By Dave Ungrady
The two-and-a half-hour drive from central New Jersey to the redesigned Monster Golf Club at Resorts World Catskills in Monticello, N.Y., offered ample time to reflect on past visits. It had been some two decades since I was last there, and I wondered what changes lie ahead. Would challenges endured during past rounds remain the same? Would my fading skills help me adequately navigate and conquer its new contours and redesigned layout? Would the course still be worthy of its memorable moniker?
The trip with my brother Tom revived a family-inspired ritual. Tom played the old monster 10 times, first with our father, a prominent Trenton, N.J., golfer for much of the mid- to late 1900s. I had played the course four times before, all but once with my dad, who had joined his country club buddies for repeated trips to the Monster.
Tom noticed the first sign of change as we approached the entrance to the resort. “We used to have to go through Monticello and drive through a back road to the course,” Tom said, referring to the nearest town some four miles away. Now, the entrance to the resort is a just a pitching wedge from Route 17.
The sparkling new pro shop is now part of The Alder, a boutique hotel with 100 contemporary-style guestrooms, Mexican cantina, and two Topgolf Swing Suites. The resort’s new hotel and casino, rising 19 floors with 332 all-suite rooms, five restaurants, three bars, spa, pool, fitness center, and 100,000 square feet of gaming space, is just a short walk away.
The course, which had been closed for about a decade, is no longer the central focus of the resort. That was not always the case.
The original Concord Resort’s Monster course opened in 1963, when more than 1,000 Jewish resorts dotted the Catskills. The “Borscht Belt” became a hotbed of entertainment, particularly for comedians such as Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, and Joan Rivers. Golf proliferated, too.
The original Monster was designed by Joe Finger, a chemist and a country club champion turned prominent course architect, with help from tour pro Jimmy Demaret, who was also the director of golf, as well as Jackie Burke Jr. and Gene Sarazen, who gave the course its name when he called the signature par-3 fourth “a monster.”
Demaret had won three Masters titles and once made a cameo in 1954 on I Love Lucy, which included a promotional mention for the old resort. “And from the Concord Hotel … Jimmy Demaret,” says an actor introducing him at a staged first tee.
For the next 40 some years, the Monster maintained a strong presence among regional amateurs and some professionals looking for a challenging getaway. Through the early 2000s, the layout ranked among the top 100 public courses in the United States, and at 7,650 yards, it was among the longest, too.
Bill Tryon, described by a local newspaper as “Elmira’s (N.Y.) greatest golf living athletic hero,” said this about the course as he was preparing to defend his New York State Amateur title in 1966: “It’s simply impossible to describe how tough a course it is.”
The Met PGA Section hosted its PGA Team Championship at the Monster from 1984 to 1986. Rick Vershure, a two-time tournament winner from Quaker Ridge Golf Club in Scarsdale, N.Y., offered this assessment to a local reporter when the course hosted the event again in 1994: “If the tees are back, I’ll be hitting nothing but long irons into every green. But the way we played it this week we played every club in the bag. It’s not just big and long, it’s a heck of a layout. On one hole it will ask you to hit a wedge into a tight pin. On another shot you’ll face a carry of 235 yards over water.”
The course attracted professional golfers as well. The Liggett and Meyers Concord Open in 1971 featured such notables as Chi-Chi Rodriguez, Grier Jones, and 1957 U.S. Open champion Dick Mayer. And in 1991, the Monster hosted the Michelob New York State Open with many of the pros calling the layout too tough for a state open.
Working with the lay of the land, Finger focused his design on length and the lush, tree-laden landscape. As difficult as it was, there was nothing contrived about its layout. During my four trips to the Monster, I encountered a well-manicured course, length that both intimidated and invigorated me, a front-nine with fairways heavily bordered by hardwood and pine trees, and challenging approach shots to elevated greens. Water had a more prominent presence on the back nine, a characteristic that remains today.
When I last played the original Monster in 2004, all was not ideal. The course remained in decent shape, but the cart paths had deteriorated dramatically. Tree roots struggling to emerge from beneath the surface created a bumpy ride on many holes.
Things got bumpy for the owners, too. After the hotel closed and filed for bankruptcy in 1998, a developer partnered with a local company, Empire Resorts, in 2005 to add a casino and resort to the property, but it was another 10 years before the New York State Gaming Commission granted them a license. Resorts World Catskills opened in early 2018.
Rees Jones broke ground on a $40 million redesign of the Monster in 2018. He and longtime associate Bryce Swanson had both played the old course in its heyday.
“It was a renowned course,” Jones recalls. “We were young, and we played it longer than we should, from the back tees. I knew that was not going to be a favorable day. Lots of courses then were competing to be the strongest test of golf, and that was one of them. You didn’t mind having a high score.”
To make way for the new resort, the new Monster combines portions of the old layout and its sister course, the International. The new layout uses five holes from the old Monster (1, 9, 16, 17, and 18) and hole 18 from the International. Holes two through nine as well as 13 to 15 are newly designed and cover portions of both the old Monster and the International courses.
Making it more playable while retaining its character was a priority, as was improving water flow and drainage, particularly on the back nine, where a creek crossed several holes. “It would always rise up during a significant rain event,” Swanson says. “If the creek would fill up, (those) holes would be unplayable.”
Jones and Swanson also redid the greens to introduce more contours and removed more than 200 trees to improve agronomic conditions. Clumps of shin-high fescue in the rough is a little thicker than the club would like, but the plan is to thin it out and give the edges a wispy, golden look.
So how did the course play after all these years? The new Monster, just like the old Monster, did not disappoint. It was an exhilarating and pleasurable experience. After warming up to classic rock tunes on the range, we decided to play two balls each: one from the tips, which are now 7,327 yards, and one from two tees up at 6,426 yards.
My two favorite holes on the old course were on the front nine: The par-5 fourth, which rolled and twisted slightly for 632 yards from the tips through an alley of thick pines, and the par-3 seventh, which required a forced carry off the tee to a plateau green some 240 yards away. Those two holes no longer remain, but homages to them do. The new 245-yard fourth hole features the distance, but its downhill design makes the hole play a slot shorter, while the 190-yard 14th has a plateau green, but now it’s surrounded by water that could easily consume an errant tee-shot.
From the back tees, Tom recorded an impressive 81 while I barely managed to break 100, a score I had not shot in years. I did, however, shoot in the low 80s on the shorter course.
The Monster may have lost some of its teeth, but it’s still got plenty of bite.