69 warm handshake that is immediately followed by what may become two of the toughest holes of the round – both around the 450-yard mark and the third playing over rolling terrain and featuring a cavernous cluster of bunkers that must be avoided at all costs with the approach. From the fifth though, any thoughts of traditional par pacing are thrown right out of the window. A par three is followed by a short par four and then the back-to-back par threes that Doak did get into the routing. All four of these greens are long and thin, but oriented in different directions to the line of play, with beautiful and individual bunkering that really evokes those classic English heathlands that Doak drew on for inspiration. “With five par threes in total and a bunch of short par fours, we felt that we should create some difficult green targets, but we couldn’t build really small greens with the amount of traffic the resort gets,” says Doak. “So, we opted for long, skinny greens. A few of them lay 90 degrees to the approach so they present as wide and shallow; while others are long from front to back, and with the bunkering we’ve done, they play much more difficult as you start to put the hole further back.” Michael Keiser has pointed out that none of the short par fours are a walk in the park. Bigger hitters will not be able to resist the temptation of driving the green at the sixth, twelfth and eighteenth, the first two of which are under 300 yards and the closing hole a little over that. But in each case, there are several layup options that may well result in a lower score. On the sixth for example, the glory hunters will need to thread their drive through the gap between deep bunkers that guard the the deep green, knowing the punishment for a shot that leaks either side is quite penal. “The sixth was one of the first holes I settled on,” says Doak. “You really want to place your tee shot left centre so you can hit your approach straight up the green, but the fairway kicks everything to the right, so you have to judge the tee shot perfectly depending on how long you’re hitting it.” The closing hole has a split fairway where the choice is a partially blind approach to the L-shaped green set into a huge dune, or the inviting but exacting slither of fairway on the right. Building the eighteenth required a different approach than some of the other holes on the back nine. “The stretch from nine to fourteen was on flatter ground, and Michael encouraged me to think about doing some significant earthmoving, as we had Photo: Brandon Carter The short par-four sixth can be reached with a long drive played to the left centre of the fairway
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