Meadow Club

Favorite Hole

No. 7, par 4, 345-436 yards

The long par-4 seventh offers a full experience of Meadow Club’s sublime setting. Off the tee, the test is navigating the small creek that cuts into the fairway. Challenging it by playing left yields a superior angle and shorter approach shot. The hole then turns into a narrow valley, and the green sits at the base of a mountain, with gorgeous valley oaks behind. Sitting on the natural slope, the green tilts severely from back to front. Hopefully in the coming years the creek will be fully restored so that it cuts across the entire seventh fairway as well as through the neighboring 12th hole.

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Overall Thoughts

Meadow Club, showcasing Alister MacKenzie’s first design in America, is not currently considered on of the museums of American golf, but it should be. It marked the beginning of MacKenzie’s incredible stateside run, which included masterworks at Cypress Point, Pasatiempo, Crystal Downs, and Augusta National. Thanks to the restoration efforts of Mike DeVries and historian/superintendent Sean Tully, Meadow Club is looking more like its original self every year.

In his writings, MacKenzie often referred to the Old Course at St. Andrews as the world’s preeminent design. He held a deep fascination for how it allowed different types of golfers to find their own ways to score, and for its malleability, which accommodated a broad spectrum of skill levels. As MacKenzie wrote in the American Golfer in 1926, “A first-class course like St. Andrews is pleasurable to all ages, all sexes, and players of all handicaps. At St. Andrews, there are always routes open to players of different handicaps…. It is not difficult to create holes on any inland course of similar characters.”

In the United States, much of MacKenzie’s work centered on adapting the principles of the Old Course to a new breed of inland golf site. Meadow Club was one such project. Here, in the coastal California mountains, he tried to capture the essence of St. Andrews. The vast landscape offered room for one of the Old Course’s key ingredients: alternate routes. In Fairfax, MacKenzie, along with associate Robert Hunter, built a course jammed with different routes and strategies that could shift depending on conditions, style of play, and hole location.

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After World War II, Meadow Club made a common mistake: it planted hundreds of invasive, non-native trees throughout the beautiful Bon Tempe Meadow. These trees not only disrupted the natural environment and the aesthetics of the native valley oaks dotting the hillsides, but they also choked away the course’s strategic options by eliminating MacKenzie’s intended alternate routes. Meadow Club’s Old Course influences became indiscernible, except for the fact that the fifth green was still an Eden.

When restoration architect Mike DeVries arrived in 1999, there was a lot to do. The greens had shrunk, the bunkers had morphed into shapes and sizes that MacKenzie and Hunter wouldn’t have recognized, and, most critically, the course’s strategic essence had disappeared. Since DeVries’s appointment, the club has made slow yet steady progress toward carrying out his master plan.

Playing the long game was a necessity. Meadow Club is in one of America’s most beautiful places and—perhaps relatedly—faces some of the country’s strictest environmental regulations. Cutting down trees, particularly redwoods, involves a lengthy legislative process. Add that difficulty to mixed sentiments from club members about restoring the natural habitat, and the ongoing restoration has inevitably been a slow burn. Yet, with each year and each tree removed, more of the original brilliance of MacKenzie’s design resurfaces.

The section of the property containing Nos. 6, 16, 17, 13, and 15 is an example of both the progress that DeVries and Sean Tully have made and the work that lies ahead. Previously, these holes were all flanked by trees, simplifying their strategy: hit fairway, hit green. This kind of test favors strong, long-hitting golfers and limits the opportunities for shorter hitters to “think” their way to an advantage.

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Today, however, tree removal has revived some of the course’s strategic elements. Take the par-4 sixth hole, which has a unique half-horseshoe green. Bunkers guard both sides of this green, and pin positions behind the bunkers are tough to access. Since the hole measures 450 yards and often plays into the wind, players typically hit long clubs from the fairway. When trees lined both sides of the fairway, this approach was somewhat dull: you couldn’t do anything but aim for the middle of the green. Now that the trees that once lined the creek on the right side have come down, however, there’s another option. When the pin is on the right, you might play across the creek to the 16th fairway in order to open up an angle. A mirror image of that strategy—hitting your tee ball toward the 13th fairway on the left—will apply to a left hole location once the redwoods on the left are removed.

Similar stories can be told about other corridors at Meadow Club. The stretches of Nos. 2-4 and 9-10 should allow for different lines of play and continue to need tree removal to reach their full potential. While DeVries and Tully accomplished a great deal in the past two decades, there’s more to be done. With each stand of trees removed, another aspect of MacKenzie’s inaugural American design is uncovered, bringing back the freedom of play seen at the Old Course, where both physical and intellectual skills are rewarded.

1 Egg

Meadow Club gets its single Egg from a combination of architecture and land. While it has a stunning setting with long views, the actual golfing terrain is modest, earning a half-Egg. The design is beginning to shine, thanks to the efforts of DeVries and Tully, but it is not fully realized yet. The presentation struggles simply because of the remaining groves of trees. Once enough of these trees have come out, Meadow Club has an easy path to two Eggs.

Course Tour

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