Country Club of Troy

Favorite Hole

No. 8, par 3, 169-193 yards

On most holes at the Country Club of Troy, Walter Travis had to manage sudden elevation changes or find the best uses of the spectacular terrain. On No. 8, his task was different: he needed to make the most of a bland piece of ground.

Since Travis couldn’t move huge amounts of earth in 1925, he focused his efforts on the green complex. The four bunkers—two bracketing the approach and two on either side of the green—lend some variety to the flat land and focus the player’s eye on the green. And what a green it is.

At first glance, it looks like lumpy chaos, but once you’re on the putting surface, you see a symmetry in the contouring. There are several mounds along the edge of the green, forming a ring. Right in the center is another mound. This arrangement creates varied pin positions… and it’s just cool. We’ve never seen anything like it.

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Overall Thoughts

The Country Club of Troy has plenty of strengths. The property is beautiful, serene, and dramatic. There’s not a house in sight. The holes use the topography in many different ways, keeping the player off balance both figuratively and literally: for instance, the third hole travels along a sidehill, the fourth goes up and over a big rise, the fifth climbs sharply uphill, and the sixth plummets downhill. It’s hard to get bored.

But the star of the show at Troy—the reason to prioritize seeing this course over others in the area—is the tremendously inventive architecture on and around the greens.

You’d never mistake an Emily Dickinson poem for the work of any other author, and you’d never mistake a Walter Travis green for the work of any other architect. Here are a few trademark components of his style:

Exterior mounding – Travis often placed multiple “chocolate drop”-style mounds on the edges of his greens. If you miss the green, these humps will cause you all sorts of fun problems. In general, Travis’s greens are defined by sudden vertical features rather than tied-in, land-hugging contours.

Open, undulating entrances – Travis invites you to run the ball up, but he doesn’t make it easy. Many of his greens have big false fronts; others have more subtle contouring—ripples or channels—at the entrance. But on almost all of them, there’s some kind of interesting ground to negotiate on the approach.

Pinnable sections surrounded by sharp transitional contours – On Travis greens, it’s usually clear where to put the pins. His designs often have multiple flat sections separated by channels, ridges, or abrupt upslopes or downslopes. Many of his greens in this vein, including the ninth and 14th at the CC of Troy, resemble C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor’s “Double Plateau” and “Maiden” concepts.

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A lack of tilt – On a recent Fried Egg Podcast episode about Walter Travis, Brian Schneider noted that Travis’s greens play well at modern speeds because they rarely have overall slope from one end to another. Since the pinnable portions are typically level, few of Travis’s intended pin positions have been lost. Tilted greens, on the other hand, don’t function as well in the 21st century because the ball has nowhere to come to rest. See: the sad story of the eighth green at Pebble Beach.

“Throne”-type configurations – This might just be a “me” thing, but some of Travis’s most striking greens resemble huge thrones facing the fairway. The false front is the front of the chair, which levels out into the seat. On both sides, raised sections or mounds form the armrests. The clearest examples of this concept are the ninth and 18th greens at Travis’s Cape Arundel, but Nos. 13 and 16 at Troy are in a similar vein. As you approach these greens, you almost feel the need to genuflect.

As terrific as the Country Club of Troy’s greens are, they could be even better. Some of them have shrunk over time, leaving Travis’s signature exterior shaping in the rough. The seventh green, for example, is compelling to look at but would be more fun to play if the putting surface were mown out halfway up the surrounding mounds, and if the mounds themselves were covered in short grass. This is how Cape Arundel presents its greens, and the benefits are obvious.

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But the CC of Troy is in good hands with Bruce Hepner, who also did the restoration work at Cape Arundel. The club may not have funds for an immediate, soup-to-nuts restoration, but it appears committed to steady, historically informed improvement. I adore this course. I can’t wait to go back.

1 Egg

Between the wild (perhaps too wild?) land and the audacious (but not fully restored) design, the Country Club of Troy reaches a full Egg. The presentation appears to be moving in the right direction, but we’d like to see some green expansions, vegetation clearance, and additional tree removal.

Additional Content

Course Tour

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