NEW HAVEN, Connecticut — After a two-year closure for a massive renovation and restoration, Yale Golf Course has reopened. The result is a quality of golf on a monumental, Gothic scale that relegates virtually every other course to a quiet corner.
That’s what happens when you have greens averaging 14,000 square feet, bunkers 20 feet below the putting surface, approach shots that climb 50 feet to greens and blind shots over mountainous peaks to greens sitting down in sunken valleys. Regardless of the skill level of those who challenge this place, the effect is a breathless four hours on a stage bigger than any other in the game.
Some may find it overwhelming. Others will find the challenge exhilarating. But one thing is certain: when it comes to a sports field that is a throwback to the heroic age of athletics — the 1920s — this is like watching Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play ball at old Yankee Stadium. Or, since we are at an institution of higher learning with lofty literary standards, perhaps the proper analogy is going out with Ishmael and Captain Ahab on the Pequod to chase Moby Dick in the open sea.
Yale’s legendary golf course dates to a 1926 routing by Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor. What had originally been conceived as a 36-hole layout was reduced to a single 18-hole course due to the cost, labor and difficulty of building on a site mired with rock, swampy ground, ponds and dense woods. The course quickly acquired a kind of ghoulish reputation for difficulty — not only to play but also to maintain. It did not help that day-to-day management through the university’s athletic department saddled the course under a burdensome labor contract that lacked the flexibility needed for golf course operations. For decades, in-house management cut corners to ease maintenance, even if it meant compromising the original architectural uniqueness of the property.
It took the intervention of third-party, outside funding by concerned alumni and the volunteer talents of Gil Hanse and his design team, including his shaping crew at Caveman Construction. They peeled back massive tree overgrowth, rebuilt all the greens and bunkers, dramatically improved drainage and added newly dispersed teeing grounds that are both shorter (4,814 yards) and longer (7,054 yards) for the par-70 layout. The result is a stern but joyous romp that revives one’s faith in the power of restorative art.
The breathtaking scale of the place is evident on the first hole, thanks to a new back tee behind the clubhouse that adds 70 yards and plays to a massively expanded green. The second hole, called “Pits,” features a flat-bottomed greenside bunker that is 22 feet below the tabletop putting surface of the green. At the third hole, “Blind,” Hanse and Co. restored the old hidden green and retrieved an abandoned alternate fairway up the left side.
Yale’s showpiece green is surely the "Biarritz" ninth, a long par-3 over water to a 22,000-square-foot surface that is traversed perpendicularly by a 7-foot-deep swale. It takes two crew members 40 minutes to walk-mow during the daily cut here, but that is what allows the hole to be cut on the front part, the back or — as lore has it — occasionally in the trough itself.
What feels outrageous in ambition on the front turns out to be almost tame in comparison with the back, starting on the long uphill par-4 10th hole, “Carries,” to a green that feels like it’s sliding off the hill. The “Alps” hole at 12 has been fully restored with a deep fronting cross bunker, and the famed “Redan” par-3 13th now fills an entire valley thanks to dramatic clearing all around. Yale’s infamous 18th, “Home,” a 611-yard, par-5, presents itself miraculously as very nearly rational, thanks to enough clearing around the fairway to allow room for its two long blind shots. You’d be excused for thinking that the hole has never recovered from its founding days a century ago, when they obviously ran out of dynamite. But that’s an appropriate thought for a place so ambitious and so outrageous and where excess is the point, not a liability.
Yale Golf Course, 3 miles west of the downtown campus, is a university asset that is also open to the public. Student, faculty and staff rates range from $35 to $150, alumni green fees are $200 and the general public rate is $350. Reservations can be made online.
