MANTEO, NORTH CAROLINA | Sometimes, a golf trip is about much more than golf.
Maybe it is the cultural allure of a community that also happens to have a course or two in town. Perhaps the natural beauty of a locale is what beckons as strongly as the layouts that exist there.
The journey also could be as much about a stroll down memory lane as anything else. Which was what my recent expedition to the Outer Banks of North Carolina was all about.
Years ago, I had called this part of the world home. Not for long, mind you. But the three months I spent here in the spring of 1974 as a long-haired high school senior measuring and monitoring beach erosion as an intern for the National Park Service nonetheless remains a favorite period in my life.
For scenery that included rugged sand dunes, vast stretches of ocean and lighthouses overlooking waters so perilous that they came to be known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” for all the ships that went down here, to say nothing of the sunsets that presented vivid and varied canvases of reds, yellows and oranges most eves.
I also relished all I was able to do when I was not on the clock. Such as casting for stripers and blues from the beaches along the Oregon Inlet, savoring the salt-scented breezes as I waited for a bite and watching seabirds hover over schools of bait fish.
When I wasn’t on the water, I was often in bait and tackle shops, talking with local anglers about the best places to wet my lines and the ways my quarry reacted to different tides, weather and winds. In time, I became friendly with a few of those folks, but only after they got over the fact that I was both a Yankee and a hippie, two things that did not exactly endear me to most Southerners back then.
Sometimes I drove about 15 miles north to the village of Corolla to watch its wild horses frolic on the beach. On other occasions, I wandered around Kill Devil Hills to the south, where the Wright brothers made their famous first flight in 1903.
I also visited the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site outside this town of 2,000 residents. It was where a group of English men, women and children established the Roanoke Colony in 1587, in an expedition funded by Sir Walter Raleigh himself. That same year, Virginia Dare became the first English person born in the New World. But when another group of settlers arrived in the area in 1590, they discovered that the Roanoke colonists had vanished without a trace. The disappearance remains a mystery.
The internship provided me with my first taste of the small-town South, and I was seduced by its easy pace and simple charm. One day, I ran into the actor Andy Griffith in a hardware store. And I realized that if the fictional sheriff of Mayberry made his home here, it really must be a special place.
As for my duties with the Park Service, they entailed six weeks in its offices outside Manteo researching the extent of beach erosion over the decades, largely by poring over aerial photographs, and then an equal amount of time in the field, measuring erosion over that 200-mile stretch of barrier islands – from Virginia Beach, Virginia, to Cape Lookout, North Carolina – that make up the geographical formation known as the Outer Banks. That last part of the job entailed spending entire days working on the beach, from sunrise to sunset, and sleeping every now and then in shacks erected by fishermen.
It was, as one can well imagine, a wonderful gig.
But as much as I relished that experience, I had been able to return to the Outer Banks only one other time since my internship. And that was some three decades ago. So, I jumped at the opportunity to come back – and to bring my wife, Cynthia, and my golf clubs.
To be sure, I was going to be retracing some familiar ground. The golf element, however, added something very new to the expedition, as I had yet to take up the game in 1974 and knew nothing about the sport as it existed down here.
But I am always up for checking out a new place to tee it up.
Local sources told me there were seven golf courses in the Outer Banks, and I secured tee times at three of them: Kilmarlic Golf Club in Powells Point, Currituck Club in Corolla and Nags Head Golf Links in the town of that same name.
As for my accommodations, I reserved one of the Golf Village Cottages at Kilmarlic and put together a list of new sights to see as well as old haunts to revisit.
I played my first round at Nags Head. Located in that bustling beach town off Highway 12, it is routed along Roanoke Sound and in and around clusters of modest beach houses, many of which boast weathered shingles. Four holes border that body of water, with inland ponds coming into play, by my count, on 11 others.
Nags Head is a tight track that puts a premium on accuracy. It measures a mere 6,000 yards from the back markers, but I quickly learned that like all layouts here, this Bob Moore course played much longer than the scorecard indicated due to the near constant breezes off the nearby Atlantic and the fact that we were truly at sea level. As a result, I still hit driver off of most par-4s and -5s.
I liked that the greens possessed plenty of spice and rolled fast and true. I also appreciated the fun and interesting shots I had to hit throughout the round and the sense the course gave me of being on the Outer Banks. If I had had more time, I would have gone right back out and played another 18 holes, especially given that I had Nags Head pretty much to myself and completed my first 18 holes as a single in less than three hours. It also did not hurt that the temperatures were in the high 60s.
The second course I checked out was at the semi-private Currituck Club, some 30 miles north in the town of Corolla. This one was fashioned by Rees Jones, and both the layout and the real estate around it had more of an upscale feel. But that did not necessarily make the experience any better. It was just different.
And by different, I mean the sandy-soil track played longer and harder than Nags Head. The first four holes at Currituck were particularly tough, heading uphill in spots and into a two-club wind. And I had a hard time staying out of the many bunkers that Jones had dug into the fairways and around the bentgrass greens. But I did not let a couple of early double bogeys discourage me and soon began scoring reasonably well, enjoying not only the different golf holes but also the stands of loblolly pines and live oaks that grew throughout and the swathes of marshland on the west side of the track and the Currituck Sound beyond it. Standing on the tee of the par-5 16th, I counted five duck blinds in the distance, and those made me think of how this area was once a hotbed of wild goose and duck hunting and home in the early 20th century to the Currituck Shooting Club, which in its time was the Augusta National of waterfowling.
Seeing those blinds, made of brown-blond reeds, prompted me to think of those days gone by. So did listening to the chuckles of the mallards that traded across the sky. The glimpses I caught of ospreys and egrets only added to the allure.
Rees may have kicked my butt with his design, but he certainly picked an incredibly beautiful place to do so.
The last course that I visited, Kilmarlic Golf Club, may have been my favorite, for its sensible bunkering, interesting ground and greens that possessed plenty of size and subtle yet testy undulations. I also liked the mix of holes and the different shots they asked me to hit, both fades and draws off the tee as well as the occasional bump-and-run on my approaches.
I learned mid-round that the course designer, Tom Steele, was a landscape architect who had once worked for Tom Fazio, which may have explained why the layout suited my eye so well. Clearly, Steele knew how to design a golf hole. I was also struck by the stands of tall pines that rose throughout the property and how the early morning rays of sunlight filtered through them.
My host this day was Bryan Sullivan, who founded and built the Kilmarlic Golf Club as well as the cottages. Now 59 years old, he had moved to the Outer Banks with his family when he was 14.
“I grew up in Virginia Beach, where my father worked as an attorney,” Sullivan said. “He hated that job but loved golf and ended up buying the Sea Scape Golf Links in Kitty Hawk with some friends and running it.”
“It was like the Wild West when we arrived. The area was pretty isolated and attracted a lot of outcasts who came here to get away from someplace else. It was very much off the beaten path.”
Bryan Sullivan, founder and builder, Kilmarlic Golf Club
Sullivan learned to play at Sea Scape and became good enough to make the golf team at the University of North Carolina. “I was an All-American my senior year,” he said. “I had won the North and South in 1983 and then went to UNC. Davis Love III and I were in the same class and on the team together. But he left school after his junior year, and I stayed on. I wanted to play pro golf like he did, but that never worked out.”
Along the way, Sullivan also learned to love the Outer Banks. “It was like the Wild West when we arrived,” he said. “The area was pretty isolated and attracted a lot of outcasts who came here to get away from someplace else. It was very much off the beaten path.”
Much to Sullivan’s delight, the Outer Banks eventually became a pretty strong place for golf. “I truly believe the courses we have compare favorably to anywhere on the East Coast,” he said. “There is amazing variety and beautiful scenery. Good weather too, and good conditioning. And you also have the wind. There was a reason why the Wright brothers came here to fly their airplane and not anywhere else in America.”
Discovering the good golf here was one of the highlights of my trip. So was being back on my old stomping grounds.
After finishing my round at Kilmarlic, Cynthia and I headed south, past Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills and down Highway 12 all the way to the iconic Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, located at the elbow of the Outer Banks. The drive took about 90 minutes, and we stopped several times at turnouts along the way to take quick hikes over the dunes and onto the beaches. I did not say much to Cynthia on those occasions, content simply to take in the views as I also reflected on being here half a century ago and surveying these very same stretches of sand.
It was good to be back.