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My feet dangling from a bluff on Lookout Mountain and my eyes trained on the expansive valley below me, I slowly pushed myself up and retreated a few paces to McLemore Club’s precariously placed 18th green. Ahead of me was a hawk gliding above an endless sea of trees; behind me was a 20-foot birdie putt, after I'd hit a 5-iron over a rocky cliff that represented the edge of the world.
There are moments like this in golf where you can feel small and alone while being comforted like a weighted blanket. This was the end of my round at the recently renovated Rees Jones/Bill Bergin design in Rising Fawn, Georgia, just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, producing the type of sensation that makes you stop for more than a photograph. Luckily, I was playing alone with nobody behind me, so I held onto the memory until I remembered who and where I was.
I could stop at telling you the trip to McLemore for this view of the final hole is worth it — it is — but like all moments of meditation, there is usually something deeper you realize the longer you wait. In time, I had a complete thought about the course I just played and what it all meant.
Before a total overhaul of what used to be Canyon Ridge Club, the course represented most of golf’s haunting architecture problems. No forward tee box. Forced carries to narrow fairways. Unrelenting green complexes with little room to miss. To put it mildly, a painfully unplayable course that hopefully didn’t serve as anyone’s intro to the game of golf.
Even on McLemore’s website, each hole has architect comments plainly admitting that the course needed considerable help.
“The par-5 sixth is, without question, the most infamous hole on the course,” the website reads. “Truly unforgettable, but not in a positive way, this hole can be greatly improved.”
If you are wondering what hole can elicit this type of unanimous response from members and guests, it’s one where you hit to a narrow fairway and then blindly send your ball some 100 feet down a mountain to a minuscule target surrounded by thick trees and water.
Jones and Bergin went to work fixing it. They added new tee boxes, took out the bunkers on the tee shot and widened the fairway, connecting it with the par-4 ninth. The cliff’s edge was lowered, allowing more players to see the landing zone. Down below, they removed a ton of scrub along the left side to substantially widen the fairway and reduce lost balls.
In this way, McLemore is a reclamation project to be celebrated. It’s still a difficult course, but it’s evolved into an engaging one with greatly widened corridors and more manageable obstacles. Once you complete your round, you pass a new six-hole short course that perfectly encapsulates the ethos of the redesigned Highlands layout.
This is what golf needs. Give us breathtaking, but with enough room to breathe so we can all enjoy it.
E-MAIL SEAN
Sean Fairholm