The Aiken Golf Club

Favorite Hole

No. 14, par 4, 216-255 yards

Very few working golf architects have the confidence to pull off this kind of concept: a tiny par 4, 255 yards from the tips, with a 50-yard-wide fairway and no manmade hazards aside from some shallow waste areas. Who would think to design such a hole? Which owner would approve it?

The answer to both question, in this case, is Jim McNair, Jr.

The challenge and strategy of No. 14 at Aiken derive from the relationship between the boundary line along the left side of the hole and the design of the green. In order to drive the green, which sits about 20 yards from someone’s backyard, you have to take a line that brings out-of-bounds very much within your dispersion cone. You also have to negotiate a pine that leans into the fairway about 150 yards from the back tee. Want to play safely out to the right and leave yourself a pitch in? Fine. But that’s when the green design starts to work against you. The farther right and deep you go, the shallower the green becomes for you, and the more your approach will be harassed by a steep run-off in front and a waste bunker behind. This angle is sufficiently dicey that, if you play the hole more than once, you may begin to consider taking less club off the tee.

There are birdies to be had on the 14th at Aiken, but a lot of times you’ll find yourself walking away with par or bogey, wondering what the hell happened.

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Overall Thoughts

We live in an era of big-name architects doing high-dollar renovations. Many of those projects are impressive and admirable, but they can’t be emulated by most public courses. A model that can be replicated almost everywhere, however, is the McNair family’s stewardship of the Aiken Golf Club.

Aiken does have some advantages. For one, the course’s 110-year-old bones are strong. The layout—established by J.R. Inglis, possibly with the guidance of Donald Ross—consists of two simple loops (the original 11-hole routing and the seven-hole addition, as described above) but changes direction enough for players to become pleasantly disoriented. The holes use the undulating terrain in a variety of ways, playing down, up, level, and ridge to ridge with more or less equal frequency. It’s a classy, understated routing.

But a lot of what makes the Aiken Golf Club special today can be traced to the design, finish, and agronomic work carried out by Jim McNair, Jr., and his crew in the late 1990s.

It’s evident in Aiken’s architecture—in a good way—that McNair had never built a course before. As golf historians like to point out, some of the best, most inventive designs were debut efforts: Oakmont, Merion, Pine Valley, and so on. What’s less frequently mentioned is that many other first-time architects haven’t been successful. Inexperience can result in dysfunction as often as boundary-pushing creativity. Fortunately, by the time McNair taught himself to use a bulldozer in 1996, he had been educating himself on golf course design and helping his father run the family club for over 30 years. He had enough experience to avoid failure but not so much that he wasn’t willing to try some weird, cool stuff.

There are several green designs at Aiken that you won’t see anywhere else. The 15th is a pushed-up postage stamp with a hump in the center and a small shelf in the back. Since you don’t want to be anywhere around this green, you’ll think twice about trying to reach it from the tee, even though the hole measures just 280 yards downhill. The fifth green has a kidney-bean shape and a speed bump on the right side. You might have to reckon with the big contour if you bail away from the bunkers on the left. Finally, there’s the double green that houses the first and 17th pins. It’s a beautiful creation, winding elegantly along the top of a ridge.

The useful innocence of Aiken’s architecture is also apparent in its variety of bunker shapes and styles. There are naturalized waste areas, clusters of circular pots, and long, curving grass-faced constructions with a Pete Dye flavor. You wouldn’t think this combination of types would work, but it does. It feels free and playful rather than labored or confused.

The Aiken Golf Club is a unicorn: a sophisticated, experimental design that you can play for a $25-30 walking rate. The reason the McNairs can offer this deal is that the architecture is as functional as it is imaginative. The course has only 38 acres of maintained turf, and the sandy base allows the fairways and greens to play firm without much intervention from the maintenance staff. Since Aiken doesn’t overseed, the fairway and rough grasses go dormant in the winter. Even the bunkers are fairly easy to maintain. The waste areas need only occasional raking, and the smaller bunkers have simple edges that don’t require an artisan’s hand to reinforce.

Because of all of these factors, Aiken’s greenkeeping staff can stay small and its maintenance budget low without sacrificing the quality of the product. It’s one of the best values in American golf. -GM

1 Egg

(How We Rate Courses)

One thing we like about the Egg system is that it allows us to assess golf courses on their own terms. The Aiken Golf Club is not trying to crack the Golf Digest top 100 or compete with Pebble Beach and Bandon Dunes in the destination market. It’s trying to be an affordable club, one that welcomes outsiders but mostly caters to a local membership. Very few courses achieve this goal as well as Aiken does. Its design creates variety and strategy on a restricted site, and its presentation allows the architecture to shine while keeping the green fee low. An excellent model for how to make golf accessible and sustainable.

Additional Content

Home Cookin’ at the Aiken Golf Club (article)

Course Tour

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