Design Notebook: A First Look at the New Met Links

Hello and welcome back to Design Notebook, where we’re hoping you have a higher tolerance for the vagaries of links turf conditions than Dunhill Links champion Tyrrell Hatton apparently does.

In today’s DN, Cameron Hurdus gives a tour of Met Links, a new nine-hole public course built in the footprint of the erstwhile Metacomet Golf Club. Also, Brendan Porath reviews plans for a… somewhat obtrusive grandstand at the 2025 Ryder Cup. Garrett Morrison then chimes in with news items pertaining to Harbour Town and Tiger Woods’s design firm. Let’s go.

Met Links Rises from the Ashes of Metacomet’s Demise

By Cameron Hurdus

When Metacomet Golf Club closed its doors in 2020 after years of internal strife, unpaid debts, and litigation (against local legend Brad Faxon, who briefly owned a piece of the club), the 1924 Donald Ross redesign in East Providence, Rhode Island, was in danger of disappearing forever. Before officially closing, the club was purchased by Marshall Properties with the intent of developing a “mixed-use” site. Retaining the full course was never on the table, but now nine holes are now back in play, rebranded as Met Linke, thanks to architect Robert McNeil, whose Northeast Golf Company is also managing the course.

McNeil had to work within a footprint of only seven holes on the original front nine, so he made some adjustments to squeeze in a nine-hole routing. Using Ross’s plans, McNeil managed to save seven greens, restore bunkers, open up the property through some welcome tree removal, and ultimately retain a good deal of the course’s Golden Age character.

McNeil used greens mix and sod from the abandoned holes to construct two new greens. He split a dogleg par 4 into a short par 4 (now the fifth) and a par 3 (the sixth) to the original green. In addition, a new par 3 (now the seventh) plays to another new green on the site of the original sixth, but from the opposite direction. The result is a par-34 course rambling across varied, sometimes stellar topography.

Robert McNeil's plan for Met Links

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Built on a hilly site above Narragansett Bay, the course plays down to and along the Watchemoket Cove before heading back up the hill on the third hole, which feels like classic Ross. The fairway is draped across a ridge, with a falloff right where weak drives are left with a difficult, uphill approach to an undulating, benched green.

A few holes play to and from this high point, making it the focal point of the new nine. The par-3 fourth plays off of it, while McNeil’s par-3 seventh features a clever horizon green set on top of it. The tee shot on No. 8 plays off the ridge, but since this hole was lengthened, the drive feels slightly awkward to me because of a group of trees blocking the view of the green. The approach, however, is pure class, playing back up and across the site’s natural grade to a wonderfully pitched green.

While not all of Metacomet’s original front nine was preserved, McNeil did a nice job of creating an aesthetic throughline between the old and new holes. It is of course unfortunate that the full Donald Ross design will never be recovered. Yet the fact that this reconfigured nine exists and now functions as a public option has to be considered a big win.

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Grand(stand) Plans for Bethpage Black at the 2025 Ryder Cup

By Brendan Porath

The selection process for future Ryder Cup venues may be dependent on something that impacts less than five percent of the competition. The all-important first tee shot—the camera one, not the actual golf one—appears to be paramount at this point.

SB Nation’s Jack Milko reported that the PGA of America has created a new tee box at Bethpage Black for next year’s Ryder Cup. But unlike 99 percent of new tee box construction meant to combat pernicious distance gains, this one is significantly forward. Not for playability or competition reasons, but for grandstand design.

If you’ve never been, the elevated first tee area at Bethpage sits fairly hard up against the clubhouse and various brick walkways. This made a big-ass Ryder Cup grandstand difficult to configure or drop in Tetris-style. So the PGA went and found a patch to mow a little tighter down the hill and nearer the 18th green. This tee box changes the angle off the tee in a major way, and may even make the green drivable, per Milko. Perhaps PGA leaders are still lapping up the morsels of that viral moment when Bryson wailed away at the first green at Whistling Straits. Here’s the Milko scoop:

At the 2019 PGA Championship and 2016 Barclays on the PGA Tour, the hole played about 430 yards, give or take a couple, and with that sharp bend right.

ShotLink plot of the first hole at Bethpage Black as it played in the 2019 PGA Championship

Fried Egg Golf’s Joseph LaMagna tells me it is 358 to the front edge from the original tee. (Keep in mind that Rory hit one 362 in the 2019 PGA at Bethpage, the longest of the tournament there.) In colder September morning temperatures, that is likely not reachable, but never say never thanks to modern innovations in golfer fitness and nutrition. The average approach was 125 yards in two of four rounds, 109 in a downwind final round, and 98 in one round when the tee was moved up about 15 yards. Owing largely to its bend and narrowness, the fairway was one of the hardest to hit that week (53%) but one of the easiest scoring holes (3.91 average on 74% GIR).

The first tee experience is unique in these team match-play events, and the Ryder Cup sets the standard. But then the first hour passes, and the substance of the competition is what matters most. Further, we’re continuing not only to winnow away the courses that are even available to host such an event but also to materially alter the holes for those we think can. A few years ago at the 2021 PGA Championship at Kiawah, an official with the tournament told our own Andy Johnson that The Ocean Course could host a PGA but no longer a Ryder Cup because the course does not have enough “in-between” (my term) land to build out all the desired hospitality spaces. Think about that. It’s big enough to host a major, but not a Ryder Cup—even though it’s the site of arguably the most famous Ryder Cup, the one that launched the entire event into its modern prominence and money-making power.

But let’s get back to the actual hole change. Does this make the opening hole at Bethpage Black better? Perhaps for Ryder Cup purposes. But you could and should argue that having to make such dramatic alterations for the purpose of building a grandstand makes it a de facto worse golf hole and closes off all arguments to the contrary. Tillinghast is not walking through that door to weigh in on the matter.

This is the most recent—and one of the more extreme, in my opinion—examples of the scales tipping way too much in service of buildout and non-golf concerns. The event has now overwhelmed the actual course. The lust for a particular idea of a first-tee setting has altered the design entirely. Are they going to move the outfield wall in at the World Series in a few weeks to add more seats? Only a small subset of fans will notice the change at Bethpage Black, but that doesn’t make the demonstration of priorities here any more palatable.

Chocolate Drops

By Garrett Morrison

A Love fest at Harbour Town: Last Wednesday, the Sea Pines Resort announced in a press release that Love Golf Design, the firm headed up by Davis Love III and Scot Sherman, will oversee an “extensive restoration project” at Harbour Town Golf Links between May and November 2025. Here are the details, such as they are at this point: “The iconic Pete Dye design will be restored to ensure championship-level conditions while preserving classic shot values and design. The restoration will thoughtfully consider Dye’s famous design but will make improvements to agronomy and maintenance of the course, rebuilding all greens, bunkers, and bulkheads. The different turfs currently in use—TifEagle on the greens; Celebration Bermuda on the fairways, tees, and rough—will remain the same. Work has already begun [with the replacement of] railroad ties on some of the bulkheads.”

At the risk of reading too much into a press release, I sense that the meaning of the word “restoration” is getting stretched here. As I pointed out in this profile of Harbour Town from earlier this year, a true restoration of Dye’s 1969 design would involve eliminating acres of rough and reintroducing a rugged aesthetic—two changes I’d be surprised to see an annual PGA Tour host implement. I do, however, have some trust in Love and Sherman’s knowledge of and respect for Dye’s design legacy, so I expect that they will at least improve the course. Harbour Town could use some general sprucing up.

Tiger returns to Texas: Tiger Woods announced last Thursday that his architecture shop TGR Design will reunite with the owners of Bluejack National to create Bluejack Ranch, “a new and exceptional golf community” near Fort Worth, Texas. The course is expected to debut in early 2026, while the ranch will likely open in the first quarter of 2025. Judging from the plan, Bluejack Ranch will be… uh, heavy on real estate.

TGR Design's plan for Bluejack Ranch

Goalby gets a crack at a Langford & Moreau in Wisconsin: Kye Goalby, on-site designer of The Tree Farm and longtime shaper for Tom Doak and Gil Hanse, has been retained to carry out a master plan at West Bend Country Club, 40 minutes northwest of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. West Bend’s front nine opened in 1930 and was built by William Langford and Theodore Moreau, the duo behind Lawsonia Links and Wakonda Club. Thirty years later, the club added a back nine designed by David Gill. Goalby’s objective will be to return Langford & Moreau’s nine to its original form and alter Gill’s nine to conform with L&M’s style. I love it.

Kye Goalby's plan for restoration work at West Bend Country Club

A Course We Photographed Recently

Hyannisport Club (Hyannis Port, MA)—early iterations of course designed by John Reid (1897) and Alex Findlay (1902), current course designed by Donald Ross in 1936, restoration work since 1989 by Ron Forse

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Quotable

“Any theatrical producer will tell you that the successful performer must possess talent primarily, and to an almost equal degree, personality. Without an appealing personality, a magnetism which draws the audience across the footlights, the actor must be endowed with rare ability to ‘get his stuff over’—as they say. But with talent, plus personality, the reward of spontaneous, sincere applause is assured…. The golf hole should have [personality] just the same as a human…. Let every hole be worthy of a name. If it does not possess a striking individuality through some gift of Nature, it must be given as much as possible artificially, and the artifice must be introduced in so subtle a manner as to make it seem natural.” -A.W. Tillinghast