the designers continually force good players to flirt with danger in order to set up decent angles and approaches.

Despite the ideal golfing ground, the architects deserve great credit for creating such a gripping layout and for building some of their most impressive greens and bunkers. Set on natural ledges, plateaus, within hollows or benched into the hills, the targets are generally open and often built with shaved fronts and sophisticated internal contouring.

The clever hipping areas around the greens provide a comprehensive test of your ability to visualize and execute appropriate recovery shots, while the rugged bunker shapes also form a crucial part of the strategic examination and are particularly striking when cut into the scrubby dunes.”