Design Notebook: Defending Mammoth Dunes

Hello and welcome to your February edition of Design Notebook. I’m Garrett Morrison.

Today, I’m defending the virtue of Mammoth Dunes. Yes, you heard that right. I’ll also give the latest on Andy Staples’s proposed renovation of San Clemente Municipal Golf Course and offer some intel on a potential new build in Lincoln, Nebraska. Let’s get into it.

Six Points in Defense of Mammoth Dunes

Nothing lights up Club TFE’s switchboard quite like a zero-Egg review of a beloved course. Last Thursday, after Andy Johnson posted his critique of David McLay Kidd’s design at Mammoth Dunes, members got busy in the comments section. I’m happy to report that everyone kept their cool. (Well, almost everyone. I think Fried Egg Golf’s Head of Product Beau Scroggins might have accused Andy of being a fascist? We’re investigating internally.)

For the record, I mostly agree with Andy’s assessment. When a course features both wide fairways and large, funneling greens, the game loses a bit of intensity for me. I know I won’t be hard-pressed to get back in position after a poor shot. On golf courses I find more strategically compelling, recovery opportunities are fraught with danger. Yes, I have a chance to make the hero play (this is a key difference between strategic and penal design), but if I’m too aggressive and not precise enough, I might land myself in even deeper trouble. At Mammoth Dunes, this kind of multiplying jeopardy is rare. And for me, that makes the course less exciting than it should be. The stakes just aren’t high enough.

That said, I always like to look at things from multiple angles, so let me play devil’s (or David’s) advocate for a minute. If I were to stump for Mammoth Dunes—and, more generally, defend the philosophy of golf course design that Kidd has espoused ever since launching the second act of his career with Gamble Sands in 2014—what would I say? I think I’d hit six main points:

1. Mammoth Dunes meets the masses where they are

Kidd contends that most golf courses are too hard for most players. I don’t disagree. The average USGA handicap index is about 14.2 for men and 28.7 for women. I’d argue that Mammoth Dunes offers golfers of that skill level a more balanced mixture of challenge and opportunity than, say, Whistling Straits. This is not to say that Whistling Straits shouldn’t be as demanding as it is—just that Mammoth Dunes provides a welcome counterbalance.

2. Mammoth Dunes plays a role at Sand Valley, and plays it effectively

Aside from its exceptional fescue turf, the Sand Valley resort’s greatest strength is its variety. The original Sand Valley course is a down-the-middle, medium-tough, beautifully executed Coore & Crenshaw design. The Sandbox is an after-hours hangout—bring a few wedges, several beers, and no scorecard. Sedge Valley is a sporting course, with scaled-down features and a par of 68. The Lido is an experiment: a private club with some public access, a high-tech resuscitation of a lost Golden Age masterpiece.

And Mammoth Dunes? It’s where you wallop driver and try to make a bunch of birdies. Nothing wrong with that, especially as a complement to Sand Valley’s other, more precision-oriented offerings.

3. Mammoth Dunes is not a member course

One of the primary knocks on Mammoth Dunes is that it doesn’t reward repeat play. As soon as you understand that the architecture is keeping you out of trouble, you may lose some of your initial interest. I would point out, however, that the majority of golfers who play Mammoth Dunes won’t play it more than once or twice in their lives. Sand Valley is a Dream Golf resort; it is meant to provide a rare type of experience. So perhaps the intention of Kidd’s design is to deliver maximum pleasure and excitement the first time around. Whether or not the course reveals deeper complexities on the third, fourth, and fifth visits might be irrelevant for most players (even if it’s completely relevant for the golf course critic).

4. Mammoth Dunes tries to defend birdie, not par

“Hard par, easy bogey” is a time-honored convention in golf course design—one that existed long before Robert Trent Jones turned it into a marketing slogan, and that continued to hold sway . Kidd is one of the only architects that principle. He insists that his recent courses do have defenses, but that they protect against birdie rather than par. And hey, why not? Birdies and pars are just numbers, right? As long as the course differentiates between good and middling shots in some fashion,* it’s still doing its job.

(*I want to quibble with my own argument here. On the holes at Mammoth Dunes that pair wide fairways with punchbowl greens, I find that good and middling shots tend to yield similar results. A lot of pars, basically. Birdies are always tough to make, even on the friendliest courses, because they usually require holing putts outside of five feet.)

5. In a time when many yearn for more variety in golf architecture, Mammoth Dunes and David McLay Kidd are doing something genuinely distinctive

“Every new course looks the same!” I’ve heard it, you’ve heard it. Some people complain, not entirely without justification, that today’s golf architects are playing it safe, building courses that they know will meet with approval rather than exploring new horizons. Well, say what you will about Kidd, but you can’t deny that he’s an original thinker. No one is as willing to allow low scoring as he is, and no one has taken on sacred cows of golf course design—like the defense of par and the use of visual deception—as aggressively as he has. If you prioritize variety in golf architecture above all else, you should probably appreciate that Kidd is bringing something new to the table, even if you don’t particularly like it.

6. People love Mammoth Dunes

This is an unscientific assertion, but I’d bet that Mammoth Dunes is the most liked course at Sand Valley among one-time visitors. As Andy said in the comments section below his profile, “People like shooting low scores more than anything else.” Very true. They also like visually dramatic bunkers and greens, grand vistas, great turf, and exciting journeys across beautiful, diverse landscapes. Mammoth Dunes delivers on all of those counts.

I doubt Kidd would put it this way himself, but I don’t think he designs courses for golf architecture geeks like me. Perhaps he knows we’re incredibly hard to please. His post-Gamble Sands body of work instead seems to be aimed at the broad middle band of the golfing population: average players with an average degree of interest in golf course design and an average amount of time to devote to this time-consuming hobby. Is that pandering? Sort of. But it’s also a valid way for Kidd to understand duty to his clients.

Of course, none of this means that Andy should have tempered his criticism of Mammoth Dunes. Doing so would have been a pandering of its own kind.

What’s Actually Happening at San Clemente

Casey Bannon of The Golfer’s Journal caused a small stir last week when he posted Andy Staples’s plan for a renovation of San Clemente Municipal Golf Course. Bannon’s tone was faintly skeptical: “A plan has just been submitted to redo our beloved San Clemente Muni. Notable changes include turning the 13th into a massive ‘putting hole’ and breaking up the iconic canyon 16th—one of the best worst par 4s ever—into two holes. The town hall meetings promise to be absolute theater.”

San Clemente Muni, about an hour from both San Diego and Los Angeles (depending on traffic, of course), opened in 1930. Its original nine holes were designed by William P. Bell, a well-regarded Southern California architect who helped George Thomas build Riviera Country Club, Bel-Air Country Club, and the North Course at Los Angeles Country Club. A fair amount of Bell’s work at San Clemente remains intact on San Clemente’s front nine, though the second and third holes were altered to make way for a driving range. The back nine was added in 1955, possibly by Bell’s son William F. Bell.

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So: is Andy Staples trying to blow up a municipal gem with Golden Age roots?

That’s not really his style. Staples, who has been on the Fried Egg Golf Podcast a couple of times, is a skilled architect with a track record of thoughtful, cost-effective work. He’s best known for his contributions to the two courses at Sand Hollow Resort and his redesigns of Rockwind Community Links in New Mexico and Meadowbrook Country Club outside of Detroit. I called him up to get a clearer picture of what’s going on at San Clemente.

Staples told me that he met with the city’s golf course committee last Thursday to talk through the version of the plan Bannon posted. “Version” is the keyword here. Many more conversations and negotiations between Staples, the committee, and the residents of San Clemente need to happen before the city council can vote on anything. Staples has prepared multiple alternative plans, and he predicts that the ultimate scope of the project won’t be as large as first suggested. His top priorities are to overhaul the course’s irrigation system, rebuild all of the bunkers, and enhance the safety of the driving range. Those needs will have to be addressed before any major design changes—such as relocating the driving range or rerouting portions of the back nine—can be considered.

Andy Staples's plan for a renovation of San Clemente Municipal Golf Course.

San Clemente is a very good public course with real pedigree, and the city has chosen wisely to bring Staples on board. I’m excited about the project’s potential. I just hope that government officials and local citizens don’t end up getting in their own way.

A Course We Photographed Recently

The Park (West Palm Beach, Florida)—designed by Hanse Golf Course Design in 2023

MORE: Read our in-depth Course Profile on The Park

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Chocolate Drops

→ Last Friday, the Lincoln Star-Journal reported that the Peed family, owners of Sandhills Global and the Dormie Network, has proposed to build a new, private 18-hole course in Lincoln, Nebraska. Tentatively called Battle Run, the club would occupy land adjoining Hillcrest Country Club and offer access to local high school and college golf teams, including the University of Nebraska Cornhusker squads. A local source informed us that the Peed family has begun conversations with David McLay Kidd to design the course. This hire would make sense, as the Peeds recently worked with Kidd in developing GrayBull, a Dormie Network club in the Nebraska Sandhills.

A stick routing of Battle Run

→ The latest episode of Designing Golf is in your podcast feeds and on YouTube right now! The guest is writer and historian Stephen Proctor, and the topic is the 10 golf architecture books that everyone should read. Stephen was also nice enough to stay with me for an extra 20 minutes to answer some Club TFE members’ questions. Check out that Club TFE Extra here.