Pound Ridge Moves Toward Affordable

It's still not exactly a bargain, but Pound Ridge Golf Club just announced a significant cut in greens fees for weekday tee times. Players can now tee it up on the spectacularly tough Pete Dye design for just $155 if they book five days in advance. Regular rates are $235, so this represents a 35% discount. After 3 PM, the advance reservation rate drops to $105.

Pound Ridge owner Ken Wang says,

“These new price points deliver tremendous value, and will allow more golfers to experience what we, and the rest of the golfing world, are rapidly recognizing as a very special course.”

Pound Ridge is indeed a special course. It opened in 2008 after some ten years of planning, permit battles, and major rock blasting on 172 acres about an hour north of Manhattan. Pete Dye, his son Perry and long-time Dye construction manager/lead shaper Michael Langkau created a demanding, picturesque track among the site's escarpments, streams and wooded hills. Dramatic rock formations and boulders were left onsite, creating some of the most visually stunning golf holes in the Northeast. More than 14,000-linear-feet of rock wall surrounds trees, wetlands and water hazards. These frame contoured fairways which wind through hardwood forests and fescue mounds leading to devilish green complexes.

Golf Digest named Pound Ridge one of "America's Best New Courses" in 2009 and rival Golf Magazine put it in the number two slot of "Top Ten You Can Play." In addition to writing about the course when it opened, I featured the 14th hole, a 401-yarder with one of the most intimidating tee shots around, in Westchester Magazine this spring.

Dave Donelson, author of Heart of Diamonds a romantic thriller about blood diamonds in the Congo.

A Legal Do-Over Putt

Every golfer knows that the second time you hit a putt, it always goes in the hole. Unfortunately, that's not legal....Unless you invoke a little-noticed aspect of Rule 28 of The Rules Of Golf, which covers unplayable lies.

Jeremy McLean, one of the excellent teaching pros at GlenArbor in Bedford, NY, reminds us that a ball can be deemed unplayable at anytime, anywhere on the course except when it lies in a water hazard. What's more, the player is the sole judge of whether or not the ball is unplayable. If you declare it, you have three options, all under penalty of one stroke:

1. Play the ball as near as possible to the spot where where the previous stroke was made.

2. Drop the ball anywhere on a line extending backwards from the point where the ball lay in line with the hole.

3. Drop a ball within two club lengths of the spot the ball lay, not nearer to the hole.

(If you're in a bunker for options 2 and 3, the ball must be dropped in the same bunker.)

Here's where the rule can help your score on the green. Let's say you've got a four-footer above the hole and decide to make an aggressive stroke to keep the ball on line. Unfortunately, the ball lips out and speeds down the hill, leaving you with a thirty-foot comebacker that's not even a cinch two-putt. Or even worse, it runs off the green and down into the fairway even further away! Jeremy reminds us that you can declare the ball unplayable, replace it on the spot above the hole and take your penalty, then have a second chance at that four-footer.

Brilliant!

Thanks for the GlenArbor Teaching Center Newsletter for that excellent rules tip.

Dave Donelson, author of Heart of Diamonds a romantic thriller about blood diamonds in the Congo.