A year after building the Gold course at Wailea Golf Club in 1994, Robert Trent Jones Jnr came back to add another 18-hole design, the Emerald course, thus completing the 54-hole golfing element at a sprawling facility.
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A year after building the Gold course at Wailea Golf Club in 1994, Robert Trent Jones Jnr came back to add another 18-hole design, the Emerald course, thus completing the 54-hole golfing element at a sprawling facility.
Wailea Golf Club opened for business on the southwest coast of Maui in the early 1970s, with Jack Synder designing a couple of elegant 18-hole layouts, called the Blue and the Orange. Back then, the architect was bringing old stone walls and natural lava outcrops into play, long before it became the popular thing for architects to do.
The Blue course lives on to this day but Robert Trent Jones Jnr dismantled the Orange course in the mid-1990s when he constructed the new Gold and Emerald 18-hole layouts. Regarded as one of Hawaii’s most women-friendly tracks, the Emerald course can still be stretched to a not so genial 6,825 yards when it’s played from the back tees.
Memorable holes include the right doglegged downhill par four 6th (where the green is surrounded by little grass bunkers), the 10th and 17th (which are the only holes featuring water and a shared double green) and the heavily bunkered 15th, a demanding par four with a well-earned low stroke index rating.
The latest ranking of the Top 100 Golf Courses in the World serves as the ultimate global golf bucket list. Most members of our World Top 100 Panel are seasoned golfers, each playing 20-30 of these courses annually while travelling extensively over decades to form their opinions on others. We recognise that opinions vary—even among our panel members. Rankings are subjective, and there are undoubtedly 50 or more courses in the UK and USA alone that could easily fit onto this list. Links Golf Pilgrimages The rankings
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