Firestone Country Club (South Course)
Generally, in life and doing the traveling golf thing, I’ve been pretty lucky with weather, Where I’ve had a top 100-type course lined up, I’ve been blessed with mostly sunny days or heavy rains either easing up before we golf or holding off until we’re done golfing (or almost done as was the case with Oakland Hills). Not Firestone. It’s bad when you get to the pro shop and have to ask if the course is even open. The pro said it was if we wanted to play and that we’d have the course to ourselves. Screw it, how often do we come to the Cleveland area so we winged it. It absolutely poured for the front nine and only slowed a bit for the back. We took a break at the turn to dry out a little. The course amazingly held up and only a few puddles formed on some of the greens.
I played with a couple of college buddies in 2010 – we came to visit our non-golfing friend who would be hosting us later for a Roger Waters concert in his company’s box. I talk about quintessential courses in various cities and in Cleveland, that course is Firestone South down in Akron.
Since it was so wet, it played L-O-N-G! The par-five 16th plays to 590 yards from the WHITE tees. With no roll that gave me at least four whacks to get to the green. During the heaviest rains on the front nine, we had four par fours well over 400 yards with a 200 yard par three thrown in for good measure.
In ranking the course, I had to imagine what it would be like without the downpour and I came away with this as a top 30-ish course. Definitely being a regular stop of the PGA helps that ranking. Firestone is like Colonial and Harbourtown in that it’s disappeared from Golf Digest’s recent Top 100 rankings – last occupying a spot there in 1989 and Golf Magazine in 2003. I think the GD rankers are anti-arborites. With a lot of the old parkland style courses now going full Brazilian with the tree removal thing, and subsequently shooting up the rankings, courses are felling trees like a Canadian lumberjack. I think there is still a place for a nice traditional parkland course with tree-lined fairways providing shade, hole seclusion and strategy.
I read somewhere that Firestone South is opening up some for limited public play so maybe I’ll come back to see if the high ranking is more nostalgia or reality. Downtown Cleveland has the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame of course and the Browns and Indians both play down there, too. I’ve never been to any of them (just an old Indians game in Municipal Stadium known as the Mistake on the Lake). Fourth street downtown is a walking only street that has some nice restaurants but my favorite there, Lola’s. is now closed – another victim of the COVID restrictions and financial stress. I feel so bad for restaurant owners who have been on the receiving end of the harshest restrictions nationwide with no science or data behind any of it. Sad. But I digress.
Golf Scrapbook 