The Kittansett Club

Favorite Hole

No. 11, par 3, 253 yards

This long par 3 sits on an undistinguished piece of land, so its interest comes from two manufactured components: a built-up cross bunker and a strange, memorable green. The bunker, with its fringe of fescue, obscures the broad approach, which players can use to run their ball onto the green. Since the hole stretches to 253 yards from the back tees, the low-trajectory route will, for most golfers, be a necessity rather than a choice.

The green is overtly artificial, consisting of two pushed-up planes—one front-left and the other back-right, both tilted from right to left and toward the line of play. These planes can serve as backstops for well-played running shots, but they can also deflect less accurate efforts into awkward positions. Finding the back-right tier is especially tricky, requiring a tee ball that skirts by the front-right bunker and avoids a central trough that empties into a no-go zone behind the green.

Although brilliant, the 11th green seems somewhat out of place at Kittansett. Its bold and blunt style prompted me and my colleague Matt Rouches to wonder whether Langford & Moreau visited the club sometime in the 1930s (or Charles “Steam Shovel” Banks, perhaps, before his death in 1931).

{{content-block-course-profile-kittansett-club-003}}

Overall Thoughts

The famous third green at the Kittansett Club, perched atop a white-sand beach, gives a misleading impression. The rest of the course is understated in comparison: the land is mostly flat, the features simply shaped, and the greens (aside from the 11th, profiled above) smallish and straightforward. But Kittansett’s modesty isn’t a weakness. Rather, it’s a reminder that a subtle property can yield compelling golf without major earthmoving.

If given a site like Kittansett’s, most 21st-century golf architects would assume that a great deal of reshaping would be necessary to produce an excellent course. Even self-described minimalists would likely feel justified in sending out a fleet of bulldozers. After all, Tom Doak himself has argued that minimalism means not only finding natural holes but also pushing around enough dirt to make the connector holes just as good.

At Kittansett, however, earthmoving on a modern scale wasn’t possible. For one thing, the technology was not yet available. For another, the construction budget was quickly exhausted by an arduous site-clearing process. So William Flynn and Frederic Hood had to rely on small interventions to differentiate each hole from the others, and their work is an example of how much can be accomplished with manual, place-based architecture.

For example, since removing the many rocks strewn across the Kittansett property would have taken too much time and money, Flynn and Hood decided to pile them up on the sides of the fairways and greens and grass them over. These mounds are now a distinctive part of the course’s character. In some cases, they serve as strategic hazards—such as on the par-4 10th, where a line of berms cuts on a diagonal into the fairway, guarding the direct line to the green. In other cases, they function simply as visual enhancements, giving the terrain more movement and variety. And since these features have shapes indigenous to the site (boulders in their natural state can be seen farther off the hole corridors), they don’t feel contrived.

{{content-block-course-profile-kittansett-club-004}}

Another challenge that Flynn faced at Kittansett was making the par 3s stand out. On a property without sudden and dramatic landforms, creating memorable one-shotters can be difficult. So it was smart of Flynn to favor bold concepts on Kittansett’s four par 3s (even though, from the looks of it, he used up much of the construction crew’s earthmoving capacity in the process). I’ve already mentioned the third and 11th holes, both of which boast heavily manufactured, instantly impressive greens. According to Wayne Morrison, Hood’s workers built up the third green from the beach “with clay, dirt filler, and a foot of screened loam layered over four feet of piled rock”—a sort of primitive USGA spec. The 209-yard eighth hole is set amid a collection of artificial mounds and bunkers, and its green features a high, tiny back-right tier. Kittansett’s final par 3, the 186-yard 14th, plays downhill to kidney-shaped green protected by a pot bunker and nest of chocolate drops short left, along with a hidden coffin bunker back right. The assertiveness of Flynn’s architecture on these holes makes up for the site’s lack of readymade par-3 topography.

{{content-block-course-profile-kittansett-club-005}}

On the par 4s and 5s, Flynn varied the tee shots by using differing combinations of mounds, bunkers, and fairway movements. He did so with particular skill on holes 4 through 7. The fourth fairway swerves to the right at the landing zone and narrows between bracketing bunkers. On the fifth hole, a center-line bunker sits exactly where most players will want to land their drives. The sixth fairway curves around a set of three parallel berms, while the seventh fairway jogs from right to left between staggered bunkers. These design elements don’t call attention to themselves, but they make each tee shot interesting enough to be recalled after the round.

Because of its low-profile character, Kittansett has an easygoing sense of place, which more earthmoving might have violated. At the same time, its selectively bold design ensures that each shot is different and exciting. William Flynn and Frederic Hood did just enough, and no more.

1 Egg

(How We Rate Courses)

Kittansett is a difficult course to rate. On the one hand, it lacks the topographical interest and architectural bravura of Flynn’s (and the American Golden Age’s) greatest courses; on the other, its subtlety is integral to its appeal. Any efforts to “improve” the course according to modern standards of design would weaken the spell it casts. So I’ll give it one Egg, with the proviso that if I were to choose a course in the Boston area to play every day, I’d lean toward Kittansett over a number of two-Eggers.

Course Tour

{{content-block-course-profile-kittansett-club-006}}