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Golf on Cape Cod Course ReviewFarm Neck Golf Club
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Photography by George Peet
The modern equivalent of George Washington Slept Here would have to be Bill Clinton Played Here, and the place he’s taken his do-overs (“Billigans” in Clintonspeak) most infamously is this 29-year-old Cornish and Robinson creation in Oak Bluffs, just a whiff from the town landfill. Peter Milligan designed the back nine in 1979.
Besides the pictures of him smoking big cigars and slouching with his spikes up in the shotgun seat of an electric cart, the former president’s affection for Farm Neck brought a lot of attention to an already beloved place, the quintessential seaside golf course, links-like but not.
Usually ranked among the top (semi-) public courses in New England, Farm Neck is strong in every regard, from the well-shaded bag-drop to the shingled pro shop to the topnotch restaurant (which was doing a brisk business even with non-golfers) to the well-engineered range and the practice putting green, whose holes include those little Dixie cups without flags for your really well-trained flat sticks.
Any round here has to feature at least a few of those moments you just want to take home and freeze, both as a result of a well-struck ball and as a product of the surroundings, with nearly every hole picture-perfectly framed by trees, water, high grass, gaping bunkers or any combination thereof.
Soft, wide, rolling fairways and mostly manageable rough contribute to a fairly benign appearance, and blind shots are few. But most fairways pinch to an alley at some strategic point, and between the ocean-whipped winds, the plentiful and well-placed bunkers, the tidal and the just plain penal waters, Farm Neck can stretch out and bite you if you aren’t on your game.
Short but challenging, Farm Neck is 6,815 from the gold tees, and 6,301 from the blue. You could believe if it someone told you they had their best score there, just not necessarily Clinton, whose claim to a 79 inspired the line: What’s the best stick in his bag? The pencil.
Farm Neck has an allure among golfers who go expecting to be wowed, and its challenges keep the low-handicap regulars coming back for more, knowing it will always have more to give. Even though it was noon on a clear day in September, the first we saw of a group ahead came at about 15, and with no one behind we could play as if the course were ours, which is always nice.
No. 1 is a straightaway par 4 at 378 from the blue tees. With a decent drive, the approach shot can be run up on the right side of this typically large, fast, smooth rolling green for a simple two-putt par.
Now it’s time to wake up and focus, as No. 2 runs like a sidewalk parallel to the road with a tree-line serving as buffer, five football fields from the tee in the deep pines to the well-bunkered green in the far-off distance. A six here isn’t bad from the rough just beyond the ladies tee.
No. 3 offers a chance to recapture some of that scoring magic, as it snakes 340 yards toward the salt water and presents a large, open-fronted green with bunkers behind to catch the runners and the greedy. With a par there, and a two-putt par on No. 4, a windy par 3 that reminded me of No. 17 at Hyannisport, it was suddenly looking like a very nice day, work or no work.
No. 5 is one of those golf holes you look at your scorecard later on and can’t figure out where all those strokes came from. It’s only 325 yards, and there isn’t much to it except for some beautiful bunkering and a tough pin, but of course that’s why we play the shots...four, five, six, I’m done.
No. 6 is another pretty par 3, a nice place to look around for your game, which is what I was doing when my gaze was interrupted by a large animal roaming around at the far edge of No. 7, a buck so big I thought it was a moose. He went into the woods just about where my drive landed a minute later, too short and too left to do anything but lay one up this side of the pond guarding the green.
No. 8 has it all – length, trees, sand and stuff all the way down the left side, water and other certain disasters all the way down the right, which combined with the omni-present sea breeze can introduce the dreaded hockey stick to your card – only a double-bogey, but oh, so ugly. It is as tricky a hole as we have around these parts, from the forced carry over a cranberry bog at the tee to the long grass that must have gotten that way by eating golf balls. (Quick reality check: I had no business playing from the blues there.)
No. 9 is the third par 3 on the side, and my favorite hole…to look at. Bogey was accomplished thanks to a fluffy lie just over and left of the green, which is tucked in behind a pond and under some overhanging trees where a hawk was perched and focused on what might be happening in the water. The forward slope requires pinpoint placement, or you can have a downhill putt that runs like the wind. It’s 175 yards to the middle from the blues, and a red flag, meaning front, makes for a very testy iron shot. One of the few par 3 doglegs you will ever see, my notes said it used to be a par 4, which may have been something someone told me just to be nice.
Course knowledge would come in handy on the greens here, but it is not such an advantage otherwise, not as much as plain old accuracy. What Cornish and Robinson, and later Milligan, accomplished at Farm Neck was to design a landscape that enhanced a rolling masterpiece of a property without making it so difficult that the par-challenged player can’t also enjoy the view.
The back nine is different than the front, more angles, more difficult, more interesting. No.’s 10-13 head away from the house in a series of dogleg rights measuring 376-519-379-343 yards, with 12 being the hardest hole on the course, as attested by a card full of bogey fives. Challenging as it is, 12 is also full of fun, even from the right woods, which would have been the right direction as the crow flies, but not my drive. From there I narrowly avoided crossing the fairway left into water, but somehow managed to take the same five as the others, which had to kill them inside.
At 15 the course begins to meander back to the beginning, and presents the final par 3, an elevated tee shot over water that makes you want to stop and take a breather, assess the damage so far, consider the fact that you are winding up your round at Farm Neck, and try like heck to enjoy the scenery without becoming distracted. I can hit a golf ball 163 yards, you say to yourself, and what else matters?
Well, the wind for one thing, the bunkers around the green for another. Like any good short hole, this one demands absolute focus…or this is where you bring out the old golfer’s saw about how you would play this track much better the second time around, which is a total lie, on the order of: It depends on what you mean by better.
No.’s 17 and 18 are why we play golf. At 368 yards, 17 is a deceptively difficult hole that favors the golfer who can drive the ball straight and long enough, but not too long or it will run beyond the short grass. There is only a peephole of a lane that would allow for an approach to be rolled onto the green, otherwise it might as well be an island for all the sand and water that surrounds the target. Three shots to the fringe and a putt to the bottom of the cup will further infuriate your playing partners.
No. 18 is similarly designed, with an extra 150 yards in the middle to make this the perfect finishing hole. At 523 yards, this par 5 requires at least three shots to get home for all but the truly talented and long. It bends around to the right midway, offers plenty of landing space for the second shot, and then beckons you to flop one over the hidden finger of water that guards the front 75 percent of the green, which slopes back to front and a little sideways. It is a gorgeous hole, with limitless views of the course and horizon beyond, and a perfect place to shake hands on another round of golf just completed.
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